Photo by Jim Coit

Bob Smith: “We’re the poor man’s bank.”

Every five or six minutes someone walks through Bob Smith's door on Fifth Avenue. Whether they're entering or exiting, they are most likely carrying gold, most likely a very small amount of it as they take the five steps that define the public space of the shop — Aztec Jewelry and Loan, a pawnshop.

Charlie Howell, the watchmaker who has worked with Smith for nine years.

Photo by Jim Coit

Only now and then is there a would-be customer who fumbles in his pocket for some broken watch or worn-out silver ring, and those who do are newcomers to the city or to the pawning game. They’re among the thirty percent Smith has never seen before. Smith, imperturbable, sleepy-eyed, laconic, shuts them down quickly. “I don’t take silver.” “I wouldn’t be interested in that.” “I don’t take electronic watches — they break quickly, and parts are hard to find.” For some reason Smith knows just exactly how to say these things so they are clearly understood. Only very few, very few, from this thirty percent linger, hoping for a reversal; and if they do stay on, they must be very desperate — a broken watch or a cheap camera or an old silver trumpet bring very little in the form of a pawnshop loan, probably just five dollars. Most of the thirty percent mumble and turn around to take the five steps away from the glass counter and out the door.

Lisa, Bob's sixteen-year-old daughter. “She could never learn in school what she learns down here.”

Photo by Jim Coit

Almost always Bob Smith will leave them with a bit of hope. There is always Lucky Loan down the street next to Ferris and Ferris, the all-night drug store, he’ll tell them, and they almost always head south toward that pawnshop.

Of the remaining two-thirds or so who come into Bob Smith’s place, probably half are known by him to some degree or other, or to Charlie Howell, the watchmaker who has worked with Smith for nine years. Some of them know Smith’s mother, Frances, or knew his father, Larry, now dead, from the time the two of them operated the shop. Many of them are friends, some of them very good friends with whom Smith goes on fishing trips or to Tijuana or Rosarito or Ensenada on eating trips.

Smith and he begin a good-natured hassle over the price of a heavy gold necklace and pendant studded with diamonds.

Photo by Jim Coit

Others are like the tall, fifty-ish black man who pawned a watch with Smith during Christmas week, pulling it from his windbreaker and offering it across the counter with his eyes briefly cast to the side of the store, perhaps embarrassed. The gesture is common among the regulars in Smith’s place. Pawning is admitting a problem — there is too little cash, or no more cash. There are difficulties in their lives. Things have not been working out well lately. All this is implicitly understood on both sides of the counter. In pawning there is an intimacy. “How you been?” Smith asks the man in the wind-breaker, then remembers how the man has been. “Wait a minute, you had a heart attack, didn’t you?”

"It’s like watching a big-screen TV.”

Photo by Jim Coit

“A big one, yes,” the man answers, his voice becoming more clear and definite. “I walk around with these in my pocket.” He pulls nitroglycerine tablets from the jacket and puts them back in.

“You lost some weight. Your wife says you quit smoking, too.”

“Yeah, it’s not very enjoyable. No salt in the diet either, but it’s what you have to do.”

As Smith is talking he has his eyepiece to his eye or bounces the watch up and down in his hand. A ticket is being made out while the big, dignified man continues to talk about the doctors who told him they’re seeing more and more young men in their mid-thirties with massive heart attacks. “It’s stress in the workplace, just too much worry and pressure and hustle. People have got to learn there are some things more important than money,” the big man says.

“Like time. That’s pretty valuable too,” says someone else in the shop.

“Yes," says the man in the windbreaker as he takes the pawn ticket and some money from Bob Smith. “Let’s hope people find out before they get in trouble,” the man says, thanking Smith softly. They exchange season’s greetings and the man leaves.

“He was a cook on a Scripps research ship. Used to be a lot heavier,” Smith says, and he watches the man walk from the shop, unconsciously patting his pocket where he’d just stored the money and the pawn ticket.

Bob Smith is forty-two, and since he was seventeen he has spent his working day in the same pawn shop. And before that, when he was not even school-age, he would spend time there, not because he liked being in the tiny, twenty-foot by twenty-five-foot room. “We didn’t have a babysitter,” says his mother.

The senior Smiths opened Aztec Jewelry & Loan in 1946, twenty-four years after Bob’s father came to San Diego to work in other pawnshops. Bob’s mother, Frances, arrived in San Diego in 1936, met Larry Smith shortly thereafter, and they were soon married. What Bob Smith knows about pawning he learned from his father. His father learned pawning in El Paso, where as an orphan he was taken in as an apprentice by a pawnbroker who provided him with room and board in exchange for working in the shop. The San Diego shop remains a family business; Frances shares ownership with her son, Bob. Until a few years ago, Bob’s daughter Laurie worked behind the counter with him. Now Lisa, his bright sixteen-year-old daughter, works in the shop every weekday after she gets out of class, and all day during the long Christmas break. “This is her seventh-period class,” he says. “She could never learn in school what she learns down here.”

Monday, December 21

Christmas week has arrived. The weather is damp and cool at 8:15 a.m., and the Gaslamp Quarter’s porridge of fancy renovated storefronts, vacant lots, and surviving tenderloin businesses looks more like the downtown of an eastern and dying city than it will in just a few minutes when the sun gets higher and the cars of office workers and professionals begin arriving for the universal 9:00 a.m. start of the business day. Charlie Howell, the silver-haired watch repairman, is already waiting in his old Chevy alongside Bob Smith’s shop at the comer of Fifth and G. Once inside, he takes his place in a comer of the tiny store, perched on a stool in front of a high workbench. Bob and Lisa move around in the cramped space behind the L-shaped glass counters, getting ready. The two safes are opened; the six-foot-high safe carries records and pawned jewelry and watches, the smaller contains new and used jewelry and watches up for sale. Lisa takes two portable typewriters from a countertop and places them in a small display window facing G Street, then she carries trays of diamonds and chains to the front window on Fifth Avenue and starts laying those out carefully. Nearly everything in the windows and the display cases inside is fitted into that smaller safe at the close of the day, even though the store is wired against burglary. “They break and run, even with an alarm system,” Smith says. “I had it broken for a radio once.”

"There are some dumb ones out there," Lisa says. She picks up a wildly ostentatious ring, a smoky, amber-colored quartz stone the size of a man’s thumb set into a fourteen-carat filigree basket; the gold alone weighs twelve grams. “Where do you want me to put this ugly thing?” Lisa asks her father.

“That’s not ugly, Lisa.” Smith says this with a half smile. “Feel the weight. ”

“Are you trying to tell me it’s pretty or it’s worth something?”

As Bob, Lisa, and Charlie work they have to dodge each other, slipping between display cases, six-inch-wide file drawers, the workbenches, refrigerator, safes, and building posts along the outer walls, and between the two large display counters in the center of the shop. Someone is at the door a few minutes before the 9:00 a.m. opening time and Smith lets him in. The day’s first customer is a man of about thirty-five, with styled hair and beard, Jordache jeans, and fancy boots. He’s wearing a thick gold chain but he’s pawning a ring to raise money for a trip to Seattle. Bob knows him, vaguely, and they talk about the man's physical fitness program. He leaves.

A short, pony-tailed blond in Levi jacket and jeans, boots, with a leather knife holder at his waist and thick glasses on his face, comes in with a counterfeit Omega. Smith looks at the watch for perhaps a second and hands it back. “I just don’t take that kind of watch,” he says, but the young man persists.

“Really? I can be back in an hour with the money.” This doesn’t begin to interest Smith (why, if he can come up with the money to redeem the watch in an hour, is he pawning it in the first place?) and the strange young blond leaves for the pawnshop across the street. Western Jewelers. Lisa, feisty this morning, watches her father clean up behind a counter with a whisk broom and dustpan, and asks, “Why don’t you do that at home?” Smith answers, “ ’Cause I do it here.”

An eighty- or ninety-year-old man in a serviceable black topcoat, black broad-brimmed hat, and stickpin in his tie comes in. His face is yellowish and he squints. His mouth remains open to allow him to breathe. He has three switchblade knives which he draws from the topcoat and Smith tells him to try Lucky Loan down the street.

A couple of winos are arguing at the intersection across the street; a third walks up and blearily watches. Several well-dressed women pick a crescent route around them, and the strange young man with thick glasses reappears, this time walking west along G Street toward Western Jewelers again, where he stops, eyes some stereo equipment in the window, and walks into that pawnshop again. A counterfeit Omega for a working stereo?

“Yeah,” Smith says as he stares out his window. “This is a good spot. It’s like watching a big-screen TV.”

Of all the ragpickers and loonies, rail-riders, derelicts, flophouse marginals, and backpacking young jobless that pass by the shop, Dirty Frank is the one Smith talks about most. Dirty Frank is an old man of indeterminate age who’s slept in the streets for the last four years, but more extraordinary than that is the technique he’s developed to keep himself from being rousted by police — he never bathes and hardly ever changes his clothes, an unhygienic practice made the worse by his refusal to find his way to a toilet when others normally find it necessary to do so. Dirty Frank just uses his pants. Most police won’t touch him.

“He sleeps in Ernie Adelson’s doorway,” Smith says, “ ’cause the sun hits there early in the morning. He lives off the trash cans in front of Vesuvio’s. I’ve seen him get a cold pizza out of the can and take a beer out for his breakfast. ” But there has been a development. One of the Klancy Kops, a private Gaslamp force in Keystone uniforms that patrols on foot to keep the worst of the bums away from paying customers, took Frank into the Rescue Mission sometime in mid-December and forced him to shower, shave, have his hair cut, and accept some new clothes. “But the next day,” Smith continues, “he crapped his pants again.” Lisa’s nose wrinkles and she rolls her blue eyes.

A young dude wants a ring cut down to Fit his finger. “Can I get the piece you cut out of it back?” he asks. Bob is set back for a second, not used to hearing the request, then laughs, “No, that’s part of the deal.” Another man gets a ring out of pawn.

A steady stream of people continues through the morning. A woman who worked in the office of former Congressman Lionel Van Deerlin talks for twenty minutes with Smith about her children, children in general, crime, morality, and her upcoming visit to Los Angeles. A watchband is attached to a watch free of charge for one man, and Christmas greetings are exchanged. A young, stocky kid in a sweatshirt wants to sell a cassette player. An old man wants to sell an electronic watch. Both are out of luck. A large, middle-class woman has some rings to pawn, and says to no one in particular, “It’s a shame. I get ’em out one week and put ’em right back in the next. ” She takes her money while a very big late-model Dodge is driven up to the intersection outside to pick her up. Just before lunch, a young black man comes in with a chain he wants to pawn. Bob offers fifteen dollars and the customer complains and takes off for another shop. Ten minutes later he’s back. “Okay, I’ll take the fifteen dollars. ” Smith asks him what the other shops offered. “The best they’d go was ten dollars,” he says, blank-faced, a little disgusted. “Can you give me sixteen dollars?” Smith does.

People tend to think of pawnbrokers, when they think of them at all, as heartless, uninterested in anything but cutting a good deal, unsympathetic, greedy. The pawnshop in most unexposed minds is tinged by tragedies unnoticed by the owner, irrelevant to him. Rod Steiger’s classic movie didn’t really change that popular conviction, it just supplied an explanation for such stinginess of spirit; the Pawnbroker had his own wounds to nurse. “You buy a piece of string for five cents,” the Pawnbroker in black and white said, “and you cut it in half and sell the two pieces for three cents each.”

But pawning, generally, is something other than a lopsided contest between loansharks and the destitute. Most of Smith’s customers, he says ninety percent of them, come back to redeem the goods they’ve left with him for collateral on loans. That is, after all, what pawning is all about — the giving of collateral in exchange for a small, short-term loan. “We’re the poor man’s bank,” Smith says. “Get two pawnbrokers together to talk about business and they’ll say that and one other thing: it’s the second oldest profession.”

It’s true that the pawnbroker stands a chance to make a big profit on goods that are left unredeemed. People frequently leave behind with Smith diamond rings that are equal to $1000 rings in the windows of conventional jewelry stores, and walk out with just $150 to $175 cash in their pockets plus the redemption tickets. The State of California says Smith must not sell that ring for six months, and before he can sell it he must send out a registered letter informing the customer that his loan has fallen due. And if the customer cannot come up with the full loan plus interest to redeem the object, he can pay up the interest and extend the loan for six more months. There are not many people who fail to pay off the loan, forfeiting a possession worth six or seven times the loan.

In fact, Smith wants customers to redeem their pawned items. Gold and diamond rings, especially used ones, just don’t move off the counters quickly. He has one, a lightweight, modem little thing — two thin frames of gold that are overlapped, with four diamonds little bigger than chips studding the comers of the squares — that is priced at $225. The man who pawned it had been a regular. “He kept coming in and asking for more money against the ring. ‘I’ll be back. I’m good for it,’ he said. He got me up to one hundred dollars and then — poof.” If Smith sells the ring at $225, he’ll be okay. If he doesn’t, he’ll wind up having to break it up for scrap, and may not make out. The price of gold has fallen considerably since he loaned out that one hundred dollars, and the raw material in the ring might not make up the loss. Six months ago, in June, gold brought $475 an ounce. By mid-December it had fallen to $402, a drop of some eighteen percent. “That could have been my profit,” Smith says.

The scrap price is what Smith uses to set a loan figure on the items that are brought to him. The loan figure usually translates to about one-third the retail price of the item. So a ring in his counter marked $500 could be pawned for about $150 or $175. Indeed, there are a considerable number of people who buy rings from Smith with their pawning value in mind. “They’ll ask me how much I’ll give them as a loan against it when they buy. They’re picking up something when they have some money against the time when they don’t.”

To understand how Smith could get hurt on a ring left unpawned, consider that $500 ring. If he had taken it as collateral for a $175 loan and it didn’t sell, he might melt it down and sell the diamonds and the gold for scrap. This particular ring contained 7.5 grams of fourteen-karat gold that cradled an older, fifty-point, or halfcarat, diamond of undistinguished quality cut in the European manner, which is to say it was a heavier cut than diamonds done in the more modem way. It had far less of that magical glint most of us can appreciate to some degree or another. Gold today is bringing six dollars a gram from the salvage people. Old separate diamonds of the grade in this ring are bringing three dollars a point. That means Smith can get forty-five dollars for the gold in that $500 ring, and $150 for the diamond — a profit of twenty dollars after six months of ticketing, storing, and futile correspondence with the former owner of the ring. And if the price of gold falls dramatically, as it did after its $700 or nearly $800 highs, he could be denied that twenty-dollar profit on the unredeemed ring. “You have to figure what you can get for the thing if you have to get rid of it quickly. You just have to loan low to avoid getting hurt,” Smith says.

The sure profit to pawnbroking, then, is really in the loan interest rates, not in the possible resale of unredeemed items, and the loan rates are limited by state law governing pawnshops. For the first ninety days of a loan. Smith can charge a maximum over that period of fifteen percent for a fifty-dollar loan, thirteen and a half percent on a seventy-five-dollar loan, and twelve and a half percent for a one-hundred-dollar loan. After the ninety days, there’s an additional two and a half percent charge every month. That means if you pawned your Longines for one hundred dollars and returned to Smith after three months, you would pay him $112.50 to get the watch back. If a bank were to give you a hundred-dollar loan, you’d have to pay more than that for it. Credit card purchases also cost more if not paid within the first month.

Tuesday, December 22

At last Dirty Frank walks by. It’s late morning and his brown and thinning hair is twisted and clumped as if he’d just rolled out of bed. He’s of inestimable age, and his moon face is wrinkled in concentric arcs the way faultlines or cracks in dried clay describe unseen pressure. His hands and face are covered with a patina of grease and dirt — a culture of dirt — and his clothing hangs from sloped shoulders and wide hips. Smith says he’s cleaned up a little, and he does have new pants. Nevertheless, he remains a wreck, and dominates the sidewalk until another apparition strides purposefully past.

He’s a thirty-five- to forty-year-old blond, strapping and hardy at six foot, three inches, moving down the sidewalk at twice natural walking speed. Nearly everything he wears is sparkling white: a white cotton cap with a high dome, white lightweight cotton shirt over white pedal pushers. He has a red sash at the waist, an army surplus day pack on his back, and fatigue boots that reach four inches above his ankle. He looks like a Soviet ski trooper or a Hitler jugend set to yodel some invocation to pagan battle gods, and he hardly swerves or blinks as he walks, or marches, by.

A bereted man of about thirty-five has walked into Smith’s shop with six excited boys and girls, aged three to ten, one of them on his shoulder. His name is Julian Quintana, a sometime musician and entertainer who has now turned all his attention to restoration work on old buildings. He’s got the contract to rework the facade of the Bank of America building on Broadway, as well as jobs in Bel Air and Newport. Across the street is one of his most recent pieces of work, the Old City Hall building, for which he has finished fashioning new concrete window casings and elaborate plaster trim for fake columns and their capitals. “Normally we work from old plans, but we didn’t have them in that case, so we had to rebuild what we thought the building would have looked like.” A woman’s face is incorporated into some of the Roman-style capitals. “She works for the leasing agent,” Quintana says. He wants to buy a small diamond ring, and is looking at three — all of them delicate and fine.

After Quintana’s departure — and after quick sandwiches behind the counter, from which Smith and Lisa sneak bites between customers — a New Yorker in Levi jacket and pants moves across the threshold, talking even before he’s entered the store. He’s flipping a big coin as he draws near, almost missing it once. “Last time I did that (what?) I was in New York and the bartender told me he’d give me . . .” He stops abruptly, looks around the shop, then resumes a babble about New York, and people there, acting as if his amusement is shared by all, though Smith is wiping the counter ignoring him. “I was telling him,” he continues, jerking his head in Smith’s direction, “of course, but he doesn’t listen to me. Hah, hah, hah , . .’’He has a patter down cold, a smile and a plausible style, but the words mean absolutely nothing. His schtick might work if he could find something specific to say, something to convince you he has some business with you, that you might just know him. But he gets nowhere and leaves, looking backward and indicating Smith again. “He’s okay, you see what I mean? Hah, hah. ” Smith shakes his head. “He was in here making noise and drunk one day last week and I told him, ‘Get outta here, you old wino.’ Ever since, he comes in here and acts like I'm his friend.”

A tall, wiry fellow appears at the doorway, his biceps and chest exposed by a vest without a shirt underneath. He wears a big Afro and he walks into the store leaning backward because he’s carrying a fifty -or sixty-pound old color television in his arms like a baby. Smith sends him out, and he walks with the load north on Fifth Avenue, checking across the street for any pawnshops he might convince to take the cumbersome thing from him.

By now, a most improbable scene is developing — a full marching band in blue uniforms has raised an Optimists Club banner, some shivering majorettes holding it, and established itself in front of Old City Hall across the street. The bandleader, his head covered by a silver toupee, is rubbing his hands and throwing directions at the high schoolers while a small crowd, mostly winos, begins to gather. Outside the pawnshop, a small dark man, probably Mexican, whose torso has a five-degree twist on the horizontal axis and whose shoulders are canted unevenly, has taken the hand of a young hooker. She’s braless for the occasion, her large, fallen breasts accented by inward-set nipples, and the man keeps fiddling with her, pulling her arm, walking her several paces one way and another and then kissing the back of her neck before joining the coin-flipper from New York on the bench. Also on the bench watching the band is a man in dashiki, who minutes before was gesticulating madly and shouting to no one in particular as he crossed the street. The dashiki is talking to yet another bench-rider, a fifty-year-old Baby Huey; immense, toothless, pink, and bald, he looks like a James Bond movie goon gone to cholesterol, and the dashiki and he make a very odd couple. The band strikes up “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” One of the Klancys has just fished a small old wino from in front of the band, holding him by the neck and guiding him away from center stage. The whole scene is a Fellini tableau past which rides a motorcyclist stretched out in land-speed-record position, his head invisible underneath a mirror-glass moon-landing helmet. A smoking, destruction-derby sedan and some delivery vans and a bus cover up the rendition at the point where the words would say, “gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.”

The vested man is heading west on G Street toward Smith’s intersection, this time without the television set. In its place is something long and wrapped in a white shower towel. As he enters the store the towel falls away a bit and reveals a rifle barrel. “You take guns?”

“No, uh uh,” Smith says.

“Oh yeah? Do you take rings?”

He has a small, weary, silvery wedding ring. Smith isn’t interested. There is some mixture of feelings in the young man. He seems stiff, tough, confused, lost, and he does not immediately leave the pawnshop but stops near the door. The rifle barrel is pointed at the ceiling, he’s looking out the door at the street without focusing on any apparent thing, as if waiting for something to happen, something to break right for him. Finally someone says, “Kind of a heavy load to carry that television.” “Yeah,” and he lets out a sigh. “They’re messing with me.” He bolts out the door.

The law is interested in pawnshops, though perhaps less than it used to be. Where there were once some thirty pawnshops in downtown alone, there are now only seven or eight. Some of them have moved to outlying areas, but the total number, twenty, is still fewer than existed in San Diego’s earlier days. Police have always checked the shops for stolen goods that have been pawned, and that’s one reason pawnbrokers must keep extensive records of their transactions, making it a business of exceedingly complex record keeping. Most of the attention of the pawnshop detail is now taken up with the far more numerous used-goods retail businesses that have sprung up. There are more than 1000 such licenses, including the twenty or so pawnshops, and the pawnshop detail of San Diego Police consists of only four field investigators, with several sergeants and a lieutenant over them. The police until a few years ago checked the pawnshops with Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or Tuesday and Thursday regularity. Now the detail visits the shops irregularly and less often. Infrequently, says a department representative, it turns up stolen items in the pawnshops.

Pawnbrokers are not protected from confiscation of any stolen items they might have accepted as collateral, nor can they knowingly take them in. “If the guy tells you it’s stolen, or even if it looks as if he doesn’t belong to it, we can't take it in,’’ Smith says. “An eighteen-year-old kid came in here with a Rolex President — they sell for $8000 now — and he wanted to sell it to me for fifty dollars. I had to tell him no. Somebody got a good deal on a watch. When a burglar or fence does successfully unload a hot item, or when, more infrequently, the pawnbroker fails to recognize and accepts for pawn a counterfeit item that is seized by police for evidence, the pawnbroker more than likely has to suffer the loss of the loan. “There was this guy called Sharpey, his name was Sharpe, who was peddling phony Patek Phillipes, they were really good copies — actually good watches — and a lot of people bought them. I pawned one for a hundred dollars. Part of his sentence was to repay everybody, and I got a letter from the probation department that said the full amount would be repaid. I only got five dollars. What are you going to do? Take them to court?” In the last several years, one burglary victim, on the other hand, was so filled with relief when a burgled possession was recovered from Smith’s shop that he paid Smith the twenty-five-dollar loan fee himself.

There are other ways a pawnbroker can be victimized. “Someone’ll come in with a pretty nice ring, a good diamond in a heavy setting. He’ll have four others just like the one he first shows me, only they ’re set with zircons [artificial diamonds]. Then, during the time I’m doing something or other at the counter, the guy takes the ring back to look at it and when I’m not paying attention he switches it for the zircon. You have to know where everything is.”

Smith, over the years he’s been behind the counter, has been called to court to testify in some twenty to twenty-five burglary cases, mainly just to identify who pawned what stolen items. As a result of that exposure, he’s picked up as customers a number of police officers, who are just as attracted to pawnshop prices on jewelry as any other mortals. One who comes in the shop is Ernie Trumper, now with the intelligence division but formerly a homicide and burglary detective. “He’s honest. I trust him,” Trumper says of Smith. They met five or six years ago when Trumper was investigating the rape, burglary, and killing of an eighty-two-year-old woman. “The guy who’d done it gave some of the stuff to a buddy to pawn. Later he came in himself and pawned more stuff, but signed his buddy’s name. I didn’t recognize the face was different. So the next thing I know, Trumper and four other cops as big as him came in here with a thousand questions. The guy I first loaned to had shown good ID and was living where the ID showed he was. One of the ways they identified the suspect was to tie his handwriting to the stolen stuff, even though he’d signed someone else’s name.”

Wednesday, December 23

Dirty Frank hits the trash can at Fifth Avenue and G Street in front of the Old City Hall building. Nothing there. A young couple comes in with a near-new Bulova. There are two tiny diamond chips in a silver floral design alongside the crystal. The gold case and watchband are losing their gold and showing a silvery base metal. She wants to pawn it for fifty dollars, and both look crestfallen when Smith offers only thirty dollars. He tells them to try another pawnbroker.

Charlie the watchman explains the luxury-watch market. “See, watches used to be gold-filled, now they’re gold-plated. Hell, now they’re even electro-plating. Some of them may have twenty-five cents worth of gold in them, twenty-five cents of gold! How much gold is that?”

“So people wonder why, if they paid $175 or $200 for the watch, they can only get thirty dollars in a loan from me," Smith says.

“Until about fifteen years ago,” Charlie adds, “companies that salvaged gold would come around regularly and buy old gold-filled watchbands and cases from us. They don’t do it anymore because there’s not enough out here worth salvaging.”

Three different customers are in the store, Ernie Trumper among them. He’s looking at a gold bracelet that is somewhat twisted, and he jokingly offers to straighten it. He leaves without buying anything.

The young couple with the near-new Bulova returns, and she accepts Smith’s thirty-dollar loan on the watch.

Senor Salgado, very short, very rotund, and very mischievous, shows up, and Smith and he begin a good-natured hassle in Spanish over the price of a heavy gold necklace and pendant studded with diamonds. Senor Salgado is a Mexican citizen and owns a fleet of trucks in Baja that ship produce both directions from the border. The chain, and the pendant in the form of an “S” that was made specially for someone who wound up in jail before he could pay for it, is marked $2000, and it is only serendipity that the initials of the surnames are the same. Salgado is looking for a Christmas gift for his wife. Calculators are brought out as Salgado and Smith try to arrive at a mutually agreeable figure in pesos. Charlie says the exchange rate is twenty-seven pesos to the dollar. Smith checks the paper and Salgado and he settle on twenty-five to the dollar. The price of the pendant is rapidly bargained down to $ 1500 and Salgado wants to give Smith 37,500 pesos.

“Demasiado pesos para mi,” Smith objects, worrying how he’ll spend the Mexican currency before a possible devaluation.

The senor offers to write Smith a $1400 check in dollars on his Mexican bank. Lisa rolls her eyes and says Salgado always wins these struggles. Smith asks someone in the store if it’s even possible for Salgado to write a check in dollars on a Mexican bank and it turns out Salgado’s bank offers dollar accounts to Mexican nationals. Smith okays the $1400 check but makes one last stab at an additional hundred dollars. “Dame cien dolares en pesos.” In the confusion it’s impossible to see if the senor hands over the pesos.

Tuesday’s young man with Afro, color TV, and rifle returns, this time not showing his biceps. He has a nondescript, worn-out diamond ring. “Where’s the matching band?” Smith asks. “I’m not really interested in these unless the set’s complete.” Smith says he’ll loan fifteen dollars for the set.

“Okay,” says the customer. “I’ll be back with both. But can you give me twenty dollars?” Smith says he will.

Ron Moore, the Klancy who is supposed to have cleaned up Dirty Frank, passes by on the sidewalk outside. “A really nice guy,” Bob says. “He’s serious about what he does, he’s really interested.”

The troubled young man is back with the matching wedding band, but now he wants a twenty-five-dollar loan. “No,” Smith says. “Check around and see if you can get more.” Once again the man leaves the store.

Ron Moore and his supervising Klancy come into the store. The supervisor is a talky, goateed man whose story of the day is about a fifty-year-old who was skateboarding down Market Street and threatening to run into solid citizens. The supervisor says he tried to hail the man down, but was almost run into, the man wouldn’t stop. Smith notes that Dirty Frank has been wearing new pants. “He can’t keep his pants clean from here to there. You know that,’’ the supervisor says.

“But he’s cleaned up quite a bit,” Smith says.

“Nahhh, he’s just another one of Ron’s failures,” says the supervisor on his way out. Moore stays behind to discuss Frank.

“I got him a room, he’s not sleeping outside anymore. The Lark Hotel. He’s keeping the room nice and clean, too. He’s got money. Before I picked him up the second time, he’d gotten rolled and lost $300. He gets a war pension check and social security. It all goes to his brother now.”

Smith is incredulous. “Are you kidding? No one would ever roll him. They’d have to go through his pockets.”

“Oh, yes they did. For $300.”

Does he make sense when you talk to him?

“Oh, yeah, he talks a streak. He was under Patton’s tank command in World War II. Then he was a miner somewhere . later. He’s been in San Diego since the mid-1950s. He and his wife managed hotels, some of them downtown. I think he managed that one out in Pacific Beach over the water. Crystal Pier? His wife died thirteen years ago and after that he fell apart, just hit the skids.”

What made Moore pick him up?

“I warned him one day to stay on the other side of Fifth Avenue or I’d pick him up and take him to have his clothes washed and get him shaved and showered. Thirty minutes later I caught him in the same place so I marched him down to the [San Diego Rescue] Mission and they said. ‘Oh, you got Frank.’ ”

Moore reached Frank’s brother in Los Angeles and arranged for the brother to receive Frank’s government checks, cash them, and send money to the hotel for rent and the remainder to Frank for food. “Every time I see him drinking now, I snatch the bottle and pour it out.”

Thursday, December 24

A man named Casillas, who walks with a pronounced limp, enters the store for conversation and to pick up a gold coin that Smith had mounted. Casillas says the name originates from the Guadalajara area, and that he was the first Casillas to arrive in San Diego after the war. “Is that the First or Second World War?” Charlie pipes up.

“Ohhh,” Casillas laughs, “Charlie’s being funny.” Casillas limps out the door and Smith says the limp is the result of a World War II injury.

On the subject of regulars, Charlie claims, “I don’t think there’s any other business with more repeat customers.” Bob Smith says it has to do with the insecurity people feel at having to leave valuables behind, and having to rely on the jeweler not to lessen or discount the value of those articles. “People take back a bracelet or ring and find that it has the stone and hasn’t been raided. And they think, ‘Oh, I better go back to them.’ That’s how it gets started.”

Lisa’s been on the phone a lot, and when she gets off this time she says, “I should answer, ‘Aztec Jewelers, Merry Christmas, Lisa speaking.’ ”

Smith, who can’t hear exactly what she’s just said, says, “Did you really?” “No, I was thinking about it.” “Don’t,” Smith says. “We’ll sound like an insurance company. You’ll ruin our image.”

A young man with a chain and diamond ring to pawn is given back the chain. It’s gold-filled and Smith doesn’t want to loan on it. Smith puts the diamond ring under the eyeglass. “How much do you want for it?”

“A quarter. No, make it thirty dollars,” says the man.

“Your diamond has a chip in it,” Smith says, the eyeglass still in place.

The young man knows about the small notch in the diamond, but also knows that Smith recognizes him as a regular customer. “I know it has a chip, but that’s all right. You know me, I do business here. I always come back for my stuff.”

Smith says, ‘‘I know. Okay, thirty, dollars.”

Before he leaves, the customer sticks his hand out. “You’re an honest man,” he says. “I want to shake your hand.”

By early afternoon it is apparent that there is going to be a Christmas rush. The cook from the Scripps research ship, the man with the recent heart attack, comes in.

Senor Salgado returns — this time to buy a diamond ring and two gold bracelets, and there is more dickering. A man named Bob Smith who used to own a number of nearby peepshows drops by for a chat. “He used to say, when the movies were still getting busted, that whenever he heard the cops were coming for him he was going to tell them, ‘I’m not Bob Smith, he’s Bob Smith,’ ” says Bob Smith, the pawnbroker. A Greek restaurant owner, whose place is now in La Mesa but used to be downtown, brings his grown nephew into the shop to meet Smith, the pawnbroker.

Julian Quintana returns to buy a jade Buddha on a gold chain and some rings for his kids. Dirty Frank goes by outside, in a new pair of shoes and new windbreaker. “Not too shabby,” Lisa says. Smith fixes the clasp of a gold chain free of charge. Two young men, one in working clothes, the other in a jogging suit and Panama hat, come in separately; the first one fails to sell Smith a ring, the second can’t get Smith to give him the trade-in allowance he wants for his old ring toward the purchase of a $375 diamond ring. The man in working clothes jokingly tells the man in jogging suit, “He’s just like the police. You ain’t got no chance.” They leave laughing. Just before five, someone named Steve enters and begins looking at chains. The door is locked. At 5:15 there’s a rap at the door and a gambler is admitted to pick up his gold watch. The pinkie and ring fingers of his left hand are burdened by two enormous gold rings. (“You can always tell when a gambler is doing well and when he isn’t,” Smith had said earlier. “He either has his rings on, or they’re in my safe.”) Steve buys a beautiful $225 blue sapphire ring for his girl, a chain for his brother, and a little gold elephant for forty dollars. Lisa is emptying the display windows and cases, stacking the ring trays and threading gold chains over blue velvet cylinders before filling the safe with them. It’s already 5:35 and Smith’s shop is still littered with unfiled pawn tickets. He’s had to dump old gold chains loose into one of the display cases as one after another buyer has requested little gift boxes that are in short supply. He’s made eighteen loans today alone, and the whole week’s business has been twice normal for loans, redemptions, and outright sales. At a few minutes before 6:00 p.m. he leaves the shop, knowing he’s going to have to come back the day after tomorrow, Saturday, to do a few hours’ worth of straightening. He locks the door behind him, activates the burglar alarm, and sprays the threshold with insecticide to ward off the cockroaches he’s recently seen entering the shop underneath the door.