On the front, sprawled across the chest, her signature: Saina.
By eight o’clock on the morning of the vernissage, nine of the ten young club promoters she’d hired via a DJ friend had shown up, all wearing sunglasses and toting Starbucks, all unexpectedly enthusiastic once she outlined the plan of attack. She loaded each of them down with a hundred factory-fresh jackets, three hundred dollars in dollar bills—paper clipped into bundles of five—and a map of Miami with their territory highlighted in yellow. She took the last hundred, slinging the nearly thirty pounds of Tyvek in a bag over her shoulder, and set out with her nine warriors.
The first man she’d approached was sitting on a crate outside a Starbucks, holding up a cardboard sign that he’d markered with, $$$ OR ?. He’d locked eyes with her as she’d begun to explain, cutting her off and yelling, “I don’t see a smile! Smiles or dollars!” So Saina had plastered a grin on her face as she held out the jacket, but still he’d spat at her, full of anger. “You think I can’t make my own fashion styles? You think you can buy my body? My body? You can’t buy my body! I wouldn’t sell you my mind and now you come swinging for my body!” She’d backed away, frightened, worried that the whole project was going to end with this. Behind her, there was wild, threatening laughter and Saina had felt a moment of genuine fear. Did the man have friends coming to his defense, ready to jump the clueless rich girl who’d thought that she could exploit them all so easily? Turning, she’d faced three teenagers, Mohawks atop their baby faces, band patches safety pinned to their ripped denim vests. One of them held a gray pit bull puppy on a length of soiled rope.
“Sorry, sorry, um, cute dog,” she’d said, trying to retreat before they got mad at her, too.
“Hey, lady, I’ll do it.”
“What?”
“Yeah, you said it was for art, right?”
“Yeah! It is. I’m an artist.” Saina had scrambled in her bag, pulling out three jackets. “Yeah, if you could just wear them for today, that’s it.”
The one with the pit bull looked at her, skeptical, not making a move to take it. “I’m an artist, too,” he said.
“Cool.”
“So we support your art, what are you going to do to support mine?”
Saina felt in her pocket and reached for three paper-clipped sets of bills. “How’s this? For each of you.”
His friends had snatched the cash and pulled on their jackets in one easy motion, her face swallowing up their punk posturing, but he’d taken the money from her fingers slowly, deliberately, curling his lip as he pocketed the bills. “Makes things pretty easy, huh?” he’d snarled, before moving on with his friends, her jacket, nonetheless, on his back.
The rest of the day was easier. Saina hadn’t counted on the number of homeless people who would be passed out—drunk or asleep—that early in the morning, but she’d ended up overcoming her guilt and just draping a jacket over each prone form, holding her breath against the urine smell of neglect that wafted up at her every time. When she’d texted the others and suggested they do the same, the responses had come back fast—Yep DUN! Duh, doing it. Thought that wuz the plan? Hustlers all. Saina mentally filed junior club promoters alongside talent agency assistants and nail salon owners as reliable sources of creative aggression.
And three hours later, there it was: Saina’s face and name on the body of every single homeless person in the city of Miami.
When eleven o’clock approached, Saina inserted herself in the teeming press of people outside the convention center; well-preserved Miami women in furs and flimsy dresses jostled against global nomads in bespoke suits and art students in carefully constructed personas. Then the glass doors were flung open and the crowd surged in, hot and eager, and within minutes, an epidemic of little red stickers bloomed like measles across the hall. Those who weren’t buying were talking, and one of the main topics was the rash of Saina’s face across the city. Some thought it was brilliant; some thought it was disgusting. Everyone who mattered thought it was both.