Portlet onclick event handler problem

I am trying to build a custom HTML portlet that will show weather data for a specific latitude/longitude value. I have all the API data and everything is ready to go. The problem I am having is with getting the user's input. I have a textbox that I want the user to input their address, which is geocoded into a lat/long pair and from there we get the weather data. The problem is with the button onclick event handler. It is not firing, I have tried every method to attach the event handler, using the HTML element onclick="", using jquery's