Pawnshop English

(*this is a piece of fiction)
We call him Pawnshop. This is on account of his barrio dialect of English and predilection for whispered deal making on all matters of daily life; working hours, the booty he reaps from vending machines, miniscule loans he promises to pay back with favorable interest rates, or trying to store extra furniture in your apartment.

We both worked in an English language institute on the second floor of a seedy retail building in a benign Seoul neighborhood. His short legs and fantastically large pompadoured head lived a majority part of their life in an always unspecified Texas city and had returned seven years ago to his native Korea (no doubt a product of the US policy to deport foreign national felons; my bet is stolen cars or a fake calling card pyramid scheme). He calls himself a native English speaker and the crooked non-English speaking conmen who run the underworld of private language institutes in Seoul don’t know the difference. They don’t pick up on his Latino-gangster cadence and are happy to have a slicked up hustler on their team to cut corners and fleece whoever walks in the door. This is the story of how Rick (aka Pawnshop) ended up on the Nigerian Express.

When he wasn’t trying to sell students the chachkis he’d won from the crane arcade game on the sidewalk he would be scouting. Pawnshop had a connoisseur’s eye for women of a certain moral and physical flexibility. His vintage; a housewife in the waning Indian summer of her beauty, abandoned by a husband for the slavery of Samsung or Hyundai middle-management. Or ‘bitches’, as he categorized them generally.

Dressed like a Reno pit boss in a shiny silver suit, bedazzled pastel tie and a clashing stripped shirt, he manipulated the over-ambition mothers projected on their child. “She’s a good kid,” he would say, ”but if she’s gonna be the top percent she needs her own personal lessons.” He would serendipitously have an opening in his afternoon schedule. Couple the boasting of his conquests and a pinch of adult imagination and one could fill in an accurate story line of transparent seduction followed closely by daytime adultery. The saccharine flattering of insecurities and a couple pieces of cheap jewelry (probably from the sidewalk arcade game) were no-doubt pivotal elements in the sting.

Pawnshop had his fingers in many a suspect pie. In addition to regularly needing to store some durable good or consumer electronic in a colleague’s apartment and a chronic short-term cash flow problem, more than one Monday would find him sporting facial cuts and black eyes. Our faux concern would be met with staggeringly idiotic excuses: ‘I crashed my scooter into a house’ or ‘I was caught in a mob at the baseball game’ or‘the door-to-door yogurt bitch ran me over with her cart’. It was known by one and all that Pawnshop lurked in the nefarious corners of Iteawon; the sleaziest neighborhood between Atlantic City and the International dateline, populated by hedonistic expats, American GI’s, Russian prostitutes and their partially evolved pimps/import-exporters, thuggish groups of African men, and the drunken outcasts of Korean society. It’s a truly nauseating place that weakens faith in humanity and where Pawnshop was like a hog in slop. This is where he collected his scars, earrings, tattoos, and hustles.

On a gray Tuesday afternoon not soon forgotten, the house-wife hustle came to a public end. An irate salary man stormed the reception of the language institute spewing high-volume gibberish and demanding blood and money. Pawnshop’s rooster swagger vanished, replaced by fear, confusion and the frantic darting movements of a decapitated chicken. Whether it was a vengeful child or a case of Dutch crabs that betrayed Pawnshop is still unknown. But what’s known is the threat of prosecution under Korea’s strict adultery laws was his tipping point.

He left out the back door and didn’t come to work the next day or any other thereafter. A few days later I got a text message asking for me to bring something from his desk. A request I’d patently refuse were it not for the rare opportunity (one in a life-time, some would say) to be involved in something so seedy and scandalous. At lunch the next day I found him in the back corner of a back alley noodle shop wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat (my request to drop them off at his flat forced the admission that he “evacuated” it and is sleeping in “bathhouses and shit like that”). It’s at this meeting, with a cocktail of excitement and anxiety, that I realized I was talking to a man with much more in his moral debit column than knocking off vending machines and knocking up bored housewives.

Along with trying to sell me the four VCRs he’d been storing in my apartment, he disclosed the outline of his plan to leave South Korea “quietly”. With South Korea effectively being an island the only departure options are airplane or boat, both of which require a passport check Pawnshop was desperate to avoid. With the help of an “African buddy” he’d get some papers and be off in the next couple weeks after he’d raised some money. He was, of course, speaking of the “Nigerian Express” run by the countrymen of it’s namesake and the last option for all foreigners with stealthy ambitions to avoid the particularities of the South Korean prison system.

Over the next two weeks I received dozens of text messages reading like desperate newspaper classifieds trying to sell anything not nailed down. The most tempting was the key to the cash box for cigarette vending machines for “only $250”, which I’m sure sold quickly. The text message auction came to an abrupt end and I thought so too had Pawnshop. Then a week or so later it was with mild delight and acute paranoia that I agreed to meet him for a “coffee” at 11 pm in a bus station bar to discuss “some business”.

He was disembarking the next day from the port of Inchon but wanted to tell me about his business plan. It turns out the Nigerian Express is a two-way street servicing not only Korea but also Vietnam. And it is in Vietnam where Pawnshop planned to grease together his next scheme. “I’m gonna start an English language institute like the one’s here but only better,” he said lighting his cigarette for dramatic effect. At length he elaborated on his plan for a “street smart” English academy teaching the important stuff like buying and selling, not “grammar n’ bullshits like that”. It would be for people needing to know how to “survive in the tourist industry” (aka ripping-off tourists) and would be taught “mostly in the streets” using real-life situations and other “good ways to study English”. Students would also be training for the “hospitality and massage industries”, but that would be mainly for the girls.

What unfolded was the outline of a franchise-able English academy to train conmen, pimps and massage girls and he was giving me the opportunity to become a ground-floor investor for only $1000. While I assured him it was a can’t miss business model, I had to pass as my capital was tied up in other investments at the moment. Disappointed, he put on his sunglasses, glanced over both shoulders and boarded the midnight bus to the coast and the waiting Nigerian Express.