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.
Sitting in the Chinese restaurant that first time with Zoey she caught him staring at the white circles on her forearms that she got when the neon she worked with spattered.
“No, I ain’t playing games with cigarettes,” she said. “Shit, the first year I singed my eyebrows off and lost my fingerprints. So I shaved the eyebrows completely and penciled them in.”
Hawk watched her work the glass the night he left for Atlanta, fascinated at how the signs of the world got made. Beneath the IN GLOWING TERMS sign she had made for Carlos’s business, she lowered her goggles, twisted the stopcock. Hawk smelled the thick odor of propane. “The closer you get to the bottom of the canister the more odor they put in,” she said. “So you know when you’re running out.”
She lit the cross torch, held it to the tubing, and twisted her body with the bending glass. The glass wouldn’t stay pliable outside the flame, and she checked the angle of the bend against the plan on her drafting table. Then she moved the glass rod into the flame, dancing it in and out, redistributing the glass. Orange flame wrapped and sparked around the glass and she bent the rod. Then she bobbed it out so it cooled and dipped, and bent it more. She blew the air hose, cheeks puffing, because, she said, if you just heated the glass it could collapse on itself, melt into a ball. Then she set the letter on the wire screen over the pattern. A passable R, foot leading into a looping l. She finished the letters, welded them together, sprayed them with glass cleaner, and wiped away the grime, and then she blacked out parts she didn’t want visible.
Zoey was asleep against Carlos’s letter-cutting machine, which cut letters out of most known substances, her blanket over her, arms around Hopabout. Hawk watched the dramas in her face as she dreamed, eyebrows scrunching. Sometimes her breathing increased and she made sounds, cried in her sleep, and when she woke she stammered in Carla’s arms, trying to explain what she’d seen.
Hawk crumples his pizza plate, wipes his hands on his jeans, and jump shoots the plate at a trash basket, misses, and keeps shooting it, hopping on one foot, until he swishes it. Suffering from an underdose of cold beer, he’d like to duck into an oasis for a pint. Only he knows he needs to remember the objective.
Thirty-one years on the planet and he feels—what?
Tired.