CAR LOT CONFIDENTIAL was intended (and still is) to be a book. Paul wanted me to read the 80 pages to see what I thought, I loved it! (He won’t give me the rest and left off in mid sentence, he can be so cold.)

For the next few months I hounded Paul to start a blog based on the book. I wanted the average person to have a glimpse into this insane world and have it now! He relented and is enjoying writing his blog. Well car fans! I talked him into adding the 1st 25 pages of the book on the site!

Enjoy!

CAR LOT CONFIDENTIAL

By Paul Burke

SAMPLE CHAPTERS:

OLD CAR LOT JOKE

Q: What’s the difference between a porcupine and a BMW?

A: With a porcupine the pricks are on the outside.

PROLOGUE:

It wasn’t the lowest rung of hell. More like prison with brightly colored balloons.

That image wedged into my brain as I sat in my small confined space, wondering how my life had come to this. The choices, twists and turns that brought me here. Now here I was, one of many, planning an escape.
Not even a window to look out.
A fluorescent light sputtered overhead. Outside a truck sat idling, its engine made a deep rumbling drone. The atmosphere was a blend of car exhaust, popcorn and cheap cologne.
Voices echoed down the long dark hallway. From the cube on my left a wheezy old salesman said, “Hey what about that ozone layer? Ain’t that something? Now just sign right here. Heh heh heh”

And from the right, a younger man’s voice, “Please Mrs. Riggs, I shouldn’t tell you this, but if I can only sign three more deals before Friday we can afford to get my mother her new kneecaps. Okay, just sign right here. God bless you.”
Directly across the hall came a nasal New York accent. “Mister and Mrs. Zekenfoose, you have the rare opportunity at this exact moment to purchase this automobile at a much lower cost than the owner of this particular dealership. Listen, if he knew about this quote you received he’d have a series of spasms. No really, they’d have to hook him up to a heart monitor. Now I know it’s crazy, but I’m a man of my word. No matter what happens to me, I want you to have this beautiful car, but you need to sign today, right now, oh no, if you came back later, begging for this unbelievable deal I could never procreate it, so let’s do it, sign right here.”

The dealership was buzzing with activity, customers looked for salespeople but I was in my cubicle hiding. Hiding from five feet of steaming mad irate consumer. Mrs. Bilbrey.

She screeched into the lot, parked in the general manager’s spot and stormed into the finance office.

I did the right thing when I saw her approach. I ran to the other side of the showroom, hid behind a potted bush, and watched her.

A week earlier I sold her a five-year-old Nissan Pathfinder. Mrs. Bilbrey had returned each day since then, demanding that we fix a scratched bumper, an underpowered sound system and a blemish in the paint caused either by acid rain or a bird with a caustic diet.

All our profit evaporated.

I had almost two weeks of work in the deal. Landing her on the right truck and working out the financing. Now that she had eaten away all the profit, I had essentially worked for free. She showed up four days ago and demanded her car while I was at lunch. An older salesman named Owen handed her the keys and took half the deal.

Owen was in his dotage. He had bounced around area dealerships for decades. Everyone knew him. One crusty old salesman told me that Owen hasn’t been the same since the paramedics pronounced him dead a few years before. In defiance of the medical community’s opinion, Owen still wobbled amongst us.

Back to Mrs. Bilbrey. She squawked at the finance manager and made fresh demands. In a few seconds he would call me to get this crazy woman out of his office and my tribulations would start again. Then Owen stepped out of the break room. A greasy bean stuck to his shirt, a jaunty accessory that went well with his stained tie.

Poor old Owen stepped too near the eye of the storm. Mrs. Bilbrey saw him. Her voice rang out, “There he is.” Owen half spun, half fell toward the office.

She blistered him for about half a minute. He came running out red-faced and trembling. His bean fell to the floor as he passed me. “Owen,” I said. “What’s going on with her now?”

It took Owen a moment to recognize me; we had only worked together for three years. “Come on,” he said. “She needs her egg plant.”

What?

“Owen, slow down. What did you say?”

He paused in mid-stumble. “She’s in the finance office and she needs her egg plant.”

“Okay Owen,” I said. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Yeah yeah, come on, help me look for it.”

We stood by the Nissan. There on the front seat was a Day Planner.

“Owen,” I said slowly. “Could she have said ‘Day Planner’?”

He blinked and shook before slapping himself on the head. “Dummy. I’m just an old dummy.” He fetched the book and ran back inside. “Come on with me,” he said. “You talk to her. She likes you.”

Right.

I followed Owen part way before I ducked down a hallway back to my cubicle, leaving my fallen comrade to his fate. Here I sat, gnarled pencil in hand, trying to make sense of a business that is designed to make no sense.
All of us did what we had to do to get by. After fifteen years of working at car lots, that’s what life felt like.
Not the lowest rung, but not at all what I had planned.
Many unlikely people wind up selling cars. I’ve worked with disgraced professors, brain-damaged ex-cons, part-time hookers, single parents and scores of naive fresh-faced kids.
But of all the misfits to wash up on the shores of the Car Business, I was one of the last who should have been there. Growing up, my family never owned a car. My father worked three blocks from our home. He walked to work year round. There was a small grocery store on the corner.
As my father used to say, there was no need.
Growing up, my room was filled with scale models of Corvettes, Mustangs and exotic sports cars. But I never, ever visited a car lot until I was eighteen and bought a genuine Hippie Wagon. It was a retired cookie delivery van. Within a few days it was decked out with eight track stereo, bed, deluxe kitchenette and mood lighting (a candle).
Top speed was fifty. Fifty-five on a long downhill stretch.
The biggest drawback to my Hippie Wagon was broken locks. Some mornings during my drive to work, snorts, grumbles and exotic smells wafted up to the front of the van. A series of passed out winos took turns nesting in the back. Usually they weren’t even winos I knew. After chasing out half a dozen inebriates, I installed padlocks.
That was a sight. It was like a rolling storage shed. What’s not to love?
The cookie van lasted a few years before I pawned it off on a naive art student.
One thing I always remembered about buying that van was the owner/salesman at the funky little car lot. He was sixty or so, a cigar chomping, fat cat loudmouth. Everything a proper eighteen-year-old counter cultural goofball like myself should stand against.
But the truth was, I liked him.
He was a funny, grandfatherly guy dressed in his striped shirt and plaid tie. White shoes and belt. The man had style in a sideshow kind of way. I’ve thought of him many times over the years.
We all have memories of our first time at a car lot. Usually there’s an air of mystery or a feeling of regret. Over the years a lot of people admitted to me that they really want to know what was the heck was going on after the salesman left to talk to the manager. I’ve heard lots of theories from people and experts outside the business but none of them came close to the truth.
So, here it is, a peek behind the curtain. This book was written to clear away some of the mystery and myths of life at a car lot. While writing it I remembered that the car business, with all its confrontations and frustrations, was sometimes a lot of fun. There are some very good and decent people mixed in with the sleazes, lunatics and morally challenged individuals that populate the car business.
I would like to tell you their stories.

CHAPTER ONE: Into the shark tank
Before life as a car salesman I suffered a general lack of momentum as a comic book geek and part-time slack dog. No progress. A dubious quality of life. My career was going nowhere.
Then I found The Car Business and things got worse.
The ad read: Free Personality Test. See if you have what it takes to be a highly paid Retail Automotive Salesperson.
Free. A beautiful word considering I had a mortgage payment due, student loans past due, thirty-two dollars in the bank and had just lost my job managing a small comic book store. For three years my world was filled with an assortment of adolescents trying to dazzle me with their knowledge of Batman trivia and middle-aged men looking for books about scantily clad women in distress. These were my people. As manager, I arrived each day pretty close to nine in the morning. Most days there was a line of agitated oddballs waiting for the door to open.
The job paid just enough to maintain a small mortgage and a minimalist lifestyle. I spent many days arbitrating minor spats about Klingons versus Darth Vader. I had settled into a comfortable niche.
One morning the door was padlocked. The state of Tennessee was not amused by the owner’s unique style of bookkeeping. They seized all the toy robots and back issues of Spider Man. I was out on the street, clutching a ragged copy of Bugs Bunny Number One, wandering from place to place.
Then I saw the Help Wanted ad: Free test. Have fun, make lots of money. It almost seemed too good to be true.
The receptionist sounded very glad to talk to me until she found out I was interested in scheduling a time to see if I had what it takes to be a salesman. Her voice dropped down to an irritated drone. She told me to arrive at nine-forty-two in the morning for the next round of testing.
My experience with misfits dressed in pointy-eared Vulcan costumes didn’t prepare me for what was to come. I was about to step into the Shark Tank.
About a dozen people showed up for the test. They ranged in appearance from well dressed to ragged.
The test was full of questions like: Do you ever hear voices when you’re alone? Do you have problems going to the bathroom? Do you think others see you as a likable person? Would you have any problems making a lot of money?
Some of the questions were lifted from the Briggs-Meyers test, others were subliminal propaganda. After a few minutes we lost three of the hopeful crowd. They left without a word. This was my first brush with the quasi-truth and shady reality that is the Car Business.

I must have passed whatever grading system they attached to the test. Two days later my answering machine gave me the great news.
“Great news,” it said. A raspy voice creaked from the small speaker. “You passed the personality profile with, well, looks like . . .” the voice faded as the crinkle of a page turning filled the silence. He was reading a script. “You have scored one of the highest test results I have ever seen. Please call . . . ”
A small-time con artist ushered me into the business.
I called the dealership and made an appointment to talk to a sales manager. Putting on my new knit tie and least shabby khakis, I walked through the doors of the Ford dealership and told the receptionist that I had an appointment with the manager.
Never looking up, she said, “Are you Adam?”
“No ma’am.”
She gave me a disbelieving expression. Maybe she thought I really was Adam and trying to hide my true identity. She pointed to a row of chairs “Please wait over there.”
The chair was hard plastic. A few minutes later a man’s voice sputtered over the intercom, “All salespeople to the conference room. All Retail Automotive Salespeople please report to the conference room.”
The first wave of bodies belonged to fresh-faced youngsters, all dressed in their Sunday finest. They stepped lightly across the showroom, heading toward a door marked CONFERENCE ROOM.
Then, in the still air, came sounds like stirring beasts. From dark recesses they came, walking on unsteady legs, eyes blinking in the harsh light. All men, middle-aged or older. Arms outstretched, guttural sounds escaped smoke and whiskey damaged throats. These were the veterans. Lifers.
Retail Automotive Sales Zombies slouching toward the conference room.
What the hell am I doing here? I thought.
That image stayed with me. It gave a direction, a compass point, to steer away from. Even after I became one of the countless lost souls adrift in the car business, I had that image seared in my brain. At twenty-nine years of age I had enough youthful brain density to convince myself this was a temporary gig.
Nothing to worry about.
I was still self-delusional enough to believe this was a short-term fast track job. I could catch up on the bills, build a little nest egg and, in the language of comic book geeks, find a position more suitable to a man with my giant brain and sensitive, artistic nature.
So, I sat there wondering what the hell I was getting myself into. The stone-faced receptionist spoke without turning to face me. “Take these,” she indicated a stack of printed forms on the corner of her desk. A well-chewed pen lay on top
I filled out the forms and waited.
And waited some more. Maybe it was a test of nerves, maybe they forgot about me. Almost two hours later she said, “Mister Benjamin will see you now,” in a stage whisper.
I was half asleep. “I’m sorry?”
“Mister Benjamin will see you now.” This time she favored me with a forlorn look that and pointed with one blood red fingernail down a long, dark hallway. This was a scene straight from Dante’s Inferno. My Spider sense tingled.
I shambled off down the hall. Raucous voices burst from the door marked: Brett Benjamin Sales Manager.
Ribald laughter and asthmatic wheezes mingled in the smoke filled air. The door wasn’t locked. There was a small crowd of men sitting in a semi-circle, all watching a small television. I couldn’t see the screen. Seventies disco music rattled out of the damaged speaker.
The men took no notice of me at first.
“Oh, there she goes, she’s gonna do it,” one man said as he pointed to the screen. He was a grizzly old cuss. His rough and wrinkled face contrasted with his smooth well-coifed hair.

I had a pretty good idea what kind of video they were watching. One of them slowly turned his head toward me.
“Greenpea alert,” he said.
All heads turned. The action on screen forgotten. I was now the center of attention. A chubby man with rosy cheeks and a pile of big white hair said to me, “You Adam?”
“No,” I said. “My name is Burke, Paul Burke.”
“Oh yeah, sit over here.” He pointed to an empty seat in the row right behind him.
I wasn’t sure if I was ready to watch sexy videos with these guys. They looked a little rough. I eased into the chair.
“No,” the white haired man said. “Not that one, sit over there.” He pointed to another chair. All the men had a laugh as I jumped up and landed two chairs over.
“You still got it Mister Benjamin,” a voice from the back said.
“You sure do boss.” There was a lot of ass kissing going on. And these sycophants were sharing a laugh at my expense. Finally the action on the small screen caught my eye.
I wasn’t ready for what I saw.
Two men and a woman were in a small office. The men wore suits with lapels that reached their shoulders. The salesman had Bozo hair and a wide tie. He wore a powder blue jacket that caused slight retina burn. The woman had a fountain pen in her hand. She sported a Farah Fawcett hairdo that would have been out of date a decade earlier. Her husband had a matching Farah hairdo. The salesman sat across a desk from the couple.
The man in blue said, “Mister and Mrs. Jackson, do you have any further questions?”
The happy couple smiled. ”No,” the man said. “I think you’ve done a swell job of addressing all our concerns, Mister Gortelli.” His wife happily signed the contract.
The action froze. The three people dissolved. Mister Gortelli (who, I learned later, was in the records book: The World’s Fastest Salesman) swaggered on screen, still in his stunning blue suit. He carried a large phallic microphone.
“See how easy that was? That’s how you handle the most common objections. Now I’ve given you what you need. Practice saying these techniques out loud while you’re shaving; practice them with you buddies at work. Practice them while you make love to your wife.”

The guys waited to see if Mister Benjamin laughed. He did. They all chuckled in unison. Mister Gortelli smiled at the camera. “Just kidding about that last part. Remember, that’s your money in their pocket. So get out there and SELL!” He pointed a fleshy finger at the camera and gave us a fluttering wink.
Mister Benjamin’s oversized head swiveled toward me. He smiled, “Well Burke, whatta you going to do if someone comes in and demands you give him your best price? Huh? Whatta you going to do?”
I sat silent for a moment. “Whatever you tell me to do”
The small crowd of salesmen waited to see how Mister Benjamin would react. He sat stone-faced for ten seconds, then smiled “Smart boy.” He rubbed his hands together. “Are you ready to make some money?” he asked.
This was a test. “Yes,” I said.
“What? I didn’t hear you. Are you ready to make some money?”
The other guys in the room squirmed in their chairs. They really wanted to answer this question. “Hell yeah,” I spoke a little louder.
“You come in here tomorrow at eight,” Mister Benjamin said. “You’re gonna spend the first few days watching training videos before we let you loose on real customers.”
So the next day I showed up at seven-thirty. I had packed a lunch, ready to get some damn training so I could pay my bills.

Mister Benjamin pointed me toward his office. “I got the videos all lined up for you Burke.” After two hours of watching scratchy old videos my eyelids were getting heavy, very heavy. A salesman, who looked like he was way past retirement age, burst into the room.
“Adam,” he said.
“No, my name is-” Before I could correct him, he dragged me out of my chair.
“No time to jibber-jabber. We’re covered up with customers. You got to take some ups.”
“Take some ups?” Was he offering me drugs?
“There’s people crawling all over the lot,” he was almost screaming. We walked to the showroom. Three or four salesmen talked to people. Five other salesmen fidgeted in place.
“Burke,” Mister Benjamin said. “Where you been hiding?”
“I was-”
“No time boy, no time. You go out there and catch a customer. You got your pick. We’re covered up. Hurry boy. Double time, hep, hep. We got buyers waiting. Bring me back a deal.”
More salespeople ambled around outside in the bright sun, smoking and scratching. There were no customers. Mister Benjamin watched me from the showroom. I pointed to the far side of the lot as if I had spotted someone waving their checkbook and jogged over. Now I was safely out of his line of sight. The salesman who dragged me from the training room, he looked to be in his mid-seventies, came over and handed me an oversized business card.
It was printed on a three-by-five blue index card. A hand drawn shape that looked like a carrot bisected the card from left to right. “Name’s Spike,” he said. “That’s a picture of a spike there.” He pointed to the card.
“Where are all the customers you told me about?”
“Oh son, that happens about ten times a day. They just like to shake things up, keep the salesmen on their toes.” Spike looked tired. “But you keep my card.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“That way if you’re ever looking for a new car or even a used one, you come find me.”
“But I work here, you know, I’m a salesman.”
“I don’t know if you’re going to make it in this business or not, most don’t.” He surveyed the lot. “But I’ll make you a great deal on a car.”
This guy prospected everyone he met. Even other salespeople. This was a new way of looking at the world for me. In the first hour of my first day I wondered if I could ever be like Spike.
An assortment of guys talked in front of the showroom. I ambled over. A man with slick hair and rotten teeth said to me, “Come on over and get in this Dope Ring.”
“Dope Ring?”
“A Dope Ring, you know, a bunch of Dopes standing around talking trash.”
Sounded about right to me. We stood around while they told tales of past glories. This went on until an old station wagon pulled up. Everyone froze. All the salespeople saw the driver and scattered. I was left alone. A bald headed man emerged from the wagon. He had a dark Mediterranean look.
A salesman stuck his head out the door, “Burke, you catch this one.“ This felt wrong. I was two hours into my career. No training, no clue.
The gentleman came toward me, hand extended. “Hello my friend,” he said. We shook. “So, how long have you been selling the cars?”
“About two minutes.”
He laughed long and loud, finding great humor in that. “Please, my friend, show me the new wagons.”
I walked him over to the row of shiny new station wagons. “Oh, these are most beautiful.” He put his hand on a blue model and pointed to the window sticker. “What’s this number?” he asked as he turned his eyes away from the sticker.
“That’s the price.”
He closed his eyes and bowed his head. “What is the price?”
I read the sticker. “Sixteen thousand five hundred.”
I was not expecting the reaction that followed. He spun in circles and wailed. I thought a wasp had stung him. “Oh my God. I’m having the heart attack. Please tell me I heard you wrong. You did not say sixteen thousand dollars?”
“Sixteen-five.”
He clutched his chest. “Oh my God.” This was almost a parody of Fred Sanford but this act seemed a much older and more solemn ritual than anything Redd Foxx performed. “So much money, I can’t believe it. This cannot be true.”
The other salespeople watched from the safety of the showroom. They smiled and jostled each other. Time for me to bail. “Excuse me,” I said. “Feel free to look around if you have any questions,”
“No,” he said. “Show me the keys to this one. We will drive and you show me what an excellent car you have.”
Later, after eight test drives and three hours of my life wasted, I asked one of the guys what had happened.
“That guy’s a car queer.”
“A what?”
“Car queer,” he said again. ”A Jacker, Lot Trash. He ain’t never gonna buy nothing. Comes here almost every day. Wastes everybody’s time.”
“Why would a salesman wait on him?” I asked.
“We didn’t. After you been doing this awhile, you’ll catch on. Just don’t let a manager catch you sweeping the lot.”
“Sweeping?”
“Brooming the Jackers. You know, blowing them out of here. You got to be discreet in front of the managers. When you see somebody you know is car queer, get busy somewhere else”
“Why would they want us to waste our time on people who can’t buy?” I asked.
“They don’t care how much of your time is wasted. You don’t get paid by the hour. You only get paid if you sell something. And they want every dumbass waited on”
He pointed toward the scattered sales staff that milled around the lot. “You can see we’ve got twice as many sales people as we need. Half of us are going to starve at any given time. Don’t cost the owners an extra dime to have us here. We’re like migrant workers; we get paid if we bring in the sales. The competition keeps us on our toes.”

This was a hard dose of reality. For another seven hours I hid from everyone.
The next day I asked Mister Benjamin if I should watch videos.
“Oh no, Burke,” he said. “I saw how you handled that up yesterday. You’re ready. You did good.”
“I did?”
“Oh yeah, you maintained good eye contact. You’ll fit in just fine. We keep some pretty high standards here. Don’t hire just anybody.”
This was one hundred percent bullshit. I was going to sink or swim. Whether I made it or not, these guys would keep churning along.

I kept telling myself this was temporary. Can’t last long.

Looking around, most of the entrances were covered. Way too many salesmen crammed together trying to keep an eye out for the next victim. I spotted a corner of the lot that only had one lone salesman standing guard. He stood between the dumpster and a gate that opened onto a side road. I eased out the door, thinking I was pretty shrewd to find the one spot that wasn’t squirming with sharks.

As I got closer it became obvious that something was wrong with the guy who stood sentry there. He was crooked. Not in the cartoon version crooked car salesman. This guy had almost an “S” shaped silhouette.

He was muttering something to himself. He must have been practicing a sales routine. The video told us to practice our greetings, “Welcome,” we were supposed to say. “To Bypass Motors. Are you here for the big sale?”

They told us to practice our routines daily.

Since no one else was around, this curved character must be out here all alone, practicing. I wanted to learn, so I got closer to absorb some wisdom.

I heard him say, “Ain’t no way I’m going back to the goddamn penitentiary,” to the empty air. He turned stiffly, moving his entire body to look to the side. His neck seemed to be frozen in place.

This guy was all messed up.

His tie hung straight down like a plumb bob, accentuating his malformations. His belt buckle was almost a foot to the right of the tie.

Yes sir, they keep some pretty high standards here.

Too late to back away before he saw me. “Oh, hey. This is my corner.” He made a grand gesture to show me his domain located next to the dumpster.

“No problem,” I said. “Just wanted to introduce myself,” I thought twice about making contact with this guy but he took my hand and gave it a weak shake. Like a clammy fish.
“Hey partner,” he said. “My name’s Adam.”
This was the guy everyone was confusing me with?
“Well, good to meet you, Adam. I’ll get back to-“
“Ain’t nobody ever give me a goddamn thing in my whole life,” Adam said.
“All right, good to meet you. I’ll be getting back now.”
But Adam had more to say. “I had to fight for everything I got. Nobody give me nothing.”
Adam looked like he lost more fights than he won. Maybe you should have seen the other guy. I backed slowly away.
“Watch your back here,” he said. “These evil bastards’ll pretend they’re your friends, then stab you in the back.”
“Thank you.”
“Can’t trust no one.”
“I’ll remember that.”

The best advice I ever received about the car business came on my second day came from a twisted delusional psycho.
There were salespeople everywhere so I snuck into the service department. A salesman in his late middle age talked to the mechanics. He carried a pot of coffee and a stack of Styrofoam cups.

He motioned for me to come over. He put down the coffee pot. “Name’s Lenny,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Paul.”

“Well Paul, I saw you talking to that crazy son of a bitch out there.” He glanced over at Adam. “Best to stay away from him. His bread ain’t done.” He tapped the side of his head.

Lenny continued, “Paul, good to have you here.” On closer inspection, he had to be sixty. He dyed his hair a shade of blonde that would embarrass most sorority girls. His arms were covered in amateur grade tattoos. His nose and ears were way oversized and bristly. His teeth were bad. Markings that looked like gunpowder burns stippled his face.

He was not an attractive man.

But he was instantly likeable. This was hard to understand, because Lenny was rough. He would have been right at home on a chain gang but he had an aura.

“Tell you what Paul,” he said. “I know you’re new here. If you ever need any help on a deal, heck, if you want me to help you close a deal, just ask. I won’t take any of your money. Just glad to help.”

What a nice guy.

Lenny went back to pouring coffee for all the mechanics. I went out to catch a real customer.

About an hour later I snagged a family of five. Two adults, two adolescents and a baby piled out of old pickup. They were all uniformly smudged with a patina of grit. They were reluctant to talk to me. It took a while to find out that the son was the buyer.

I asked the teenager what he was looking for.

“I need a truck big enough to carry my tools and my wife and baby.” The girl was his wife, not his sister. These kids looked about sixteen. The grandparents were in their early forties.

“What sort of payment range are you looking for?” I asked.

“Huh, cheap as possible.”

I learned quickly not to ask questions like that. Lenny stood nearby. He came over and said, “Burke, show them the base truck over there.”

We kept a cheap truck to lure people in. It had no air conditioning, no radio and no bumpers.

“How much is that one?” the boy asked.

“Seventy nine hundred.”

“They hell, that’s more that I paid for my house.”

Now that was a pretty funny joke but I was the only one laughing. The rest of the family stood silent as I regained my composure.

The first car I ever sold took nine hours, mainly because of the spotty credit history of the buyers. Lenny came in and told the boy we could get him any payment he liked. Just go in and tell the finance manager that Lenny said so.

When they shut the door to the finance office, Lenny smiled at me. “Get these folks new truck ready for delivery,” he said. I left after eleven that night.

The next day I arrived early to wrap up loose ends on the deal and to see my name on the large grid the dealership had painted on the showroom glass. Every car sold during the month was written on the grid. The salesman’s name first, then the customer’s. When I looked up my name there was something there that confused me. Lenny’s name was written before mine in the salesman column.

Must be a mistake.

Turns out the mistake was mine. I was applying logic from the outside world to the realm of car sales. Before Lenny had left the night before, he told the finance manager to write his name on the front of my deal. Any bonuses from the manufacturer would go to him.

I found Lenny back in the customer lounge handing out business cards. “There’s been a mistake,” I said.

He knew exactly what I was talking about. “No mistake. You were in over your head. I had to save your deal.” Lenny could tell I was losing my temper. “Come over here,” he walked outside. I followed.

“Let me clue you in on something.” He said. “The average car salesman in this country sells eight cars a month.”

“So?”

“I sell thirty five to forty units each month and they don’t care how I do it. Hell boy, I made this dealership almost half million dollars last year all by myself. I cleared a hundred grand with bonuses”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“If I can make that kind of money as ugly as I am, think what you could do. Just keep your wits about you.”

So right then and there I had a decision to make. Stay with a corrupt system and maybe make more money that I had ever seen or smack this guy in the head and walk out. He looked like he had been hit in the head many times before.

I left Lying Lenny standing there.

One week later the young man and his father were standing in front of me ready for combat. “That ugly-ass son of a bitch told me I could buy that truck for two hundred dollars a month for thirty six months.”

“So,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

“What’s the problem?” The boy turned to his father, “He’s asking me what’s the problem.”

“Beats all I ever seen,” the father replied.

Lenny strolled into the showroom, all smiles and handshakes. “And how are you fine folks today?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you how we are today,” the boy said. “Damn pissed off, that’s how.”

“What seems to be the problem?” Lenny’s brow folded in pleats and his eyes crinkled. He looked genuinely concerned.

“We got the damn payment book today and do you know what it says?”

“Please tell me.”

“Says we’re to be paying on this truck for seventy-two months,” the father said. “Hell, I’ll be dead before he pays the damned truck off. You just take this truck back and give us our trade in and we’ll be on our way.”

“Now folks,” Lenny said. “We both know we can’t do that. But this isn’t anything we can’t work out. Now,” he turned to the young man. “You do like the truck don’t you?”

“I don’t like those payments.”

“So the number of payments is your only objection?”

The boy thought about it, “I guess so.”

Lenny said, “Let me see your payment booklet.”

The young man handed it over.

Lenny flipped through the pages and ripped out the last thirty-six payment coupons. “There you go. Problem solved.”

The father asked, “Is that legal?”

Lenny laughed. Suddenly he was a patient and loving grandfather to us all. “Legal. That’s a good one. Do you think I would do something that could land me in the pokey?”

“Guess not.”

Lenny pulled a ten from his pocket. “Tell you what guys, lunch is on me.”

When Lenny was through with them, they were apologizing for causing trouble. After they were gone I asked him, “Can you just rip out three years of payments like that?”

“Didn’t you see me do it? By the time they figure it out you and I will be long gone.”

The next day I arrived at five after eight, much of my original zeal had faded. So far this job was as bad as I had feared. And I was only two days in. The rest of the day I caught a series of people. They had all made the effort to drive to the dealership, some had traveled great distances, just to tell me they weren’t interested in anything I had. Scram. Get lost.

But when I took them at their word and left, every one of them asked me where I was going. “Show me this car. And this one. And while you’re at it, get the keys to this one too.” At the end of the day my pockets were bulging with scraps of paper that I had written all their information on.

The next day I came to work with a small pocket sized notebook.