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

by Rick Harrison

  Here’s the signature story from my youth: I was in ninth grade, and one day it was more important for me to go and help my dad finish a job so he could get the bills paid than it was for me to take my final exams. That’s a true story. Instead of taking my final exams, I went and helped my dad. He paid me for my time, but it was just understood that I was needed more with him than I was in school.

  I never felt I had a hard life. I never had resentment. When I became a teenager, my dad said to me and my sister, “I raised you guys to know the difference between right and wrong, and from here on out you’re going to have to make your own decisions. I’d rather have you guys mess up on your own and learn as you go than have me decide your life for you and you don’t make those mistakes until you’re twenty-five.”

  There were many times when we had to rely on the kindness of others to make it. We got a lot of government food—frozen pizzas, butter, all kinds of weird and not especially healthy stuff. I don’t know how it happened, but one time we had close to a hundred one-pound sticks of butter in the refrigerator. Anyone who came over and opened our refrigerator would go, “Whoa—what’s with all the butter?” We didn’t have to buy butter for about two years.

  When I was thirteen, my dad got married and they had a son, my half brother. My sister and I helped raise him for the first five years of his life, until his mother decided to stick around. (Biological moms who don’t always stick around seem to be a theme with Corey and me.) It’s crazy to think I was raising a newborn baby when I was thirteen, but that’s the truth. My sister was twelve, and she was right there with me. I think we did a pretty good job.

  My sister and I were close. We had to stick together; all we had was each other. As the older brother, I had a protective bond with my sister, and that’s how I got to know Big Hoss. Our relationship had a rough start. He and my sister were in the same class—fifth grade—and I was in sixth. She came home one day and told me Corey was picking on her.

  This wasn’t cool. Nobody picked on my sister without dealing with me. I went over to the park near my house and waited for him. I knew he would show up there—all of the neighborhood kids hung out there—and sure enough, he came barreling down the hill on his Rollerblades. I jumped out and tackled him onto the grass. He was a big boy then, too, so it was probably a pretty good collision. We grappled for a minute, just flopping around, and then he left.

  He wasn’t done. Two weeks later, he came back looking for revenge. You know how it is when you’re a kid in a blue-collar neighborhood—you can’t lose face. You can’t have everybody at school saying that a guy that looked like me got the best of you. This was probably a big deal back then, but it seems pretty silly now. He knew he could find me in the park, because I could be found there every day with my skateboard. When he came back, he walked up to me and pushed me in the chest, and I pushed him back, and before long we were in the most pathetic fight ever, just a couple of idiots flailing their arms and rolling over on each other. After a few minutes of this, Corey choked me out and was declared the winner of the big fight.

  Afterward, we sat on the ground talking shit to each other. It was really stupid.

  After that, we kind of left each other alone, but one day after school he got into a fight and he was getting beat up pretty badly. I stepped in with a couple of other guys and broke it up, and he looked at me with a look that said he was surprised but thankful that I did it. We realized then that all of our friends were friends with each other, and that it was probably really stupid for us to keep up this fake feud. Once we realized we really weren’t as different as we thought we were, despite my punk-rock persona, we knew it made more sense for us to be friends than enemies. Being enemies took a lot more work, that’s for sure, and I wasn’t interested in flopping around on the grass in the park trying to keep Big Hoss from choking me out.

  So from those humble beginnings, we started hanging out and became best friends. This friendship happened even though Corey’s parents didn’t want him hanging out with me. My sister and I were the wild punk-rock kids with crazy hair, the outcasts. Everybody knew us, and we didn’t fit in with the crowd. I had my tongue pierced in seventh grade, and we were coloring our hair way before anyone else in the neighborhood was. Rick and Tracy looked at me and thought the worst thing for Corey would be to hang out with me.

  “We don’t want you hanging around with Chumlee,” Rick would tell Corey. When Corey would ask why, Rick would say, “Uh . . . just look at him.”

  They didn’t know my house was really different than it looked. My dad’s work with AA meant we had people in our house all the time, and they kept an eye on us. Sometimes there were people around the house even when he wasn’t. It was a different upbringing from what you see on television sitcoms, I guess, but when you don’t know anything else, you just accept it for what it is. Just life, you know? My dad grounded me only for ditching school. That, he didn’t like. But with most other things, as long as it didn’t involve getting arrested, I was left to make my own decisions and mistakes.

  It took Rick and Tracy a long time to realize that Corey was the bad influence, not me. I was the calm one, the one who usually wanted to do the right thing. I have to admit that I wasn’t an angel, but Corey had a much stronger wild streak than I did. We both goofed around with drugs and partied the way you’d expect of kids with too much time to themselves, but I was always the one who knew when to stop. Corey? Let’s just say it took him longer to learn his limits.

  At some point, Rick and Tracy got hip to the idea that Corey’s behavior was not being influenced by me. When that happened, their opinion of me underwent a massive change. I went from being the bad influence to being the good influence, and I could do no wrong. I didn’t deserve it, but I didn’t argue. I was the Teflon man, and I have to admit it felt good.

  When we went to Reno for Job Corps, I wrecked Corey’s car. I was trying to learn how to drive, and I hit another car. To this day, his mom thinks Corey wrecked it and I just took the blame to keep him out of trouble.

  I told her, “I hit the car. I was just learning how to drive and I screwed up.”

  Tracy said, “No, no, Chumlee—I know you’re just doing this for Corey.”

  No matter what I said, I couldn’t change her mind. After a while, I just stopped trying. I’m not so stupid that I can’t see a good deal when I get one.

  * * * *

  When Corey went to Reno for Job Corps, I was working at Wendy’s and living my life without a whole lot of direction. I had worked at Burger King and I would go on to work at McDonald’s—as an assistant manager, I’ll have you know—so I became kind of an expert in fast-food employment. If you asked me to give you a scouting report, I’d say McDonald’s had the most serious environment. Wendy’s is the place to work if you want to flip burgers at your buddies who are working the counter and generally goof off. I don’t know too much about Burger King because I didn’t work there long enough to even figure out that whole flame-broiled thing.

  I hung out with the Harrisons a lot when I was a teenager. When I was sixteen, I showed up at their house on Thanksgiving because there wasn’t enough food at my house. I ended up spending a lot of holidays with them, and when Corey was in Reno I would go over there and hang out with Adam. I also liked the food.

  Corey had been in Reno for about three months when Rick had a little heart-to-heart with me at his house. He was sending Adam to Job Corps, too, and he told me I’d be better off learning a trade than flipping burgers across the room at Wendy’s. Rick’s smarter than me, so I figured he was right. The next day I went down and filled out the application.

  A lot of good things happened for me in Reno. I was taught how to be an electrician, and you could start a good argument by asking Rick who was the worse electrician: me or Corey. Neither of us ever collected a paycheck as an electrician, but that doesn’t mean Job Corps was a waste of time. The program was great, but it was where probation officers from Los Angeles send a lot of their clients
, so there were guys like me and Corey mixed in with a bunch of gangbangers from L.A. Out of the classroom we had too much freedom, and with a few hundred guys and girls living in dorms without much supervision, it got to be a free-for-all sometimes.

  I stayed in Reno to get my high school diploma. I’m not proud of this, but I paid people $25 per test to take three of my equivalency exams. That was kind of the atmosphere at Job Corps: anything goes.

  When we got back, Corey and I got an apartment together. This is when the partying went into high gear. This is when I started doing a lot of meth with Corey, and we set about the task of pretty much wasting our lives. We hadn’t lived together very long when Corey got a collapsed lung and Rick had to come over to help him. Rick hadn’t been to our apartment yet, and when he pulled up in front of the complex he didn’t even have to call us and ask which apartment was ours. He just walked up to the one with the most garbage in front of it and knocked on the door.

  He was right. Isn’t that pathetic?

  I got to the point where I couldn’t do it anymore. Our pattern for about three months was to stay awake for four or five days at a time and accomplish absolutely nothing while we were awake. I was sitting there on a couch one day holding a pipe in my hand, thinking, What am I doing? This isn’t me.

  The way we were going, and the way our friends’ lives were going, we both knew either death or prison was in our near future. I only got involved in meth for a short amount of time, but it dug its claws into me so fast and so hard it scared the shit out of me.

  Corey was still partying and I said, “Corey, I just can’t do this anymore.”

  We decided to pay our last month’s rent and part ways. It was tough, but we had to fix ourselves. This happened during the summer before my little brother started kindergarten, so I moved back into my dad’s house to help him with my brother. He needed someone to take my brother to school in the morning and pick him up in the afternoon because my sister had just gotten married and moved to Utah. It gave me a good reason to refocus and get my life back together.

  My dad never preached recovery to me. He knew what I was doing, but he stayed consistent with the way he raised me. He let me make my own mistakes, and he let me figure out the solutions.

  I’ve been around recovery my whole life. I didn’t think I was addicted to meth; it was a three-month thing that I regretted even while I was doing it. But I thought about those people at my kitchen table telling their sob stories just about every night. My sister and I went to AA meetings with my dad because there was nowhere else for us to be. Even though my dad never threw it back at me, it was ingrained in me.

  We listened to all of it. Keep coming back. It works if you work it. Saying their prayers and shaking their hands.

  For the better part of two years, that was my life: taking my brother to school in the morning and picking him up in the afternoon. About this time, Corey’s life spiraled out of control. He hit bottom when he ended up in jail after a bad trip had him thinking some girls had stolen his dad’s car. When he moved to California to live with his mom, we fell out of contact for a while.

  I kept helping my dad with my little brother while I worked as an assistant manager at McDonald’s, completing my fast-food trifecta. I stayed away from meth and felt like helping raise my brother gave me a purpose in life. I learned some responsibility at McDonald’s because I had a good manager who taught me how to handle myself. It wasn’t the perfect life, but I was a productive member of society.

  When Corey got back from California, he called me up to see if I was still clean. He didn’t want to associate with any of the guys from our past who were still using because he’d worked so hard to kick the drugs that he didn’t want to be around anybody who might tempt him to go back to his old ways. Once I stopped, I never gave it a second thought except to kick myself for ever starting in the first place.

  Corey started coming by the McDonald’s three or four times a week and we’d hang out. I don’t know if it was my dad’s influence or what, but I felt a responsibility to help Corey stay clean. It gave me another purpose in life, and since I knew how easy it could be to slide back into the old lifestyle, I made sure Corey was never in a position where he might make the wrong decision.

  When Rick bought the Quiznos and gave Corey a percentage for his birthday, Corey told me I needed to quit working at McDonald’s and help manage the Quiznos. I figured it was a good chance for me to get some more management experience, plus it allowed me to add to my fast-food résumé. That was an important factor in my decision.

  There were a lot of things that went wrong during our reign at Quiznos, but most of it boils down to this: I didn’t manage the place properly. You know, I wasn’t ready for that kind of responsibility. I never took inventory. I just faked it. Quiznos’s corporate policy demands that you fill out these forms every morning, and I was always at least ten days late. And they were probably never right. I didn’t give a shit because I was twenty-two and stupid. I wasn’t ready to manage a business.

  Somehow, Rick gave me a second chance. I still enjoyed my second job at the shop, and Rick gave me a second chance by making me full-time. I loved it from the first day, even with Old Man constantly teasing me. Nobody ever thought it would lead to us being in a television show, and being kind of famous, and having such a great time. I never knew what the word “surreal” meant before now, but this is surreal.

  I was working the night shift for a year before the show started, and they switched me to days about a month before they started filming. The night window is another book entirely. One night I’m sitting there minding my own business when all of a sudden boom!—a four-hundred-pound woman falls into the window. She got up and boom!—there she was again.

  “Help me!” There was no one in line and she was out there by herself screaming.

  I said, “Ma’am, I can’t call the ambulance until you tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Help me!”

  The night window is home to a steady stream of crazy people. They appear at all hours, in all conditions. I didn’t know what was wrong with this woman, and I didn’t want to call the ambulance if she was pulling a scam or trying to get me to come out of the store so ten guys with shotguns could come around the corner and storm the place.

  I was trying to figure out what was wrong with her, but she still wouldn’t tell me. She passed out under the window, and I opened the little teller’s window and splashed a Dixie cup of water on her. She woke up and I asked, “Ma’am, are you all right?”

  “Call the ambulance.”

  “I can’t call an ambulance unless you tell me what’s wrong. If you scoot up to the curb I’m sure one will come by and pick you up. They come by all the time.”

  She scooted to the curb, and within five minutes an ambulance stopped. As soon as they got to her, she said, “I’m ODing on heroin.”

  All she had to do was tell me that and I would have called for her. It’s not like I would have held it against her. After all, I was working the night window in a pawn shop. I’d seen everything.

  It’s kind of a fluke that I ended up on Pawn Stars. I know everybody who watches me on television probably says, “Yeah, you look like a fluke,” but I’m talking about a real quirk of fate. If I had stayed on the night shift, I wouldn’t have been on the show.

  Leftfield Pictures was developing the show with three characters—Old Man, Rick, and Big Hoss. There were only about ten other employees in the shop at the time, so we were always hanging out and watching what was going on.

  They tried out a few other employees, including me, as they were going along. During the scenes they filmed with me, I think they liked the chemistry between me and Old Man. These guys know they can say whatever they want to me and I’m fine with it because they love me and I love them. And since Old Man says whatever’s on his mind, it worked out pretty well.

  If you came into the shop and heard the banter back and forth, you might say it’s a ho
stile work environment. Come to think of it, it is a hostile work environment. Most people probably don’t want to be put down all day, but we just throw words around and everybody can take it.

  I’m referred to as the village idiot—Corey coined that term during the pilot. They needed some way to explain who I was, since everyone else was family. Corey said, “This is Chumlee. He’s my childhood friend.”

  He kind of paused, thinking of what he should say next.

  “He’s . . . uh, what we refer to as our village idiot. Every village has one.”

  I admit it: I’m not very book smart. But if you put me on the street I’ll make it every time. I don’t read a lot. I don’t spell very good at all. I don’t know where periods and commas go. But if you put me on the street with nothing, I’ll make something up. I’m very wise and street smart and I have common sense. I’ll take common sense over book smarts any day where I come from.

  We’ve always been hustling—gold, T-shirts, whatever. Corey’s been buying little chipped diamonds from people since he was twelve years old. We’ve always had a little hustle going. It’s kind of where we’re from, and this place puts it into you.

  Corey is really smart, like Rick. He has all the street smarts and he’s smart with books. People don’t give Corey enough credit for being smart because he comes across as a hard-ass on the show. He is a hard-ass, but he’s really intelligent and earned everything he had. That’s a big misconception about Corey; he didn’t grow up with a silver spoon. His dad never gave him anything—he had to work the night shift for a year when he first got here.

  You could say my life has changed a little bit. I’m living in a nice place and trying to figure out how I can put my money away to make it last as long as possible. That’s a lot different from where I was fifteen, or even five, years ago.