Perlstein Button Company On June 6, 1944 Allied armies landed in France. On that same day I began work at the Perlstein Button Company on Canal Street in Manhattan. Mr. Busenbaum didn’t like me. I didn’t like him either. Mr. Busenbaum, my boss, looked like a Nazi. He was the spitting image of Hitler, the number one Nazi in the world. Mr. Busenbaum had a toothbrush mustache, hair plastered across a high forehead, beady eyes that bored into your skull, and a sharp voice able to cut deep no matter where you were in the huge stockroom. First thing he told me was, "I doubt if you can do the work. I’m sure you will never understand our system. I don’t expect you to last more than a few days. If that," he added after a short pause that he used to look me up and down as though I were naked. That was my first job ever. Because of the war I was able to get working papers at age fifteen. I didn’t answer Mr. Busenbaum but I remember thinking, okay if it's war you want, it's war you will get. Then he told me to spend the next hour looking over the button boxes, noting how they were grouped according to material, shape, and size. Then I should locate the ladder, broom, feather duster, and make sure that they were returned to the same place after I used them, which I would do often, he said. Those last words slid between his teeth, blowing past the bristle mustache, and hissed their way through my head as if they were shot from a bow. I half expected him to require me to salute him in the "Heil Hitler" fashion pictured in Movietone News. Perlstein Button Company’s building was on the China Town side of Canal Street sandwiched between Hung Fu Noodle and Chang Import Ltd. All the structures were three-storied and cream-bricked with flat roofs and red-metal fire escapes attached to the Canal Street side. Inside Perlstein Button Company were creaky wooden floors, high stamped-tin ceilings, large bare light bulbs suspended on black-wire cords, and what seemed like thousands of stacked wood boxes lined against the walls from floor to ceiling. Each box had a white porcelain pull-knob and a button fastened to the front. The first floor was narrow but extremely deep. Heavy dust mixed with rat-poison scented air. Button boxes marched far back, back into the next block, or so I imagined. This floor was my field of operation. It was here that I would be tested, but never broken. I moistened both lips with a wet tongue, gritted my teeth, and set out to become master of the button. Tuesday, June 27, 1944, Cherbourg Falls to American Troops shouts The New York Times headline. I also had a triumph, still working after two weeks and Lord knows how many buttons. It seemed that there were more kinds of buttons then there were grains of sand on Jones Beach. Brass buttons had been the most popular. Everyone being patriotic and feeling supportive wanted to put military looking buttons on their coats, jackets, and shirts. With the war effort going full blast it was not possible to fill the orders coming in for metal buttons. Customers accepted whatever Perlstein Button Company had and they had plenty. I found stashed in the mountain of wooden boxes buttons made of wood, horn, bone, sea shells, nut shells, glass, leather, typewriter keys, ivory, ceramic, clay, bear claw, porcelain, mother-of-pearl, celluloid, cattle hoof, shark tooth, and cloth. And locked in the basement were some made from pearls and semi-precious stones. Mr. Busenbaum told me about the basement cache, not in so many words but enough for me to figure it out. That past Monday, as he glared at me with a beady eye, he said that I might just last at the job and if that happens then he will introduce me to the basement treasure buttons. That’s what he said, “treasure”, so I figure it must be precious stone buttons, like I once saw a lady wearing coming out of the Metropolitan Opera down by Union Square. She had a jet-black long-sleeve velvet outfit with pearl buttons on the jacket and sleeves. Those buttons were the whitest white against the jet-black velvet; they caught light from the street lamps and tossed their rays about like bolts of lightning. I was thinking that Germany was now losing and maybe, just maybe, Mr. Busenbaum was softening because he might need me as a character witness. Perhaps, I thought, he should change his hairstyle, shave his mustache. If he stops using his cutting voice then I might help him. August 26, 1944: Nazi Rout Grows; German Commander Surrenders in Paris. I’ve learned a few things working these past two months at Perlstein Button Company. Not anything grand, like driving a Sherman tank, but important things nonetheless. I always ate my peanut-butter-jelly sandwich outside the building. I sat on a rough wood crate in front of Chang Import Ltd. and watch the girls walk by in their flimsy summer dresses. I was afraid of ingesting rat poison if I ate lunch inside the Perlstein building;