Benny the Mole

I wake up about 4:30 or 5 in the afternoon—the funky gray/blue night swells into my view. I have to be at the desk at 11 P.M.—though I don’t expect much traffic tonight.

I drink one beer. It slides into me, filling all the cracks and soothing the damaged nerves. The first drink of the day is a beautiful thing. Like a warm, smooth, lubricated hand job to your whole body. Peace. I wonder if this is what the monks on the mountains get—this feeling. I think about a second drink, but the alcohol’s just for medical reasons until we get the money. Just to keep myself moving smoothly. And then maybe I can think about quitting and seeing what Tara thinks about a life with the new Nick Ray.

I go see Benny the Mole at the pawnshop. A few months back, I hocked some stuff, including a Harmony flat-top acoustic guitar, my old computer and monitor. The computer was good—I would have bought it back when Tara wanted to hook up via e-mail, but I couldn’t afford it back.

It’s full of my film-editing software, Adobe and Vegas Video and a couple others, and I let it go for some short-term money. I have no use for that computer, but I want my guitar back.

The Mole is Benny Wynn—-and Benny Wynn runs the pawnshop that his mother owns. The Mole is called the Mole because he blinks all the time to keep the floating dirt and dust out of his eyes.

It’s a condition he took back from being an oil-rig worker in Saudi Arabia. The story people tell, which may or may not be true, has Benny Wynn becoming Benny the Mole the minute this rig he was working on went up in flames. Burned all the hair on his face and the front part of his head. His hairline starts near the crown of his head now. No eyebrows and no eyelashes. He blinks—both eyes at once—every few seconds. The oil fire was sometime back in the late seventies. Since then, he’s run his mother’s pawnshop and no one calls him the Mole to his face.

I open the door and a buzzer goes off in the back room where the Mole and his mother watch TV. The mother’s near deaf and I did the Mole a favor a few months back by running some wires from the TV to a speaker that I mounted right behind her head where she sits in this fat-assed recliner chair that smelled like old urine and cigarettes and bologna. A chair that smelled like a subway stop—like a tenement stairwell. She’s sitting there now—I can see her—with the speaker I hooked up screaming at her from behind her head.

The Mole comes out.

“Wasn’t sure you’d be open,” I say.

“I’m not, really,” he says. “Sometimes you get some late shoppers.”

“A day late?”

“It happens.”

I look around. There’s the jewelry in the cases. The fine instruments. The Mole’s got a soprano sax with ivory inlays over gold plate. It’s beautiful. I stare at it for a moment—wondering what led to it ending up here. Only someone who knows how to play loses an instrument that good. Whoever it was, they had to know how low they’d sunk to let go of it. There’s a mahogany-topped Martin R-17 hanging above the gun rack. An Epiphone. A nice Gibson Hummingbird. A couple of mid-sixties Harmonys, including the one I sold him. He hasn’t cleaned it. Hasn’t even added a new set of strings—it’s still got the broken B-string dangling the way it did when I brought it in.

I know that Martin, I used to have one. It’s the only non-collectible guitar Martin ever made. A total Edsel of an arch-top guitar. I used to have a couple of other guitars I see. I lost them all in bad decisions and desperate moments. The way you lose things. Or, at least, the way I lose things.

I’ve lost stuff, things, quickly in my life. People, I lost more slowly.

Behind the Mole is the gun rack. There’s a kid, maybe thirteen years old, looking at the guns the way we looked at fake guns when I was a kid, like it’s the greatest toy in the world. But a thirteen-year-old can’t, I suppose, be bothered with toy guns these days. They have real problems and the cops just might shoot them for carrying a fake pistol. Why not get the real thing? A depressive funk starts to settle on me, one of those you get when you really think about thirteen-year-old boys getting shot and shooting one another. The Mole tells the kid to move on, that he can buy a gun when he looks eighteen.

I shake myself out of it for the moment.

“Shopping?” the Mole says.

“Not really.”

“I’ll give you a deal,” he says. “It’s Christmas.”

“Yesterday,” I say.

He shrugs. “It’s the season, is what I’m saying.”

I tell him I want my Harmony back.

He blinks—his whole face makes a fist of itself. The scar tissue’s a different color than his skin—it’s pinker and lumped up like cauliflower heads. It looks painful. His face fists up again and releases itself. “Sure,” he says. “Slow going on old guitars. Fucking eBay is killing me. I never should have taken it off your hands.”

“I’ll give you a hundred and twenty for it,” I say. This is what he gave me for it.

Benny the Mole blinks two or three times. “A midget came in here. This is not now—I’m talking maybe fifteen years ago. A midget comes in and says to me that he wants this gorgeous nine-foot Brunswick pool table. Perfect slate—nice felt. He tells me there’s two grand in his pocket—cash. I ask him how he can play—I mean he’d need a phone book to get eye level, you follow? He tells me that’s his business. I ask again why he wants it and he tells me again it’s his business and not mine. He puts the cash on the glass.” Benny the Mole raps knuckles on the glass counter that I’m leaning on. “I didn’t sell him that table. Cash on the counter and I said no. Do you know why?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “You hate midgets?”

“Because he would have sawed the table’s legs. Things have integrity. Money has integrity—and I won’t let any midget with a roll of bills destroy the inherent integrity of things, you follow?”

“No.”

“I let you have that guitar for what I gave you and what am I?” He holds his palms up in some parody of wonderment and puzzlement. “I’ll tell you what I’m not. I’m not a businessman. The rules—in business—must apply to everyone, or else the system’s integrity is compromised.”

“You didn’t even add new strings,” I say.

“What I did is my business.”

I hear his mother wheezing in the next room in between commercials.

“How much?” I say.

“Two seventy-five,” he says.

“You only gave me one-twenty,” I say.

“What am I running? Charity?”

I make a face.

Benny the Mole says, “Don’t try to make me feel bad for earning an honest buck.” He waddles back along the counter and grabs my guitar. He puts it on top of a box that was once used for some black, greasy auto parts. The box smells like burned motor oil.

“Two hundred,” he says. “Merry Christmas.”

I pay him, pick it up, and walk out.