Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott Read Free Book Online

Oakland. It’s been raining every day and I head to the East Bay. The Paramount is an art deco theater from the Depression that plays classic movies. The theater opens early for cocktails and the Wurlitzer. I’m there first, above the 19th Street station, and after fifteen minutes I start to worry that she isn’t going to show up and then she is standing in front of me. I try to take her hand but she won’t let me. “What do you think you were trying to pull?” she asks. We’re moving with the crowd of people down the street.
    “I …”
    “You what? Do you belong to me or not?” Men are watching her. She’s wearing thigh-high latex yellow boots, fishnets, a leather skirt. Her tight curls are cut close to her scalp and dyed arctic blue. She seems to be looking around, smiling to all of them at once. She also seems to be focused only on me.
    “Yes,” I say quietly.
    “What?”
    “Yes. I belong to you, Mistress.” The guy walking next to me snickers.
    We move through the large doors of the old theater, the velvet floors, columns and statues reaching to a roof that ends in a midnight sky. The theater was built to hold thousands. Ambellina sends me for Coke and popcorn and when I come back the seats around us are filled and the man in the coat and tails at the Wurlitzer is being lowered beneath the stage.
    Bogart’s face fills the screen and out of the corner of my eye Ambellina is rummaging through her purse. I grew up with Humphrey Bogart. We had a television and my father loved the old Bogart films and would make me watch them.
Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo
. “You’re not big enough to take me down, see.” In his better moods my father would quote Bogart. “Sure, on the one hand maybe I love you and maybe you love me. But you’ll have something on me you can use whenever you want. And since I’ll have something on you who’s to say you’re not going to knock me over like you did the rest of them?” My father was a big man with a loud laugh, four inches taller than I am now. He was a violent man who wouldn’t stand for being looked at crossways by women or children. He pushed my kindergarten teacher down a small flight of stairs. He carried a small gun, a bottle of mace, and brass knuckles inside his coat. He was lazy and his laziness made him a criminal. He was killed with a shotgun just before my eleventh birthday, which is when my hard time began, though it might have already been too late.
    Bogart seems friendly to me, among the roulette wheels and the card tables. His confidence. His big sad eyes. The white linen suits moving casually across the screen while the world is at war all around them. Rick’s, a little Free French outpost on the sand. He does what he has to. He betrays poor Peter Lorre to the Nazis. But the world won’t let him alone. The world is bigger than the castle he has built for himself. This is the lesson of
Casablanca
.
    Ambellina forces the gag into my mouth and I catch my breath. I let out a tiny moan while the big, round puck forces open my jaw and cheeks, sending a throbbing up the sides of my face.
    “Shhh.”
    The theater is so quiet except for the actors and Ambellina slowly rubbing her thumb and index finger together. There’s a hole in the puck to breathe through and I feel her pulling the straps around the back of my neck and fastening it tight to hold the gag in. I grip onto the seats. The strap catches and pulls my hair. I want to move out of this. To squirm. To wriggle down to the floor. I jerk my head one way, and then back. One quick breath. I push back in my seat, my feet pressing the floor. I try to hold the middle and when I can’t I lean cautiously into Ambellina’s shoulder, and she lets me stay there. Before the plane flies away I’ve grown used to the pressure against the roof of my mouth. When the lights come on I’m resting; I can hardly feel my hair caught in the buckle.
    “C’mon now, Angel,” Ambellina says, unfastening the