In place of the usual hello, Mike Hook, the veteran pawnbroker and manager of DM Past and Present, has a phrase prerecorded on his mobile phone, which he plays when a customer first enters his small Iola shop. The audio is of a womans voice, tinny, robotic its the standard issue voice of Google Translate, in fact and its one of the few ways remaining for Hook to sever, if only momentarily, the vast silence into which circumstance has plunged him.
CUSTOMER [enters store, sound of door chimes]: Hello. Hot day, huh?
MIKE [seated behind the counter, reaches for his phone, hits play]: Sorry, the automated voice intones, Im not trying to be rude but I lost my tongue to cancer a few weeks ago.
CUSTOMER [she peers at Mike his neck girdled by a tracheotomy collar, his hand dabbing at his lips with a cloth every several seconds because hes lost the bulk of his salivary control and she finds that she can no longer locate the perfect response]: Oh, she says. Or: Im sorry.
HOOK, who was never a drinker and never a smoker, was stricken three years ago with an oral cancer, which, after laying dormant for a time, made a brutal point of returning 13 weeks ago. Doctors needed to operate, and fast. Hook, a gentle man with spectacles and a mop of thinning gray hair, was told prior to entering the operating room that the surgeon would likely only remove a very small, significantly affected area of his tongue. But when he awoke 12 hours later, it was to find that theyd taken the whole thing. He couldnt speak, he couldnt eat, he couldnt drink. He still cant. Of his former tongue, Hook says, they seized it by the root. He makes a slicing gesture with his hand: Gone.
HISTORICALLY, in the practice of writing, the easiest way of expressing speech on the page has been to employ what are called dialogue tags the he said or she said that follows a line of conversation. But, in Hooks case, the he saids are the hardest part.
Hook currently has three ways of saying anything. He keeps a lined notebook and pen on his desk, which is his most frequent method for relaying his thoughts. He avoids the often unwieldy, Google-generated voice if he can help it. His preferred method still born of a lifetimes habit is to try to vocalize his thoughts, slowly, carefully. To talk, in other words. But his success rate in this form is mixed at best. More often than not, Hook is asked to repeat himself, at which point hell drop again into the use of pen and paper.
Its not impossible to understand a man without a tongue; its only very hard. It sounds like this: Press the tip of your own tongue firmly against your bottom row of teeth and hold it as rigidly in place as possible. Now, read the previous sentence out loud.
Hook has started a twice-weekly speech therapy program at Allen County Regional Hospital but its too early in the process to have registered much effect.
ANYWAY, Hook is and always has been a man more in the company of objects than people.
And given the slow foot traffic at DM Past and Present, Hooks limited capacity for speech isnt challenged too many times in a single day. Instead, his hours are spent, in the main, among the inanimate bric-a-brac of life, objects whose demands on Hook are though each item has its own story entirely non-verbal.
A very partial list of the items lining the walls of Hooks Washington Avenue store would include: DVDs, mass market paperbacks, an automated steamer, rare coins, Harry Potter action figures, jewelry-making kits, Native American wolf decor, big and small toys, a signed photo of TV personality Steve Wilkos, plastic necklaces, cookbooks, artfully slumped rows of stuffed animals, crates of vintage LPs, decorative plates, commemorative whiskey bottles, ceramic angels, ceramic flowers, A&W Root Beer mugs, an enormous Sephrabrand chocolate fountain, cutting boards, a melancholy Emmett Kelly snow globe, a Pepsi soccer ball, a Pepsi Santa figurine, a Pepsi yard glass, collectible Barbies, a fur-collared flight jacket (think Tom Cruises cute torso in Top Gun), model cars, packets of beads and other necklace-making equipment, an antique bathroom scale, a 16-piece miniature tea set, a dinosaur diorama, a beginners metal detector, a microwave stand, soup mugs, dozens of $2 skeleton keys, brooches, bracelets, earrings, rings, circlets, tie pins, cufflinks, fossils, homemade cayenne pepper pills, bottles of moringa oleifera (good for arthritis, diabetes, and a lagging sex drive), comic books, baseball cards, old magazines, and more. Much more.
DM PAST AND PRESENT isnt technically a pawnshop, however it doesnt offer loans, for example, and so doesnt need to carry pawn insurance, which is cost prohibitive but Mike Hook is, in his every fiber, a pawnbroker.
A Kansas City kid with a penchant for cast-off things, the teenage Hook found himself helplessly drawn into a nearby pawn shop. He kept up the habit until he was 21, kept it up, in fact, until his habit became his career.
I sat down with Hook last week in the bright front room of his shop, a pad of paper and a pen between us. I asked how hed gotten started in the business. He wrote his answer in careful block letters: I VISITED METRO PAWN A LOT WHEN I WAS YOUNG AND SOMEHOW I GOT BEHIND THE COUNTER AND BOOM I WAS A PAWNBROKER.
