Japanese Junk

You meet some real jerks when you’re selling cars on a lot, and you meet some wonderful folks who become great friends too. I met a couple one time who became pretty good friends. They were elderly, probably in their seventies. I was just a new forty-something, so they seemed old to me. They were a very happy couple, had been married for a long damned time, and you could tell they loved each other a lot.

I don’t remember what they drove in, but I was figuring they were probably Accord buyers, and we had a slew of them. They were looking at a Civic when I got out to them and Introduced myself. He said they were “just looking’ which is a standard blow off, but he was friendly and she smiled. I liked them immediately. He asked me a few questions about the Civic and I gave him my spiel. I was new to Honda, so I talked a lot about halogen headlights and dual airbags since I knew the cars had them. I had stopped talking about steel-belted radial tires by then.

I still didn’t really know what they wanted, but he asked me about the Prelude that was sitting next to the Civic. He wanted to know what kind of car it was. I told him it was a Prelude and he asked if that was a new Honda model. It was 1993 and it was a new body style that was quite different from the last models, so I explained all of that. He wanted to look at it closer, I think they both liked the color more than anything, but I could feel some heat now.

They followed me to the driver door and I opened it and they looked in. He wanted to get in the passenger side and have me show him all the buttons and stuff. He walked around to the other side of the car and I was searching for the unlock button and lowered my self into the driver’s seat. I didn’t make it all the way in until I had banged the very center of my kneecap on the pointed piece of the dashboard that protrudes in a very dangerous manner as I was sitting down. And I banged it hard! It was like biting your tongue only on the knee. It shot a knife through my leg right to my brain and shut off everything in there that might keep me from yelling, “Goddam piece of Japanese JUNK!” And then there was silence.

I couldn’t talk. I was holding my thigh because my knee hurt too much to touch and tears were clouding my vision as I was trying to stand up and get out of the car away from the object of my intense pain so I could walk it off.  He started giggling and a few tics later she did too. I was hobbling around rubbing my knee, because the pain had finally lessened enough for me to touch, and I tried to give them a weak giggle back. Slowly, the pain lessened more and more until I was laughing and then we were all belly-laughing.

“Japanese Junk!” He kept saying that and laughing harder. When we all calmed down he told me they didn’t really want a Prelude, but they thought they might like to look at an Accord in the same color. They didn’t have exactly the same shade silver in Accords but I hobbled off and they followed and I showed them a silver Accord.

They loved it. we drove it, we made a deal and became friends. The whole deal was punctuated by him laughing every once in a while and saying, “Japanese junk.”It was an easy deal. We made a pretty good deal for a new car and they were happy as a polar bear on a big berg.

They always would come in and say “hi” when they brought the car in for service and we exchanged Christmas cards and stuff. They even used to come out and see my bluegrass band play every Thursday evening at the local coffee shop, and we did friend things for years after that.

 

Those folks are gone now and I think about them every once in a while. They bought a “piece of Japanese junk, ” and loved it! I did too.