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

by Rick Harrison

  He hit a superfecta and he had a nickel on it.

  Only Bill Urlaub.

  His parsimonious gambling habits were a big reason why we could never figure out how he was always broke after the first eight days of every month. Gambling seemed to be his only vice, but he didn’t bet enough for it to make a dent in his standard of living. Maybe from sheer volume, but not from the amounts he was betting.

  Then again, this was a guy who had a bookie that allowed him to bet on high school football in Las Vegas.

  Another time he came in and started bragging to Corey about having a hooker the night before. Corey wasn’t that interested, but you didn’t have to be interested for Bill to keep telling his stories.

  Corey interrupted the story and asked, “Dude, how much you pay for a hooker?”

  Bill says, “Four bucks.”

  We’re almost on the ground laughing, trying not to let Bill think we’re making fun of him. Four dollars? Corey says, “Dude, what kind of hooker do you get to come into your seedy-ass apartment for four bucks?”

  Bill gets this little shit-eating grin on his face and says, “Corey, you know the difference between a four-dollar blow job and a hundred-dollar blow job?”

  “No, I can’t imagine.”

  “I’ll tell you the difference: Ninety-six dollars.”

  The whole room broke up. The next time Bill came into the store, which was probably later that day, Corey shouted, “What up, Bizzle my Dizzle?”

  This was during Snoop Dogg’s heyday, and Bizzle stuck. Everybody who works here has a nickname, so why shouldn’t our most famous customer? Besides, if you saw this guy with his mouthpiece teeth and his duct-taped shoes, the idea of calling him “Bizzle” was just too funny.

  It stuck. From that point on, he was Bizzle. He even started calling himself that.

  * * * *

  I don’t want to make it sound like we made fun of Bizzle. We had our fun with him, but we also looked after him and took care of him. One of the ways we took care of him was by continuing to take his crap on pawn every month.

  You might wonder: What kinds of things would a guy like Bizzle pawn when he showed up at the shop on the ninth of every month?

  His two spare bicycle tubes, which were several years old and still in the box (pawned for $10).

  His hammer ($10).

  His Nevada state flag ($20).

  His spare bike frame that he was always saying he was going to build up when he got enough money saved up ($20).

  And, most famously, his weights ($25).

  The weights were always the last item to be pawned, for obvious reasons. Bizzle didn’t own a car, so he had to get his weights from his apartment downtown to the pawn shop, probably three miles, on his bicycle.

  Picture this: a six-foot-seven man with duct-taped shoes and unlined dentures pedaling a bicycle down Las Vegas Boulevard balancing a forty-five-pound Olympic barbell with two forty-five-pound Olympic weights on the ends.

  You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen Bizzle rolling down the street with his weights. The man was a sight to behold.

  Our biggest charitable move toward Bizzle came when Big Hoss and Chumlee ran the Quiznos. They hired Bizzle to work in the store.

  Yes, despite everything, they hired Bizzle. His loyalty would be unquestioned, that’s for sure, and he’d do anything to make Corey happy. He showered every day, so that wasn’t an issue. We figured, what the hell?

  Everything started fine. He might have been a little annoying, but the biggest complaint Corey had was about his eating habits. Every Quiznos employee is allowed one free sandwich for lunch. The first day the rules were outlined to him, Bizzle asked Corey, “What kind of sandwich are we allowed to have?”

  “I don’t know, Biz,” Corey said. “Any kind you want.”

  At lunch that day, Corey watched in amazement as Bizzle went to work. He piled his high with turkey, ham, salami, three or four different kinds of cheeses. To top it off, he landed a big scoop of tuna.

  As he was walking to a table to eat, he said to himself, “I think I’m going to need a knife and fork.”

  I bought the Quiznos to take advantage of its location across the street from the new federal building, but I failed to investigate well enough to learn about the food court they were building inside it. Regardless, Corey got a call one day from someone in a position of authority at the federal building. He wanted to open an account at our Quiznos so they could place large orders for meetings or conferences. This was big. Given the fact that Corey and Chumlee weren’t exactly breaking records at Quiznos, this was huge.

  Bizzle got caught up in the excitement. Corey and Chum were excited about it, so you know Bizzle was five times as excited. If it was big for Quiznos, it was big for Bizzle.

  The day after the account was set up, Corey got an order from the federal building. It was big, too—probably $200 worth of sandwiches. Bizzle was, among other things, the short-distance delivery guy, so they sent him across the street with several bags of sandwiches. He didn’t have to go far, he didn’t have to collect money—it was foolproof.

  About an hour after Bizzle left the store, Corey got a phone call.

  Federal building.

  “What the fuck is wrong with your delivery guy? We will never order from you guys again.”

  Corey is on the other end of this, thinking, Oh, my God. What could he have possibly done? Was he even gone long enough to have done something so bad they’re never going to order again?

  When the guy calmed down, he told Corey the story:

  Bizzle was in a panic when he walked into the federal building to deliver the food. He practically ran up to the security guard at the front desk, handed him all the food, and yelled, “Where’s the bathroom?”

  It got worse.

  Bizzle’s trip to the restroom wasn’t quite fast enough. No one knows whether he had trouble finding it, or whether it was crowded, or if he got hung up locking the stall door. Maybe it was something he ate, or the Vegas heat, or the excitement over the first of many big orders from the federal building. Whatever the case, the report Corey got from the folks on the scene was that Bizzle “shatter-blasted” the stall once he got in there. His insides exploded all over the walls, the floor—the guy even said the ceiling, but that might have just been hyperbole.

  A few weeks later, Corey opened a piece of mail from the federal building. It was a bill, for $800 for cleaning the bathroom. The notation said, “Bio Crew.”

  And those folks at the federal building, give them this much: They kept their word. Corey and Chum’s Quiznos never got another order from them.

  Between the first and ninth of the month, Bizzle came into the store four times a day to inform us why we should be betting Taiwanese racquetball, or high school football, or on what hole Tiger Woods would get his first birdie of a tournament. There was absolutely no end to the number of funky bets this man would make, and every time he was convinced he had unlocked the key to future wealth and happiness.

  He was not shy about his opinions. He was gracious about sharing the inside information he had obtained through whatever means he obtained it. He was a regular at some of the less-expensive buffets around town, and he would often return to the shop after a hearty $1.99 lunch at the Nugget (fortified by the bag he brought back filled with pilfered food) telling tales of the important people he had guided toward the promise land.

  “Saw the DA at lunch, Rick,” he’d say.

  “That right, Biz?”

  “Oh, yeah, and he’s gonna owe me big-time. I gave him a horse today that nobody knows about. He’s gonna bet it, and it’s gonna come up big.”

  Tuesday was his big day. Tuesdays were huge. Tuesdays were dubbed “T-Bone Tuesdays” in one of the downtown casinos, and like clockwork Bizzle would make his first appearance early on a Tuesday morning and proclaim to the shop, “It’s T-Bone Tuesday. It’s T-Bone Tuesday—four ninety-nine T-Bones on T-Bone Tuesday.”

  Without fail, he would
make his way to T-Bone Tuesday, but he wouldn’t go alone. Nope, he carried his trusty plastic bag, which he filled and brought home with him. Bizzle turned T-Bone Tuesday into something that could last all week.

  As I mentioned, things changed some starting on the ninth day of the month. Tuesdays were still big, and it was still worth checking out the betting line on softball from Belize or some such place, but after the ninth, Bizzle’s attitude had undergone a slight transformation. He’d pawned all his stuff, and he was out of money, so he figured he’d use the shop to make a little extra. His enthusiasm never waned, but its direction changed.

  “Hey, guys,” he’d say. “Anybody hungry? Need lunch? If you’re too busy to get it yourself, I’ll do it for you. Only a buck. Only a buck.”

  That was his post-ninth battle cry: Only a buck.

  Need your car washed? Only a buck.

  Need an errand run? Only a buck.

  It got to be so incessant that we figured, what the hell? Give him a job to get him out of the shop and make him feel like he was accomplishing something. The money was secondary—we were already trying to take care of him without insulting him—so we figured we’d take him up on his offers.

  He cleaned our cars. For a buck.

  He’d clean the parking lot. For a buck.

  He’d grab us lunch. For a buck.

  The thing is, we would have paid him more, but that was his price and he felt he would be going back on his word if he took more than the quoted price. We learned early on that he wouldn’t accept more, even if we presented it as a tip for a job well done. The price was a buck, and a buck it was.

  Even if it was ridiculous.

  There was one time I did feel bad about taking advantage of Bizzle’s buck-an-errand policy. Every Thanksgiving, right after dinner, we pack up and head for the Glamas Sand Dunes, where we ride our quads in the dunes and have an absolute blast. We roll in about midnight, and one of our buddies has a DJ company, so within thirty minutes of us finding our campsite we have a full-on rager going. We leave everything behind and just have a ball, running our quads during the day and partying deep into the night. We do it with about two hundred thousand other people, which makes the late-night noise a little more acceptable. You don’t go to Glamas over Thanksgiving weekend if you’re looking for solitude and quiet.

  It’s also why our Thanksgiving dinner keeps moving up each year. Corey and I ask each other, “Do you think ten A.M. is too early to have Thanksgiving dinner?”

  One year, about two days before Thanksgiving, Big Hoss was complaining about it being his turn to do the booze shopping for Glamas. He was whining like a little girl, saying he didn’t feel like driving to the liquor store and why was it his turn and why can’t someone else do it and why can’t everyone just bring their own booze.

  We’ve learned to ignore it, but still.

  Well, Bizzle catches on to Corey’s whining and figures we’ve got a problem and he’s got a solution.

  He’d do it.

  For a buck.

  Corey tells Bizzle it’s a deal. Bizzle goes and retrieves his shopping cart from God-knows-where he keeps it. He comes back to the shop, thrilled to be needed, and asks Corey for the money and the list:

  Fifteen 24-packs of Bud Lite

  Four quarts of Jack Daniel’s

  Three quarts of Patrón

  And on and on it went. Bizzle didn’t blink. He folded the list, put it in his pocket along with the $600 Corey figured would cover it, and headed off to Speakeasy Liquor, located a half mile down Las Vegas Boulevard from the pawn shop.

  About an hour later, here comes Bizzle, rolling a fully-loaded cart up to the front door of the pawn shop, bent forward like a guy pushing a car up a hill.

  A half mile down with an empty cart.

  A half mile back with a full cart.

  For a buck.

  He walked in, gave Corey some change and the receipt, and Corey handed him a buck.

  You would have thought he won the lottery.

  * * * *

  I wish Bizzle’s story had a happier ending, but stories of guys like Bizzle rarely do, unfortunately.

  Sometime in the first few months of 2009, Bizzle walked into the store all hyped up about some bet or another. He was talking a mile a minute, starting every other sentence with “No, really Rick . . .” and basically just being the same old Bizzle we’d known, loved, and tolerated all those years.

  But something got into him that day, some impulse-control issue that probably happened more often than we saw. To us, he was eccentric and flat-out nuts, but he was never violent. He was one of the harmless mentally ill, people for whom there aren’t nearly enough public services. He had no place to go, no friends to hang out with, so the pawn shop became his de facto home. And if it hadn’t been for Old Man, who had a soft spot for the guy, he might have been dead long ago. Hey, some guys have bars. Bizzle had the pawn shop.

  Well, on this day, as Bizzle was rattling on to Corey about some sure-thing bet, Peaches walked into the store to begin her shift. Peaches was one of our first female employees, not counting my mom and Tracy. As she walked past him on her way through the showroom, Bizzle reached out and slapped her on the ass.

  Peaches was not happy, and she shouldn’t have been. Corey was not happy, and he shouldn’t have been.

  Bizzle looked at Corey with a pleading look on his face, as if someone else had done the slapping. Once the shock wore off, Corey said, “Bizzle, you’re done here.”

  He thought Bizzle was going to cry.

  “Why?”

  “Bizzle, if I let you in the store anymore, she’s going to sue me for sexual harassment. You blew it. I’m sorry, but you’re done.”

  And that was the last day Bizzle walked into the shop. Six months later, an acquaintance of his showed up at the shop—we don’t know if he was family or what—and told us Bizzle had had a massive heart attack and died.

  I honestly think being banned from the pawn shop broke his heart. When Bizzle got bounced from the pawn shop, he lost his home.

  CHAPTER 12

  Chumlee

  I guess I should start with the nickname. I wish I had a better story for how I got to be known far and wide as Chumlee, but the truth will have to be enough.

  My sister and I grew up with my dad in a blue-collar neighborhood in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas. My dad raised us pretty much on his own, and we spent a lot of time at the neighborhood park across the street from our house.

  When I was twelve, I made a new friend. It was a big deal for me to find someone I could hang out with, since my sister and I were the neighborhood punk-rock oddballs. Like me, my new buddy Tom was being raised by a single dad, and we hung out together at the park and at each other’s house.

  One day we were at his house, playing video games in his room, and it was getting to be around dinnertime. I figured I should probably leave, so I headed downstairs to say good-bye to his dad and be on my way.

  His dad was like my dad, working a lot and not around the house very often. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I could hear him in the kitchen cooking dinner. On my way to the door I took a quick detour into the kitchen to be polite.

  “I’ll see you later, Tony,” I said. “Thanks for having me over.”

  He looked up from his cooking and said, “Where are you going? You ain’t going anywhere until you sit down and have dinner with us, Chumlee.”

  I don’t know what caused him to name me that, and at the time I had no idea what it meant. I was an outcast, even at twelve, with a new hairstyle just about every week. At this time, my hair was crazy even by my standards: It was cut to look like a monk’s, with the crown of my head shaved and a ring of hair starting about an inch above my ears. No monk would do what I did to top it off, though. The ring of hair on top was spiked, colored orange and red, and every four inches or so was tied with a rubber band. It looked like the Statue of Liberty crown.

  It was designed to shock. I thought it was cool.


  From the moment the word “Chumlee”—is that even a word?—left Tony’s mouth, I was cool with the nickname. I thought, Chumlee—I think I’m going to roll with this. Maybe I was flattered that someone thought enough of me to give me a nickname, I don’t know, but I liked it even though I had never heard of the Tennessee Tuxedo cartoon or Chumlee the walrus. And once my friend’s dad told me why he named me that—my body reminded him of a walrus’s, I guess—I was still cool with it. I wasn’t insulted. I’ve always been pretty easygoing.

  And I guess because I was cool with it, the nickname stuck. My real name is Austin Russell, but there are maybe twenty people in the world who call me by my given name. People in my family or people who went to elementary school with me and knew me before I was twelve call me either Ozzie, Austin, or Oz. To the rest of the world: Chum, Chummie, Chumster, Chum-Chum to little kids, and Chumlee to anybody who’s ever watched the television show. It’s the all-purpose nickname with a hundred variations.

  * * * *

  My childhood probably wasn’t ideal, but it never felt anything but normal to me. My mom wasn’t around much, and my dad worked for himself, so my sister and I had to fend for ourselves most of the time. She’s a year younger than me, and we pretty much made our own way—and our own rules. We didn’t think we were underprivileged or at-risk, but I’m sure it looked different from the outside.

  My dad was a master carpenter, but there were times when he struggled to get food on the table and pay the bills. We usually had food, and clothes on our back, but there wasn’t always a lot of food and the clothes were rarely new. Dad was the president of his chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that took a lot of his time, too. I think his work with AA was his true calling, and if he could have done that full-time and been paid enough to keep us going, he would have gladly quit the carpentry work. Some of my strongest childhood memories center on cigarette smoke: My dad always had a bunch of people sitting in the living room and at the kitchen table, telling their stories and smoking like mad. I’ve never smoked cigarettes, but my lungs probably look like I have. There was a permanent cloud of smoke in my house throughout my childhood, or at least that’s the way I remember it.