Counter Culture: Cash For Gold

Adam Matcho

The owner of the collectables shop opened the glass door, walked into the Cash for Gold office, and told me he was robbed last night. He asked if anybody had come here—where I was working—and tried to sell a silver trumpet.

The Cash for Gold office was actually a single room with a large wooden desk, a flatscreen TV, a wickless Yankee candle, and a couple of chairs lining the wood-paneled walls. It was all part of a nondescript plaza on the side of a busy Oakland Avenue in Indiana, PA. The Cash for Gold office was at the end of the single-story plaza. The office next to me was an insurance advisor, though it seemed closed on the weekend.

The collectables shop owner told me the silver trumpet was missing this morning when he took inventory of everything that was stolen. The buzz of Oakland Avenue droned on through the large office window. For all of the cars, motorcycles, minivans and trucks that rode by, none of them turned into the modest parking lot, where a yellow sandwich-board sign with two smiley-face balloons anchored to it displayed CASH FOR GOLD.

The Cash for Gold office shared a wall with an antique shop on the backside of the plaza. The shared wall was in the large—mostly empty—storage room. The storage room was where I stashed my wallet and keys. It’s where the bathroom was and where tied-off garbage bags from the workweek collected in neat heaps in the corner. I only did Cash for Gold on the weekends, when my neighbor asked me. He was the real Cash for Gold guy, buying and selling and melting every day. During the week, I had a full-time job. But sometimes that wasn’t enough, so I did this for extra money.

The other half of the Oakland Avenue plaza was a collection of rowhouse apartments, filled with tenets that occasionally made their way into the Cash for Gold office to quiz me about the rising price of gold and silver, to ask if I take silver coins and crucifix necklaces. They never had much gold or silver to sell, only an opinion to offer. I listened to their opinions, nodded and smiled, disinterested.

I’d been there for two hours already, and though people had stopped to hock gold charms and earrings, ten carat class rings, wedding rings and bangle bracelets, I could say, with certainty, a silver trumpet did not pass through. I told the collectables shop owner as much. He was earnest and understanding. He just figured he’d take a shot and see if it was here.

He also wanted to warn me. “I’ve been robbed before,” he said. “This ain’t the first time.”

I think about getting robbed all the time.

He said, “There are a lot of drug addicts around here. Heroin’s a big problem. That, and prescriptions. Not to say nothing bad about people who use drugs, but they will steal, they will do anything they have to do.”

I swiveled in the faux leather chair and thought about the $6,000 in the desk drawer. There were no security cameras, no alarm system, no guns in this place, just me and an insignificant penknife in my pocket. I was not certain it could kill a drug addict.

The collectables shop owner said, “I’m a big believer in karma.”

He removed his hat, revealing a shaved head. He rubbed the stubble on his cheeks and chin, pondering. He had large eyes—like a nocturnal animal—that seemed to fill with water when he spoke and recede when he listened, like a tide in the ocean.

He said, “I don’t even want the money or the trumpet, I just want someone to pay.”

He said, “I’m not even worried about it, they’ll get theirs.”

He was just a small business owner in an economically deficient Western PA town. Someone broke into his shop and stole his silver trumpet. I felt he deserved the karma. Shit, we all deserve a little karma, but he seemed to be talking about justice, retribution. Karma didn’t work like that. Karma was like an investment with the universe, or a lottery number. Karma was like going to a Cash for Gold store, dumping a coffee can of costume jewelry onto the desk and walking out of there with a couple hundred dollars.

If the collectables shop owner wanted vengeance and called it karma, so be it. I hope he gets it. I had never robbed or killed anybody, so by my definition of karma, nobody shall rob or kill me. Right? That seemed fair enough; a half-proof premise perhaps.

I just wanted to sit in this office, pay people for their gold—on behalf of my neighbor—and walk out of here with a couple hundred dollars. Easy, under-the-table, weekend work.

Yet, there was a real sense of peril that weighed on me. I didn’t like the desolation of this plaza on the side of the highway in Indiana, PA. For each piece of jewelry I paid for, there was a story behind it. Most of these stories were sad, stories about divorces and death, stories of lost faith and deception, stories that were stolen from a mother’s jewelry box or the local hospice. Stories I was willing to sit in a swivel chair and nod and smile and pay for. Stories that all end at a refinery, where they are melted down and molded into something else entirely.

I didn’t like that aspect of the job. It just seemed a little sordid to me, in this speakeasy plaza, as the people thanked (and even blessed) me as they left. I didn’t feel these transactions fit so well in my definition of karma.

The rest of the day, I watched Oakland Avenue traffic and waited for death. Which vehicle would it be? Which one would skid into one of the three parking spaces in front of the office and pop its doors open like the prophetic wings of locust and release a drug addict? Then another. And another. Christ, another?

And the drug addicts would spill from the car like clowns from a multi-colored VW Bug. For some reason, they wore white makeup over their deep-set eyes and dead faces. The fantasy became so intense, I had to lock the single glass door, hang the sign that I was out for lunch and stow away in the bathroom. Inside the bathroom, I smoked pot as I pissed and focused on not letting hot ash fall onto my penis. That, it seemed, would be worse than dealing with a clown car full of drug addicts.

I unlocked the glass door, took down the Out for Lunch sign and sat in the swivel chair. I pulled the penknife from my pocket and began mindlessly opening and closing the blade. It was little more than a sharpened fingernail file. This was not Excalibur. But, I did decide, right then, that would be the penknife’s name. The absurdity of magic saving me from drug addicts and the allusion to folklore made me like the new name even more. Plus, the pot helped.

I made a robbery contingency plan while looking out the office window, opening and closing the penknife, watching people stop at the ice cream shop across the street. They would have no clue I was being robbed and tortured over here. What if I was shot in the face? What if Excalibur was turned against me? Nobody outside these four walls would even notice.

My plan was this: If anybody—drug addict or otherwise—came into this office and demanded money, I would give it to them.

I would say, “Hey, this isn’t my money. You can have it.”

I would say, “I hope you get away. Seriously, good luck.”

I would say, “I have a son and I want to see him grow up.”

There were also times I honestly thought, in a moment of self defense, I could grab a person’s wrist, pull them prostrate across the wooden desk and stab them in the neck and face maybe four of five times with my worthless penknife before they could get back to their feet. I practiced four downward stabs into the top of the desk. Excalibur barely scratched the surface. But the skin around the back of the neck seems softer and full of arteries, nice and veiny—like puncturing an apple with a paring knife, the blade butting up against the core. I didn’t want to do that. But, I envisioned it. I saw it happen from different angles. I knew if I stabbed a person once, I could stab them twice.

I also had a plan if the person had a gun. There are too many things that can go wrong with a gun. Fingers slip; people make rash decisions. I don’t want to die. I haven’t written my goddamn book yet. I have a son and I want to see him grow up. It was all too inconvenient at the moment.

No. The gun wouldn’t do. If somebody came through the glass door, put a gun to my head and demanded money, I would produce the cash and mutter, “I think I’m going to pass out now.” I would then close my eyes and collapse behind the desk, a forced fainting.

That’s it. That’s the plan.

Who knows? Maybe karma will come into play. Maybe the person will just grab the money and leave. Leave me passed out behind the desk. I would.

I sat there in the swivel chair and watched the highway and the sky cloud over and darken. It began to drizzle. Then the sun came out. People flocked to the ice cream shop across the street. A car parked in front of the Cash for Gold office. I held Excalibur in one hand and my phone in the other.

An old woman and her hunchbacked husband opened the glass door and filled the two seats at the desk. I sat on the other side and smiled. I held the penknife behind the desk, trying to fold the blade back into its slot with one hand.

The woman was in loose and faded clothing. She wore dangling earrings and a gaudy opal charm on a necklace. I immediately thought of gypsies. She set a clouded glass vial on the desk. There were a few gold-capped teeth in there. They are sixteen carat and we buy them. I tilted the vial and dumped the teeth onto the desk between us.

I usually take the teeth back to my neighbor and he lets his twin six-year-old boys take hammers to the teeth. Smash them to dust. The boys walk around shirtless, gold necklaces around their necks, hammers in hand, asking for teeth when I stop by after a day’s work.

This seems, to me, a legitimate reason to be there for my son, to show him how to smash teeth with a hammer, things like that. Boy things. The under-the-table cash didn’t seem so great now, now that I was doing the work, taking the risk. Later, this would all be over. I would be home with money in my pocket and a fresh case of beer. My son would tell me about all the bugs he captured that day while I was buying teeth from a gypsy.

The woman smiled and said hello. She brushed a curly tuft of gray hair from her brow. She spoke English. (It was actually the idiomatic Yinzer English people speak in Western PA, and I was fluent.) She did not have a Romanian accent, as I had imagined. She was not from the Old Country.

“These belong to some of my dead aunts and uncles,” she said of the teeth. “You don’t pay more for antiques, huh?” Then she cackled, not quite like my archetypal gypsy, but more like a lifelong non-filter smoker.
I told her we could take the teeth.

She said, “Good. My aunts and uncles don’t need them anymore. And none of them fit me anyway.”

The woman picked up the largest tooth—four dirty-white roots reached from the gold cap like tentacles—and held it up to her own mouth, demonstrating it would not fit. She grunted and acted as if she were wedging a jigsaw piece into an incompatible puzzle.

She said, “See? Won’t fit.” She cackled again and put the tooth down. Her husband sat there, comatose, focused on my hands.

I laughed. I didn’t think it was funny, but I laughed. She liked that I laughed. Her husband didn’t laugh. He watched my hands—illuminated by the spotlight magnifying glass—handle the teeth with the smallest amount of contact possible.

I operated with the tips of my fingertips, lifting one tooth at a time, setting it on the digital scale. I thought of the hand sanitizer in its convenient push-pump bottle right next to my pipe in the bathroom. The husband remained vigilant. He watched me lift the largest tooth—the one his wife used as a prop earlier—and place it on the scale.

The tooth weighed 3.1 pennyweights. I had to deduct 2 pennyweights to account for the brown, antique tooth inside. I thought my boss’s twin boys would enjoy smashing these teeth. I could see them bringing down their rubber-handled hammers, sending shards of tooth in all directions, laughing like children do. Not like the wheezing fake gypsy in front of me. Her laugh was full of death and halitosis.

The woman was smiling. She was hopeful. Her own teeth were deteriorating. Her husband had finally taken his eyes off my hands and silently stared at my mouth now, which was moving, but not really saying much. They were waiting for me to name a price. I could have said $10 each and they would have taken it. They had no intentions of bringing these teeth back home.

I gave them $105 for the four teeth. The gold was certainly worth that, if not more. Plus, if I was willing to hand over all my money to the first drug addict who asked, I should be downright excited to help out these two. They thanked me several times. The woman commented on the storm clouds coming and going and cackled once more before leaving. Her husband said thank you and shook my hand.

I didn’t have another customer for the rest of the day. The sky was overcast for a while. It smelled like rain. But the rain didn’t come. Neither did the drug addicts. No silver trumpet either.

I stuffed a baggie filled with silver, four baggies of gold—separated by carat—and the vial of gold-capped teeth, in the glove compartment and the $4000 in cash under the passenger seat. I merged onto Route 422, toward Kittanning, toward home, as the rain finally arrived. It fell in large drops that made smacking sounds on my windshield like useless bullets. Perhaps I was bulletproof today. I lit a joint and turned up the radio, hoping I wouldn’t get pulled over, with all this explaining to do.

Adam Matcho regularly shares his work stories with The New Yinzer. Names and details have not been changed, as they are all as guilty as Adam. His chapbook, Six Dollars an Hour: Confession of a Gemini Writer was published by Liquid Paper Press.