Car Dealership
a short story by Lucas Restivo
The Toyota dealership is about a mile from where I work, so there’s no excuse. I haven't driven anything made in the last millennia, so the concept of a test makes no sense to me. I’m already sold. The newest car I’ve driven is old enough to vote, fuck, and fight war. You need a car. And I can’t believe I can walk into a parking lot, point at a car, and for free, some guy will put his life in my hands. I could drive him to Timbuktu. I could smell bad. I could go nonverbal. My dad says test drives annoy dealers, and I suppose this is why, but come on. This isn’t a new t-shirt. If I have to take out a loan for it, I should be able to risk someone else’s life in the process. It’s only fair.
The van dream died and I’m left with the embarrassment of a GPS alerting me in cool, female objectivity that the dealership will appear on the right. Must’ve passed it one hundred times without clocking it. Another faceless lot on one of those two-lane interstates that compose entire throwaway states, like Virginia and Ohio, full of every chain restaurant you’ve seen in TV timeouts. Where flooring wholesalers still afford brick and mortars. We got them too here, you just gotta get in that sweet spot striking distance where city money fades to a TGI Fridays with a Scandinavian face lit. Go any further west and it’s heroin through Worcester until you hit the boonies. South shore is republican north shore, less cafes and more beach bars with rastafarian lobster t-shirts that say “I love pot” while being boiled alive in one. Past that, it's heroin to Rhode Island. Hope is swelling. I think I just like shitty things. It dawns on me I’ve only ever been in a car dealership when delivering sandwiches.
Before I reach the door, a greasy, ethnically ambiguous man, who very well could be me in another lifetime, directs me to a back circular table to wait for a sales rep. No I don’t have an appointment. Should I be sorry? Every day on God’s green earth, language fails me in the most pathetic ways. Over and over again. The dealership is an American beauty. Hospital bright, white-walled and-glassed, with a wavy second floor balcony lining the perimeter, plastered with a screen-printed mountain chain where some lucky freelancer was tasked with photoshopping the history of Toyota’s trucks onto the mountain, as if the landscape were a chronology of Toyota itself. Toyota: As God Given As the Appalachians. A beauty of a copy and paste job. It looks like a meme and that must’ve been enough to impress tech illiterate boomers at some point and there’s something beautiful in investing way too much money in something so obvious and tacky. It’s like a form of generational wealth transfer every time a boomer hires someone younger to right click. The visual itself reinforces my belief that the avant-garde has always belonged to amateurs, but try convincing a PhD that a car dealership can inspire anything other than class demonstrations. Ugly turns beautiful and in that process becomes ugly again. A different type of generational transfer. It’s like how the rich hipsters in Brooklyn dress like Adam Sandler now. Beside me is an old roped-off Toyota wagon with a cloth roof, a jungle Jurassic Park looking thing, either old restored or made to look old and restored. Very nice. Navy green with a Medellin license plate, who knows how real. An ahistorical nod to history. Vaguely warlike and maybe even anticommunist. So good. It’s like if a climbing gym and a veterans hospital had a baby and it’s diaper’s filled with Japanese cars I can’t afford.
A young, vaguely hispanic, acned twink salesman approaches the table, his voice a practiced calm, as if to suggest of course you think I’m going to be pushy, but here? Me? We do things a little differently… I’m disarmed immediately, in exact proportion to its falseness. Sometimes it’s fun to know you’re being taken for a ride. I couldn’t tell you his name and I love that.
The unnamed twink asks what I’m looking for and I tell him it's between a Camry and a Cross and he takes my license to fill out some paperwork to get a test drive in order. In the meantime he suggests I check out the lounge for coffee, even though it's too late in the day for that, and smoothly compliments my Celtics jacket. Sure man. You got decaf? I love to be doted on. Everybody does. Every man, as part of the initiation from boy to manhood, should be given the authentic experience of a car dealership. Instead of reading the Torah or getting confirmed or doing whatever rite happens in Islam, every man should feel what it’s like to be charmingly lied to, while conscious of the fact. Every man should know how fun and easy it can be to accept lies. And how far men will go to get what they want. How deeply they will debase themselves, humiliate themselves, to get what they want. Men would treat women with far more compassion if they only knew the barrage of comfortable, exhilarating, and dangerous lies they are bombarded with day in and day out.
My beautiful young twink scampers off to whatever back room while I sip fine decaf from styrofoam and contemplate the luxuries of my life. Sitting next to the old/new truck, beneath the screen-printed sky, my father’s money and my failures dissolve like the chemicals I’m sure are lining this cup of coffee.
The Cross looks good and I'd be lying if I didn’t say my favorability wasn’t rooted partially by my affinity for the word and a predilection for drawing cosmic alignments in that this book had already been started at the time of test drive. What a beautiful indication that I’m on the correct path in life. Writing my book, Cross, the engine of my life, while I buy a car called Cross that engines my life. Maybe it all can be this simple. I tell my towel boy even the cloth seats look slick and I’m just saying stuff to sound discerning. The back seats pull down right? It’s a CRT transmission right? I googled that beforehand. It’s a new car. I’ll take literally anything I can. No one needs to sell me anything. The desperate don’t need advertising. Why I’m committing to the performance is beyond me. Maybe something to do with future negotiation leverage, but that feels like a cop-out. I like my position here and I’m getting off to it. I’m a slut to expectations like the rest of us.
The driver’s cabin has one of those giant screens that one time an Uber driver had Netflix playing on. Bigger than an iPad. Drives smooth out the lot and the womanly computer voice directs me off the two-lane econo-belt of MetroWest Massachusetts to the fake farms of richer zip codes, back roads away from all the fuss. Just me and my sales twink, his voice so impossibly calm and attachedly detached like mashed potatoes on a fork. He points out this and that, asks now with both hands for emphasis, if this car “makes sense” against the Camry, which sounds like a device picked up at a Tony Robbins sales seminar or something.There are hot coals beneath the floor mats of his seat, no matter how calm. We talk idly about hometowns and our girls and he very transparently attempts a deconstructed “bitches be shopping” joke after he hears I’m from Burlington, home of the Burlington Mall. Human muzak. I suppose it beats strange silence.
I guess I’m making this decision off feel, which is how I make decisions. I already tried to pit him against the Subaru Crosstrek, just to see how he’d dance. Apparently he worked at a Subaru dealership before and hit the dab equivalent of tell my friends I said hi there when you visit. All he wants is to figure out what makes sense and I don’t know him like that. I don’t know me like that. He’s asking if it's the height of the car? The price? The features? And it’s all a sort of, partially, and no one is ever content with ambiguity. It’s like when you take a personality quiz online and have to pick a point on a spectrum between two extremes. It’s always both. It’s always depending. It’s yes and no. Factor in a financial negotiation, and it’s plain stupid to give it straight. Not that it’s an intentional misdirection, but it is confusing and roadblocking his attempts to suss me out. People are too in their heads, too cerebral. They really can’t fathom that someone can be sort of dumb about things and not know what they want.
I tell him I don’t care for the bell’s and whistles, which is true, you can’t grow accustomed to what you’ve never had, but I’m paying cash, which signals wealth and this is contradictory. His synthesis, I suspect, is just frugal. I want to drive the Camry, but he passively makes it clear that's not happening. Whatever. If I said driving a Camry will help it all make sense he’d probably blow me in it. But it’s pushing 6 o’clock and at this point motivation is waning, for us both I think. Maybe everything in the world is a sales tactic. Maybe he had me drive this car so I’d desire what I couldn’t drive more. Hit on the ugly friend first to make the hot one jealous. Men are evil like that. Or do the conditions necessitate it? This should’ve been my bar mitzvah if I was Jewish. Italians need their own thing like that. I guess a car dealership grease off makes sense then. He might just have to help himself to a cup of coffee having smelled mine! I’m the prettiest girl at the prom.
The Camry is nice, I keep calling it slick and feeling unsure of what it reveals. Feeling like a caricature of myself that’s bad to project in this beautiful ode to money. And I’ll be clear, I can see how someone gets seduced into paying extra for lumbar support. I won’t be getting the second test drive I want, which feels ridiculous with this much on the line. Whatever, fuck me. The rules are made by those who own cars, not the other way around. He asks me one last time which car makes sense and it feels like a test. A test to make you think you can fail. A test to encourage second guessing. Dark arts. There is no test, there never has been. I have the leverage and no one in this gorgeous Toyota dealership can change that. I have the money you want. You are working on commission. That’s what makes sense, you silly stupid twink. All your youthful energy, your willingness to learn, to change, to adapt, to serve, channeled into what makes sense, your dealership floor performance, your life force, your brilliance, all attached to sense. In this moment, you are what makes sense. Transaction on the line, your whole, your piece of the puzzle, your due diligence, your doing your part, your necessary evils, your bills to pay, your dinners to afford, your girlfriend’s parents to impress, your self worth to fulfill, your duty, your duty, all your duties, channeled into what makes sense. I want to kiss your forehead in the most disrespectful way possible. Tell you it’s all going to be alright.
He says he’s gonna draw up some papers with all the numbers, whatever that means, and for some reason I ask if he has a card—I think trying to stir up hope in him for whatever potentially manipulative reason. I’m evil too. These subtext games we fall into. First seed of psychosis. And after crunching the numbers, for quite awhile might I add—my Youtube algorithm filling the empty space with Barstool Sports and Mac Demarco and Odd Future clips, though I didn’t want to be seen on my phone, a perceived sight of weakness or disrespect to the rules of engagement, he returns with an older, also ethnically ambiguous tan man, presumably his boss, and I figure it’s a formality, a sign of good faith, that he is willing to pull his superior into the conversation, though in hindsight, and this is very naive and dumb of me having worked in sales departments before and knowing firsthand the ladder to a wallet. It’s a shakedown. We shake hands. I forget his name as soon as I hear it, he asks not about the Cross or Camry, but the Subaru Crosstrek, surprisingly. There’s a used model in the lot, apparently (I didn’t know car dealerships could do that to be honest). I ask if it's new, it’s not, and they say no updates have been made since 2019 to 2024, which my instinct of horseshit would eventually prove right with one Google search. He acts like he's throwing me a bone, saving me a trip, and it’s all sort of sad attempts of retaining hierarchal sales structure, an illusion of leverage. Why can’t business just be honest? Why can’t we be straight with each other. In my idea of Old America, people said it how it was and there was honor in that. I need this. We have that. It costs this. I’ll pay that. Deal. Or no deal. No skin off my teeth. Things would move so much faster. Be so much easier. The world fell to the philosophy of snakeoil. To philosophy itself. To every cowardice, a philosophy. To the good money in slowing things down and confusing people. When it comes time to say our goodbyes, boss man shakes my hand while looking in the opposite direction, a weak man’s fuck you. The little twink has to keep his cool guy schtick up and pretend like the last five minutes didn’t happen. Where the money is really earned. Hands me his card sans numbers or papers and one last time asks me to consider what makes sense.
Between Car A you can’t afford and Car B you can’t afford, which would make more sense to you? The spoils of the empire affording you not a life or livelihood, but daddy buying a car. No career. No fuck you. Just a moderately smoother time. A little college debt, not that much though! A basement to sleep in when you can’t afford an apartment. I’m fucking scum! Privileged fucking scum! I’m the enemy, sue me! Take my 09 Civic. It was my grandmother’s. She got dementia. It needs $3000 of work. As if every competing voice in my head doesn’t tell me to be grateful. For my position. In the empire. In someone’s pocket at all. Let alone one I can climb out of. I’m the enemy. I feel weird. I’m the enemy. Despite it all, despite the job, the degree, the self-sufficiency caved in with an unexpected clean up cost. Champagne tears. I make bad money decisions and call it art.
Whatever. Free decaf, a nice joy ride. The fascination and spectacle of an American car dealership. The made-clear economic lines of reality. The screen-printed mountaintops. The sexy ethnically ambiguous secretaries. The ethnically ambiguous everyone. There’s still business to attend to. Still more lollipops for my pocket.
The Subaru dealership is next to a Honda dealership a few miles down the road, into the next thickly populated stretch of commercial real estate that I’m increasingly seeing as less soulless and more as simply not for me, and certainly defines us, whoever the us of us is out there. Window cleaning businesses, fast food. Car dealership. A tan, muscular, and ethnically ambiguous man at the front desk sits me at a table, like before, and fetches the paperwork. Again, I don’t have an appointment but I’ve learned not to feel sorry for it. He tells me it’s a logistical question to make sure no one poaches each other’s commission. He’s far less enthusiastic, even in the performative sense. I love this type of service worker. He doesn’t care about me so completely and honestly that he doesn’t care that I know it. It’s a relief. I love a bartender who hates his job. A server you have to chase down. Retail workers hiding in changing rooms. Though he does pull my seat for me, a bare -bottomed gentlemanliness or maybe muscle memory, and I fill out the form this time, instead of dictating the answers. It looks to be a scanned copy from 1990, like how you could tell tenured teachers hadn’t changed their curriculum in decades. It asks if DVD and CD players were on my checklist. No fuss. No used cars to warm me up and scare me with. I tell him what I want to drive and he leaves to grab the plates. No tour of the seats, no what makes sense. Just punching the clock. He’s older, maybe he can smell a potential buyer from a real buyer. I don’t know anything other than his indifference puts me at ease.
The car accelerates smoothly into the two-lane highway. No scenic tour, we’re doing a three-mile loop, U-turn included. I wonder what would happen if I crashed the car. I ask him how many times he does this loop a day and he chuckles a little. Maybe five or six times. He asks where I’m from and doesn’t say much when I answer. All in all, maybe twenty-five words exchanged during the whole five-minute drive. I park it out front, he hands me his card and I’m on my way. And I want to be clear here. His indifference wasn’t tactical. That’s very important to me. He wasn’t galaxy braining, playing hard to get. He was over it.
On the way home I drive into the sunset, feeling tickled by the whole experience, from the rare position, the lack of consequence and responsibility, but with the perks of the vantage. An unreal power. How could I expect anyone with real power to remain human? If this is how you live your whole life from the moment you’re born, of course the slightest bit of resistance would feel like terrorism. These people are not people in that sense. No humanity. I got a free cup of decaf and someone feigning interest and my internal monologue turned into a tyrant. And isn’t that indication enough of the fucked up dynamics of everyday life? I’m deeply deeply crushed to have so much marrow to suck from what is otherwise an innocuous experience. That I’m soaring from an ounce of influence. I’ve plotted this story the moment the door opened for me at the Toyota dealership.The word masticate rings through my head in every mile of highway. How to tell this story to my dad? To anyone? How will this wonder shape how I tell it? How will this wonder about wonder shape how I tell it? Run that logic forever and get nowhere. Only questions. Only unanswerable questions. The highway is cleared at this hour and my commute is breezy for a change. I turn the music up and let my thoughts wander.
Ahead in the near distance, something I’ve never seen before. A turkey calmly walking across the second lane of the highway into the third. I speed up. I’m anticipating trajectories. The turkey cuts across the third lane and I pass in the fourth. I don’t really think. In my rearview, an SUV swerves, plows into the bird, and sends its feathers fluttering across its windshield. Both tried to avoid the impact. The turkey smacked into the concrete highway divider in that split second. Its body limp on the pavement. I see hazard lights and wonder if the driver saw it coming, if the turkey made a sound. If the driver could hear the sound through the windshield. If that was me, would I have stopped.
Lucas Restivo is a writer from Massachusetts.