License to Pawn: Deals, Steals, and My Life at the Gold & Silver

by Rick Harrison

  The most amazing revelation of being in a drug treatment facility came when I realized I could buy drugs in there. I was scoring weed in rehab, at an AA meeting they held inside the building.

  The second revelation came from the teachers, who started telling me I was one of the smartest kids they’d ever been around. I don’t say this to brag, but their words changed my life. The facility included a school, where we took classes in the mornings and attended meetings and group sessions the rest of the day.

  These teachers were the first ones who saw me without judgment. I was in a drug treatment center as a fourteen-year-old, so they knew I was a troubled kid. They knew I was a fuckup, so they weren’t really trying to figure out what was wrong with me. My presence indicated a tacit understanding that I needed some help.

  The teachers at Taft just wanted to know why I was disruptive and asleep and getting 100 percent on tests I didn’t appear to care about. Here, the 100 percent I got on tests was seen in a different light. Inside rehab, my brain was seen as a great thing. Hey, everybody. This kid might be troubled, but he’s a goddamned genius.

  These teachers were the first people who didn’t search for reasons why I might not be as smart as I appeared. They saw me as someone who spent five minutes doing his work and the rest of the time twiddling his thumbs and staring at the walls while everyone else sweated out every problem.

  They encouraged me. That was a first, too. They allowed me to spend the last ten or fifteen minutes of every class period trying to teach the other students how to do complicated math problems in their heads. I didn’t have great success, but the process gave me a level of self-confidence I didn’t have previously.

  Also, the program ran on a points system. The more points you accumulated—through good behavior or schoolwork or a good deed—the more freedom you were afforded. So I told my math teacher, “I’ll do a week’s worth of homework today if it means more points for me.” She was good with that, and almost immediately I was racking up points faster than they could count them.

  After three months, I transitioned out of the inpatient treatment facility and into a six-month day school that was the outpatient part of the program. I was given an assessment test on the first day, and I scored 100 on the math. After it was graded, they told me the test topped out at third-year college math. I was fourteen.

  “The way these results look, you’re a genius when it comes to math,” the lady running the program told me.

  I didn’t argue. I had thought I was a math genius since fifth grade, when I thought I’d discovered differential squares. I wasn’t aware that someone else had discovered the concept many, many years before me. I was messing around with numbers because I enjoyed it, and eventually I stumbled upon this way of figuring out 59 cubed in your head by using squares.

  The self-confidence I gained in rehab was great, but there was also a dark side. You tell a fourteen-year-old kid like me that he’s a genius, you’re asking for problems. A little tip: It’s probably the worst thing you can tell him, even if it is true. I was already a bad kid, full of evil thoughts and vile schemes. I was willing to do anything that sounded fun or cool or adventurous.

  Now I was being told I was a genius?

  Uh-oh.

  Bad move.

  I became a bad kid who was even cockier than before. I was arrogant, which meant there was no chance I was going to listen to anybody. This was all the evidence I needed that I was smarter than the adults in my life.

  And imagine the look on my parents’ faces when the teacher from the reform school told them the news. They were dealing with me on a certain level: wild, undisciplined, and nearly impossible to reason with. I was an epileptic who required a lot of extra care. I was the source of a lot of worry on many different fronts.

  Again, a puzzle.

  I was in eighth grade, capable of doing college-level math. But I was also doing third grade–level spelling. I couldn’t spell to save my life, and I think it was because it made no mathematical sense to me. Why isn’t “school” spelled s-k-o-o-l?

  Math made sense. Math fit the concept of order, and spelling didn’t. Spelling was arbitrary, the product of someone’s whims.

  I never was big on trusting anyone but myself.

  I’d like to say spending three months in a locked rehab facility changed my outlook on life, but I was too young for any lasting transformations. There were a lot of complicated thoughts floating through my immature brain, and three months was not enough time to get them all sorted out. I was an invincible kid who was haunted by mortality. I was a fatalist who lived like I was bulletproof.

  Three months of lockup helped me develop some self-esteem. I walked out knowing I was not just a kid who always seemed to make the wrong choices. I was smart, and smart could be cool. The kids and teachers who followed my in-your-head math lessons were quite amazed at my facility with numbers.

  And I filed some valuable information away in my head for later use. I might not have been ready to drop my bad-boy lifestyle completely, but in realizing a few things about myself I couldn’t help but be improved in the process.

  I didn’t do as much drugs. I stopped smoking weed after I realized what an idiot it made of me. I didn’t steal any more motor homes. I didn’t get hammered on SoCo at lunch at school anymore.

  School was a problem I solved in a different way: I quit going.

  I finished eighth grade in the facility. Back at Taft, ninth grade was a different story. I left the house in the morning like I was going to school, but I just took a little detour and hitched a ride to San Diego’s Mission Beach. It was pretty easy, really: I spent my whole ninth grade year at the fucking beach and nobody said boo.

  Eventually, I went back and finished ninth grade, but that was the pinnacle of my formal education. I didn’t stop learning, though. I see it as a trade: I went from being taught by teachers to being taught by the world around me.

  CHAPTER 2

  Vegas Dreaming

  Back in 1973, when I was eight years old, my dad bought a brand-new Volkswagen Thing. If you’ve ever seen a Volkswagen Thing, you’re probably questioning the wisdom of that decision. However, setting aside the aesthetics of the vehicle, my dad’s purchase of the 1973 Volkswagen Thing had a big impact on my life.

  Why? Because I was there. I was in the showroom with him, and it was the first time in my life I ever watched someone negotiate.

  It was a civil conversation between my dad and the salesman for the longest time. I wasn’t really paying attention, because at the time it was just two adults doing their adult talk. The salesman was doing most of the talking, and my dad was listening patiently and occasionally asking a question. It was clear the salesman felt he was on his game, and he definitely seemed to be in charge of the conversation.

  But then, without warning, the volume rose and the tone changed. My dad raised his voice, and it caught everybody in the room off-guard. The salesman gathered his bearings and came back at my dad, which really set Old Man off. He got furious with this guy, yelling and jabbing his finger in the air at him. He was going on and on until people were coming out of their offices to see what was causing all the commotion.

  The salesman, clearly flustered, walked away from my dad and said something about having to talk to his manager. “We’ll get this settled, Mr. Harrison,” he said. His calm was gone, his mojo shattered. He was no longer in charge of the conversation. It was clear the power dynamic in the relationship had shifted.

  “I’ll talk to my manager and be right back,” the salesman said.

  “You do that,” Old Man said.

  My eyes must have been as big as basketballs during this tirade; I was staring at my dad and wondering what could have made him that mad that quickly. I was feeling sorry for the salesman, because it didn’t seem as if he’d done anything to set my dad off. And as the salesman turned his back and walked away, my dad turned to me and gave me a big wink.

  It took me a second before I realized what
was happening. It was all a game. My dad wasn’t really mad at this guy; he was just doing what he had to do to get himself the best deal. I remember feeling relieved that it wasn’t going to end up in a bloody fistfight, and then I thought to myself, Ah, so that’s how this works. It’s all for show.

  The episode in the Volkswagen dealership is something I think about often. It was a memory that gained significance as the years went on. Not only did I learn something about negotiation, but I realized that a business transaction is not meant to be a friendship. The salesman wanted to be my dad’s friend, but for my dad the purchase of a 1973 Volkswagen Thing wasn’t a sentimental endeavor. He knew what he wanted, and he knew what he wanted to pay for it. End of story. Anything beyond that, including the salesman’s feelings, was immaterial.

  Even though I wasn’t allowed to play sports, I was always a fiercely competitive kid who needed to find an outlet for that competitiveness. Watching my dad and that salesman, I realized something: That was a competition. And since we ended up bringing The Thing home with us, I knew Dad got the better of that slick salesman. Say what you will about a 1973 Volkswagen Thing, but it was proof of his victory.

  The Thing ended up having a long and colorful life in our family. It made the trip with us from San Diego to Las Vegas, and it ultimately ended up being driven by both of my brothers and me. My older brother, Joe, did some damage to it before it was passed along to me. I fixed it up a little bit and worked on it to get it going, and one night I was driving down the freeway at about midnight and . . . whoosh! . . . the roof ripped clean off and flew down the freeway behind me. So for about the next few months I drove a car without a roof—or a heater—in the winter in Las Vegas, where it gets colder than you might think, especially at night.

  But while the history of The Thing might be irrelevant, its place in my memory is strong. It represented the first time I saw firsthand the power of negotiation, and the first time I discovered that prices were only suggestions, not absolutes.

  The money bug hit me for good when I was twelve. When people ask when I began working for my dad, I say it started then, when he started taking me to swap meets on Saturday mornings to look for overlooked treasures and, believe it or not, silver spoons. Those aren’t just a cliché, by the way. Up until the 1980s, you could forage through swap meets and garage sales and pick through people’s stuff to find silver spoons. When people sell silverware, the everyday stuff often gets mixed up with Grandma’s old silver collection. It might be one out of five hundred, but if you took your time and knew what you were looking for, you could come away with some pretty good finds. It wasn’t unusual for us to find ten spoons over the course of a weekend.

  My dad always sold gold and silver, subscribing to the idea that metals are a surefire investment. Gold has a hallowed place in the eyes of American investors. There’s a historical reason why so many people retreated to gold during the mortgage meltdown and banking crisis. In 1933, during the banking crisis after the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, which required U.S. citizens to turn in their gold. It prohibited citizens from owning more than $100 worth of gold coins. This limitation on gold ownership was not fully rescinded until President Gerald Ford signed a bill in 1974. Because of this, gold has become the investment of choice among those who either fear or distrust the government, and the sheer quantity of people with those beliefs caused the price of gold to spike to more than $1,300 an ounce in 2010.

  And now back to my childhood: Searching for treasure at garage sales and swap meets was a pastime that required a great deal of patience, and even though I was a wild kid, I found I had the patience and determination to pick through the chaff in search of the wheat. I was very focused, a fact I attribute to the hours spent on my bed reading all day with the ice packs on my legs.

  My lifelong curiosity and quest to determine real from fake started simply: with my dad teaching me the difference between real and fake silver. He taught me to examine everything very closely, and it gave me a feeling of power to pull a real silver spoon out of the pile.

  Since he grew up with nothing and didn’t like the feeling, my dad has always been a hustler, the kind of guy who would learn about something and use it for his own benefit and profit. Old Man’s always had a combination of curiosity and savvy. He’s got street smarts and an uncanny ability to read people.

  I had spent most of my life either ignoring or disobeying my parents, but our new partnership was cool. Everything was new, everything was different. There was so much to learn, which appealed to my analytical side. My mom got interested, and roaming swap meets for hidden treasure became something the three of us could do together. (Funny, they weren’t overly involved parents when it came to school, but they were happy to spend time with me when there was money to be made.) If I wasn’t spending the weekend helping my dad fix up his run-down rental houses in San Diego, I was hanging out at swap meets and garage sales.

  During this time, I was still having seizures, but they were starting to become less and less frequent. You might have an image of me as an aimless, drug-addled kid, but I had a passion for things that interested me. I was taking semiregular trips to the public library, and in my readings on epilepsy I came to conclude that my seizures were changing from grand mal to petit mal. They weren’t as ferocious, and they weren’t as frequent. I could almost feel my heart bounce in my chest when I read that oftentimes kids my age simply grew out of the seizures and no longer had to take medication.

  It was difficult for me to find the kind of comprehensive information on epilepsy that would satisfy my fierce need for knowledge. This wasn’t the age of the Internet, of course, so I couldn’t simply log into WebMD and go to town. I had to find medical journals or textbooks that might provide an overview of the disease or give me some little tidbits—like the information about the evolution from grand mal to petit mal.

  This was important, because I was getting to the age where I could see a huge milestone looming: a driver’s license. This wasn’t going to happen as long as I was still having seizures; I knew for a fact the state of California wasn’t going to issue me a driver’s license if I was an active epileptic.

  So, starting before my fifteenth birthday, I took matters into my own hands.

  I told my parents I’d stopped having seizures.

  This lie was easier to tell because they were becoming far less frequent and far less severe. The petit mal seizures were no picnic, but they were far less traumatic than the full-blown grand mal. However, just as I started to lose my fear that a massive grand mal seizure was going to kill me, another concern began.

  Sitting in front of the television one night, the world went black. My eyes were open, but it was as if a black curtain had been pulled over my eyes. I sat there, half-expecting a seizure to follow, but nothing happened. I tried not to panic, and I tried not to let anyone know there was a chance I was going blind. After a period of time—probably fifteen to thirty seconds—my vision returned as quickly as it had left.

  These bouts of blindness happened periodically over a stretch of about six months. Terrified of not being able to get my license, I kept quiet about them. This wasn’t the wise choice, of course, but the truth was they scared the hell out of me and I believed there was a chance they would stop if I just wished them away.

  Every time my sight returned at the end of one of these episodes, I felt like a miracle had happened. And then, just like the seizures, the bouts of blindness became less frequent and less severe, until they ultimately went away entirely. I never investigated what caused them, probably because I was in denial. It was almost as if I willed them out of my life.

  Sixteen was a big year for me. My last seizure came when I was sixteen. The bouts of blindness came and went when I was sixteen. I got my driver’s license when I was sixteen.

  I hadn’t had a seizure for quite some time when the last one hit. I’m embarrassed to admit it happened after I had ingested four or five qua
aludes. I’m guessing I might have brought that one on myself.

  Yeah. Smart, huh? I might have been a genius, but that didn’t stop me from doing stupid things.

  Nobody could figure me out. I was a tenth-grade dropout who read and studied more than most college students. I could be a raging, partying guy on Friday night and then get up Saturday morning, pack three or four physics books into a backpack, hop on a motorcycle, and drive into the desert. I’d sit on the side of a mountain all day long reading them. No wonder nobody knew what to make of me. I wasn’t always sure, either.

  When I was fifteen, I got my hands on a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Understanding Physics. You would have thought I’d found a new drug. I read that thing front to back three times, one after another. I eventually got all four volumes and read through them the way some people shred through Harry Potter books. To me, it was not only educational, it was fascinating, and it was fun. To this day, I love to read physics books, and I will not apologize for that.

  The bottom fell out of my parents’ real estate business when I was sixteen. All I can remember them talking about was the high interest rates—as high as 18 percent—and the complete shutdown of the housing market. They started losing money, until they didn’t have any more money to lose.

  One day my dad came into the family room to talk to me and my two brothers.

  “Sons, we’re moving to Las Vegas,” he said. “We just can’t make a go of it here anymore.”

  He was never much of a talker, or an explainer, but he outlined what he wanted to do. He would go to Vegas because Vegas was the best place to start a small business buying and selling coins and jewelry.

  Looking back on it, it was a desperation move. They waited out the real estate market and figured it wasn’t bouncing back anytime soon, thanks to the 18 percent interest rates. My dad had his navy pension and his smarts, and I’m sure there was a big part of him that relished the challenge of making a new life for himself by surviving on his business savvy and his wits.