Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott Read Free Book Online Page B

curtain and wrap the hungry children in it and they wouldn’t be hungry anymore. Now she comes back because I have a career. She arrived last night with her bags while you were sleeping. Can you imagine?” He shakes his head. He takes a flat pad of tickets from inside the empty ticket booth and hands them to me, then reaches into his pocket for some coins. “Have you had coffee?”
    “No.”
    “Here’s three gulden. Get two cups from Harry.”
    Where I work it looks like a theater, a smaller version of where Toine stands, but it isn’t. There are pictures from the actual show cased in glass along the outside: Hank and Melinda fucking on a trapeze, Miriam sticking a banana in her pussy, Lucy smoking a cigar with her vagina, the lesbians. The stairs are carpeted and lead to a small landing with a podium where I write my tickets in front of a wall full of mirrors and what looks like a door with a golden handle. But it’s all an illusion. The door opens to a storage closet where costumes are kept. There’s no show here. This is just a rented storefront. The show is down the street, where the windows cost more, where it’s so crowded on the weekends your shoulders get stuck. But some people come in this way.
    “Live sex show,” I call out. “See Mickey’s mouse.” I sell a couple of tickets before noon. I write out a card on the podium and initial my name at the bottom of it next to the price they paid. I make eight percent on each ticket plus the first sixty gulden. I can charge between fifteen and fifty gulden. The customers wait in front of the golden handle to the storage closet for me to open the door for them. “It’s not there,” I say, tucking the ticket pad into my pocket. “Follow me.”
    “Where are you going?” an American in a rugby shirt asks, reaching for my collar. “Give me my money back.”
    I avoid his hand. “I’m taking you to the theater.”
    “I thought this was the theater.”
    “You’ll be happy when you see it.” I try to walk quickly to stay ahead of them, but not so quick they panic. “You see,” I say, arriving at the Casa Rosso, pointing toward the facade. “It’s not a fake.”
    “You’re a fake,” the man says. “You’re a fucking clown.”
    “You can go in now,” Toine says. He takes their tickets and folds the slips into his pile, then opens the door for them. “You’re having a day,” he says to me. “Good for you.”
    “OK. Two hundred gulden. How about you?”
    “Sometimes more, sometimes less.” He takes his cigarette from his mouth and turns his hands over so the cigarette disappears. He turns his hands back and the cigarette is still gone, but his hands are both smoking. He smiles at me and the cigarette slides from between his lips, the smoke channeling along his cheeks. Then I walk back to my spot and try again.
    After leaving Chicago, I traveled for almost two years before I wound up here. My wife had been staying with her lover in his condominium. I offered to move in with them and stay in the other room and she looked at me like I was some kind of monster, but I was the one looking for a solution. “I mean it,” I said. “You won’t even know I’m there.”
    She walked away. It was too much for me, the apartment without her. I didn’t mean to end up in Amsterdam. But this is where I ran out of money and found a job.
    I don’t work often at night, which is when the Banana Bar opens and the barkers make most of their money. It’s after seven now and I’m drinking and watching Adel, the Nigerian prostitute. She rents the most expensive window in the red light district, just around the corner from the main theater. It’s getting dark and the streetlamps are coming on along with the fluorescent bars along the top of the windows. The streets are pink.
    Toine works the evening shift and I hear him calling tourists. Through the mist I can make out the edge of the neon sign pointing north. I watch Adel from a safe distance near the New