Home again in post-crash, subprime Indiana
“White Americans have always known how to develop aristocracies from local resources, however scant.”—Margo JeffersonThe bankers, inconsolable in the face of their lawbreaking, wept in slow-moving subway cars; I witnessed this phenomenon myself one day in late 2008 as I commuted to an Upper East Side townhouse, where my employer, an oil man who had lost considerably in the crash, fired me. From there I became homeless, broke, and dimly aware that I had absorbed the financial crisis into my psychic life, so I soon left for Bloomington, Indiana, a college town about fifty miles from where I was born. [1] There at my brother’s apartment I could rest easier on a spare air mattress, I believed, for three months or so. Three years later, I returned to New York. In the days between, I worked as a pawnbroker for a hillbilly named T—, who was himself a pawnbroker and the patriarch of a family of pawnbrokers.
I’m still not sure why I stayed in Bloomington. Maybe I was entranced by the recessional vision on offer there. Under the austerity regime of Governor Mitch Daniels, nicknamed “the Blade” for his budget-slashing jolliness, Indiana was left to ruin. The city of Bloomington, long a mirage of progressivism in a desert of rightist folly, was now steeped in Mad Max vibes: its parks teemed with anonymous drifters, who mixed uneasily with a professoriate and its attendant underclass of adjunct instructors and students. The edges of the burg blurred into a wilderness of mobile homes populated by a growing number of rural poor, a dream only darkened by the shadowy presence of the town’s overlord, the now-dead billionaire William Cook, who amassed his fortune by inventing medical devices for angioplasty in a state endearingly bynamed both “the Heartland” and “America’s breadbasket.” In my time there, I was unsurprised to read a Business Insider listicle designating Bloomington “the most unequal city in America.”
It was the right time and place, in other words, to become a pawnbroker; in truth, I could find no other work. After weeks of hunting for a temporary job, I answered a newspaper advertisement that called for a “holiday merchandiser.” Days later I received a cryptic voicemail, from what sounded like a child, providing only an address. Curious and short on cash, I soon boarded a city bus that beelined through the local housing projects before depositing me in a parking lot filled with pickup trucks and a rusted Dodge Neon. I reasoned, on account of some chainsaws propped against a fence, that I had arrived at a lawn care store, until a bearded man carrying a .22 rifle exited the building. It was then that I spotted an unfriendly sign with three golden balls: the international symbol of the pawnbroker.
I cursed my bad stock; I had given word to myself, plenty of times, never to return to this region, where one was able to pee freely in any given yard, but where the age of mortality had plummeted to the point where one would pee the bed, free of volition, before achieving the age of Social Security.
It Either Ain’tThe scene inside the pawnshop reminded me of the hoarder Plyushkin’s estate in Dead Souls. I saw racks of unredeemed collateral for sale: glass cases of Blu-ray discs stocked with not one but three copies of the movie Seabiscuit; rows of makeshift shelves holding orphan computer monitors and nearly state-of-the-art flat screens, one of which was playing Seabiscuit; an intimidating arsenal of mud-crusted, yellowy-orange power tools, the function of many inscrutable to the ignorant; home stereos and car speaker systems, undoubtedly stolen, of every make and design; the cheapest of all possible plastic laptops, arrayed in the style of a Best Buy display; microwaves stacked in the manner of Lego blocks; low-quality, probably unusable equipment for the aspiring DJ; tagged and taxidermied buck heads flanking a print of Boulevard of Broken Dreams; pool cues; camouflaged army helmets, good as new; boat motors, lightly worn; properly arranged fishing rods; a wall of brass instruments, not limited to saxophones and a tuba; woodwinds, or at least clarinets; half-cased violins abandoned by once ambitious child learners; guitars in the shapes of flying Vs and chiasma; white baby dolls encased in their original plastic-and-cardboard packaging; rows and rows of secured jewelry, curiously cheap, accounting for every cut and condition of diamond or birth stone; a militiaman’s fancy of shotguns, rifles, and revolvers; and original homespun art fashioned from what seemed to be river wood.
I wandered through the aisles until a woman with a bowl cut approached. As she breathlessly narrated, unsolicited, her recent bout with scabies, I recognized her voice from the voicemail. “We got ya,” she said menacingly and again at a child’s pitch, before leading me to a back office where a squat, goblin-like man with a white buzz cut invited me to take a seat.
“T—,” he said, shaking my hand. “Truth is, I need a pawnbroker.”
T— spoke for the next twenty minutes in a rural idiolect of dropped g’s and Elizabethan diction. He told me he once traveled as a carnie before a kindly papaw from Terre Haute taught him the pawnbroking trade; now, he said, he reckoned himself something of a scholar, a liar’s bid to put on airs given that I had unadvisedly dressed up for an interview. Later, he continued, he quit the carnival circuit, had a number of children, and started his own business. I learned that T—, by no stretch a believer, understood his work as philanthropy; his pawnshop charged a “fair and charitable” interest rate to the cash-strapped souls he greeted into his shop. And, he swore, his clients maintained a “redemption ratio” of 80 percent; after getting a loan, in other words, they returned to redeem their collateral eight of ten times, a ludicrous claim I later learned was bruited by scheming brokers regardless of region. T—, not at all diverted by my confusion, boiled over with complaint about legislators who aimed to put him out of business, though he was an “accredited lender.” He maligned the police, too, for accusing him of accepting stolen property. When he ended his rant, T— leaned back, folded his arms over his chest, and said: “I’d buy that for a dollar.” I was confused at the time, but later I realized he’d stolen the line from Robocop.
When T— offered me the job, I felt as if God was communicating through a whirlwind, exhorting me not to take it. I hesitated. He did not like this, so he inched closer and closer to my face.
“It either is,” he coughed. “Or it either ain’t.”
I had entered the pawnshop that day a broke and desperate person;
when I left, I was a subprime lender.
Moments later I was introduced to my fellow pawnbrokers, whom I came to barely know. T—’s two sons, W— and G—were the de facto showrunners when their father was away (drunk). Both were stocky, like high school wrestlers. W— was a self-proclaimed anarchist, at least until the Tea Party came along; his mutually exclusive life-goals were 1) to hide away in Costa Rica with a shotgun and 2) to become a pawnbroking mogul, mainly through the rhetorical force of speeches he planned to deliver at Pawn Expo, the mother of all pawnbroking conventions. His brother G— was plainly the more capable of the two; in an unthwarted, non-provincial modality, he might have been a statistics quant. In this life, he drank heavily and played Sega Genesis. G— seemed to be negotiating the state of his soul on a momentary basis, and the more I worked with him, the more I realized that his constitution could not bear the onslaught of human misery brought down on him during his transactions with the rural poor. To relax he would sometimes repeatedly beat the landline phone against the pawn counter, smashing it to bits and terrifying the hilljacks who gathered in the shop........MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
News You Can Use When The Zombie Apocalypse Hits: The Economics Of Pawnshops
"Pawnbrokers to the Rich Boom in Britain"
