Happy Baby

by Stephen Elliott

  “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 Bridge. Toine sleeps with her sometimes and tells me she doesn’t charge him.

  This is where I spend my evenings. A student is playing guitar on the bridge. The student’s friend dances on his heels, like something out of a children’s book, and waves a fedora around for change. The pickpockets are looking for customers. The Nigerian pushes herself up on her toes. I lean against the pylon as the streets swell. The owner of the bar on the far end of the district comes floating past with his dog at the wheel of his short barge.

  I should go but I stay here where it’s light and noisy, the air filled with reefer, urine, and perfume. Hypodermics and trash float against the canal walls. Toine’s friend Jessie is home alone, probably setting our apartment on fire. Behind us, a man painted green is stripped to the waist and juggling bowling balls as if they were balloons. Toine’s baritone hovers over all of it like an umbrella. “Step right up, young lovers. You’re not here for the architecture. Ladies and gentlemen, step right up.”

  Late, when the last show has already begun, I return to the theater. Yuen holds the door open for me, parting his gold teeth, holding his suitcase with his other hand. I climb the red carpets into the balcony where the bar is. Jessie stands with Toine. She’s changed into a flowered shirt and white slacks that hug her waist and she looks transformed from this morning and innocent among the salesmen here, all of whom wear dark suits. “I hope you got a discount,” I tell her and she laughs. She touches my shoulder.

  “Someone’s been drinking already,” Jessie says.

  Taco is bartending. A necklace of coconut halves is strung over the entrance to the dressing room. Miriam in her grass skirt is saying something quiet and urgent to Rynant the bouncer.

  “Where did you go?” Toine asks. “I thought you would keep Jessie company after you got off, but you never went home.”

  “He doesn’t like me,” Jessie says. “He’s afraid of girls.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “I tied one on.”

  “Allow yourself to be teased,” Jessie says. “You’ll enjoy life more.”

  “Don’t lecture people,” Toine tells her. “They don’t like it.”

  Jessie makes a pouty face and pinches Toine’s elbow.

  “She’s dangerous,” he jokes, leaning forward so the bar lights crawl under his chin. “Imagine, coming back to me after so many years. What could be more corrupt?”

  “Beer, Theo?” Taco asks.

  “Yes. And one for my friends.”

  Miriam emerges on the stage below us, wearing a cape, dancing to Surinamese drum rhythms, and Hank scrambles out behind the curtain in the gorilla outfit. She’s painted WAR in bright green letters across her stomach. She steps from her skirt and jumps into the crowd, her long red cape flashing behind her, her bare feet smacking the armrests. She climbs along the customers on the first floor. She wraps her cape around a woman’s head. When Miriam pulls the cape back, her underwear is gone, her pubic hair inches from the woman’s nose. She scoots closer, bringing the woman’s face between her legs. Hank looks puzzled, scratches his head, then begins to play with himself, spraying the crowd with water from the plastic gorilla penis. When it’s over Miriam pulls Hank from the stage by a chain.

  The lesbian show is starting. Victoria ambles forward in her police outfit with her thumbs tucked in her pockets and her hat cocked. Alexis waits for her in a shimmering metal dress, clutching the stage pole in her hands. Victoria told me one night that there are too many foreigners here. “No offense,” she said. “I mean the Arabs.” And the Arabs are in the front now for her show. Sheiks with magnificent turbans of all colors bundled over their heads. Yuen and Toine will always approach the Arabs and ask if they need women because the rich Arabs are too discreet to visit the girls who stand in the windows. Once a Pakistani general came dressed in full uniform and Toine sat with him and they talked about driving tanks through the Khyber Pass. Another time Toine sat in front with a small, hairless, pink man who wore only one long bolt of fabric like a toga. Toine later told me the man was the leader of a religion a million strong and there was a price on his head large enough to retire on. I thought he was encouraging me to kill the man and I got sick.

  “I’ve never seen a sex show,” Jessie says, placing her elbows behind her on the bar. Victoria has cuffed Alexis’s wrists together and is inserting her baton into Alexis’s vagina. “Do you think they enjoy it?”

  “What’s not to enjoy?” Toine asks.

  Victoria rubs a teaspoonful of grease into Alexis’s anus and slips her thumb inside. An artificial moan comes through the speakers. “We’ve had his presidents in here,” Toine says, pointing at me. He finishes his beer and places the empty glass back on the bar near the spigots. “I’m so bored with this I could die.”

  Toine’s room is in the front, where four windows overlook a quiet Dutch street. Not far from here is the Anne Frank Huis, but it doesn’t look different from any of the others except for the sign.

  “Tell me about America,” Jessie says.

  “America is a prison,” I say.

  Jessie balances a box of photographs on her knee as if it were a child. She runs a finger along her gumline. “You know, since last I saw you, I’ve been working in a refugee camp in the Congo. I worked there for three years.”

  “I know what you’ve been doing,” Toine says, without looking up, tossing waves of cocaine with his blade.

  “Mmmm. The Hutus used the camp as a base for killing missions into Rwanda until Médicins Sans Frontieres protested. The whole world ignored it,” she says, stretching her arms high over her head. The box nearly falls, and she catches it. “So how did you come to live together?”

  “This one? He’s an orphan. I took him in.”

  “Is that true, Theo? Are you an orphan from an American prison?”


  “I’m too old to be an orphan. I’m old enough to be a father.”

  “She cares about everybody,” Toine says. It sounds as if he’s apologizing for her.

  “You sound bitter,” Jessie says, smiling. “Anyway, I left Holland to go to Oxford and then took a job with the relief agency.”

  “You won’t get what you came here for,” Toine tells her, wagging a finger in her direction and then returning to his task. “You might as well go back to your refugee camps.”

  Jessie’s leg is shaking. “You wouldn’t believe the things you see. Have you heard of blue baby syndrome? In Gaza the water’s poison and babies are born unable to breathe. The UN sets up another tank of water every time the Israelis bulldoze a building.”

  “She would clean the wells with a toothbrush so the Palestinians can have more babies,” Toine says to me, then turns to Jessie. “Yuen is giving me the apartment behind the theater. Theo stays with me until I leave. I don’t like living with people anymore.”

  “But it was nice of you to let Theo stay,” she says. “So you’re either not as mean as you pretend. Or you have something else planned.”

  “It was nice,” I say, swallowing. The back of my throat is numb and hard. I pull on my forehead and try to stretch the skin. “Toine’s the nicest person I’ve ever met.”

  I watch him use the razor like a chef, quickly splitting then crushing the piles together. Everything comes easy to him. He has the best spot. He outsells all of the other salesmen. He’s Yuen’s favorite. All of the women love him. He doesn’t care about anything. The world gives him whatever he wants.

  “Anyway,” he says. “You haven’t heard my story.” I know what he’s going to tell her. It’s the first thing he told me when we first went for a drink. He had said I didn’t look like I could work for the Casa Rosso because the district is such a violent place, but he went to Yuen and I was hired, because, he said, the space wasn’t being used anyway. Our first night together he told me about the desert.

  “Listen,” Toine says to Jessie. “After you left to wash shit from the legs of black babies I bought a motorcycle. You don’t know the difference between a two-stroke and a four-stroke bike, but what I had was a two-stroke. On a two-stroke bike you have to mix oil with the gasoline. It’s meant for driving in places where there are no roads.” Toine hands me the mirror to do my line first. This is also Toine’s way. He knows he will always be left the longest line; he doesn’t worry about it. He never shares a joint, he rolls everybody their own so he doesn’t have to bother passing. “I took a boat to Algiers and rode into the Sahara. After fifteen days I was stopped by a caravan. Saharawi bandits still fighting for the Western Sahara with the Moroccans, the Spanish, and the French. That all ended without any result in 1991. But this was 1986. They took my motorcycle and left me in the dunes to die.”

  I snort my line and hand the mirror to Jessie, who places it over the box filled with photos. She’s holding her leg steady and I’m worried she’s going to start shaking again and send the last of the powder to the air.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  “The desert is growing,” he says.

  “I know that,” she says.

  “You don’t know anything. These people are fighting over sand.”

  “I’ve seen more wars than you.”

  “Congratulations, G.I. Jane,” he tells her dryly. “In El Oued they shovel it from their doorsteps in the mornings. The dunes have buried whole cities. It’s like fighting the sea. Only the bandits know the Sahara. After three days, when the leaders of the bandits came in a car and drove me to an oasis, I didn’t ask them any questions.”

  Jessie is leaning back with her arms at her sides. When I look at her now she looks a bit like my ex-wife, a little taller, a little prettier. Zahava also had black hair and liked cocaine. There was a time when my wife would do anything for some cocaine. If Zahava could see me now she wouldn’t believe it. She always complained I lacked ambition.

  I run my hand under my nose. Toine and Jessie’s eyes are locked together. I bite at the inside of my mouth. I suspect the drugs don’t affect him at all. He just likes to get other people high.

  “It was thrilling, really,” he says.

  Jessie shakes her head then dives into the mirror. “We’re only talking about ourselves,” she says, lifting her face, snorting heavily, running her hands over her head as if she’s just stepped from a pool. She sucks on her finger then picks up the mirror and hands it to Toine with both hands. “What’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done, Theo?”

  “Hang out with you guys,” I say, and they both laugh.

  “You see why I let him stay.”

  “I like you,” Jessie says. “You’re nice.”

  At night I sleep with my memories and my Italian poster that Toine translated for me. I hear them arguing in the other room. They sound as if they’re in the bed next to me. I squeeze my eyes shut, then open them.

  “Please,” she whispers.

  “Be quiet,” Toine says in a low, selfish voice.

  I imagine Adel, the Nigerian prostitute, hitting me across my face with a whip, cutting my ear. I shake my head. I imagine Toine pulling me down the stairs by my hair. I concentrate, try to make my mind clear. My savings are gone now and I have what I make at the theater. My life before now wasn’t worth anything. I hear Toine’s hand sliding over her body. I hear Jessie’s low cry. I hear Toine say, “I won’t.”

  I could sneak in the doorframe and watch them. I could crawl along the baseboard. If I could love I would have loved by now. To be in love, and want only the best for that person. My wife, Zahava, was always so happy. She never worried. When things stopped working, she spent time with a first-year lawyer named Mickey who had wide shoulders and thick black hair. It was his baby she got rid of.

  “She’s going to have to leave,” Toine says. It’s the afternoon already and we’re near the Oude Kirk having dinner. It’s been raining. The window is open and a priest is sitting with a table full of papers. He’s not unfamiliar. There’s a line of homeless waiting for the church to give them soup. The Oude Kirk is surrounded by prostitutes, some of them men, who cannot afford the more expensive windows near the Bulldog or the Achterburgwal. It’s Toine’s favorite place. Where the old meets the new, he says. Just behind the church is a public restroom, a tin cubicle that hides you from the street and a hole in the ground with a pipe that pours straight into the canal. It’s Monday, the slowest day.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. “She’s pretty and smart. She loves you.”

  “She’s half Asian and I’m Dutch,” he says by way of explanation. I look at his cheeks to see if he is alluding to something else but his face doesn’t give anything away. A door opens and a large man steps onto the cobblestone, his hair slicked across his head and his shirt tucked in. The prostitute he just visited stands behind him in the doorway, waiting for him to leave. The large man smiles benevolently and makes a big show of kissing the lady he’s just paid. She nods then closes the door and pulls the curtain across it. She takes her place in front of the window.

  “That’s bullshit,” I say and he shrugs. “That doesn’t mean anything that she’s Asian.”

  “Tell that to the Japanese. Say it doesn’t mean anything that you are Japanese. Tell the Spanish their nationality is irrelevant, a genetic accident. You’re still married, aren’t you?” Toine asks. “You left your ring somewhere.”

  “I gave it away at the Taj Mahal, in Atlantic City.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear you’re a gambler. I have a wager for you.”

  “I’m not a gambler.”

  “But you come from gamblers.”

  “My father and my grandfather. But not my mother.”

  “You watch that black prostitute Adel. What is it about her? Why don’t you ask her to marry you? She can finish a customer in less than ten minutes. That’s six fucks an hour. You’re lucky she doesn’t have a pimp. She asks me why I let you stand there in
front of her window every night. She says you scare away customers, and I tell her I am not your brother or your keeper.” Toine’s watching me and I’m staring back at him. “Forget it,” he says. “I’ll leave. You and Jessie can stay together. That’s best.”

  “I don’t want Jessie,” I say.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you want?” Toine waits expectantly. I start to say something, but it gets caught between my ears and my mouth. I grab the table. Toine leans his head back and laughs. “Stay in Amsterdam as long as you want,” he says. “It suits you. Look at the old priest. In the middle of all these whores and all he hears is pissing.”

  The streets are quiet now, only a few puddles of light from windows still open for business. Two street performers lie sleeping in jesters’ hats, curled around the rail at the end of the bridge. Between the district and where we live there are four waterways and a set of tracks from the Terminus. I pass the new district where the new hostels are and the cafés are named for rock and roll bands—Café The Doors, Café Pink Floyd, where the tourists are still sitting on the porch quietly smoking marijuana. I’ve read that half the population of Amsterdam are illegal aliens.

  At home I hang my jacket in the closet. My shirt is out. I pull my belt from my pants. “I’ve been waiting for you,” Jessie says as I’m closing the closet door. She’s standing in the small kitchen, smiling calmly, her makeup washed across her face from different directions. The knives are out and arranged by order of size along the cutting board. She hands me a beer already opened and I take it from her. She’s only wearing a long cotton shirt again, like when I first saw her; it goes halfway to her knees.

  There’s a goblet full of red wine in the sink and she lifts it to her lips. Toine is not home. I take a sip from my beer. “Thank you.”