TWENTY OUT THE DOOR

The insistent yearning of memory

As I walk through the front door of this grimy, glass-and concrete repository of heartbreak and crushing hopelessness, a man and a young boy are walking out. The man is tucking two five-dollar bills into his wallet. The young boy is craning his neck back toward the counter, watching the clerk carry a child-sized bicycle into the crowded back room where the physical manifestations of a thousand other hard-luck stories are stored, held hostage until the ransom is paid, with interest.

Most never are. A few months later the hostages — past history now erased by an unpaid pawn ticket — will be taken out, dusted off, assigned a value and then set out to be recycled into someone else’s dream, like a big wheel that just keeps going round and round and round...

That’s why I’m here, poking in dusty corners and rummaging through the ruined dreams of others, hoping to scavenge something of value among the smoking ashes of their misfortune.

And that’s when I see it, leaning against a big tangle of cheap rods, cheap reels and yellowing monofilament.

It’s not a reel. It’s a time machine, and I’m no longer a dyspeptic, slowly eroding 54-year-old man standing in a filthy pawn shop that reeks of cigarette smoke and desperation. It’s nineteen eighty-something and I’m a mullet-headed teenager standing on the cow-stomped red dirt bank of a windswept Oklahoma farm pond, reveling in the warmth of a mid-spring sun, the sirens of youth whispering their false promises in my ear as I cast that exact reel. The world is good. No rocks on the shoals of my future. Were there ever, back then?

It’s morning. School is in, but we aren’t, and a whole day of illicit possibility stretches out before us. The next pond, the next adventure beckons, so off we go, stowing our gear in the back of a ‘71 Nova that stinks of bass slime and the anise-infused oiliness of Fish Formula attractant. Where? Don’t know. Just go. We’ll find something. And we do, although none of us are to realize it at the time. We search for no grand, overarching truths, no deeper meanings. We just fish. What else is there to life when you’re 16?

I’m back in the pawn shop. I kneel and disentangle this artifact of memory, this someone else’s dream from the snarled pile. The rod isn’t the same. Mine was a Lew’s. This is a Berkley. But everything else is identical: Medium-heavy action. Pistol grip. Five feet, six inches long. Stiff. Clunky. Utterly obsolete these days, a museum piece. But in 1985? Perfect.

The reel, however, is mine. A Shimano Bantam, paid for with the minimum-wage sweat of countless paper bags filled with the groceries of bitchy housewives, life-weary single welfare moms, alcoholic, rheumy-eyed bachelors, sweet, gray-haired widowers who’d sometimes tip me a quarter, and batshit-crazy outpatients from the state mental hospital who’d yell at the sky and pray to gods only they knew as they took the bag from my hands and walked out the door and down the street, shuffling back to whatever world they temporarily stepped out of for bread and milk.

I hold the reel in my hands. It’s cherry. History wiped clean. Memory erased. Whatever hard-luck story that led it to this pawn shop is now forgotten, and it’s ready for new memories to overlay the old ones. Or in my case, serve as a physical reminder of my own old memories.

Because that’s what we do when we’re old and thinking of the past: We seek out those things that take us back. Round and round and round...

I take the rod and reel up to the counter.

“What’s your best price on it?”

“Twenty-five and tax.”

“I’ll give you twenty out the door.”

“I can do that.”

I give the clerk a twenty and walk out the door with my artifact, this totem of memory suddenly brought back to life.

Is it merely a proxy? A temporary stand-in for something yearned for but never coming back? Maybe. But at some point, isn’t it all?