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broker6
Member
since 1999-11-07
Posts 132
Bellevue, NE, Sarpy

0 posted 1999-12-11 07:22 AM


GUYS 'N' GUNS,
THE SAGA OF HINKY, DINKY, BLINKY AND OTHERS

by Richard J. Budig

One thing that surprised me within days of buying my pawnshop were some of the strange people who walked in and asked to see a handgun -- and expected me to hand it to them.

I've been at this business more than a quarter century, now, and there still are  people whom I refuse  when they ask to see guns. Trust me when I say that some of the guys who ask to see guns are walking around with blanks in their ammo belts.  The loudest bang they'll ever hear is the sound of their own brain-fart.

A character I  call Blinky comes to  mind.
Blinky raised ducks in his trailer home. I don't know how he did it, or why.  Someone said he just liked ducks.  Whenever he came into my shop, which was often back then, I always wanted to work his ducks into the conversation and see if I could wangle an invitation to see what a flock of ducks looked like in a trailer home.  But I was never able to turn the conversation that way.  And it was just as well, I suppose.  I wouldn't have been able to do it with straight face.

Another oddity about Blinky was he had a rather good taste in clothes, but he was about 10 years behind the fashion curve, and apparently, he had not sense of his own size because his clothes would have fit a much smaller man.  His shirt sleeves were long enough, but the jackets he wore -- he wore jackets winter or summer -- were hiked up about three inches above his wrist.  Likewise, his pant legs were always at least three inches high, leaving exposed his dingy socks, when he wore them.  But his shoes were nice.

He and a buddy came in one day and asked to see a little .25 auto pistol. I can't remember his buddy's name, but he didn't have a live round in his ammo belt either.

One reason I called him Blinky was because he had a wall-eye which he sometimes blinked at a furious pace.  It must have been the one that worked because when he looked at you, he turned his head away so, except for that one eye looking at you, it appeared as though he were looking past you.

Blinky went through phases, and at this particular time, he was in his gun phase, which I found curious.  What with his bad eye and all, it didn't look as though he could hit anything at arms length with a brick,  let alone nailing a moving target with a gun and live ammo.

One of the ways I sometimes get out of showing guns to the unwashed and questionable was to ask to see a Nebraska driver's license.  Federal law does not allow me to sell a hand gun to a person from out of state.  If the guy can't produce a local driver's license, or some other acceptable form of identification that shows him to be a resident of the state, I explain I can't sell him a gun, which lets me off the hook.

I wish I had known that in the first few weeks of taking ownership of the place.  It would have saved me a ton of trouble and a thousand gray hairs.  I didn't know it back then, but I didn't have to hand anyone a weapon, especially to the disturbed guy who walked in one day and tapped demandingly on the handgun case, indicating that he wanted to see a spiffy little chrome-plated S&W .32 revolver.   When I handed it to he turned and walked out with it . . . but I'll get to that in a minute.

I was relieved when Blinky said he didn't have a driver's license.  But, to my dismay, his buddy had one.   So, there I was, painted into a corner. I checked the buddy's driver license, hoping that it had been issued in a foreign country.  But no such luck.  Sighing inwardly, I handed over the little automatic to the guy with the license, who, by reason of that license, had just become "somebody" worthy of holding a deadly weapon.

He took his responsibility seriously.

He wouldn't let Blinky hold the gun.

With great ceremony, he would hold it in various positions, turning it so Blinky could cast a critical but wandering eye over its shiny surface.  He even held it up so Blinky could sight down the barrel.

What a vision.  The gun, in the hands of Blinky's buddy, pointed straight at the back wall of the shop.  Blinky's head turned at an oblique angle toward the wall, and his wandering eye peeping down the barrel of the little gun.

Having been cheated out of actually holding the gun, Blinky searched for some way to get a leg up on the situation.  At last, he hit upon it.  Although his "in-charge" buddy was manipulating the weapon in the fashion of a child with a ball on a stick, Blinky managed to spy the safety lever on the side of the gun.  Like most safety levers, there were two letters at each end of the lever's throw . . . and "S" and an "F."  S for Safe, and F for Fire

Now, let me digress a moment for those who aren't familiar with guns in general, and shotguns and shotgun barrels in particular.  I’ll tie pistols and shotguns together in a moment.   Manufacturers can and do vary how wide they make the open end of shotgun barrels.  This governs how widely dispersed the shell's load of shot will be at bird shooting range.  These varying barrel openings are called chokes.  The four basic chokes you find on shotguns are Full, Modified, Improved and Open.

However, the barrels of pistols are not  choked.
So, here was Blinky, humped over, trying to fix his wandering eye over a wavering pistol barrel (a barrel with no choke built into it), and desperately seeking some way to best his buddy, when he spied the safety lever, and said, with gusto and pride, "Well, looky here . . . it's got a Full and Semi choke."

The part that left me shaking my head was when his buddy replied, "Yup . . . already saw that."
Had I known this driver's license trick a few years earlier, it may have saved me a terrifying and anxious few minutes.

I had owned the place for no more than a few days when a man in bib overalls came in and stood looking into the gun case, which, in those early days, was off in a corner by the front door.

His clothes were clean and his shoes were shined.  He looked okay.  He stood patiently at the gun case, his back to me, as if ignoring me. I slid behind the case and faced him.  "Help you?" I asked.

Without saying a word, he began tapping insistently on the top of the case with his right index finger, pointing to a mint condition chrome plated Smith and Wesson .32 revolver.  After what happened next, I later adopted that revolver as my own and resolved to give it a good home.  I still have it.

If I had looked hard, I may have seen the trouble in his face. However, with just a few days behind me as a bona fide pawnbroker, and anxious to please, I handed the weapon to him.

What happened next was like one of those in-the-movies-continuous-movement-in-agonizing-slow-motion things.  

I handed him the gun, his hand opened, a couple of  bills landed on the case, and he wheeled and strode through the door.  He turned right, and headed downtown, gun in hand.

It took only seconds, but it seemed like hours before I could think, and then not too clearly.  Finally, it dawned on me to call the police.

Within seconds, the block was buzzing with cruisers.  A few minutes later, an officer came in and asked me to step out to a cruiser parked in front of the store.

Inside the cruiser, in handcuffs, was the man who had just walked out with my gun.

He had been picked up at the other end of the block, trying to stuff .38 ammo into the too-small shell chambers in the little .32.

Seeing him attempting to load a weapon on a public street, several police officers drew their weapons and ordered him to stop.

The man who took my gun was, indeed, on another planet.  If he had had the correct ammo, and if the police had not been successful in disarming him, they might have sent him to whatever planet he was on at the moment.

It turns out he was a war veteran on medication from the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Lincoln.  The medication alone did not affect him this way.  But, he liked having a cold one now and then, and the combination of alcohol and his medication did not mix well.

An hour or so later, when things had settled down, a police officer came in to ask some questions, like, "Dick, what the hell happened?"

I told him about the finger tapping, handing him the gun, him walking out.

"Did it ever occur to you to find out who he was before you handed him a gun?"  the officer asked.
He said it in a constructive way, adding, "Why don't you ask for I.D. of some kind?  Gives you a chance to look 'em over . . . and, if one of 'em walks out on you again, at least you'll know who he is.  We were lucky on this one.  If he hadn't stopped and tried to load up, we may not have found him."

It was a good suggestion and my "show me who you are" policy was born.  It served fairly well over the ensuing years.  More than once, as that police officer said, it gave me the chance to think it over just one more time before handing a weapon to someone.

But, in the end, it has not served well enough.  My “get I.D. so you can slow down and look them over” policy does not allow me to look into a man’s heart.  There are thousands, probably millions of people out there who are responsible.  I have no problem with them.  The problem I have is due in large part to something that happened to my soul the first time I sold a gun to a man who used it to kill himself.  I thought I'd never recover.  I know . . . I was not responsible for that.  He had his own dragons to slay, and he mistook them for himself.

It is the finality that guns represent.  Until you’ve taken a bullet, you can't appreciate how utterly final it is.  Once the hammer drops, there is no calling the bullet back.  And there is no sense of surprise quite as complete as looking down and seeing a hole in your body, the dark foamy blood pouring from the wound, and the sense that part of your body no longer works.

It was probably like that for the nice, clean-cut college kid who crept into my place on a cold day at the beginning of spring break.  He said he had stayed behind in the dorm to catch up on some studying.  He was from the farm, he said, and missed rabbit hunting.  He bought a nice little .22 rifle from me.  Twenty minutes later, he was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot.

You can assign all sorts or reasons for what he did . . . rejected by a girlfriend, or parents, failing in his studies . . . who knows?  It was his monster and like most people who turn to a gun to solve their problems, he faced it alone.  For me, it is the utter finality of it all . . . just moments earlier, that young man shared with me a thread that led back to who he was and what he was all about, to kith and kin, to hopes and dreams.  In the few minutes it took to wait on him, I learned of our commonality.  Like him, I used to go hunting on the farm.  When he talked about rabbit hunting, I saw again in my mind's eye the vast prairies of Western Nebraska and Kansas, of pastures I had walked, of stands of timber where I waited for game, of quiet days with sunshine on my face and a fair breeze in my hair.  It's a small thing, I suppose, but it reaches deep inside to that little bit of bedrock that each of us carries within.

As I think about it, regret seems to be high on the list of topics associated with me and guns.

Like the sweet little old guy I called Dinky Don Juan, and his female companion, who came in one day just before noon.  They were obviously in their 60s, or maybe even in their 70s.

They browsed, looking in all the cases, looking at just about everything, giggling, chucking each other with gentle elbows and affectionate touching.  They cooed like the proverbial dove.

They finally made their way to the gun case, which I had moved to a  more secure location in the back of the store, near my permanent station.

They stood there, murmuring, laughing quietly.  Finally, Dinky asked if he could see a cheap .38 revolver in my case.

By now it's a few years later and I'm wise, so I check his I.D., and sure enough, he has a valid operators license from the State of Nebraska. Deep inside, I had hoped he was too old, or so infirm that he had been refused an operator's permit.
He gave the gun a cursory examination, and said, "I'll take it."

At that time, there was no waiting period on handgun purchases in Lincoln, NE, so it was simply a matter of filling out a federal form and a local form, paying his money, and he and his giggling companion were off with their new gun.

The old guy wasn't whacked out, or on another planet, and he knew handguns didn't have chokes.  So, why was I worried?  I wasn't sure, but the feeling wouldn't go away.

I didn't have long to wait to find out.
Within  30 minutes, a police officer came in and asked if I had just sold a .38 revolver to a man whose description fit that of darling Dinky.

"Yes," I said.  "Why.  What did he do?"

"Went home and shot his wife," the officer said.

"Shot his wife!!!"  I was incredulous.  "That sweet little old lady who was just in here with him.  They were carrying on like lovers," I said.

"That wasn't his wife," the officer said. "That was his girlfriend."

As it turned out, Dinky botched the assassination.  He shot his wife in the face, but low and on one side.  The bullet passed more or less between her upper and lower teeth.  It took out a few teeth, and put a nasty hole in both sides of her face.  She lived, and, no pun intended, she  probably never spoke to him again.

Believe it or not, not all gun deals end in tragedy, although this next character thought he had suffered tragically at my hands.  He took it so personal that he never spoke to me again.

It all started over a ratty, rusty old six-shooter someone pawned and never came back to redeem.  For the life of me, I can't remember what gun it was, but when Hinky saw it lying in the case with a for sale tag on it, he had to contain himself to keep from dancing a jig.  My second clue that I had grossly under-priced the gun was when he reached for his wallet.

Hinky had adopted me early on.  Like a shark, Hinky smelled blood early in my career when, in several casual conversations, it was obvious I didn't know spit about all the right stuff.  The right stuff included things like certain variations within the same gun model.  For example, a manufacturer will discover that by adding something here, a reinforcing screw there, the reliability or performance, or both, of a certain model gun can be increased.  The result is a certain model gun will show up with a dash-2 or a dash-3 behind its model number, and thereafter, gun enthusiasts will refer to it as the three-screw version instead of the two-screw version, or something of that sort.  
Stuff like this is very important to guys like Hinky, which is why, from his point of view, he considers me a failure as a pawnbroker.  Trying to remember all that stuff is about at interesting as watching paint dry.  Don't misunderstand.  If I come upon a highly prized piece, I do what any respectable businessman would do . . . milk it for all it's worth.  I'm not against making money.  I once told that to a surgical nurse who happened in one day, trying to sell something.  When I explained I couldn't make any money on her item if I paid what she was asking, she became upset to discover my motivation was profit.  

"You mean you make money on this stuff?" she asked.

I inquired where she thought it was the doctor she worked for got the money with which to pay her.  It went right over her head.  I put her on my list of surgical nurses to reject should I need surgery soon.

Hinky used to make a great show of teaching me these intricacies. Secretly, he relished the thought that I didn't really care that much, which meant, someday I would blunder in his favor.  

So, Hinky-the-shark cruised my waters regularly. He was tall and gaunt, with rheumy blue eyes that never seemed to look at you.  He was thin, and strangely shaped.  Looking at him from the side, he was sort of S shaped, with his chin always resting on his chest, his lower lip hanging down with a drop of spittle always about to fall, and his back swayed.  He wore one of those plastic things in is his shirt pocket to keep pencils in.  It looked like every lost and missing pencil in town was in his pocket.
My third clue was when Hinky, searching every pocket for a stray dollar, caught the plastic pencil holder from the bottom as he swung his hand upward to frisk that pocket.  Pencils erupted like minnows scattering from a predator.

"You sure that's the price?" Hinky asked, turning for the door.

By now, I was sure I had mispriced the gun, but I didn't know what else to say.  The price tag said it, and I couldn't very well say, "no," or so I thought.

"I'm going home to get some money.  I'll be right back," Hinky said.

By now, I knew I needed expert advice, so I called a friend who was also a local gun dealer who, like Hinky, had all this information in his head and on the tip of his tongue.

He wanted to know how many screws it had here and there, whether the grip was this way or that way, and on and on.  Finally, he determined I had the expensive version, and that it was under priced by about $200.

Like the cowboy says in the grade-B movie, "I hadda do what I hadda do."  I raised the price.  Hinky was not happy.  In fact, he was livid.

I tried to overcome his shocked dismay with everything from logic to reason.  Nothing worked.

"You can't do this," he kept saying.  "Whatever you priced it for is what you gotta sell it for!"

The simplest explanation I could think of was the truth, which I told with as much plain language as I could muster.

"Look, Hinky," I said.  "I own this place.  I can price things as I please.  And that's a fact.

But beyond that, there isn't a businessman anywhere who, being made aware of a mistake of this magnitude, wouldn't change it. It's just that simple.  I under priced this thing, I've caught my mistake, and I've fixed it."

Hinky fumed.  "If you don't sell me that gun for what you had it marked, I'll never come in here again," he threatened.

It's at moments like this that we are sometimes blessed with one of those rare glimpses of truth and logic.  It's a little like that old TV series about a guy who could move so fast they had to play it in slow motion.  It was happening fast, but the clarity was outstanding.

My immediate reaction was what you'd expect.  I stood there, trying to think of a graceful way to back down, and sell him the damned gun.  Patch things up, all that rubbish.

Hinky saw my hesitation, and mistaking it for the acquiescence he demanded, he let a little smile play across his drooling lips.

But my inner voice wouldn't quit.  I heard it saying, "Now look, Dick . . . what has this guy done for you in the last two or three years?  He's never bought a thing.  He comes in here and wastes two hours at a time, and he does it about three times a week.  That translates into almost one work day a week this guy costs you."

I've never been fat, so it took work to stick out my belly.  I patted it and said to Hinky, "Does this thing look like it's missed any meals on your account?"

Hinky's smile faded.  He licked his lips.  Those eyes that never quite looked at me, looked right at me. "You'll be sorry," he blurted, and slammed out the door.

The door hadn't fully closed yet, and I was feeling better already.

I put Hinky out of my thoughts almost from that moment, and he didn't surface again until years later at a gun show (Yes, I go.  No, I don't like them).  

I had an old Belgium Browning over/under shotgun with fancy, hand-carved wood, and an extensively engraved receiver.  It was more art than gun.  It was old, and it had been fired, but it looked like it did the day it was finished.
  
I repeat, I'm not a gun freak.  But this shotgun was pretty.  It was almost a masterpiece.  I took it to the show thinking I'd have a better chance selling it there than in my shop.

Most of the gun customers in my pawnshop are looking for bargains, a serviceable gun for $75 to $125.  I sell some of the higher priced pieces, too . . . guns with prices of up to $1,000.  But, mostly the fancy ones lay around collecting dust.  So, every once in awhile, I haul one or two of these showpieces off to a show where I sometimes sell them faster, and for about as much as I can get for them in the shop.

That old Browning wasn't the neatest gun at the show, but it got some attention.  Every once in awhile, a dealer would ask to see it, and we'd chat for a minute.  Show visitors also would spot it and stop to heft it and talk about it.  Every once in awhile, I'd be standing in the middle of a bunch of guys watching them look at the Browning.

I don't know why God so blesses us every once in awhile, but He does.  My blessing came in the form of Hinky.  I saw him long before he saw me.  He was steaming down the aisle, his bleary blue eyes fixed on the barrel of that old Browning sticking up out of the crowd.  I smelled shark breath.

I turned so my back was to him, and tried to sense his arrival.  With shotgun in hand, and head held a touch low, I turned.

Another blessing.

He had his fox-to-Red-Riding-Hood smile on.  It was aimed directly at me.  His hand had just arced up over the crowd, reaching for the Browning.

Lifting my eyes upward  momentarily, I intoned silently, "Thank You, Jesus," and said, "Hi, Hinky," and extended the gun toward him.

Man is rarely afforded moments so grand as this.  I felt this one was due.  It had been a good 10 years since Hinky promised me I'd be sorry.

So, the pleasure I experienced as I stood there, watching it sink in who I was, watching his hand withdraw from a treasure that was but an inch away, was worth the 10-year wait.

Poor Hinky.  Poor anybody who tries to make it through life on bluffs, threats, demands or bullets.  They have their place.  Every now and again a beleaguered field commander will bluff and win. "What do you do when you're surrounded?" is the old tactics question.  "Attack!" is the answer.

But few of us live our lives on the battlefield. Most of us just trudge through life as best we can.  Living on threats and bullying is like telling lies.  You always have to remember who you threatened and whether you won or lost.

If you're wrong, you lose face.  That's all a bully has going for him.

It wasn't that Hinky didn't get to touch the Browning that got to him.  In his mind, it was that he came within an inch of losing face.
                       30-30                          


© Copyright 1999 broker6 - All Rights Reserved
PhaerieChild
Senior Member
since 1999-08-30
Posts 1787
Aloha, Oregon
1 posted 1999-12-11 08:16 AM


Very impressive story. Was glued to my seat to see what would happen and loved the ending of it. Very enjoyable read.

 Poetry~ Words falling on paper, painting a dream.

Shawna R. Holder
Boise, Idaho



Dusk Treader
Moderator
Senior Member
since 1999-06-18
Posts 1187
St. Paul, MN
2 posted 1999-12-11 06:28 PM


Great story you've written, and a great ending too.  I've enjoyed all your pawnbroker tales so far  

 "Pointing Fingers to Defend" - Gravity Kills - "Guilty"

Christopher
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-08-02
Posts 8296
Purgatorial Incarceration
3 posted 1999-12-12 02:42 AM


Interesting indeed, and lessons to be learned.
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