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

by Rick Harrison

  The rest of the world was drifting out of sight and out of mind, but meth was always there, front and center. It got to the point where I didn’t know if it was pleasurable or not. I never gave it a second thought. All I knew was that I couldn’t bear the thought of being without it.

  It created gaps in my life. I woke up in jail not knowing how I got there. I woke up on the floor of a friend’s trailer in the middle of the night one night because I felt something on my face. When I opened my eyes, all I could see was a girl with a demonic look. She was scratching at my face with both of her hands, convinced there were bugs crawling on me.

  Another night I wasn’t so lucky. I passed out in a house filled with tweakers and woke up the next morning looking like I came down with the worst case of chicken pox you ever saw. A girl that was there—not the same girl as before—swore my face had been crawling with bugs and it was her job to get rid of them. It looked like I’d been attacked with an ice pick. When you think about it, you have to ask yourself: What’s the joy in doing a drug that makes you see bugs crawling on people’s faces? Meth turns your life into an ongoing nightmare.

  And it got expensive. Since I didn’t have any money, this created problems. I had pretty much left home by the time I was seventeen, and my dad wasn’t interested in supporting my bad habits. He didn’t know what to do with me, just as his dad hadn’t known what to do with him. He didn’t enable me, though, the way many of my friends’ parents did. He was not someone who was going to pat me on the back and tell me everything was going to be all right.

  “You want to be a drug addict, fine,” he told me. “Go be a drug addict out on the streets. You’re not going to do it in my house, and you’re not going to do it in the shop.”

  I went through some money, too. When I first became addicted, $25 would last me two or three days. Then it got to where I was blowing through a quarter ounce in two days—$800 worth. It was nonstop, a habit that closed off the rest of life. We’d sit in my buddy’s trailer and get high, thinking and talking about how we were going to get more money to get more drugs and keep doing it. It was like throwing coal into a furnace. When we ran out of drugs, we’d go out on The Strip and steal, then use it to buy more drugs. Then, back to the trailer.

  My entire life fit into a backpack.

  Our big adventure was to go to a casino and play video poker. We were so stupid we did this even though we were too young to cash in. We could gamble, but we couldn’t win. I was committing felonies to get high and gamble, and if I did happen to hit that royal flush . . . oh, well.

  I had a strange attitude for being a drug addict. I knew that I was a drug addict and a piece of shit, but I also knew I wasn’t always going to be one. I knew friends who stole from their parents and got so bad they didn’t care about anybody or anything. In the back of my head, I knew there were people in my life I was going to have to eventually go back to and make amends. My dad was at the top of that list, so I never stole from him and I always tried to keep civil around him. It didn’t always work, but there was that small, persistent part of me that knew I was going to make it out of this eventually.

  My dad didn’t know what to do with me, but he knew he had to do something. So he looked around and found a program called Job Corps. I was the first one to go there, followed by my brother, Adam, and then Chumlee. Over the course of about six months, my dad sent three of us there. They should have run a bus—the delinquent bus—from Vegas to Reno. We called Job Corps “Ghetto College,” but it was a one-year trade school and one of the best programs out there. Chumlee and I were taught to be electricians and Adam became a plumber. My dad thought it would give us some direction and remove us from the influences in Vegas, which it did, but it also provided us with a little too much freedom. The students were what you’d call a diverse group—aimless guys like us, parolee gangbangers from Los Angeles, tough girls from Oakland and Sacramento. We kept using when we were there, kept screwing around on our off hours, although the program gave our lives some structure that they never had.

  My other friends didn’t have the same kind of support system. They had parents who just enabled them and made excuses for them. Their parents made it easy for them to continue to do drugs and feel sorry for themselves. Those are the guys who never turned it around. They never got that slap in the face or that wake-up call that let them know: (1) someone cared about them enough to make a hard decision; and (2) life couldn’t go on indefinitely along the same hideous course.

  Job Corps wasn’t magic. Far from it. When we returned to Vegas, we fell back into the old cycle. My brother got a job as a plumber, and he did really well, but I wasn’t much of an electrician. Chum went to work for McDonald’s. We weren’t exactly on the fast track to success.

  Back to the drugs, too. Deep into them. After Reno I went on the two-week, no-sleep bender. After Reno I was still couch-surfing, still waking up wondering if someone tweaking harder than me would try to pick apart my face on those nights when I did sleep.

  One night after Reno I was out with some people and I saw a bunch of girls in a parking lot in my dad’s car. I’d been awake for several days and was in my typical state—high on meth. I flew into a rage and headed over to the car and started pulling them out of it, one by one.

  “You stole my dad’s car!” I kept yelling.

  They were freaking out. During this scene, someone called the cops. I was handcuffed and thrown into the back of the squad car, and only then did I realize, somewhere deep in the recesses of my addled brain, that it wasn’t my dad’s car after all. I was either hallucinating or so far gone I couldn’t see straight. Either way, the result was the same: I was assaulting a bunch of girls for being in a car that apparently looked like my dad’s.

  That earned me a night in jail. I didn’t have many options when it came to calling someone to bail me out. My dad was disgusted with me at this point, so I called my grandmother on my biological mom’s side to see if she might come down to the jail and bail me out. Usually guys like me have more luck with grandmas when they’re in a situation like this. By some fluke, my mother was there, and she agreed to help me out.

  For the first time in my life, I came upon something that made me believe there was a larger force at work in my life. You have to understand: I felt my mother was not around for me. I had a lot of problems with her for a lot of years.

  But now, through some coincidence I’ll never be able to adequately explain, she showed up at the Las Vegas jail to get her eighteen-year-old son. I hadn’t seen her in six years. It wasn’t the homecoming I envisioned, but she was there.

  “I feel good,” she told me. “It would make me feel better to be able to help you.”

  At this point, I was willing to take any help I could get. Something about the randomness of this encounter, the weirdness of her being there to help me when I really needed someone, made me think I was being given a sign from above: It was time to get clean, before it was too late.

  She was living in Northern California, in Santa Rosa, and she suggested that I come back with her and try to get my act together there, away from Vegas, away from my friends, away from whatever trouble was consistently finding its way to me.

  I agreed to go, with the intention of spending a couple of months getting sober and returning to Las Vegas.

  Wishful thinking.

  It wasn’t that easy. Meth doesn’t come with the same kind of physical withdrawals as heroin, but it’s just as hard to quit. Your only desire is to do more, and you don’t care what the consequences are. That’s the hard part about quitting: When you’re addicted, it’s the only thing you want to do, so what is there without it?

  My mom’s house was across the street from a Carl’s Jr. I told myself, “Every time I feel like getting high, I’m going to walk over to that Carl’s Jr. and get a double-bacon western cheeseburger, a large fries, and a large Coke.”

  I felt like getting high a lot. How often? Put it this way: I gained 100 pounds in sixteen months. I
was 230 pounds when I moved away from Vegas, and my dad liked to call me “the only fat tweaker in the history of the world.” I got a lot fatter in the process of quitting, and the people at that Carl’s Jr. got to watch me expand before their eyes.

  But you know what? It gradually got easier. I wouldn’t recommend that a double-bacon western cheeseburger replace a 12-step program, but it helped me. To each his own I guess.

  After a few months, I got a job at a lumber mill in a town just north of Santa Rosa called Windsor. I worked for Calico Hardwoods, a company that makes stocks for rifles. The particulars of the job aren’t that important—it was hard work, though—but to this point I had never had a job for more than two months.

  As part of my recovery, when I started the job I told himself, “I don’t care what happens, I don’t care how bad of a job it is or how much I hate it, I’ve got to keep this job for at least a year.”

  I didn’t enjoy my time in California. I was there for one reason: to get clean. I worked hard and stayed away from the drugs and ate a lot of double-bacon cheeseburgers. I didn’t make friends or sightsee. I put my head down and injected some discipline into my life. After a while it became easier to put meth out of my mind, and by the time I left California I was the biggest anti-drug guy you’d ever want to know.

  I worked at the mill for one year and one day. On that 366th day, I went into the office, quit my job, and moved back to Las Vegas, a hundred pounds heavier but way lighter in my soul.

  Chumlee and I have been friends forever. (His real name is Austin Russell, but nobody ever calls him by his real name.) He’s like a brother to me, maybe more than my real brother. We grew up in the same neighborhood, and he had some family problems that caused him to gravitate more and more toward our house. By the time he was ten or eleven, he was a fixture at our house at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I think he liked us, but I think food was a major attraction, too.

  When I got back to Vegas after being in California, I made some calls to my old friends to see if any of them had gotten their acts cleaned up. I wasn’t interested in hanging out with guys who were still using, and I was happy to hear Chum had gotten off the stuff, too. Most of the other guys were just walking clichés: dead or in jail. Chum was working in McDonald’s and keeping his nose clean. I asked him if he wanted to go out and do something, and he said he couldn’t afford it.

  I knew he had gotten clean and was working and renting a small room from a guy, and I knew he didn’t have any clothes or a car, so I was a little surprised he couldn’t go out and do something. I mean, seriously—how much money does it cost to live like Chum? Plus, I wasn’t looking to do something that would cost a lot of money, either. My tastes weren’t very refined.

  Then he ran it down for me. Working at McDonald’s, it took a month’s worth of paychecks for him to pay his rent, his food and his transportation to and from work. He was trying to make it work, and stay clean, and that’s how he had to live. I respected that.

  Around that same time, my dad got the bright idea to buy a Quiznos. In order to open one of those, you have to work in one of them seven days a week for three weeks. Then you have to spend two weeks in Denver attending Quiznos University. For no pay.

  There was no way my dad was going to stand in a Quiznos and work there. He decided to give me 25 percent of the Quiznos if I would do all the work. Chumlee came into play because he was already working in McDonald’s and had that all-important fast-food experience. Our deal was that he would manage the Quiznos and work part-time at the pawn shop and quit McDonald’s.

  He had no problem with that.

  Chumlee and I both went to Denver for Quiznos University. Some of the stuff they taught us could be applied to other business-related things, but since I grew up around businesspeople and knew the basics, I didn’t really need to be taught basic math.

  As great as my father can be in business, his biggest fault is that he can be impulsive. Normally, it takes two years to start a Quiznos. You scout out the location and do all the homework necessary to justify a quarter-of-a-million-dollar investment.

  Well, my dad saw that a Quiznos went out of business on Fourth Street in Vegas. My dad says, “Hey, this one’s close to the pawn shop.” Obviously, not everything was perfect with the location since it went out of business. But my dad also saw they were building a giant courthouse/justice center right near it, so we figured we’d have no problem picking up a big lunchtime crowd from there. Even with Chum as manager.

  Little did we know: They were building a huge food court inside the justice building.

  Two years later, we sold the Quiznos to some other sucker.

  From the time I was in the third grade, the only thing I wanted to do was work in the pawn shop. If I had to write something in school about what I wanted to do when I grew up, I always wrote, “Work in the shop with Dad and Grandpa.”

  Funny thing, though: My dad and grandpa didn’t share the same dream. My mom and dad didn’t want me to work in the shop, not because they didn’t think I could but because they thought I should decide upon a career path on my own.

  I spent a lot of time in the shop, and that’s what I wanted to do. Whenever I got suspended from school or sent home from school—which happened a lot—my dad would bring me into the store and make me sweep floors or clean the bathroom. There was no way he was going to let me stay home and watch television all day.

  I needed a job after we got rid of the Quiznos, and I renewed my quest to start working at the shop. I figured if I hung around, he’d give in and put me on the payroll. Instead, my dad opened a business called paddletireking.com. He had been looking to buy paddle tires (big off-roading tires with tread that resembles paddles) for one of his all-terrain quads, and he couldn’t find any online. So, my dad being my dad, he sensed a business opportunity and opened his own company. If he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he figured there were a lot of people out there in the same position. Some people complain about it, some people start their own business to fill the gap. You could drop my dad off in the middle of Africa, and he’d find a way to make money.

  “It’s easy to do,” he says. “Just apply yourself.”

  It helps when you have the vast amount of knowledge he has, and a fearlessness about taking a risk. Here’s an example: One day my dad bought an original photograph off a guy who just wandered into the store needing some cash. The customer didn’t know what he had, but he knew it was a reasonably valuable piece. My dad paid $1,000 for it, and when the guy left my dad said, “I think this could be a real steal.”

  It turns out the picture was taken by one of the few photographers whose printing plates are in the Smithsonian. Now, I know Ansel Adams and a few others, but I didn’t know this guy. My dad did. Me? I still can’t remember the guy’s name.

  The next thing you know, he’s selling the photograph for forty grand. Remember, it’s not our job to educate the customer on what he has—that’s his job. The same as it’s my job to know if something isn’t valuable.

  But if my dad didn’t have his broad scope of knowledge, if he didn’t spend four hours a night reading obscure books, he wouldn’t have bought that piece. And it’s more than just knowing; it’s knowing right now, when that customer walks into the store with that photograph. The day-to-day workings of the shop don’t always allow for him to call in an expert or step back into the office to do some research. If he hesitates, or if he’s wrong, he can either miss out on a great opportunity or end up buying something that’s worthless.

  When it came to the paddletireking.com, my dad didn’t have the time or the inclination to do the work ( just like Quiznos), so he hired me to mount tires for $8 an hour. I worked out of a little room in the building across the parking lot from the pawn shop. The business was successful, and the work was hard. I was mounting twenty-five sets of tires a day, every day. In Las Vegas, in the summer, it was rough. Carrying around hot black tires in 113-degree weather—not fun. My dad was too cheap to buy a mounting
machine, so he figured he’d hire the human mounting machine: me. I worked hard and kept at it, and most important I stayed out of trouble.

  At about the time when I didn’t think I could mount another tire, the night shift guy at the pawn shop quit. I talked to my dad about taking over that job, and he eventually gave me his best “Oh, what the hell” and moved me into the shop. And so began my progress through the ranks of Gold & Silver Pawn, starting with the shittiest job and moving up.

  The night-shift guy works the walk-up window. The window is like a bank teller’s window, with bulletproof glass and a slot to pass through money or items. It’s the only part of the store that’s open twenty-four hours.

  And I’ve seen some stuff. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a lady OD at the night window. Chumlee saw that once. Probably because once is all you need.

  Chris Rock tells a joke about people at an ATM at three in the morning. His point is that anybody who’s at the ATM at three in the morning is up to no good.

  Well, I can do that one better: people at the night window of a pawn shop at three in the morning. Those are the people who have already sucked all their money out of the ATM. Either that or they aren’t stable enough or together enough to even have a bank account to suck out of.

  Either way, you see some things at the night window of a pawn shop in Las Vegas.

  I’m sitting on the stool inside the shop at the night window and a woman walks up and asks me, “Do you buy gold teeth?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we do,” I tell her.

  She’s looking at me through the window, and she doesn’t look like a drug addict or a desperate person. She’s in her fifties. She’s dressed reasonably well, her hair is groomed, she’s not dirty. (Those three descriptions qualify as high class for the night window.)

  She says, “OK, good. Do you have a pair of pliers I can borrow?”

  Stupid me, I think the two questions are unrelated. I think she’s asking to borrow pliers for reasons that have nothing to do with the question of the gold teeth. I’m thinking maybe she needs to fix her car, or maybe give them to a guy she’s with so he can fix the car.