Idaho Pawn Shop Grift
I don’t know what road we were on. I don’t even know what town we were in. I do know that we were in Idaho. The three of us had left Austin a week prior, blazing a trail north into New Mexico snow storms, through herds of elk in the moonlight, passed out on hotel bathroom floors, screaming nonsense in the sacred cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, and speeding through salt flats up into Idaho.
It was supposed to be a busking trip. We were three scrawny musicians just trying to cover gas for a little joyride across America in a minivan. And it had been working up to that point. We’d walk into a bar or restaurant, armed with guitars and a big homemade mesquite acoustic bass, cocksure and ready. We’d walk to the bartender or host and ask, “You got a band tonight?”
“No. Not as far as I know.”
“We’re your band tonight.”
With a smile, we’d be told where to set up, or to get the hell out. If they gave us the go ahead, we’d find a table near the door (for the quick getaway), and take our guitars out of their cases. I’d leave my case open on top of the table with a simple sign duct taped inside it saying, “Musicians from Austin en route to Seattle. Tips for gas appreciated.”
Slick, wearing the mesquite bass that was nearly as big as him, would start a bass line song intro, I’d start chunking chords along on my Meal-Ticket guitar, and Wilt would start doing little lead licks on his fancy black guitar. We’d take turns singing and harmonizing wherever we could, a rag tag band of sorts.
We played a restaurant in Clayton during a snowstorm, and got tipped a hotel room for the night. We played a hard rock bar in Moab and got asked to leave. In Farmington we even split up and played three different places at the same time, then came back together at the van to count the spoils and fill up our canvas cash bag. All spoils were communal and went towards buying gas and greasy spoon food down the road.
It was supposed to be a busking trip, but at some point all three of us started going on our own trips. I had admittedly been a little hard on Wilt. His inexperience on the road caused him to make some mistakes. He dropped an ‘f-bomb’ at a diner we were playing in front of a whole bunch of children and their parents. It’s tough to get tips when you’re offending your audience. Wilt seemed to miss a whole bunch of little things that I thought were common sense. And on top of that, he committed one of the worst sins of busking trips: Wilt seemed to go about this business exuding a terribly poisonous air of entitlement. He seemed to believe that these people who did not show up at the bars to see us play, who did not ask us to play, and even may not have wanted us there, owed us something because we were there.
If you show up on the doorstep and are allowed to play, sing, and peddle your wares for tips in an establishment, that’s a privilege given to you. It should be treated accordingly. You play by their rules. Some of those rules include: don’t offend your audience; and because you asked them to play and they didn’t ask you, nothing is ever owed to you. Sometimes you play for an hour and you leave without a dime. Sometimes you play for thirty minutes and get tipped a couple hundred dollars and a burger. But no one owes you for showing up and sweet talking the waitress into allowing you to force your music on unwitting patrons. If you’re doing it right, everyone will enjoy it, and there will likely be tips. But you are not entitled to anything. The moment you start acting like you’re entitled to all their cash, food, and beer, is the moment they close their ears and their wallets. You cut your own legs out from under you, and get to watch as the audience walks away.
So Wilt. Entitlement. Inexperience. I was upset at him. He was bad business. I could have gone a little easier on him, probably should have been more understanding, but hell, I wasn’t terribly experienced either. Wilt was taking his own trip now, in the back seat of the minivan, nose stuck in a book, as Slick and I sat in the front screaming for dear life. The van was out of gas and we were rolling down steep, cliff-side roads in neutral, trying not to hit the brakes too much on the hairpin curves for fear that we’d end up rolling backwards on the narrow road’s occasional inclines. We were screaming profanities and prayers to life that a gas station would present itself soon. Wilt sat in the back and just kept reading. Didn’t notice or care. He had effectively ended his trip with us already.
Slick took over the wheel in Utah. I was exhausted, and he was familiar with the territory. He had lived near Salt Lake for a while where he had spent most of his time deflowering Mormon women and avoiding his superiors at an Air Force base. Slick decided to binge drive us all the way through the night and through most of Utah to Idaho. I bought some energy drinks at a gas station so I could stay up to keep him company on this late night jaunt down memory lane. I slammed two of those energy drinks and promptly passed out.
Slick drove on into the salt flats and mountains. Little grains of salt rattled around on the road in the headlights. Salt was drifting like fog in the wind. He started seeing ghosts in them. They took him out of his head and into a past constructed of landslides and regrets.
When I woke up, we were at the first rest stop in Idaho. Through the half-light of dawn, it looked like this rest stop was carved out of the side of a potato field. The sun was rising on the horizon and Slick was talking gibberish.
“Utah did a number on me last night, man. The golden spike driven into my spine, and the old brains leaked out my beehive. We made it to Idaho though.” He said squinting into the sun. “I never thought I’d be so happy to be in Idaho. I’m going to take a nap.”
“That makes sense, Slick.”
We all went to sleep in our respective seats as the birds woke up and potatoes started to grow outside the windows. Idaho… We had been breaking even financially up until Idaho. At that point we just started breaking. Somewhere in there we had started to do much more driving than playing. Those miles added up in dollar signs, and lo and behold, the canvas money bag was looking unhealthy and slim. It was hungry. How could we take care of ourselves if we couldn’t even take care of the money bag? It was time to harvest some cabbage.
But Idaho was stonewalling us. We drove through strip mall cities that would not let us work. “You folks have a band tonight?”
“Nope. Corporate headquarters won’t let us do music.”
We found a pawn shop and I dug my party guitar out of the back of the van. The party guitar was a glorified toy of an instrument that I used mainly to pass around at parties and to rehearse on. It was scarred, burned, and twisted, but I was hoping I could score maybe twenty bucks for it.
Old DVDs lined the pawn shop walls, some rusty looking chainsaws, a snow blower, and some children’s dolls. A little capitalist monument to the power of dead dreams and money. I set the party guitar on the jewelry case counter.
“I won’t buy this,” the pawn clerk said to me.
“What? You didn’t even try to play it.”
“No one would want to buy this. It looks like it’s held together by Elmer’s glue and bumper stickers. And there’s too many holes in this thing. Normally they just got the one.”
That was true. Leave it to me to try and sell a guitar that only I could love.
“I understand…” I said to him, secretly happy not to sell it. “I used to work at a pawn shop in Wisconsin, I know how this all works…” I picked up the little guitar and went on. “Matter of fact I wrote a song about working in a pawn shop. You wanna hear it?”
“Sure.”
I proceeded to play an upbeat number of mine called “Valentine’s Day at the Pawn Shop.” The clerk was laughing out loud by the end.
“That’s a great song. It’s dead on,” he said.
“Glad you liked it. Say, ah, you wouldn’t by any chance be interested in buying a CD with that song on it, would ya?”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars.”
“I’ll take two.” I got the twenty bucks I was aiming for and kept my beater guitar too. The three of us rode that twenty bucks to a Washington border town; the next improvised concert, the next little con, the next place we could attempt to get a meal and continue making a meager living doing only the things we wanted to.
At hungry times in the future I’d try this trick again in other places. I’d bring the party guitar into a pawn shop, knowing full well they wouldn’t buy it, then would turn around, play them ‘Valentine’s Day at the Pawn Shop’, and try to sell CDs.
To date it has only worked in Idaho.