It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a joke about used car salesmen (or dog catchers), hard to escape when I was a kid, whether in TV shows, movie or casual neighborhood conversation. In the 1960s that maligned profession was usually near the bottom of surveys asking Americans how they rated institutions, and, not surprisingly, the clergy always scored high points (even as altar boys were bending over for priests), followed by the U.S. government and the media. The table’s flipped today, with nurses, grade-school teachers (maybe in lieu of decent pay), military officers, pharmacists (!) and medical doctors deemed the most “trustworthy,” according to a January, 2025 poll. (I’ve ignored political polls for eight or so years, they appear almost daily and are slipshod, but this one appears “trustworthy,” although pollsters themselves weren’t mentioned. Maybe edited out.) Lobbyists received the lowest score, just below TV reporters and judges.
Bring back the old jokes. In the past 15 years, I’ve accompanied my family to used/new car dealers three times. The first time, buying a used Jeep jalopy for my son, cheap and in good shape, was a mostly painless procedure, aside from the boredom (worse than a hardware store for me). My wife, who grew up in the car culture of Los Angeles, is the opposite: she can name the make of a vehicle one-two-three-and-that’s-so-elementary, sometimes with a tidbit of history thrown in, when we’re on the road.
About 10 years ago, when our 1998 Mercedes wagon finally conked out, we bought a new silver Jeep at a colossal franchise south of Baltimore City, and again (though the Jeep turned out to be a lemon), it was an all-business transaction with minimal hard sell or extraneous bullshit. I gave the guy a check for $20,000, worked out a modest loan document for the remainder, and we were on our way. The best memory I have of that wintry day is when I asked an employee where the john was—a simple question—and my sons cracked up at the “ancient” colloquialism, and poked fun at Deputy Dawg for a week. (They didn’t break a sweat when I accurately described a young female clerk as a “hot tomato.”)
At the beginning of August, after the 2015 Jeep needed more repairs, the brakes again, we bit the bullet and traveled for miles on York Rd. into Baltimore County—an ugly drive that resembled, with its endless generic fast-food shop, CVS outlets and nail salons, Any City, USA—to poke around, figuring we’d see what was available, put a hold on another Jeep, with a small down payment, and complete the deal over the Labor Day weekend to take advantages of the sales advertised non-stop on TV. Hold the phone, Lester, this isn’t a storybook ending.
I’ll leave the onerous dealership anonymous—don’t need any nasty attention like that Liz Warren-lookalike who caused a stir over a fucking baseball in the stands in Miami, which might’ve revived the Karen Meme—but it was a confluence of stupidity, anodyne small talk (why does a car jockey care what we do for a living?), double-talk and, at the end, full-on rude banter. My younger son works in finance, and knows what the current profit margins are for most industries and when the triple-team of employees, and then the boss, refuted his simple facts, he held up his phone to show the evidence. This torture (not atypical today) lasted over three hours and was worse than a never-ending tape loop of Bobby Sherman/Osmond Brothers/Dan Fogelberg songs.
Finally, the boss, an imperious asshole, made his “best” offer, knocking $500 off the sticker price. We walked away and one of the guys, probably pissed at the loss of a commission, angrily let fly several barnyard epithets and the three of us gave him the finger and drove away.
The only saving grace, and this was minor, was my memory of one night in 1975, when the campus bar closed and I accidentally bumped into a lacrosse jock on the way to the men’s room. He got testy and I flipped him the bird, and the guy, twice my size, wanted to “take it outside.” I was ready to rumble, and get flattened, but one of my companions, a savvy and glib gal from Jersey City worked out a détente. It was ludicrous, in retrospect, but that’s what you do at 20. The punchline, of sorts, is that the jock and I, two years later, became pretty good friends when I designed and pasted up his frat’s annual yearbook (it was a three-week production). We joked about the earlier dust-up, smoked a peace pipe, and he gave me a whopping tip.
That’s the car story. We finally did get a new Jeep, thanks to the dogged determination of my son and wife, who wrestled with a more convivial (but just as dim) staff at another dealership, and paid eight grand less than what the first pit demanded.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023
