The Arab says, “I’ll call the manager.” He moves toward the man in the white shirt and dress slacks. “Maybe we can work something out.” He touches the man’s shoulder as though they are old friends, and the man shrinks away.
The man says in a firm voice: “Please, young man, retrieve my money and my license. I no longer wish to do business with you.”
“Okay, okay,” says the Arab, making his way to the tower, where Curly, the manager, and I are waiting. “Okay. Okay.”
The Arab needs a “turn”—a fresh salesman to save the sale. This is quite a surprise, for the Arab is our best closer.
“He’s a puke,” the Arab mumbles. He falls heavily into a swivel chair and swivels. “He’s not buying. Throw him out on his ass.”
The manager counts the man’s deposit, $450 in twenties and tens. He picks up the man’s license and turns to me and Curly. “There’s still money on the table. Who wants to play manager?”
Curly and I say “I do” at the same time.
“He’s a puke, I tell you,” insists the Arab.
But Curly and I feel no pressure taking a turn from the dealership’s top earner. If we close a deal that has slipped from the Arab’s stubborn grasp, then we are super salesmen and we get half the money. If we don’t close it, no problem—we weren’t expected to anyway. We go home early.
“Give it to me,” Curly says, “I haven’t had a sale in two days.”
Yes, I reply, but I haven’t lost a sale in a week.
Big Curly puts himself between me and the manager. “You owe me one,” he says to the manager. “I can close this guy. I do well with cleancut guys.”
But preachers are my specialty, I respond.
“A preacher,” says my manager, handing me the money and the license: Hezekiah McBride, forty-five, safe driver, most likely a Holy Roller. “Go make us some more money.”
“A puke,” says the Arab.
I step down from the tower and walk toward Hezekiah McBride. Brother McBride. Pastor McBride. A man whose diction speaks of sterling credit and a Holy Bible with Concordance in his briefcase. The good Reverend McBride is not here to play games with heathen who calls God “Allah.” He’s here to buy a car, and I’m just the Sunday school dropout to sell it to him.
So I take my time. I check the tires on our showroom model. I take a side trip into an empty office and sit in the dark for thirty seconds. I come out and sip water from the fountain. I address Miguel, who is now pushing a dust mop over the showroom floor. I ask him if he is certain all the cars outside are locked up. When he informs me they are, I say “Good” in my most authoritarian baritone and then sip from the fountain again.
I take my time not because I’m afraid of Hezekiah McBride, but because I have his license and his money, which he won’t leave without. A power game. The longer a buyer stays in the store—no matter how badly you treat him—the more likely it is he will buy.
Hezekiah McBride demands his money and license as soon as I arrive, ignoring my palm extended for an introductory shake; I hand everything over but position myself at the exit of the half-office so that he cannot leave without pushing past me impolitely. He fumbles to replace his license and money in his fat wallet. In the process, he drops two twenties; I pick them up, hand them to him.
“Thanks,” he says.
Hezekiah McBride, because he is a man of God, hopes to conceal his anger. I shall use this against him.
Hezekiah, I say, I could hear your voice way up in the management tower, and, well, we’ve been having some trouble with him.
I point in the general direction of the Arab.
“That young man is a liar and a thief,” he says. “He lied about what he was going to give me for my trade-in until I got ready to sign the papers.”
Did he now?
“He said he’d give me a thousand, but then he added the cost of air and tires and rust proofing to the new car, raising its price by $750.”
In effect, paying you $250 for your trade-in.
“Two hundred fifty dollars.”
I frown. I pick up the buyer’s order.
Is this the deal?
“Yes.”
Trading in a ’74 Eldorado. Moderate condition …
“Good condition,” he corrects. “It just had a paint job.”
… Some rust. Missing grille. Bald tires. Forty-two thousand miles.
“Two hundred forty-two thousand,” he says. “It went over twice.”
Thanks for being so honest.
“Mine is not a deceitful tongue.”
I lower the buyer’s order. I look him straight in the eye.
I appreciate that, Hezekiah. If more people were honest, selling cars would certainly be a lot more enjoyable. You’d be surprised what sort of junk I pay top dollar for.
He says, “No one can fool you. You’re a car salesman.”
So many years in church, I say, has made me an easy mark for the false tongue.
“Really? What faith are you?”
I say, It’s against policy for me to discuss religion at work.
I could’ve said, My faith is money—though it didn’t used to be.
Even now, on Sundays, when I’m not slamming customers or stealing the commission from some ignorant green pea, I might visit the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters to check on the Faithful. I arrive late, take a seat in the back, of course, sing as loud as anybody else—without use of a hymnal—the songs I’ve known since childhood, and then leave as soon as the musical portion ends. I like music. I can pick a tune on the piano with the best of them, but I have no time for sermons anymore and no faith, except for the green kind, since Elaine passed.
One day I left my wife and my child and my God for her. It was long overdue. She was hospitalized. No cancer. No heart disease. No high blood pressure whirling out of control. An embolism—whatever that is—in her brain. And then in my heart.
“Love,” she said. The green, electric mountains became hills, then smaller hills, and then they flattened against the horizon.
The blip-blip became a sigh.
“What?” I said, leaning close to her ear.
“God is love,” she said. And then she died, even though I held her hand. She was only fifty-four years old.
“You wouldn’t be a Holy Roller, would you?” Hezekiah McBride asks.
Are you?
With his thumbs, he pulls his pants up higher than his waist. “I’m pastor of the Greater Miami Holy Rollers’ Tabernacle of Faith.”
Beaming, I shake his hand.
I lie, I’m a Holy Roller too!
“Really? I’ve never seen you in service. Where do you worship?”
I’m not local.
“Kendall, Goulds, Homestead …?”
Yes, Goulds.
(Wherever that is.)
“Pastor Jeroboam, right?”
Yes. (I guess.)
“Well,” he says, “you must come up to Greater Miami next week. We’re having a tent meeting, and believe me, brother, you don’t want to miss the Reverend Jedediah Witherspoon. He’s a dynamic speaker come all the way down from Gainesville.”
Reverend Jedediah Witherspoon, I echo. I know him well. (He hates me. So does his daughter.)
“What a wonderful testimony he has. He had it all in the ’60s, but then because of sin—”
He lost it all. His mansion, his money, his TV show. He spent some time in prison. But now his ministry up there at that University of Florida has come back strong. I wonder if his daughter Donna is going to be there with him. She has a wonderful testimony too.
“You even know his daughter. Well this is something,” he says. “To meet a brother at a car dealership.”
He made some preachers, He made some salesmen, I say.
“Amen.”
I tell you what I’m going to do for you, Pastor McBride. I’m going to simplify this deal. How much do you really think your trade-in is worth?
He knits his brow. “
About $800.”
A ’74 Eldorado with no tires, no grille, and serious rust?
“Five hundred?”
Pastor, it’s got over 200,000 miles.
“Three hundred?”
A hundred fifty dollars tops, I say.
“That’s no deal. The other guy offered me more.”
On paper he did. But when you figured it out …
He sighs.
What about this? What if I buy the car from you? What if I give you the $150 in cash? Real money. It’s more than these heathens are going to give you when they finish writing it up on paper.
“Cash? Can you do that?” he says.
Yes, I’ll buy the car myself. I need something to putter around town in. You can add what I give you to your down payment and get a cheaper monthly rate. And we don’t have to let the dealership know. This is between brothers.
“Amen to that,” he says. And Hezekiah McBride, without my asking him to, sits down and once again pulls out his $450 in tens and twenties; I reach into my wallet and pull out the “biscuit”—the $150 that the dealership gives me for just such occasions.
I give the biscuit to Hezekiah, and he gives it back to me with his down payment. Now he’s happy with the deal.
So am I.
Perhaps if Pastor Hezekiah McBride had earned a useless bachelor’s degree in mathematics like I did, he’d realize that biscuit or not, I just snatched his trade-in for a hundred dollars less than the Arab was offering him.
“You are on a roll, my friend,” says the Arab.
We could’ve made more money if you hadn’t been so transparent.
“Like you’re hurtin for money,” Curly says, “after the mint you made on that black girl.”
I shouldn’t have buried her, I say. It’s her first car.
“So?”
She rode in on a bike.
“Don’t worry about it,” says my manager. “With the money you made, you can afford to take her out to a fancy dinner. Wine her, dine her, take her to bed. I did it a hundred times when I was in sales.”
The Arab says, “Best lovers are customers.”
Curly says, “Ever notice how when a customer forces a great deal out of you, I mean practically steals the best car on the lot, this same jerk customer—instead of being satisfied—always returns again and again to complain about everything? But you rip a customer off, bury the sucker like you did that black girl today—and guess what? That customer never bothers you again. If anything, a sucker like that refers other suckers to you.”
She’s not a sucker, I counter.
“No offense,” says the Arab, “but you know young black women are the easiest sell. Young black women, then young black men, then young white women, young white men, and like that all the way up to the toughest sell, old white men.”
So where do sand-niggers like yourself fit in?
“Hey!” exclaims the Arab.
Are kikes on that list?
“Wait a minute,” says Curly, rising to his feet—Curly whose paternal grandfather survived Treblinka.
I turn to my manager, but he is a peckerwood with the power to fire me.
He smiles. “Take it easy,” he says, putting a hand on my shoulder.
“You’ve gone overboard,” says Curly. “You wouldn’t like it if I called you the N-word.”
“I thought we were friends,” says the Arab.
Forgive me, I say. You are my friend. You are all my friends. I’m just under a lot of pressure.
“But you made so much money,” say the Arab, Curly, and my manager.
Yes, I did, I say.
But maybe money isn’t everything.
I pull up to my parents’ house, where I live in a room over their garage. A light is on in the living room, and through the verticals I make out my mother, my father, and my ex-wife Mary, who I know is there to ask me in a most displeasing fashion why child support payments haven’t been received in two months, so I back up and out of the driveway.
I drive a two-seater tonight, my reward for burying Ida and bamboozling Pastor Hezekiah McBride. The odometer reads 25—a virgin. The smell is Windex and Lysol and something lemony. Then the car smells like smoke too, when I light a cigarette. I’m trying to quit. I take two, three, four drags and I crumple the cigarette into the ashtray. Then I chew a piece of Juicy Fruit, wad it up, and stick it in the ashtray as a little something for the new owners to find—let them know I was here first. I ride the clutch. I make the tires squeal when I round corners. I pull onto the lonely expressway, pretend it is the autobahn, crank it up to 120.
As usual, I end up in that bad section of town where Peachie, my oldest and dearest friend, lives. My car is eyed by two lanky young men with heads shaved except for on the top where there is a profusion of short, tight braids tied together with rubber bands. I get out of the car. I do not bother to lock the doors. It ain’t my car. What do I care?
Inside, Peachie lights cherry incense. She goes into the bedroom and comes out in a see-through slip. We fall onto the couch and grope each other until it is obvious nothing more is going to happen tonight. For some reason, my stud machine is stuck in neutral.
I light a cigarette.
Peachie rolls off my lap and sits up, scratching her bare ass. “I thought you quit smoking.” She makes a prune face and fans the fumes away from her, gets up, and mounts her exercise bicycle set up in the middle of the small living room—THE AMAZING CENTRO-CYCLE, LOSE TEN POUNDS IN TEN DAYS (actual weight loss may vary from user to user).
She begins to pedal. “Smoking is going to give you cancer.”
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
I take a final puff and mash the cigarette into the bright red ceramic elephant-fending-off-tiger-attack ashtray on her coffee table.
“You’re the only one who ever uses that,” she observes.
I get up and reach for Peachie again.
She covers her breasts with the see-through slip and shoos me away. “Don’t start the engine if you don’t want to drive,” she quips, pedaling faster. “So talk.”
My life is shit.
“Not your life,” she says. Pedal. Pedal. “Your job. Just quit your shitty job.”
It’s not that easy. I love my shitty job. It’s great getting paid to play mind games on people.
“It must be, because they certainly don’t pay you much. Your ex-wife is hounding you for child support. When was the last time she let you see your son? And look at you—a car salesman who can’t afford a car. You’re a college graduate, isn’t that what they call irony?” Pedal. Pedal.
Peachie, my once-skinny Peachie, weighs close to two hundred pounds. But she manages the restaurant now. She’s moving out of this dump at the end of the month. In a year, she’ll apply for a franchise, and she’ll get it. She’s that good at what she does. I have faith in her.
It beats preaching, I say.
“Who’re you kidding? Preachers make plenty of money. Barry is a millionaire ten times over. And I know from experience that they get laid a lot too. Should I mention Barry again?”
It’s just a joke, I say.
“The joke is that as old as you are, you still live with your parents.”
Thanks for cheering me up, Peachie. I feel so good I could just kill myself. Praise the Lord for friends like you.
“That’ll teach you to withhold sex from me. You know how snippy I am when I don’t get my quota.”
Look, if you’re serious about it, I’ll come over on the weekend. I’ll help you pack and we can do some et cetera.
“No way, stud. The kids are coming over. We’re going up to Disney World.”
You’ve really gotten your life together, Peachie. I’m proud of you. I envy you.
“All I had to do was figure out that the Lord wasn’t going to help Peachie until Peachie helped Peachie. The solution was on the inside all the time.”
I wish I could get my life together. Everything I touch seems to turn to crap. I have no luck
. Everybody seems to be doing great, but me. You—you’re my friend and all; I mean, I’m not jealous of your success, but I do have a college degree.
“And I don’t. And yet things are working out for me.”
See what I’m saying? Right. I’m thirty. I live with my parents. I’m a car salesman.
“Yes.” The big wheel on the bike is turning faster now. Pedal. Pedal. “Maybe you should accept the Lord again.”
Give me a break.
“It might help,” she laughs. “Maybe God is mad at you for turning your back on Him. Get saved and see what happens. I’m saved.”
No offense, Peachie, but what kind of saved woman—
“Don’t go getting into my sex life, boy, or you won’t get any more of this sweet thing ever again.” She rubs her round little tummy suggestively. “My private groove is my private groove. I pay my tithes. I give to the poor. I say my prayers at night. I’m saved. I want to go to heaven when I die. God stays out of my sex life.”
What! But that’s not saved, Peachie. That’s not saved like it was when we were growing up. That’s so worldly. So secular. God’s people have to be apart. They have to be different. Christians these days—I don’t understand them at all. They go to parties, they drink, they have premarital sex, they wear the fashions of the world. Even the music. These days you can’t tell the difference between a church song and hip-hop.
Peachie is pedaling. Peachie is ignoring me. Finally, after I have finished my venting, she says into the silence, “So who has rendered you impotent this time? A secretary, a fry cook, a bag lady—”
Bag ladies don’t buy cars.
“A maid, a postal clerk, a stripper? Strippers buy cars, don’t they?”
Yes. I’ve had a few strippers.
“A ditch digger, a cop, a paralegal …?”
A student, I say.
“Aha! Seduction of the innocent. That’s your specialty. Have you slept with her yet?”
No. But I think there may be something more to it this time.
“You?” She gets off the bike, wipes the sweat from her brow with the hem of the slip. Peachie’s a big woman now. But her body looks real nice with the extra pounds. Real nice. “Give me a break.”
Really. I regret ripping her off.
“Regret? Not you.” Now Peachie mimics me: “I feel no guilt. I’m a salesman. I’m hardcore. I’ve got a hard-on for hard cash.”
Jesus Boy Page 30