The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [45]
I explained about copyright and trademarks and licensing agreements. It was a little bit like explaining the internal-combustion engine to a field mouse. He kept nodding his head, but I don’t know how much of it he got. He understood the main point — that we were walking off with his stock, and he was stuck for whatever it cost him. He didn’t like that part but there wasn’t much he could do about it.
Lee tucked the shirts under his arm and we kept going. At Forty-seventh Street we crossed over in response to a signal from Wally. They’d found another pair of Senegalese with a big spread of Batman items — T’s and sweatshirts and gimme caps and sun visors, some a direct knockoff of the copyrighted Bat signal, others a variation on the theme, but none of it authorized and all of it subject to confiscation. The two men — they looked like brothers, and were dressed identically in baggy beige trousers and sky-blue nylon shirts — couldn’t understand what was wrong with their merchandise and couldn’t believe we intended to haul it all away with us. But there were five of us, and we were large intimidating white men with an authoritarian manner, and what could they do about it?
“I’ll get the car,” Wally said. “No way we’re gonna schlep this crap seven blocks in this heat.”
With the trunk almost full, we drove to Thirty-fourth and broke for lunch at a place Wally liked. We sat at a large round table. Ornate beer steins hung from the beams overhead. We had a round of drinks, then ordered sandwiches and fries and half-liter steins of dark beer. I had a Coke to start, another Coke with the food, and coffee afterward.
“You’re not drinking,” Lee Trombauer said.
“Not today.”
“Not on duty,” Jimmy said, and everybody laughed.
“What I want to know,” Eddie Rankin said, “is why everybody wants a fucking Batman shirt in the first place.”
“Not just shirts,” somebody said.
“Shirts, sweaters, caps, lunch boxes, if you could print it on Tampax they’d be shoving ‘em up their twats. Why Batman, for Christ’s sake?”
“It’s hot,” Wally said.
“ ‘It’s hot.’ What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means it’s hot. That’s what it means. It’s hot means it’s hot. Everybody wants it because everybody else wants it, and that means it’s hot.”
“I seen the movie,” Eddie said. “You see it?”
Two of us had, two of us hadn’t.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Basically I’d say it’s a kid’s movie, but it’s okay.”
“So?”
“So how many T-shirts in extra large do you sell to kids? Everybody’s buying this shit, and all you can tell me is it’s hot because it’s hot. I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to,” Wally said. “It’s the same as the niggers. You want to try explaining to them why they can’t sell Batman unless there’s a little copyright notice printed under the design? While you’re at it, you can explain to me why the assholes counterfeiting the crap don’t counterfeit the copyright notice while they’re at it. The thing is, nobody has to do any explaining because nobody has to understand. The only message they have to get on the street is Batman no good, no sell Batman. If they learn that much we’re doing our job right.”
Wally paid for everybody’s lunch. We stopped at the Flatiron Building long enough to empty the trunk and carry everything upstairs, then drove down to the Village and worked the sidewalk market on Sixth Avenue below Eighth Street. We made a few confiscations without incident. Then, near the subway entrance at West Third, we were taking a dozen shirts and about as many visors from a West Indian when another vendor decided to get into the act. He was wearing a dashiki and had his hair in Rastafarian dreadlocks, and he said, “You can’t take the brother’s wares, man. You can’t do that.”
“It’s unlicensed merchandise produced in contravention of international copyright protection,” Wally told him.
“Maybe so,” the man said, “but that don’t empower you to seize it. Where’s your due process? Where’s your authority? You aren’t police.” Poe-lease, he said, bearing down on the first syllable. “You can’t come into a man’s store, seize his wares.”
“Store?” Eddie Rankin