by Susan Orlean
“I did go to Graceland, but it’s not a model for us at all,” Mr. Pei said. “It is true Americana, but our building will talk about something very different.”
Mr. Pei told us that his crash course in rock and roll had left him with a taste for the genre, and that he is especially fond of the Beatles, early Dylan, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino. He hasn’t yet extended his study to bands like Throbbing Gristle and Twisted Sister. He also said that as soon as he felt that his education was ready to enter another phase he’d gone to see some live performances, starting with Paul Simon at Radio City Music Hall and Genesis at the Meadowlands. At the Hall of Fame Foundation induction ceremony and concert recently, he had especially liked Little Richard. “What a performer!” he said. “Was he always like that?”
NONSTOP
“MY NAME IS PETER BENFAREMO, but everyone calls me the Lemon Ice King of Corona. That’s been the name of my business since 1946. What’s my business? We have Italian-style ices in twenty-nine flavors. You don’t see the sign in the front? Just like it says: ‘Benfaremo the Lemon Ice King of Corona. Ices with Real Pieces of Fruit in It.’ Excuse me a minute. Hey, Louie! There’s a guy up at the counter who’s picking up eleven cans of ices for his store! Sir, let me see your list. Okay—lemon, raspberry, mint, cantaloupe, pistachio. All right, Louie will get them for you. Louie! Louie! Anyway, I grew up here in Corona, and my father had a little store right here, at 108th Street and Fifty-second Avenue, and he was making a few little fruit ices, nothing big. After I got out of the army, I started this store next to him. I knew it was my calling. I was wounded in the war in Europe, and I thought to myself, Hey, you’re going to die right here. Instead, I didn’t. This was my destiny.
“You were wondering how I got the name Lemon Ice King. Look, I don’t know—I didn’t set out to go and get it. It just came to me. You ever hear of the Sultan of Swat? The Yankee Clipper? Those are baseball names. They just came about. Well, Lemon Ice King is the same thing. It just came about. I don’t know who first called me the Lemon Ice King. Maybe I did. Anyway, that’s who I am now. I’m famous. I’m famous and I’m infamous, I always say. I’m famous because of my merchandise, and I’m infamous because I fight with everyone. Everyone’s always on me all the time. ‘Mr. Benfaremo, can I have an extra this, and a couple of that, and can I have a sixty-nine-cent ice in a dollar-size cup?’ And my attitude is: Look, I can’t be doing for everybody all the time. I’ll fight with anyone. Excuse me a second. Hey, who’s this guy? Yes, you. Can I help you?”
“Yes, Mr. Benfaremo. I’m interested in carrying your ices in my store.”
“Look, let me ask you one question. Can’t you see I’m talking to someone? Do I look like I can take care of you now? No. I cannot. I am with this person, and when I’m done I can discuss this with you. I only have two hands, right? You don’t want to wait? No? Fine. Okay, good-bye. See that? See? He’s got some little store and he wants to carry my merchandise, and I should suddenly bow down and holler with pleasure? Good riddance. Louie, where’s Anthony? Anthony! I need you up front. Anthony!
“Now, where was I? You were asking what this round thing above the name of the store is. I don’t know what it is. It’s a Mexican hat. Why a hat? I don’t know, maybe it’s like the hat my father used to wear. Who thought of it as the store symbol? Who knows? Who knows who thought of the symbol for General Electric? It was just a good idea, that’s all. Everything in the store is exactly the way it was when I first started the business. Psychologically, it’s very important to keep it that way. People come and see the same things—the Lemon Ice King of Corona T-shirts on display here, and the jars of nuts on display on the back wall, and the list of flavors on the counter—and it absolutely must stay the same. Someday, someone will take this over from me, and they have to agree to keep it exactly the same or I’m not going to give it to them. It has to be my way. I won’t let them desecrate it. I’m getting ready to get out, though. I’m seventy years old. I’m not made of steel. Today, I don’t feel so good. Most likely, I’ll die here. My heart’s pumping like crazy. I need a rest already. Hey, look at this guy at the counter with the watches. Hey, you, how much you want for those things?”
“Nice watch, fifteen dollars.”
“Fifteen dollars? Whaddya, pulling my leg? Forget about it. Two dollars, maybe. Anyway, come back later. What is he, kidding? Fifteen dollars? Anthony, hey, where’ve you been? Anthony? Louie, get Anthony up front, it’s getting busy. See? What did I tell you? It never stops. I work all night and all day. I haven’t gone for a walk in the park in thirty-four years. Last time I went, my son was eight months old. It’s time for me and Mrs. Benfaremo to have some fun in life. You know something? I have never in my life—never, and I am seventy years old—bought a brand-new car. I’m doing fine, but personally I don’t need to flash it around. My ’78 Chevy takes me exactly the same place a brand-new Cadillac would take me.
“Let me tell you something. Wait a minute. Louie! Tell the new kid not to put the containers in the freezer that way. He’s new. He doesn’t know. He has to learn. What’s this pulling up? Oh, the UPS truck. Never a dull moment around here. Let me see that order. Anthony! I didn’t tell you to take your boots off, did I? I want you to leave them on for when you go back into the freezer later. Anyway, what I was going to tell you is that to succeed at something you need to have desire. You need the motivation. I am totally unique. No one in this entire country has the merchandise we have. Also, I am practical. I will not make certain flavors. Mango I won’t make. Weird stuff I won’t make. Some guys who worked for me a couple of years ago, they broke off on their own, and started making the oddest-ball-flavored ices in the world—mango this and banana-something that—and, of course, eventually they went out of business. I found out some guy was carrying their merchandise and carrying mine also in his store, and I said to him, ‘No way you’re carrying both. Carrying both! You can drop dead.’ And you know what? Three weeks later, he did. No kidding. But I had nothing to do with it. He had heart trouble. The fact is, though, I am very vindictive. I am. You might think: Peter Benfaremo, he’s a short guy, he’s a plumpy guy, what can he do to hurt me? Well, I have my ways.
“Come on back here and I’ll show you where we make the merchandise. Step over these boxes. These are boxes of macaroni. I make macaroni for the boys who work for me sometimes, for their lunch break. Anthony! Where’s the new kid? What’s he doing? Anthony! Here’s where we make the ices. You know, it took me three years to make grape ice. You want to know why? Because I couldn’t make grape to my satisfaction, that’s why. Here, taste this. You say it’s good? Of course it’s good. I never eat the stuff. Oh, I used to eat pineapple occasionally. Now I never eat it. What would I need to eat it for? I know what it is. You wonder what it’s been like being the Lemon Ice King of Corona? It’s been a big thing, a very big thing. That’s the truth. I was born for this.”
BUTTONS
DIANA EPSTEIN RECENTLY BOUGHT seventeen thousand buttons, sight unseen, from the city of Tempe, Arizona, and the other day she invited us over to watch as she opened boxes, suitcases, and an entire trunk full of the buttons to find out what she now owned. Ms. Epstein is in the business of buying buttons—she is the founder of Tender Buttons, on East Sixty-second Street, which is the only buttons-only store in America—and she has traveled far and wide to find stock for the shop. In the past, she and her partner, Millicent Safro, have tracked down buttons in Egypt, Russia, Finland, and Italy; in a château outside Paris; in a Quonset hut outside London; in a cave in Brussels; in a campground in Massachusetts; and in a little town near a beefalo ranch in West Virginia. But the lot from Tempe is the first pig in a poke she has ever bought. “I have a feeling these buttons will be either very appealing or very awful,” she told us soon after we arrived at her shop. “I’m a little nervous, because I paid thirty-six hundred dollars for the buttons and right after I won the auction I got a letter from a woman in Arizona saying that the collection was nothing but rusty old
buttons. All I knew when I put in my bid was that a wealthy woman in Tempe had willed her button collection to a museum in town, and the museum had given it to the city to auction. I couldn’t go to Tempe to see the buttons, but I had my mind set on getting them. Now I’m about to see whether my intuition was brilliant or demented.”
Ms. Epstein, an exuberant woman with round shoulders and short silvery hair, led us upstairs to her office. It was full of buttons—in bowls, boxes, drawers, crates, and bags. Before we broke into the shipment from Tempe, Ms. Epstein showed us some of her old favorites: Eskimo buttons of ivory in the shape of seals and walruses; Victorian glove buttons with tiny daguerreotype portraits of babies; large, yellowish 1940s buttons made of Lucite salvaged from Second World War bombers; and one big brass button with the famous Currier & Ives print of skaters in Central Park stamped on it, which, she told us, is considered the rarest picture button in the world. Then she said, “Here are my real pets,” and handed us little Bakelite buttons in the shape of hearts and matchsticks. “I always liked buttons, and I always liked the word buttons, but I never intended to get into the button business. I was in publishing. At lunch, I used to go to a funny old button store on the East Side, where I’d get good four-hole buttons for my clothes. One day, I heard that the owner had died and the contents of the store were for sale. I thought it would be great to go through all those buttons. That’s all I really wanted to do—just go through the buttons. So I bought the contents, and when I went to collect them I realized that there were so many buttons that I’d have to rent the store just to go through them. So, suddenly, I had a button store.” She cottoned to the button business right away, she said. “It was the middle of the sixties, and I was interested in the nature of performance and art, and all that,” she went on. “I liked the philosophical notion of focusing on something so small when everything else was so big. Paintings were big. Buildings were big. It appealed to me that buttons were thought of as useless, everyday objects. I liked the found-art nature of it.”
The store manager, Zachary Stewart, came upstairs and said, “Diana, I know this is highly unlikely, but I have a guy on the phone who wants to know if we have any hand-painted ivory buttons of faces.”
“We do, we do,” Ms. Epstein said. “I couldn’t resist—I stuck my hand in one of the suitcases yesterday and guess what I pulled out.” She handed him a crumbly blue cardboard box that said vitamins plus on the outside. Inside were six Oriental heads, each wearing a different expression and a different ornate hat. Mr. Stewart shook his head in amazement.
Now Ms. Epstein decided that it was time to dig into the rest of the collection, and she threaded her way between boxes and crates to a corner of the room where a small steamer trunk, two ratty-looking suitcases, and two crumpled cartons were stacked. She rubbed her hands together and then dragged out one of the suitcases and opened it.
“Oh, this is nice!” she said, spreading out a red cloth on which dozens of black glass buttons were sewn. “I should send this to Diana Vreeland. The woman who owned these must have been a real old-time collector.” She turned back to the suitcase and started passing buttons to us. “Here’s a display card of good carved pearl buttons. I’d say they’re from 1880. And this is a display card, very nice, of picture buttons of birds.” She rummaged through some more display cards, mumbling, “Oh, here are some bug buttons. Oh, more birds,” and then stood up and said, “The cards are too easy. Let’s look at a bag.”
Ms. Epstein reached into the suitcase, took out a dusty plastic bag full of buttons, and sat down at a table, so she could spill them out and pan them. As she was cutting open the bag, she said, “You know, I still wear only plain four-hole buttons. I think it would be a bit ostentatious of me to wear something more spectacular. Of course, I never, ever wear zippers. I don’t believe in them. I don’t like the sound or the act of zipping. And I won’t even say the word Velcro if I can help it.”
While she was talking, she was sifting through the pile of buttons. Now she said, “Here’s a picture button. Oh, my! This is a very rare button. It’s a picture of a rabbit meeting a frog. Oh, my gosh, here’s another one! Maybe there’s a set. This collector had good taste.” She held up a small brass button and said, “This is an overalls button. It says ‘Stronghold Steve’ on it. I love work-clothes buttons. They used to have wonderful, poetic sayings on them. It was as if they were a bit of an escape dream for the working class. Here’s a big tin button. That’s good for me—I sell my huge buttons to Prince for cuff links. Some of these are a little rusty. We’ll have to soak them in Pepsi. Oh, I think this is going to be a fantastic bunch of buttons.”
Mr. Stewart came upstairs again and said, “Diana, I’ve got a guy on the phone who would like to sell you three hundred military buttons.”
“That’s about two hundred and ninety too many,” Ms. Epstein replied. “Tell him no. Oh, look!” She slapped her forehead. “This is one of the rarest black glass buttons in the world!” She handed us something small and shiny with a scene of two people on a toboggan molded into it. “A button collector might pay fifty dollars or more for that. That’s incredible. Let’s open another bag.” She swept the buttons on the table into a box and took another dusty bag out of the suitcase.
“This one isn’t full of glamorous buttons,” she said after scanning the pile. “These are very old buttons that are interesting for historical reasons—for the way they’re made. A lot of them are men’s trouser buttons. You can see the whole history of men’s fashions through trouser buttons alone.”
She picked out a small tin button and said softly, “This is what I love about buttons. Each one is like a tiny, evocative event.” She held up the button, which had a bit of green thread still wrapped tightly in its sewing holes. “A Boy Scout button, maybe fifty years old,” she said. “I wonder where this Scout is now.”
THE HUSTLE
THE OTHER DAY, we found out that Frank Stella, who for thirty years has deconstructed pictorial structure and challenged representational art with his formalist paintings, is a C-level squash player. He claims to be a D-level player, which in squash’s ranking system would make him an advanced beginner, but people who are intimate with his game insist that he’s really a C. These people also say that anyone new to Mr. Stella’s squash game should be warned that he is a genius practitioner of the hustle—that is, the classic and artful maneuver of saying you’re worse than you are, getting your opponent to drop his guard, and then beating the pants off him. To this, Mr. Stella just says, “Oh, phooey.”
If you ask Mr. Stella about squash, which he prefers to art as material for general discussion, he will probably come very, very close to telling you that he has played for only five years, but then he will catch himself and admit that he was going to tell you that, because he’s such a lousy player and it would sound better than the truth, which he has now decided to tell you, and the truth is that he’s actually been playing for eight years, and he ought to be ashamed of himself for even thinking of lying as crassly as he planned to do.
He admits he was once told by one of the people he plays with that he runs like a weasel.
Mr. Stella has a large show of his artwork on display right now at the Museum of Modern Art, but what he had on his mind the other day was squash. At the Palladium nightclub, which is right near his studio, the fifty-thousand-dollar Rolex United States Open Squash Championships were being held—an event he helped organize. He made a poster for the tournament, and arranged for a photograph of one of his pieces—a gigantic, colorful form made of painted cones and swirls of metal—to be used on the program; it was his idea, too, to hold the tournament on the dance floor of the Palladium. He also appeared in a special exhibition match that was part of the tournament, besides playing his usual, thrice-weekly game. “Frank’s very involved with squash this week,” Paula Pelosi, his assistant, told us. “He’s happy to talk about it at great length.”
Mr. Stella explained that he thinks that squash and art have little o
r nothing in common—except for something or other about a blank canvas, and that’s not anything he’d care to elaborate on. But he did have a few notions on how the two pursuits compare, and he revealed them to us when we visited him in his studio before heading over to the Palladium with him to watch the semifinal matches—between Chris (Muscle Man) Dittmar and Ross (Iron Man) Norman, and between Jahangir (Emperor) Khan and Jansher (Rubber Man) Khan.
“At least, in painting, experience counts for something,” Mr. Stella said, and then he grinned and wiggled a big cigar between his fingers. He was wearing a white cardigan with a U.S. Open insignia patch, blue jeans, and beat-up tennis shoes, and had a pair of eyeglasses strapped to his head with a stretch band. He’s small and wiry—about half the size of one of the new art pieces hanging in his studio—and often has an impish look on his face. “In squash, what happens is that you get a lot of experience but you also get old,” he went on. “Maybe I could have been better at one time, but I have had a lot of injuries. Of course, they’re the sort of injuries other people might consider trivial, but I like to think of them as crippling. When I started playing, I have to admit, I really thought I would become a great player. I really wanted to become a great player. I really hoped I’d become a great player. In art, you can keep getting better, but in squash you hit your level and that’s just about it. Curtains. You’re finished. I hit my limit at about forty minutes of mediocre playing.”
One thing that isn’t mediocre about Mr. Stella’s squash is his racquet. He had Ben, the guy who strings racquets over at the Park Place Squash Club, string it with nylon in five different bright colors instead of the single subdued color that most people use. The result is a squash racquet Mondrian would have been proud of. Mr. Stella says he did this to bring a little glamour to his game, but confesses that he hoped it might also serve to confuse and intimidate his opponents. He said it hasn’t worked—the trouble is that most of them consider his racquet of many colors to be a sort of sissy affectation.