Michael D. Davis

Car shopping is not often fun, but necessary. It is not a sport or a pastime. No. Car shopping is all out warfare between two lifelong enemies, the salesman, and the customer. This here, this is the story of the battle of the Jon Voight.

A few years ago, it was decided that I would get a car. A used car of course; nothing fancy, nothing shiny, but something nice. I wanted a car with character and style. Not just another bland sedan ya see goin’ down the street. Granted, it was already decided that whatever I got, no matter the make, model, or anything, I was gonna paint it. That was just a given.

After a few weeks of combing over every car seller and dealer website in the state, I saw an ad. It was perfect; a battle gray late 80s Chrysler LeBaron with only 80,000 miles and a broken back windshield. Yes, Seinfeld fans, it was the Jon Voight car. The dealer took the ad off the website after only a few days.

So, I thought someone already nabbed it, but we decided to drive the thirty minutes to the dealer anyway. It was still sittin’ there. They had it in what my dad likes to call the push, pull, and drag row. That’s usually the row around the back of the building, where all the cars are parked on gravel instead of cement.

We weren’t there long before a salesman caught our scent on the wind and began galloping towards us. We asked about the Chrysler like we knew nothing. We asked about it like I hadn’t been studying its ad every night before bed, its visage like sugar plums dancing in my head.

He told us it was a California car; no rust. A guy drove it here from the coast and traded it in. The back windshield was shattered with a fist like hole in the middle, but the previous owner had sandwiched it between two pieces of plexiglass. We took it for a test cruise, and it drove like a dream.

The salesman also tried to push a little Pontiac on us. Said it was about the same price. The Pontiac had been in a wreck before, but we figured we should at least give it a test drive. It made a sound every once in a while like a rock was thrown in a blender. The decision was made, we’d get the Chrysler or nothing.

We went into the dealership; the salesman had a little cubicle he worked at. Ma sat down across the desk from the salesman as my sister and I stood.

Like any good warrior, my Ma had fought this fight a thousand times before she even set foot on the battlefield. Minutes before, as we were walking towards the door of the dealership, my Ma prepared me. She said, “Let me do the talking, you don’t say a word. And know I’m gonna say some stuff about ya, but don’t worry about it.”

So, they sat across from each other. The salesman threw out a number. His mistake was thinking this was gonna be a back and forth; he’d say a number, she’d say a number, then they’d meet in the middle.

No, this wasn’t a boxing match; like I said before, this was warfare, and I was the first casualty. “This is gonna be his car, ya know,” my Ma said to the salesman, pointing at me. “He’s disabled. He can’t afford much. The boy has been sick his entire life. He’s allergic to everything you can think of cats, dogs, trees, grass. He’s got a heart problem too, and severe asthma. He has to have his inhaler on him at all times. It took him forever to graduate high school. Any money he does have goes straight to his medications. He’s only gonna use this car to drive around town, mainly to the doctor and back.”

Now, everything she said was true, but I’d never heard myself described in such a Tiny Tim fashion before. I half expected Sarah McLachlan to start singing that song from those sad dog commercials.

Either way, it was workin’; she got the price down some more. But the price still wasn’t perfect. My Ma looked to her right, and on the wall of the cubical hung a picture. It was the salesman and this old couple standing in front of a new car. Ma hooked a thumb towards the picture and said, “I bet you gave those people a better deal than you givin’ us.” In a feeble, almost childlike voice the salesman uttered back, “That’s my grandparents.”

It’s at this point in the story that I usually like to say the salesman started to cry, but in truth, he didn’t. He did sell us the Chrysler for $800, and we got a spare set of tires in the trunk. So, it all worked out.

It’s with this skill set that my Ma has bought nearly all the cars we own. She says it all started when she was a teenager and bought her first car for only $128. This other time, when the salesman handed over the keys to my Ma, she’d done such a job on him and got the price so low that he told her never to come back. I mean, what a sore loser.