Button Man

by Paul Lyons

  Hawk loves the old man, owes him so much of the life that he has—the loft, years of paydays, friendships with the b-gang, afternoons of baseball at Yankee Stadium with hot dogs and Cokes when they were kids. But it sickens Hawk when Sammy gets on his high horse about criminals with this sour expression and spits the words “felon,” “convict,” “drug user.” Since they were fifteen he told them, “Don’t enter into business with criminals or junkies.”

  Hawk thought this might be good advice for kids, but for adults it rules out too many people. Of course Sammy and Norman get flexible about crime when it comes to their little Kosher Nostra. Bringing twenty-dollar bottles of Arpège in from Manila at two dollars a pop, that’s business. Sammy’s distinctions match his interests and are supposed to become yours. Criminals give bribes, Sammy gives performance incentives or shows appreciation. Even if you play by his rules he acts disappointed. You could play like he’d taught you but you never played quite right. If you ever mastered his system he’d change the rules. And the guy’s so oily if he touched himself he’d leave a smudge.

  Men from all walks of life work for him. Accountants, fire marshals, doormen. They check with Sammy when they need quick cash.

  “Try and get a loan out of the cheap bastard,” Flo cackles.

  Sammy’s the last person Hawk could ask for help.

  “I’ll give you work but not money,” Sammy says. “Boys, do I look to you like a bank? The day you can’t work a good day you might as well lie in the ground.”

  When Sammy suggests a play on the street it’s what the smart money would do. He’s either right or more right than you.

  If only Hawk had listened about the balloons.

  When Hawk goes to the bathroom, the blood, disinfectants, and ooze have soaked his top sock red-orange-yellow. He lays the sock on the sink, rinses the slipper sock, thinking he better give the Doc’s latest wrap a day at least at the show before he changes it.

  “You take one of these pills if you’re hurting bad,” the Doc said. “You take two and you can’t work. I could be decertified.”

  “I promise not to tell,” Hawk said.

  Looped, he’s trying to remember if he took one of Doc’s pills or any of the Darvocets Witold gave him when Mario pushes in, almost knocking Hawk off the toilet, and sees the bloody sock on the sink.

  “Jeez, Hawk,” he says. “That must be one hell of a cut.”

  “I didn’t think it was so bad at first,” Hawk says.

  The button gang, half of whom Sammy recruited when they were kids that Watergate summer, sits around a heap of fifty-count bags pinning tight rows of Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis buttons to foam core boards. One wall of Sammy’s apartment is lined with cork boards pinned with buttons from a dozen campaigns; the antimacassars on the sofa are fastened with little stickpins. Whatever’s left from a show, Sammy sells to collectors through a catalog put out with Norman, who runs a button factory. Some of the buttons date from fifty years. They’re from all countries, endorse or mock any cause. White/Black, Democrats/Republicans, Gay/Straight, Sammy doesn’t side.

  Tomorrow the gang will make the night van ride down to Atlanta, where Sammy’s all-around-man Harold has rented a condo and arranged licenses. Gazing around at the familiar faces, buttons splattered across the carpet like blood drops, uncut boards, duct tape, crumpled fast-food bags, pistachio shells, and soda cans, smells of socks and Aqua Velva, Hawk feels back in his boyhood.

  Even a day late and a dollar short, on the eve of the convention there’s much to be hopeful about. So much of the world is coming apart, people shooting up, shooting others, dropping out, at credit’s end shrieking about what’s been done to them. Hawk’s not sleeping over hot-air grates or in box cities like guys he’s nodded at for years. These guys stay alive by wiping tables in old-men’s bars and collecting glasses for the bartender and sucking off anyone who’ll pay. Old Mac the other day, a good man, looked like death in a Hefty bag. It had been raining and he must have forgotten to take it off.

  His hair was filthy cornrows, forehead all scabs.

  “Hey Mac,” Hawk said. “Where you been at?”

  “Hospital, man.”

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  “You stay cool,” Mac said, arm around Hawk.

  Hawk returned the man’s hug and slipped him a fiver. He started in with a wiseass remark but it stuck in his throat because the odds were that he would never see the scabby bastard again. And after Mac was gone Hawk’s hand and shoulder itched and he rubbed himself like he was cold.

  7

  HAWK’S EAR

  Things are looking up for an evening in, when Carla’s ex calls. They’re eating Cuban takeout at the loft, having rented a double feature. One dinosaur cartoon film to be followed by Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with Tina Turner. And this goon rants about being in Queens County and Hawk being next if he doesn’t … only Hawk passes the phone to Carla before he hears “doesn’t” what.

  Carla pauses the VCR. She listens a minute, face burning, and yells into the phone, “Nelson, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I got no use for this shit.” The phone cackles on until Carla yells “No WAY, ASSHOLE,” then mashes the phone into the receiver. She explains that her ex has jabbed Kenny, her accountant lover, with an assortment of Ginsu knives.

  “That idiot bitch wants me to bail his ass. I need to go straight to the judge and offer myself as a hostile witness.”

  “Ever heard of restraining orders?”

  “Wouldn’t work.”

  “How’s Kenny?” Hawk asks.

  “Unhappy, I bet.”

  Hawk sits there, looking at the blurry brontosaurus on the screen as Carla phones the cops for the hospital number, and then calls her punctured accountant, who is in stable condition at Mount Sinai.

  “Zoey-girl, my dancing star,” Carla says, “I need to go out for a little while. You be good and eat your string beans.”

  “I would never put anything green in my mouth,” Zoey says.

  “Not even a lime slurpie or a green candy cane?” Hawk says.

  “Mommy, what did my father do now?” Zoey asks.

  “Something he shouldn’t have. You eat a few string beans, honey, and finish watching the movie with Hawk. And later I want you to tell me all about it, okay?”

  But Zoey runs and jumps around the heaps of merchandise: rolls of red-white-and-blue ribbon, drooping balloons, boxes of refrigerator magnets, old promo buttons for The Fonz, Bay City Rollers, Starsky and Hutch, strings of chili-pepper lightbulbs, logoed coffee mugs or ashtrays, ceramic Statue of Liberty lamps that Hawk’s hooked up around the room like holiday lights, Santa Claus on the Cross T-shirts, sad boxes of Earth Day balloons, helium canisters, hand trucks.

  “You’re not a hunter, you’re a gatherer,” Carla says, looking for her boots.

  “The stuff’s not mine. I just try to sell it,” Hawk says.

  “You know, you could fix this place up,” she says, rummaging around. “It has potential. Sammy’s good enough not to charge much.”

  Hawk wants to say that with all the boxes he’s hauled up the stairs, Sammy should pay him for living there. Or at least pick up the utilities. Sammy probably figures if Hawk lives there it protects his junk from getting robbed. And he only takes two bills for rent. They count out at a show and Sammy deducts Hawk’s rent from a pile of thirty grand.

  “Maybe, like, we could fix it up together,” Hawk says to Carla.

  Carla tightens her boot laces, picks up her denim jacket, and stares at him.

  “You telling me now you want me to move in here?”

  Hawk shrugs. He hadn’t planned on asking her. It just slipped out.

  Carla tucks her narrow beaded braid behind her ear.

  “You could still see whoever you want,” Hawk says.

  “Obviously,” she says.

  “You know what I’m saying, Carla. There’s plenty of room. You could move your stuff in one cab ride. We could fix it up nice together.”
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br />   Carla’s gotta be tight on money, trying to work as much as she can and raise a kid in the city by herself. She never raises a finger when Hawk pays the tabs.

  “You wouldn’t have to pay rent. Zoey’s here a lot anyway.”

  “You know what I like about you?” Carla asks, and puckers her lips at him.

  “What?”

  “Your timing,” she says, and slips out the door to see Kenny.

  “What was your favorite part of the movie?” Carla asks Zoey later.

  “The part when I sat on Hawk’s lap,” she says.

  “That wasn’t in the movie,” Carla says.

  “I know, silly,” Zoey says, and laughs.

  However the chips fall with Carla, Hawk’s a goner over Zoey. So beautiful, and knows it. For a while she watches the video intently, and then she leans against him and falls asleep, snoring gently. Hawk turns down the sound and finds relief and comfort in watching the smiling green dinosaurs munch on the tips of trees.

  When he babysits he clowns around with Zoey for hours and reads her Curious George Goes to the Aquarium and Winnie the Pooh and Babar Sees the World. He gives her piggyback rides, plays Go-Fish for jelly beans, Hawk pretending to feed her stuffed kangaroo, Hopabout, the jelly beans between games. He traded buttons for the blue kangaroo at a block party with a guy behind a Quantas Airlines Dream Vacation Getaway table. He bought her a tricycle on the street and jogged after her in the park, her starry helmet pulling away, and she laughed into hysterics when Hawk meowed at passing dogs.

  She does love running around the loft in her cycle helmet and bumblebee tights or short polka-dotted pink and orange dresses. She tramples him or uses his back as an easel to make her watercolors with caption bubbles she fills in later. Or she makes him up in drag with Carla’s orange lipstick, giggling while he pretends sleep, then trails behind as he walks to the bathroom where he’ll look in the mirror and jump back.

  Smelling like daisies, she finds dirt on him even after he’s washed. Street grime between his toes and in the crevices behind his knees. She clips his toenails and files under them. She pokes around his ears with moist Q-tips, laughing with half-feigned disgust at him, holding her nose and saying “pee-you” and “grrr-oss.” There she is with a halo telling him you’re a freak and you stink and he gets this tug in his chest and just says twinkle, twinkle. She cleans around the bumps and scratches on his knuckles. No one has ever paid him such close attention. She’ll trace the Q-tip along the whitened scar where his ear juts from his head.

  He was a few years older than Zoey that morning, flying down a hill on a bike in Van Cortlandt Park, when he snagged his ear on a wire. Taken to the emergency room by some kid’s parents, shirt cupping the dripping flap of ear to the side of his head, he entered a whirl of lights and a corridor that echoed like a refrigerator. A nurse held an anaesthetic mask and told him to breathe deeply and count back from ten.

  “Looks like you’re gonna keep it,” the doctor said when he woke. “But kid, you’re gonna have one cauliflower ear.”

  For years he stood on the toilet counting his stitch marks.

  “He’s practicing to be an artist,” Fat Frankie says. “Youse heard of Vince van Go. But have youse heard about Hawk van Went?”

  8

  THE BUTTON GANG DOES THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

  The sky is, shockingly, blue. Sweet absence of the threat of rain. A birthday blessing. First day of the show and the delegates are fresh off charter buses. Hawk leans against a sold-out Atlanta Constitution rack, adjusts the Dukakis/Kitty and Dukakis/Jackson buttons on his lapels. He isn’t in the mood to hawk and roll, slow-cruise and spiel, and he doesn’t need to. The buttons are selling themselves.

  An elderly man, wearing a styrofoam Democratic Party hat with a foldout paper mule that has a red-white-and-blue egg for a body, guffaws and points his three-pronged cane at a button calling George Bush an arrogant, inept wimp. Hawk strips the button off the board and the man profiles in the classic gesture, a hand reaching into a pocket, and Hawk exchanges button for cash slowly, stringing it out so those approaching see the sale.

  Cash generates cash.

  “Hey, buttons, convention buttons here,” Hawk yells: “BUSH AND FALWELL, BUSH AND ROBERTSON. BUSH INC., BUSH IS A WIMP, I WON’T EAT MY BROCCOLI, PUT AMERICA BACK TO WORK.”

  And he’s pocketing. Buttons leap off his board. Three left, then none. He opens his daypack and drops beside it on one knee. Pins prick his fingers. They sting, grow red. The air’s like the breath of a pizza oven. He creases bills into a thick stash in his hand, fans the stash, and swivels his face into the hazy sun.

  Hours later Mikey says, “Okay, now,” and, “How’s the economy?”

  “Señor Skanky,” Hawk says to Mikey, and then shakes hands with Jep the Professor. “The economy shows signs of recovery.”

  The light blinks green and a wave of delegates starts across the street and Mikey says, “stand by for action,” and again Hawk’s button-dancing, sweet influx of cash in a major key, swiveling and making change, and when the rush is over the three lean against a car, their reflections mutating over the windows of the Swiss Family Restaurant: Hawk’s fraying close-the-deal seersucker, Jep’s untucked God Bless America shirt from the July Fourth festival, the man running his hand through wispy hairs, rumpled like drunks who sleep in the park and get woken by sprinklers, though he hardly drinks since his wife let him back in the house. Mikey in his indigo shoe-shine jacket with a crown logo and Right Scuff scripted in gold, rings on three fingers, and his Vietnam tags, which he swears increase sales. Royal Shine cap. Black shined shoes. Nose flat to the face like a fighter’s. His sassy, corner style. And he’s snapping those fingers, singing his “bad boy, bad boy, what you gonna do, what you gonna do when they come for you.” And when Japanese shoppers go by and he winks and they don’t respond, “Damn, can’t get no love from the other side.”

  “Ice cold soda,” yells a cruising vendor. “Ice cold so-dah. They’s so cold they’ll buss-up your teeth. They’ll make your face cold. Your cheeks will crack it’s so-o-o-o-o cold so-dahs here.”

  “Yo, soda man,” Mikey yells.

  When he returns, Hawk’s selling plate-sized Kitty and Mike buttons to a woman with a confettied Kitty wig.

  “Folks, let’s make a deal,” Hawk yells at a couple carrying so many shopping bags they limp, and the woman sees a button with a photo of Reagan and Bush and the inscription SHIT HAPPENS! and Hawk pins one on each of her lapels and she sees an NBC Convention Reporter badge that Hawk bartered for and Hawk says it’s his last one and he’s gotta get fifteen dollars for it, though he has a bag full of them in his daypack.

  The van has pulled up and Sammy watches with an approving frown as the woman counts out thirty dollars for the pins and the badge.

  “Nothing better for them newscasters to cover,” Sammy says, and spits. “Local color ambience, they call it. The city of Atlanta puts the homeless in tent hotels outside of town. Nobody cares about the AIDS rally. The government hopes the queers die anyway.”

  “Express your viewpoint!” Jep yells. “The polls tell us what the country feels, but who checks if they’re right? Buy a button that says, ‘this is who I support,’ whatever the damned polls say. Buy a button and show where you stand.”

  And Jep takes out a pad to write something, only Sammy grabs the pen. “Professor, you writing yourself a ticket?”

  “I was resting.”

  “You rest or write notes to yourself when there’s no customers. Give me that board, schmuckola. Now pay attention, all of you.”

  And Sammy snatches Jep’s board and dashes into the crosswalk, threading through car windows adazzle with orange sunlight. However many times Hawk sees this, he chokes at the sight of the old guy crouch-running and dealing. This guy could be shuffleboarding with a straw hat on his Miami Beach condo patio, or strolling around the penthouse solarium with a bunch of retired insider traders, testicles swinging in the wind.

  “Ladies
, ladies,” Sammy says, coaxing a pair with matching rhinestone donkey necklaces. And when some buzz-cut state troopers approach, rather than backing out of the street Sammy waves them over, asks a jughead to kneel so he can rest the board on his flattop, and finally deals them a handful of Jesses at his guaranteed lowest Peace Officer Group Discount. And then, returning the half-empty board to Jep, “Okay schmuckola. Get onto the sidewalk before you get smacked by a car. These third-world drivers come straight from camels to taxi cabs. They got no traffic lights where they’re from.”

  Later, street lights hum. Buildings rise against the milky sky. Hawk’s throat is raw. Because of how he’s limping his foot feels like it’s attached wrong to his leg, something he’s dragging around and stabbing himself with. He lifts his board by the grip slats, cut and duct taped near the top, and heads down Peachtree, gazing up at the overpasses between the buildings where executives walk around with bibs and point at things and eat.

  Hot times, summer in the city, he sings, feeling the grime of his seersucker collar and the peach tinge of his face, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty, until, aware of hunger, he ducks underground, selling down escalators, and limps into the heart of an immense mall where, at a pizza counter, he eats three slices and sells seven buttons.

  Alone in this mall. Things percolating on his thirty-first birthday. Not one of the gang knows it’s his birthday. A happy one, though, busting ass into the convention night, eating Sicilian with one hand, fingernails blackened, selling buttons with the other, debt lifting off him one button at a time.

  If he can settle his accounts and put together a little something, change his button-pushing sidewalk act, maybe Carla will be able to picture them together better. His beautiful timing aside, was it just dreaming out loud to ask her to move in with him? She could be out with some professional type right now. Sometimes it feels like she’s playing him until something better turns up. But if she is, so what? The bottom line is that his life is better when she’s around. Maybe she’s working in Carlos’s shop, down by the Hudson.