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 outside 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.”