Now That’s Really Bent

I was selling Hondas in Mendocino County in the nineties. Mendocino is a rural county near the coast in Northern California. We were a small dealership but we sold a lot of cars out of an old run down dealership. I used to tell people we had really low overhead and told them, “The only running water we have on the showroom is when rain leaks through the roof .”

A really tall, (I mean basketball player tall), guy came in one day and I upped him. He wanted a Del Sol Si in a rare dark green color. It was maybe the hardest to get car Honda had at the time. It was the same color as the only Del Sol we had at the time, but the one we had was not the Si.

The guy was a hippie, long blonde hair, wearing Birkenstocks and a tie dye T-shirt. But he was very clean and looked the part of the new age wealthy “artiste” type. And he lived in a little town on the coast about 75 miles away in a very exclusive community of “artiste” types. He was driving a VW Eurovan that was almost brand new, so I knew the guy had money.

The only car he was interested in, we didn’t have and I ran a locate of all the California dealerships and there were two in the whole state including the dealership in Reno Nevada who I occasionally traded cars with. If you have worked in a dealership and traded for cars with other dealers you know, if the car you want is rare it is worth a lot of money and you don’t trade it for anything unless it’s something with at least as much profit potential. My odds of getting that car were almost zero.

The guy was adamant he wanted that car and he didn’t care how much he had to pay for it. One of the cars I needed was in the Sacramento area with a guy I traded with quite a bit, so I went into the sales office and called him. I asked if he would trade his Del Sol and he laughed, so I laughed along with him. We said our howdies and hung up.

I told my customer about the quandary of getting the car he wanted and he told me he would wait until I could get one. And he even gave me a deposit to trade for the car and he left. I had pretty good deal made so I called the other dealer who had a car. He was in San Diego, five hundred miles away. He laughed too.

There were a couple more of the cars in the queue to be shipped in the next month so I kept a positive thought that sooner or later I would land a car. We had good trade bait, a couple of rare vans and a very desirable red Accord Coupe, so I had hope.

I stayed in touch with the customer and came to learn he was very opinionated and a know it all who was always trying to push me around. Just not much of a nice guy. He started talking about how to finance the car and ground me on interest rates one day so I ran his credit after I got all his information. He worked for himself and told me he would not be able to show income documentation but said he made easy ten grand a month. He was putting a healthy down payment and after I ran his credit I could see he was going to be pretty easy to get done. He told me he was an architect, but I figured he was a pot farmer. There were many of those around there then. But, he wasn’t a pleasant person to talk to.

A couple weeks later my buddy at the Sacramento dealer who had one of the Del Sols called me for a trade for a new Honda mini van which was the hottest product we had. After we laughed about his predicament we agreed to trade for his Del Sol. Normally dealer trades like that get driven and the cars have the extra hundred and fifty miles on them but his customer would only take a car with less than fifty miles on it so my buddy sprang for a transport to trade the cars, so now the Del Sol was going to be undriven and just perfect for my customer.

We got the car and I called my guy, he said he would drive right over. I got the detail guys to do the spit shine on the car, filled it with gas and had it sitting ready to rock right on the ramp in front of the showroom when he arrived. We did his paperwork and he gave me the down payment.

Then we went out to look the car over. He walked around the car pointing out all of it’s features to me, almost like a salesman in a demo competition.

He opened the doors, opened the trunk, looked in the tool kit, knew exactly where everything was and showed me how smart he was. He bent down to inspect the rocker panels all the way around, explaining to me how you have to look carefully at everything. Then he popped the hood and walked around and opened it. He knew exactly where the hood prop was and expertly un-hooked it and propped the hood up.

He looked all over the engine compartment, and even got down on the ground and looked underneath because “you can’t be too careful,” he said. When he got up he grabbed the hood to close it and pushed it down…Oops, he forgot to undo the hood prop, and he bent the hood in half.

I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. He turned bright red and started stammering and “Oh Shitting.” We already had done the paperwork and the deal was done so technically it was his bent hood so I could have let it be, but he was so  wildly discouraged. I told him we would pull the hood off of our other Del Sol, same color, and swap them out. I’m sure that was not how it’s supposed to get handled, but we had the car, the hood fit, and we were gonna be fixing a hood for one of the cars no matter what, so we did it. Besides I really didn’t want to deal with this guy anymore and decided whatever grief I might take on the car we still had with the hood repaired  was better than having to deal with this guy any longer. Plus if there were ever any problems, I made sure he knew I was doing him a huge, huge favor.

He sheepishly drove away in his new Del Sol and I bet he never told anyone what really went down. He probably never recommended anyone come buy a car from me either for fear I would let the story slip. Well, dude, you’re screwed now!