My family owned a small bar and grill in Baltimore. The business was licensed for both on and off premise sales. That type of license is no longer available unless it’s been grandfathered in. The Liquor Board has preferred to keep the two kinds of sales geographically separated. But if you hold that license, many sales of package goods are made right as the bar is closing. It’s convenient for those who want to continue the party elsewhere. One of our closing instructions was, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
The 1970s were transitional in Baltimore. Good neighborhoods switched to bad, into urban blight. Money was invested downtown and in the suburbs to counteract those vectors of decay.
Often, the patrons of my mother’s bar would come up short trying to budget their booze. I don’t know how many bars today would do it, but back in the 70s my mother, Esther, regularly took people’s personal possessions in hock. She might “loan” one of her customers a dollar on a newer shirt. It was easier (and more profitable) to give them a dollar’s worth of the booze they craved. “Honey, give Hillbilly a fifth of Richards.” She’d write down the pawn transaction on little receipts the old NCR cash register would spit out when the No Sale button was used. “Hillbilly, 1/5 Richards, brown jacket.” The pawned clothing items were rarely recovered.
Before the Wigwam became the Club Charles, it wasn’t uncommon to see some of these items for sale on a hanger behind the bar. I don’t know if purchasing used clothing while drunk is considered good financial behavior, but if you ever needed a red and white vertical-striped button down shirt at one a.m., Esther had you covered. Would you like a jacket with that? Hat?
When the economy turned bad, Esther pivoted slightly from food and beverage to anything and everything, which is exactly what that unclaimed pawn stock was. She also sold certain groceries in those years. She wasn’t licensed to sell milk, but what the hell? Miss Evelyn needed a gallon of milk and there was plenty in the walk-in. In the rear of the bar by the back door was the liquor room. The liquor room was a 10x12-foot structure solidly built of concrete blocks. The door was ¾” plywood on both sides of an overkill wooden frame. It had its own complete un-penetrated roof under the building’s roof. It was the secure storage area for the most valuable stock and you didn’t want to risk a leak or a breach. All that liquor was a tempting target for bad dudes and bad drunks. The room was lined on all sides with wood shelving, mostly 1x12s. The liquor on the shelves in that room was probably the most organized area of the whole bar and restaurant. Then the pawned items were stored there.
Radios were pawned a lot. One Panasonic model in particular must’ve been very popular for several years because there were several of them in storage. Black and chrome AM/FM, two dials, pull-out antenna. I think it used four C-cell batteries.
Esther would keep something like that cushioned in a big Hefty garbage bag full of somebody else’s pawned clothes in the basement office of the Wigwam close to the desk. Enough stuff was pawned that many Hefty bags were filled, and then migrated to the liquor room. Liquor that had been easily accessible in 1965 was beginning to get lost in a stratum of Hefty Bags by 1970. The business changed as the neighborhood changed.
By the time I got around to trying to organize in the late-1970s, the bags had piled up nearly waist-high and I had to climb into the Liquor Room using Hefty bags full of clothing and appliances as ladder rungs. “Watch your head, honey, goddamn!” Then the bags would have to be moved from one side of shelving so the liquor bottles stored down below on the one side could be reached.
I was living a block away on St. Paul St. in a big studio apartment. I started taking bags home with me every other day or so. There wasn’t room at the bar to spread it all out and take inventory. Irons and clocks and toasters. Bell bottoms and comically wide leather belts. Shirts with collars that had five and six inch points. Lots of groovy threads were pawned there during the Vietnam War. Hippie fashion, medals, uniforms, a wreathed star grave marker from a Union soldier burial site. Esther didn’t know what that was when she took it in pawn; she just knew it was old and most likely had value.
My once spacious apartment was filled with items of almost no value. Some were still in pawn to Esther, but had been stored for years. “Don’t do anything with that radio. That belongs to Rufus and he’s going to want that back.” Poor Rufus passed away years later leaving that radio unclaimed.
My organizing method is “piles of like items.” I put like items such as appliances into one pile. When there were enough radios in the appliance pile to warrant their own separate pile, I’d separate them out. It was the same with the clocks. Pretty soon I had piles of clothing on every square foot of horizontal surface. Purses, boots, jackets. On the floors, tables, and chairs. I’d seriously underestimated the enormity of this task.
Twenty-nine bags, mostly clothing, I carried over to be sorted. It broke me. I couldn’t do it. I’d carry some stuff back over to discuss with Esther and invariably, the item was still being held for So-And-So, “and he’s a good customer, honey.” And then it would end up back in the bag at the side of the desk, and then back to the liquor room.
I gave up. I walked out on those piles of shit. I re-enlisted in the military and went away to Germany. I don’t know what became of that mess. When I came back from the military, it wasn’t spoken of. I do know Rufus’ radio was saved because I saw it go into a Hefty bag by the desk in the office before I left.
When my siblings and I were young children, we didn’t go to the bar frequently. We loved going, because it was dark but bright with neon. Loud with music and people laughing. Lots of strong, distinctive odors. Beer, smoke, wet wood. And we were usually going there to pick up the world’s best sandwiches for a road trip. As we got older, we’d go more often to help with various cleaning tasks. Back then bars were closed on Election Day and we kids were good chore hounds. On Election Day Esther would make sure everything was thoroughly cleaned floor to ceiling and also “behind that son of a bitching icebox!”
The deli meats that went into those road trip sandwiches also found their way home to our own kitchen. Ham shaved so thin it would turn translucent when warmed. Roast beef that needed no bread or condiments. No matter what other lunacy we might’ve endured as kids, we ate well.
Sometimes the pawned items would make it to our house, too. These were the items that required feeding and watering. Esther would take into hock her customer’s pets. Not often, thank God, but often enough.
When I was born there was already a pet in the family. His name was Tux and he was a buff and white boxer. I don’t know if he was originally bought or taken in pawn. I do know that Esther got a boxer because she knew Billie Holiday and Billie Holiday’s boxer, too. Her personal physician also had boxers. Esther got a boxer.
I was four, playing in the back yard one day when some kids came running up the alley to our back gate. One was holding a can opener with its end covered in blood. He pointed down the alley with his free hand and said, “I just killed your dog.” I was staggered that something happened to Tux, never mind an admission of murder. I just ran screaming inside to find somebody older. We ran down to where the kid had pointed and there was poor Tux, dead, hit by a car. He’d gotten out somehow and died running the streets. I sometimes think it might have been a failed escape attempt.
The pawned pet I remember most was Sancho the squirrel monkey. As I remember the story, a sailor had picked up the little guy somewhere in Central America. He was cute, but we were young kids and shouldn’t have been given responsibility over him. We always wanted to play with him, which meant taking him out of his cage, which meant him escaping inside the house, which meant screaming and chaos. We were chasing Sancho once and he got outside and at that point everything went screwy. We think this sailor’s coming back for him and we can’t let him loose in downtown Baltimore. Esther will kill us!
My dad had planted a line of Lombardy poplar trees along the fence dividing us from our neighbor to the north, Betty. Betty had several dogs and they were in their yard when Sancho made his break for freedom in ours. He jumped 20 feet from our back porch to the first Lombardy poplar along the fence. Betty’s dogs went mad trying to get the monkey. They were jumping on the fence, bouncing off it, snapping, snarling, and barking their fool heads off. Sancho climbs higher in that tree and then jumps to the next tree, even higher. My brother was the tallest so he can’t let the monkey get out of reach or that’s it. He’s focused on the monkey, circling the tree, leaning back against the fence and just as he reached high enough and grabbed Sancho, a German short-haired pointer named Nora took the biggest bite of his ass which was bulging through the wires of the old fence. He screams which scares the monkey into a panic. I have to give my brother credit. With a dog bite right in his ass, he held on to wild Sancho until the monkey was safe.
Not long after that, Sancho fell ill. My dad got on the phone with the vet who said, based on the symptoms described, Sancho had a cold. He simply couldn’t adapt to the dry air caused by our forced air heating system. The vet recommended an eye dropper of orange juice and brandy to perk him up. Keep an eye on him and try to get him to eat. The eye dropper worked. Sancho perked up, became very animated, got loose and tore around the living room for about three minutes until he fell over dead from whatever wasn’t a cold. The sailor never came looking for poor Sancho.
The next pawned animal Esther brought home was a black Lab mix named Blackie. Blackie hunched every leg, every dog, the cats, all the neighborhood kids. He was awful. I remember him trying to hunch my little sister while she was swinging outside. He jumped up on her as she reached the bottom of the arc and wrapped his legs around hers in that death hunch grip they do. She kicked him away and he did it again. We didn’t have Blackie for very long; I believe he went to the pound.
A Mallard duck came home with Esther one day. The duck didn’t last long enough for me to remember his name. He was beautiful, too, with the shimmering green feathers around his neck. He quacked a lot and shit even more. Someone stole him out of the back yard, probably to eat, and while we were all very sad about that, nobody suggested getting another duck to replace him.
Ali Baba was the name of the Afghan Wolfhound that was pawned/fostered/dumped with us. When he arrived, he was matted and dirty. He was black with some red highlights and his tail formed a perfect nine. He was also emaciated but with an Afghan, at what point is its emaciation unhealthy? We had him shaved down to skin and bones and then we (the kids) were supposed to brush him two or three times a day as the hair came back in. We didn’t. He was all matted up again in weeks.
The only thing Ali Baba wanted to do was run. Walks were okay, but he wanted to run. He was so thin that if you opened the door enough to be handed a letter, he could slip through. We were always worried he’d get hit by a car. Nobody could catch him once he was running. I chased him up N. Calvert St. for a block once and when he got to 28th St. he stopped and looked both ways. And still outran me. I thought he was the smartest dog ever… definitely smarter than the kids responsible for him.