Button Man

by Paul Lyons

  Now Peter Jennings comes on with a segment on a thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser and there’s a shot of Bush on a caboose, close-ups of his Jell-O eyes, flanked by midwestern politicians in sombreros and his two squinty button-eyed juniors who look like they’ve been tasters in coke-for-arms deals. Party officials start in with doo-doo economics about growth and development in inner cities, the countryside, and overseas, lowering crime rates foreign and domestic. If their candidates are elected, women will have better health care, day care, working conditions, equal pay, greater opportunities for corporate advancement. But what the election is really about is the necessity of restoring the family values that made America great. Even Jennings’s quizzical expression suggests that the pack should be hung by their tongues.

  “Sammy’d never believe it. It’s a bought city.”

  The word is that there won’t be any street selling tolerated. A private advertising firm paid for all convention marketing rights: a million and campaign contributions. A committee was set up to approve which convention merchandise was legal. Any item with the words Republican, Democratic, or Convention on it will be nixed by the committee. You can get a lawyer and sue. Take a number. The next day the Times-Picayune will feature pictures of George Bush jogging, Barbara Bush kissing a Haitian AIDS baby with a caption calling her a “down-home Mother Teresa,” and on page ten in small letters, “Vendors Protest, Claim First Amendment Violations.”

  “If the man in the street gets some crumbs,” Mikey says, “the Republicans don’t enjoy their sandwiches.”

  Norman’s face twitches with button-o-logical intensity.

  “It don’t look so hot without them licenses,” Greek Joey says, throwing a towel at Mario, then tossing a paperback after the towel. “I’m throwing in the towel. They’ll throw the book at us.”

  “Listen,” Norman yells. “First of all, show a little faith in the economy, boys. Second, please shut up you chuckleheaded Greek bastard. You don’t know Du-ka-ka.”

  “If it wasn’t for us Greeks you’d all still be uncivilized.”

  “Working the streets is out,” Norman says. “The city gave the store owners walkie-talkies. In forty years, it never happened. Harold, get us caucus locations. We’ll work receptions, airports, bus stations. This convention hasn’t started. Keep your focus. There’s thirty thousand delegates and we’ll reach ’em if we have to go door to door.”

  Norman’s tapping his forehead, hunched, that old spine twisted from scheming. The overhead fan’s doing maybe seven rpm. Hawk looks at Mario, who looks up from the Times-Picayune and frowns.

  “Try to think like you’re a Republican. How you gonna greet people? Hello, sir, hello ma’am. Where you from? Oh, isn’t that nice? How many kids do you have? You’re in the hotel lobby using small boards: ‘Can I interest you in convention buttons? The money supports our local chapter.’ Yada, yada. Do you schmucks hear what I’m saying? Stay focused.”

  What Hawk hears is catastrophe and his face flushes at the thought of Sammy’s open safe and packets of money spread out over Sammy’s desk. Norman won’t print any more buttons and the moment they’re out of ear range he’ll wholesale the stock to delegate organizations to get his investment out. So close to settling his accounts, Hawk thinks. It’s like a horse lying down in the stretch.

  “Two days you gotta wait,” Norman says. “If you go out now, you’re going to end up sleeping in Central Lockup. They got code law here. It comes direct from Napoleon. Do not pass Go. You’re guilty until proven innocent.”

  “Sounds about like everywhere else,” Mikey says.

  20

  THE BUTTON GANG DECIDES IT DON’T NEED NO STINKING LICENSES

  On a swath of clipped lawn outside the Superdome the button gang watches demonstrators so permanently angry it would be pointless to try to sell them anything. Activists parade back and forth with spray-painted sheets reading Fascist Baby-Killers and WHEN THREE PERCENT OF THE POPULATION HAS SEVENTY PERCENT OF THE WEALTH HOW DO YOU EXPECT THE REST TO BEHAVE? and THE HOMELESS ARE NOT CRIMINALS, THE SYSTEM Is! High overhead fighter jets boom and on the ramp to the dome sacred aerobics troupes dance for Strategic Defense Initiative.

  A group of Sioux emerge from a tepee behind them, wearing antlers on their heads and feathers on their arms. Helmeted policemen with drawn nightsticks take up position behind native handicrafts concessions, crowded with customers buying arrowhead necklaces, eagle bone whistles, elk-hide moccasins, and blue cornmeal piki bread. A vendor with a necklace like a washboard made of linked bone distributes change.

  “Look at them move those Sioux-veneers,” Greek Joey says.

  The Sioux shake feathered spears to drums, necklaces and beads jangling as they high-step, duck and crouch and spin in the sun. The men have long hair and dark tans like some of the waiters at Cannoli’s, and wear about two thousand bucks worth of leather.

  “The Feds oughta give ’em the Dakotas,” Mario says.

  “Yeah, give it to ‘em. But then they gotta give back all the cars and TVs, right?” Greek Joey says.

  “They paid,” Hawk says, and watches with sadness as the first people of the land chant in a circle, hey-a-a-a-hey, hey-a-a-a-hey, bells around calves and arms, circling in spirals, footwork like a middleweight’s. And he thinks of the gang, final night of the Statue of Liberty Festival, wearing multicolored glow-in-the-dark goods, orange necklaces twisted into Pee Wee Herman glasses, green Lady Liberty hats, fluorescent purple chokers and earrings, necklaces around their arms like armbands.

  By the second day, Hawk’s disgusted with caucuses.

  “Caucasian Caucuses,” Mikey calls them. “Mayonnaise.”

  “Hey, guys. Don’t feel bad,” Greek says. “There’s some pepper and chili flakes in the mix. What about Reverend Jesse?”

  “Did he win?” Mikey says.

  Japan’ed elevator walls, deviled eggs in rococo halls, and breakfasts with presidents decoupaged on the place mats is none of the gang’s idea of a button show. Hawk has made peanuts so far. If he’s going to settle his accounts, he has to be on the street.

  “I’ve heard a lot about arrests,” Hawk says in the condo.

  “Licenses?” Mario says. “What license? I don’t have to show you any stinking license. Why don’t you be a little more polite?”

  “Yeah,” Hawk says. “We don’t need no stinking licenses.”

  “I advise you to cover your expenses first,” Norman says.

  The phone rings and Harold takes it, talks for awhile, mostly saying “Yes,” then hands Norman the phone.

  “The old man sends his love,” Norman says, cupping the receiver, then, “Look, Sammy. No. Don’t worry about it. You rest, okay. We’ll get ’em at the inauguration, we’ll put on warpaint.”

  “Probably freeze our nuggets off there again,” Mario mutters.

  Next morning Hawk trades in the margins along the river by the Moonwalk, works onto the Poydras Street Wharf, blending with vendors selling plastic American flags, trades for an ice-cream sundae and leans back into the sun, watching caramel fudge trickling down over the creamy ridges, thinking of Two Hats Gonzalez with Q-tips out of his ears and the new zoo in Central Park and Two Hats feeding Elton at the Bronx Zoo, and Zoey. Behind him he sees Saint Louis Cathedral with its dunce-cap steeples, conventioneers circling the pigeon-shit bespattered statue of Andrew Jackson.

  Hawk backpedals down the staircase toward the avenue.

  “Ding, ding, ding,” goes a kid with sun splotches gravied over his face as his mother reaches purseward. “She’s gonna buy.”

  “Hey ladies, hey,” Hawk starts. “Buttons, hey. Lowest prices, hey. Let’s make a deal, hey.”

  He repeats something he heard on TV about inflation in Massachusetts but a nine-year-old with a bow tie tells him he’s “vastly underestimated the figures.” Hawk sells the snot a button. Halfway down the curve of the stairs, his board clean, he repins by a mime frozen in midstride, painted a gleaming tin color. A six-piece jazz band warms up o
utside of the Café du Monde.

  “HEY BUTTONS, CONVENTION BUTTONS. BUSH AND DOLE FOR A STRONG AMERICA” Hawk hears. “TEDDY FOR LIFEGUARD BUTTONS; I LOVE BUSH; NEW ORLEANS LOVES A GOOD PARTY; BEWARE OF GREEKS BEARING GIFTS.”

  It’s Mario and Mikey and when they see him they sit alongside to pin, and a bum sits next to them, smiles, and a kid wearing a Princeton shirt walks up as if to ask directions.

  Down the avenue lavender-clad AIDS demonstrators from ACT-UP stage a kiss-in before a giant quilt. A group carries a banner saying A Queer Nation Divided Cannot Stand and a mirror to turn on Reagan’s motorcade. It all reminds Hawk of the Gay Pride show on Fifth Avenue where he wore a T-shirt saying I’m One Too and asked naked couples where he should pin their buttons.

  Then Hawk hears sirens and cops pour into the streets and the ACT-UPers are being dragged down, motionless to vans. Hawk closes his button board and starts to walk down the avenue, only he’s grabbed from behind, arm twisted back.

  “Drop the buttons on the ground,” the Princeton kid says.

  “I’m not selling these,” Hawk pleads. “I’m giving them away!”

  “Will you come quietly or will you come quietly?” the bum says, flashing a badge and manhandling Mikey.

  “We’re here on vacation,” Hawk says.

  “We have some special accommodations,” the bum says.

  At the station police in latex gloves frisk the ACT-UP people.

  “What if someone you knew were dying?” one says.

  The cop shoves his face into the wall.

  “Leave him alone,” Mario says.

  “I’ll leave y’all alone together,” the cop says.

  At the reception desk they empty their pockets and the woman asks their names and addresses, and when no one answers, “Do you sleep in the street?”

  “Not yet,” Hawk says.

  Twenty bedraggled men sprawl around the holding tank. An exposed toilet in one corner, a wall-length plastic window. Hawk listens to the sleeping men.

  “You awake, Hawk?” Mario whispers, hours later.

  “No.”

  “Remember we went into the supermarket with a Magic Marker and erased the price on a watermelon and wrote WEEK OLD, $1.25, and then sold slices in the sun for a buck a pop? We’ve been at this shit a long time. The other time we sold roast beef sandwiches without meat in them, and the guy was standing there with rolls in his hand trembling with rage? You feel the world moving and you’re standing still.”

  “I hear you,” Hawk says. “But hey, you’ve got your acting.”

  “Dog food commercials. Holding up rolls of toilet paper. After gourmet chow you can wipe your dog’s ass with softer tissues. I’m thinking of moving to L.A.”

  Hawk has been lost in thought, again visualizing Sammy’s money piled on the desk, him setting up mental barricades and ducking under. In the end he’d put four of Sammy’s two-thousand-dollar packets into his seersucker. Insurance he hoped not to need. He’d told himself he’d put the cash back no matter what. If sales ran true to form at the convention, he could do it as soon as they got back to the city. How much harder could it be to put money in a safe than to take it out? He’d put together a grand or so on the street and even strung together a few winning sessions at poker and backgammon.

  He’d arranged the rest of Sammy’s money neatly into the Garcia Vega boxes and locked them back behind Barnum with the envelopes.

  If he hadn’t been ready to consider temporary use of the old man’s money against further loss of toes he shouldn’t have opened the safe in the first place. Old Sammy, hanging on by tubes. Fighting for more time on the planet. Hawk with his back against this sticky prison wall, feeling a sudden flash of continuity between this night and the afternoon the old shyster walked into Laszlo’s pizza joint.

  Watergate was their training ground, when they were still babes-in-buttons, learning to hawk and roll, how to act in public. While one official after another went down, Sammy dropped button knowledge on his chosen, the arts of duck and dodge in rat-maze alleys, how to slip police barricades, when to let a product sell itself or make commotion, how to mirror the customer’s body language in the space between connect and sale and when to spin and shut the board against your hip and blend with the people and come out hawking when the heat is gone.

  This spry old man—he seems always to have been old—could see around corners, see trouble in the reflections of shop windows. They carried plastic cartons, accepting donations for The Committee to Make Watergate Perfectly Clear. They’d huddle under drippy Times Square scaffolds, or weave under the high domes of Grand Central yelling SENATOR SAM ERVIN JR. FAN CLUB; FOUR MORE YEARS, MR. NIXON, THEN TEN TO TWENTY; IMPEACHMENT WITH HONOR; NIXXON, THE SAME OLD GAS. And in the hot early evenings when it stayed light they strafed the wide picnicking lines on the Great Lawn waiting for Shakespeare theater or Broadway shows letting out.

  One minute you’re a sweaty kid sipping soda between hustling the streets and the next you’re thirty-one and leaning against a slammer wall.

  For what? Selling a few buttons in the street?

  For lying and stealing and obstructing justice and messing with your average American’s faith in his country a few of those Watergaters did a year or two in country clubs. Then they got talk shows, twenty-grand-a-pop lecture tours as part of their release program, megacontracts for books about their crimes. Or they became CEOs of companies. Government officials give off that it’s necessary for them to be devious and violent and corrupt in your interest, since other governments are presumed to be so much worse. Reagan with his talk of Armageddon and Evil Empire and if freedom is lost here, there’s nowhere to escape to. Freedom for who? Honesty! As long as you didn’t have the opportunity to steal or eavesdrop thrown in your face you could think of yourself as a relatively honest type.

  A newspaper poll said 91 percent of Americans lie on a daily basis (only 46 percent of these were considered important lies). How could you know if the nine percent who claimed not to be liars were telling the truth? Honesty. A poor person jumps a subway stile and goes to jail. A rich person wipes out a pension fund or trades insider stocks, stealing the savings that thousands worked for all their lives and they do less time than you or me would get for robbing a hundred bucks from a 7-Eleven. What is the point of making judgments when the haves and have-nots play by unrelated rules?

  Hawk hasn’t eaten since the ice cream, so he raps on the window. A black guard with Elvis sideburns almost as ludicrous as Joey’s appears and Hawk pantomimes a fork entering his mouth.

  The guard cracks the cell door.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “You got a roll or something I can eat? I’m hungry.”

  “Boy, you shoulda thought about that before y’all chose to get on the wrong side of the law.”

  “Y’all trying to starve us?” a cell mate yells.

  “If you behave your no-good selves,” the guard says. “I’ll take y’all to the Best Western tomorrow morning for waffles.”

  21

  GOOD MORNING AMERICA

  “Schmuckolas,” Norman says when he gets to Central Lockup to bail out his boys. “I got you some pastrami from the deli.”

  Mario gives the old fox a hug.

  “Better ask him the price of those sandwiches before you go hugging,” Hawk says.

  Harold drives the van through sequences of busted neighborhoods, past a drunk rent-a-cop making out with a girl in a polka-dotted miniskirt and bums sleeping in car skeletons with Glad bags for doorways. Outside a liquor market a man kicks down a bicycle and stomps on it and walks into the store.

  “Nice place,” Hawk says.

  “Any place is a nice place as long as you got a bus ticket out of there,” Mikey says.

  The gang hits Bourbon Street where crowds swirl around rose carts and vendors with beer holders and fluorescent shoelaces and red styrofoam hands with two-foot index fingers printed with #1. A shirtless kid tap-dances up, “Hey big guy, ho
w about a tip?”

  “Stay in school,” Hawk says, and slips the kid a folded buck.

  “The city has its hands out,” Mario says, passing winos among a row of fortune-tellers, “and there’s palm readers everywhere.”

  When Hawk turns, the rest of the gang’s gone except Mikey. Bright red po’boy signs flash. Music pours from clubs. Purples, reds, yellows glow against buildings. Police carts crunch oyster shells. With three bands playing at once, Hawk feels acoustically pinballed, and ducks into a bar with a red glow behind the bottles and a banner saying OPEN MIKE VARIETY NIGHT. Him and Mikey slug a tequila and Hawk feels the night taking aim toward the next salting. A singer named Tellina starts in a cappella and it’s clear she’s no crooner doing table work. When she holds a note sixty seconds, someone screams, “Dial EMS.” Mikey snaps his fingers. The woman at the next table has glorious styled hair and an open sore from her lip to her chin and only one front tooth, and a gamey arm that flops about at her side like a rubber attachment. Hawk wonders what diseases she has. She’s not old and once was beautiful.

  “Would you like a bag?” an Indian cashier says in a Fast Stop, handing them oyster-flavored potato chips and a bottle of Thunder bird. “Or are you going for instant gratification?”

  Wind blows straight off the water and slicks the boards. The parking lot behind them has been sealed and is jammed with network vans and charter buses. Bluish letters from the Canal Place Hotel dissolve and reform on the water. They see Mario and join him on a bench overlooking the toxic river.

  “Have an oyster chip,” Mikey says.

  “It’ll put ink in your pen,” Hawk says.

  “But I don’t have anyone to write to,” Mario says.

  Great shafts of light sweep the belly of the chalky sky, which hangs like firesmoke in an indigo sky. The clock on the three-pronged cathedral reads 4:00 A.M. Hawk feels the night coming on, the wind amplified so it rushes over itself and shuffles palm fronds. A man dressed as Colonel Sanders walks around signing autographs with a woman in a star-spangled suit selling star-spangled balloons. Lumbering delegates photograph each other between a cardboard elephant with Styrofoam tusks and a papier-mâché dummy of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat, then hand dollar bills to a seated man in dark glasses. A phalanx of cops on horseback appears, antennae out of back pockets like tails. In the spaces between police barriers there are cameras and coils of wire and mounted floodlights and a man barking orders through a megaphone.