So when I’m asked how my life has changed since the show, that’s the kind of story that explains how crazy everything’s gotten. I still don’t think my life is all that interesting, but it’s gotten quite a bit more interesting in the past couple of years.
CHAPTER 10
A World of Secrets
I’m always trying to provide historical context on the television show. History is what I love, the more unusual the better. And while I’m pretty conversant on historical items such as Civil War muskets and presidential signatures, I’ve also spent a lot of time studying and learning some lesser-known facts.
In other words, I’m full of both useful and useless information.
I’ll let you decide which category to place my extensive knowledge of pimps and the history of their profession in. Fact is, I’ve dealt with a lot of them over the years, and there are some interesting aspects of their subculture, even beyond the crazy pimp rings we’ve had in the shop.
The stereotype of the pimp with the fancy, loud suit and the gaudy, large jewelry is, in my experience, very true to life. But did you know there’s a practical business purpose for that jewelry?
Pimps buy a lot of jewelry from me, and the bigger the better. It’s not fake, either. They insist on real gold and they’re willing to pay a good amount for it.
And here’s why: If they get arrested, the cops will confiscate their cash but not their jewelry. They can give their jewelry to one of their girls, and she’ll take it directly to the pawn shop to get money for bail. It makes perfect sense if you look at it from their perspective.
The jewelry is not just an accessory for them, or a way to announce their success. (Or their profession.) They know that a pawn shop, as an industry standard, will give fifty cents on the dollar for jewelry that was purchased in that shop. And gold is always valuable to us, whether as is or as scrap. So to these guys, jewelry is economic security.
And when times get tough for the pimps, as they have since the economy went south, we see more and more of them sending their girls in to pawn the jewelry.
Hispanics are another group that has historically used jewelry as economic security. When you’ve been poor or beaten down or are skeptical of people’s motives—maybe you distrust banks, or maybe you aren’t in the country legally—you look for different avenues to provide security. If you’re worried about being arrested or deported, and you don’t completely understand what the police can and can’t confiscate, you’re going to rely on what you know. And a lot of people in that community have been taught about pawn shops.
There’s something comforting in knowing you can buy a piece of jewelry from me and be guaranteed to get fifty cents on the dollar if you need to sell it back. They see it as wearing cash. Some bail bondsmen who cater to the Hispanic community will accept jewelry as collateral.
And if it makes you feel good to wear it, all the better.
These are the kinds of pawn-shop subplots that we don’t get into on the television show. There’s a backstory for just about everything. For example, on the show I ask nearly every customer, “OK, do you want to pawn it or sell it?” Almost without fail, the people who make it onto the show say, “I want to sell it.”
There’s a good reason for that, also: People don’t want to be seen on television pawning their stuff. If close to six million people are watching you on television, you don’t want that to be the image that beams out from the set. If someone agrees to be on television pawning an item, they have to agree to waive the confidentiality.
To sell something is a business transaction, but to pawn something is an admission. It’s telling the world, Hey, everybody—I’m broke.
The people you see on the show are really selling their items. Most of the time, the rare and unusual stuff is more likely to be sold than pawned. We’ve got a reputation for dealing in that stuff—for being one of the few places outside of a museum or an auction house that does, in fact—so word has spread that we’re the place to go. The show has made this more apparent, obviously, but even before, we’d get people coming through the door with someone weird saying, “My buddy told me you guys might be interested in this.” Or “I don’t know what to do with this, and I heard you might be able to help me out.”
But in the real, everyday life of the pawn shop, people want to keep their stuff. So they pawn. There’s something to be said for America’s inherently positive outlook, because people who pawn fully expect to get their stuff back as soon as their life takes a turn for the better. They rationalize: I’m just going through a rough patch right now; it’ll be over soon and I’ll have money to go back in there and reclaim my stuff.
A guy who works for a living doesn’t want to sell his tools. He wants to pawn them. He might wake up the next morning and discover the estimate he gave for that big kitchen remodel came through. So now he’s got work, and he’ll eventually have money, so things will be back to normal as soon as he can scare up the money to get into the shop and get his tools back.
And he’s telling himself: I’ll never see the inside of a pawn shop again. He might be right, and he might not be. If he’s wrong, we’ll still be there.
I see people who don’t have anything. I see people who are broken, who don’t have a dime to their names, a drop of gas in their tanks, or a scrap of food in their stomachs. They come to me and I have to tell them no. I can’t help them because they have nothing to offer me. That sounds awful, but it’s another stark truth of the business. More facts of life. Sometimes it’ll just kill me—those people will just walk out the door and go sit in the parking lot to cry.
We’d had the television show for about a year when a marine walked into the store, and he was desperate. He was trying to sell me some piece-of-shit digital watch. It was the only thing he had of any value, and I had no interest in it.
He had the watch in one hand and a police report in the other. He’d had his wallet stolen. He’d lost everything, and he needed to get back to Camp Pendleton outside San Diego that day. He’d come to Vegas for the weekend, got robbed, and had no means of getting back. He was in a tough spot, to say the least.
“I can’t take your watch,” I told him. “I don’t want to sound mean, but it’s really worthless to me.”
He was on the verge of tears. If he didn’t find a way back—either by plane or bus—he was going to be declared AWOL. I was clearly his last resort, and he stood there, paralyzed, not knowing where to turn next.
“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I went into the back of the store, and I told everybody, “OK, here’s what we’re going to do: Everyone is going to give me twenty bucks, and we’re going to get this guy back to Pendleton.”
It wasn’t a request, it was an order. I figured if everybody contributed, we’d all feel good about helping someone out. I passed the hat, and we rounded up enough for him to get on a bus in time to get back to the base.
It’s a tough business. You see a lot of people you wish you could help, but if you start turning your business into a charity you’ll find yourself right alongside those people. A pawnbroker with a really big heart isn’t a pawnbroker for very long.
* * * *
Every once in a while we get the odd case of someone who pawns something for far less than it’s worth and never picks it up. Perfect example: We had a guy come in and pawn a belt buckle that held two twenty-dollar gold pieces and a fifty-peso gold coin.
He used this buckle to borrow $50, and he did it on a regular basis. At the time, this buckle held about $1,200 worth of gold in it. You can argue about the sanity of wearing around a belt buckle worth that much money, but it was quite a sight. One morning, I went to the safe to see what items came off pawn that day, and there it was—the belt buckle.
And then there’s the other cases: There’s a Harley-Davidson shovelhead motor in the shop that’s been there for fifteen years. This guy has been paying interest on his loan for this motor for fifteen years. We’ve made so much mone
y off interest on this thing—he could have bought himself a brand-new bike with the money he’s paid us in interest. But to him we’re probably just a storage facility, and we can live with that.
It’s not uncommon for people to use us for storage. If someone is going on vacation and doesn’t trust their family members with a valuable piece of art or an antique, they can bring it in and have it under twenty-four-hour armed security for as long as they need. It’s unconventional, but it makes some sense. When we sold non-antique guns, a lot of people would bring them in and pawn them while they went on vacation. They didn’t want to leave the guns lying around the house, and we were an easy and safe alternative.
There are hundreds of items in the back room that have been there for years. It works out great for me—I’m happy to collect interest forever if they’re willing to pay it—but it underscores one more great thing about my job: I don’t always understand people. It’s just a thing. Don’t be so attached to it.
One of Corey’s favorite lines in the pawn-shop business comes right after he’s disappointed someone by refusing to give them what they want for something.
“Come on, dude,” they say. “I’ve got good credit with you guys.”
Corey looks at them and says, “Come on, brah, who you kidding here? People with good credit have credit cards. Just because you’ve picked up your shit a bunch of times doesn’t mean I have to trust you.”
I had a regular customer who’s a billionaire. An honest-to-goodness billionaire. He’s a local guy, maybe late fifties, eccentric and cheap as hell. That’s the key to his wealth: He never spends a penny.
For years, the sole purpose of my pawn shop for him was to get laid. I didn’t encourage it, but that doesn’t make it any less true: He used my shop to pick up chicks. Here’s how his operation worked: Every two weeks or so he showed up with some young thing on his arm. We’d always talk; he’s a fun guy, what am I going to say? He knew that I was in on his little game, and he was fine with that. He wandered the store for a while, showing her all the oddities before eventually making his way over to the jewelry counter.
He would then call me over to show her all kinds of expensive jewelry, and the girl would always go crazy imagining how it was going to look on her. Just as it reached the point where he either had to buy something or disappoint her, my billionaire friend would say, “OK, Rick, thank you very much. You can put it back in the case. We’re going to go to my house and talk about it for a while first.”
Never bought a thing. Two weeks later, he was back with a different girl.
Now, you ask: Why would he do this at a pawn shop? In Vegas, he could choose any of the high-end stores—Bulgari, Prada, Tiffany’s—and probably impress the girls more than at Gold & Silver Pawn Shop.
Oh, but you’d be wrong, and here’s why: Those shops wouldn’t put up with him. Once, maybe twice, but after that he wouldn’t be welcome in one of those places, no matter how much money he has. They’d get sick of him, and they’d be on to his game in no time.
Me? Hell, for me it’s entertainment. I don’t care what he’s doing. I’m more concerned with good conversation with people who have lived interesting lives, and he fits that category.
I love to pick the brains of people who have expertise in unusual areas. Of course, I’m someone who can sit down and read a book on the history of batteries and be enthralled the entire time. (The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution—check it out.)
There’s another rich customer who comes in because he has the world’s largest collection of slot machines. Whenever someone comes in with an old slot machine, I’ll call him up and see if he’s interested. We’ll go off on some conversational tangent that might take an hour, but in the end I’ve always learned something.
We have a group of little old ladies who have been regulars for more than a decade. They walk in every six weeks or so to see what’s new. They want to see every single piece of jewelry, and they might spend an hour just browsing around. It’s their outing, and I love talking to them. One of the downsides to the show is that I can’t spend as much time talking to the old customers like them; there’s just too much commotion when I walk out into the showroom.
I try to learn something from everybody. I try not to make moral judgments. Of course, in a pawn shop in Vegas, I wouldn’t have too many customers if I was making a lot of moral judgments.
And that’s how I end up learning things from the kinds of people respectable society would consider unsavory—like a pimp I’ll call Calvin. Up until a few years ago, he came into the store regularly to buy jewelry or pawn stuff. There’s an anaconda-skin suit in the back room—honest-to-goodness anaconda skin—thanks to him.
Calvin would roll up in the parking lot in the first of two tricked-out Navigators. Riding with him were two of the most beautiful black women you have ever seen, along with four of the fattest, nastiest white girls. The second Navigator was filled with more nasty white girls.
I’m not trying to be mean here; I’m just telling the truth. These girls were not attractive in the least. But Calvin seemed to have an endless supply of them at his disposal, and finally my curiosity got the best of me.
“Calvin, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve gotta ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“How do you make any money with those white girls?”
Calvin nodded and ran a hand across his chin like a college professor getting ready to explain a complicated formula.
“Well, Rick,” he began, “I’m going to let you in on some of the secrets of the secret society”—in his cadence, this is see-cret so-seye-i-teee. “A brother has been told his entire life that this”—he pointed to one of the white girls—“is the forbidden fruit. These two sisters here are absolutely beautiful, but if I bring any two of these others into the ’hood, I will make twice as much money.”
Now, look—this guy’s probably a douche bag. I’m not arguing that point. But I’ll ask anybody anything, and sometimes that gets me in trouble. But more often than not, I’ll ask my questions and come away knowing more than I did before I asked. I learned something from Calvin that day.
Calvin had tentacles all over the place. He worked in Vegas, and he worked in Arizona. He was working in Arizona when the cops finally caught up to him. They arrested him for pimping and pandering, and this time they had an airtight case. One factor they didn’t consider: Calvin’s cocaine habit.
He had a massive heart attack inside the county lockup. Once you’re in police custody, the state has to pay for any medical issues that might arise, and they apparently weren’t too excited about this down in Arizona. As the story goes, they took him out of jail and dumped him at a nearby emergency room. He recovered and eventually made his way back to Las Vegas.
One day he walked back into the pawn shop. He must have just gotten back from Arizona, because he was down to nothing. He handed me a piece-of-shit gold chain that must have been the only thing of value he had left. I gave him twenty bucks for it, and as I handed over the bill, he winked and said, “You watch, Rick, I’m going to turn this into five grand by the end of the day.” I don’t know how he did it, but at the end of the day he walked back in with a pocketful of hundreds, got his chain back, and bought as much bling as he could.
People ask, “How can you stand it?” Stand it? I think the human race is the greatest thing ever! From my vantage point, every single day is a chance to talk to someone that most people would never have the chance to meet. It doesn’t mean I have to live like they do.
After twenty-one years in the pawn business, I’ve learned that just about everybody is crazy in some way. Black, white, brown—all people have some aspect of them that’s completely nuts.
This shop is a graduate-level class in human nature every single day. It’s a wild, crazy, weird world out there, and I’ve gotten to meet just about every kind of wild, crazy, weird person who inhabits it. I have the greatest job in the world, because I ge
t to see people in their native habitat. They don’t sugarcoat anything with me—they lay it all out there.
Whenever I read a study conducted by a sociologist or someone who’s trying to tap into the psyche of the poor or downtrodden, I picture the interviews in my head. Since I know the types of people they’re talking to, I also know those people look upon sociologists or journalists as officials; people who are in some way connected to the system. They’re going to tell them what they want to hear. Or at least what they think they want to hear. Either way it’s different when they’re talking to me with their guard down.
There are certain things you learn by working in a pawn shop that you might not get too many other places. For instance, I assumed everybody knew that strippers in higher-class clubs have to “tip in” at the beginning of every shift. We’ve had girls come into the shop for years pawning stuff to get their “tip in” money. It means this: It might cost a stripper $100 to go to work every night. As soon as she gets to work, she has to drop $100 in the tip-in jar to have the right to work that night. The club owners do this mainly because they can, but it also ensures the girls have an incentive to work hard to earn back the money. The tips they make for the night are theirs to keep, but they can’t start work until they tip in.
I don’t believe a sociologist conducting a study of low-income Americans would be told the story of “Father Unknown.” Well, I’ve been told it more times than I can count. A large portion of poor people in this country write “Father Unknown” on their baby’s birth certificate. They know exactly who the father is, but they put “Father Unknown” for a very practical reason: They get more welfare, and the government can’t go after their boyfriends for the extra money. You put “Father Unknown” on your child’s birth certificate, and it’s a license to double-dip.
License to Pawn: Deals, Steals, and My Life at the Gold & Silver Page 15
