Slugfest

exhibitors in line, preoccupied, furiously fingering BlackBerrys or sucking on coffees to help them wake up. He quickly calculated the odds and stuck with me.

“If you can’t get me in, will you deliver a note for me?” He took my silent intake of breath as assent. “Perfect.” He dropped his things on the floor and rummaged through his backpack until he found a scratch pad, pilfered from a budget hotel chain a half step up from the museum’s doorway. He pointed to my thick show directory. “Can I borrow that to write on?” He scribbled his note, then folded it over four times. “It’s private. You can’t tell anyone.”

Two

Why was I such a softie? Where was the ruthless media exec who had trampled corn-fed kids like this on her way to the board room or edit suite in a previous lifetime? “Okay, who gets it?” I asked, holding out my hand for the note and the directory.

“The company’s new. I’m not sure which name they’ve settled on, so I need to look it up.” He stood up and clumsily juggled the note, the directory, and his bags. The throng of exhibitors waiting to set up condensed, and we slid a few feet closer to the door, the way you do at Disneyland or airport security when you need to feel like you’re getting somewhere but in fact aren’t. I picked up one of his bags to keep his belongings together. While he searched the bricklike book for his friend’s name, I inspected the patches on the bag. I’d been to a lot of the same places—Hong Kong, Rome, Utah. As he flipped through the pages, the crowd clustered around Rolanda until the doors were opened and a gold-rush-like sweep of people attempted to enter the halls all at once. Credentials were checked carefully at every door and we inched up to the door of Hall E until it was our turn.

“I know he doesn’t work for you, missy.” Rolanda Knox peered at my badge to let me know she’d remember me. “Miss Holliday, Primo’s Outdoor Art. And you, Mr. Happy Valley, how many times do I have to tell you, you ain’t going nowhere? How do I know you don’t have an incendiary device in those bags? Or an envelope of anthrax?”

I was still holding the guy’s bag and reflexively held it out toward him. Great. I’d be collateral damage and an unwitting accomplice to a terrorist act or some obscure ecological protest like Free the Albino Tree Frogs. Passionate and ready to take a stand, a handful of antichemical demonstrators with placards were stationed outside the convention center. For all we knew, this kid was one of them. He made a move to open the bag with his free hand.

“Don’t do that, fool. I don’t want to see your dirty laundry. You never heard of a rhetorical question? I was simply illustrating a point. No badge, no entry.”

We’d stepped aside to let in a slight man in a black cotton outfit, who’d obligingly raised his badge up to Rolanda’s eye level, when a bloodcurdling scream ripped through the cavernous convention center.

“What the…”

Three

All heads turned to see what the commotion was. Other security guards and exhibitors rushed in, only some running toward the screams that had now escalated into wails. Rolanda held her arms out wide, but it was like trying to hold back the ocean or a surging crowd of European soccer fans.

“Oh, hell.” She dropped her arms and sprinted, as much as a large woman can sprint, in the direction of the cries. Rolanda was the largest and most intimidating of the Wagner Center staff, and the crowd parted for her. The shrieks were coming from the direction of my booth, so I rode in her slipstream.

Near a grass shack, under a banner that read Connie’s Brooklyn Beach Garden, was a blond woman dressed in an outfit that suggested she’d raided the closet of the Little Mermaid’s promiscuous older sister. The top was a shrunken Sergeant Pepper–style vest with two small fabric lobsters instead of epaulets on the shoulders and scallop shell appliques cupping her breasts. Across the back was an octopus whose tentacles reached to the front, grabbing the wearer around the waist. Someone spent hours of his or her life creating this garment. It was impossible not to stare.

“My veronica. My veronica’s dead.”

Two women from nearby booths brought a conch-shaped chair from the back of her display. Without thinking, the woman I assumed was Connie sat down heavily on the papier-mache chair, and it collapsed, eliciting a ripple of laughter from some teenagers on the fringes of the group. A woman in overalls, who wasn’t much older than they, gave them a stern look; but it wasn’t easy to maintain since she was chuckling herself.

A trade show volunteer in a bright yellow pinny fanned the woman with a straw hat, and a weather-beaten exhibitor in a smock produced a pack of cigarettes that the woman smacked away. The smoker stood with her arms folded as if to say, In that case, I’ll just enjoy the meltdown. She scanned the crowd and fixed an accusatory gaze on the teenagers that shut them up more effectively than their companion had.

Rolanda explored the partial ruins of a cloyingly sweet flower bed filled with a staggering number of cardboard fish and plaster crustaceans. In the rear, a painted sign paid homage to Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and thick-cut fries, two Coney Island staples.

The woman’s eye makeup spread out like a Rorschach test. The creator of a nearby Zen garden drifted over to console her. “Sometimes plants die,” he said. “It’s a circle.”

“Listen, grasshopper, circle this. My garden looks like it’s been kissed by a blowtorch. Don’t talk to me about impermanence. I’m not shopping for enlightenment right now, so why don’t you just scurry back to your little hut and rake the sand again?” Ouch. The pajama-clad man backed away.

Any sympathy the shrieking blonde might have garnered evaporated. She’d been rude to the hat fanner, the smoker, and now a Zen gardener. It was as if she’d trashed the Dalai Lama. The Little Mermaid’s less nice sibling fiddled with her cell phone and jutted her chin in the direction of an exuberant display garden, prejudged and already festooned with ribbons. It belonged to a Mrs. Jean Moffitt.

“That old dame practically has armed sentries stationed at her displays. Where are my sentries? I’ve ruined five nail wraps on this exhibit, and someone has sabotaged it. And don’t think I don’t know why.” She held the phone to her ear and waited for it to come to life.

“There’s no one here,” the security guard said, after a thorough check around the display and inside and behind the fake grass beach house.

“Veronica, veronica,” the woman persisted. She raised a freshly manicured hand and pointed to a mound of desiccated plants. Formerly blue, formerly tall and willowy.

Under her breath, Rolanda Knox muttered, “Welcome to the Big Apple Flower Show.”

Four

Connie Anzalone stared down the few remaining bystanders with a slightly less friendly look than she’d given the Zen gardener and they wisely scattered, leaving just Rolanda and me. Rolanda was paid to stick around, but what was my excuse? In addition to being mesmerized by the outfit, I was drawn to the spectacle of a grown woman throwing a tantrum over a few dead plants. Her veronicas had gone to that great compost heap in the sky. It happened: the little suckers don’t always do as they’re told. You feed them, you water them, and do they thank you? No. Sometimes they gave it up to pests, bacteria, fungus, or a good stiff wind and they didn’t even say good- bye. I kept silent while Rolanda tried to do what the Zen gardener couldn’t.

“Calm down, ma’am. I’ll alert someone from show management, and I’m sure they’ll mount a complete investigation.”

I couldn’t tell if the guard was joking, but within minutes a frosty woman of about thirty arrived to defuse the situation. She introduced herself as Kristi Reynolds, director of the Big Apple Flower Show.

She had a Bluetooth implant in her head and I would have bet there were two larger implants farther south. I could visualize her standing in front of a weather map, making sweeping motions with her arms and maintaining the same manic smile whether she was forecasting sunshine or tsunami.