El Chupo

About the only thing I remember from high school chemistry is Mr. Young's explanation of the basic mechanism behind sucking devices. 'To suck', said the old wizened crank, 'is to create a low pressure zone', and with merry eyes and a practiced sense of wonder, he proceeded to share the inside story of particle flow, the Bernouli family, and nature's feelings about vacuums. Like most teens, we were neither dull nor kind: as students filed into laboratory the next day, they were greeted with judgment in large caps on the blackboard: 'CHEMISTRY CREATES A LOW PRESSURE ZONE.'

Benjamin has reached the age where the biological imperative to create low pressure zones in the mouth has assumed such urgency that not slipping him the pacifier seems an act of active cruelty. Still, until yesterday, we had held firm, heeding Dr. Sear's stern warning that putting your child on a pacifier in his first month threatens him with nipple confusion, unproductive feedings, despair at the teta and the subsequent vicious downward cycle that ends with the gimpy life of a bottle baby. Our theologian friends, who beat us to the baby punch by about three months, assured us that their pediatrician had given them the green light when Baby Schleiermacher was just a week, but Catalina and I have our doubts: might not the dividing line between theology and philosophy fall precisely in the place where the humanist impulse muddies the head? Better to hold to the straight and narrow.

But Zoogle's behavioral patterns have been changing. Time was he would eat, shit, sleep, and hit rewind. Recently, however, his meals have been followed by fidgeting, a state of alert, quite consciousness that carries with it some overtone of aggrievement, and that can quickly balloon into a five alarm fire. He moves his hands in sharp, downward gestures, gently at first, then firmer, more violently, until it becomes a gesture of thwarted Baby Power, a Snoop Dogg knockoff that shakes and vibrates the whole stiffened body in a convulsive protest against the System, the Schedule, the contours of his Stomache. His face, sweet and placid after feeding, slowly darkens under the advance of the Sucking Spirit, his brow wrinkling, his eyes narrowing, and suddenly it breaks full upon him and it's Angry Baby, Gangsta' Baby, Baby whose face is a rictus of unspeakable rage racked red around his tortured and toothless Sadclown mouth.

Beatriz has been telling us for some time that we should just give the boy the maldito chupo. Though we have resisted, our will has been breaking, especially in light of recent rumors that she has been treating him all along to secret chupo samples, in those long, stolen hours of the afternoon when Madre would catnap and Fadre would work. (Childrearing seems to be an exercise in relinquishing illusions of control.) So last night we gave Zoogle his first, official taste of chupo, a green-rimmed silicon device with breathing holes for the nose and an ergonomically contoured tip, presumably to keep the tongue and palate in fighting form for their ongoing battles with the breast. Just as Zoogle was gearing up for his nightly concert, Beatriz produced the glombus and with a (suspiciously) practiced hand, popped it in.

Never have I seen fuller fusion between man and technology. Zoogle's massive jaw muscles immediately went to work, plastering the suck-guard against his fat-rimmed baby lips, the chupo bobbing in time to his rhythmic sucking. Simultaneously, his breath slowed, became gentle and even. His evil pigeyes gradually lost their porcine quality, became soft, questioning, as if it to ask 'what's the catch?' Within minutes he was asleep, though the chupo continued to bob and the jaw muscles continued to work. With black ninja stealth, I stole the glombus, kissed him good night, and set to my dinner with relish.

Years later I found out that Mr. Young was a creationist, one of those guys who believes that dinosaur bones were put on the earth by a God anxious to test his flock's faith in the literaral truth of the bible. The force of this revelation was for me on par with the discovery that my best friend and long time roommate was gay, which is to say a trigger to reconsider a whole body of conversation (about girls, about atoms) and wonder how what was said aligned with what was meant. And just as it turns out that most of those grand moments of friendship survive intact, changed and repolished, perhaps, but still meaningful, lovely, explicable against the broad backdrop of human foibles, so, I imagine, does most of Mr. Young's science survive, falling well within the boundaries of the generally accepted and the formally true. Still, Benjamin's response to the chupo makes me suspect that maybe Young got the sucking theory backwards. Could it be that low pressure is the result, rather than the cause, of sucking? That the Suck itself is the prime mover, the first consoler, the basic trick by which nature lowers pressure, dispels tension, banishes ghosts, and sends us off into deep and comfortable dreams about our mother?