Point Doom (5 page)

SIX

T
he next morning, after less than two hours’ sleep, after another dream about reaching into my jacket pocket and finding the severed and bloody hand again, I reported for work. I parked Mom’s red shitbox up the block from Sherman Toyota, on Ninth Street. A legal spot. No meter.

It was seven forty-five
A.M.
Saturday morning. I was wearing a new pair of pants and a stiff, new unwashed white shirt that was already scraping a red mark on my neck. I had a new tie, too, but I’d stuffed it into the glove compartment before I went in, in case I needed it later.

The conference room at Len Sherman Toyota had no windows and no pictures on the walls. In fact the room wasn’t a conference room at all. It was a working replica of a high school classroom, complete with two dozen one-piece pine and metal student desks. There were pads and pens resting on the desktops and my friend Woody was the only other person in the room. I waved
hi
. Not only had Woody gotten me my job, but over the last several months he had come to be a good friend. On two occasions when I was freaked out and on the verge of getting drunk it was Woody I’d called both times. He had driven all the way out from Santa Monica to Point Dume to talk me down and save my ass. “How’s it going, big guy?” I asked.

“Just ducky, JD. Pull up a chair. The big show’s about to get started.”

Then he pointed to a large corkboard pinned to the wall to my right. “But first have a look at those mug shots and see who you’re working for.”

I turned and saw a gallery that contained all of Sherman Toyota’s retail sales permit photo IDs. Stepping closer to the board I couldn’t help but notice that Robin Baitz’s ID was above all the others. Robin Butler Baitz, aka Rhett Butler, Sherman’s new GM. Apparently Rhett Butler was a nice, spiffy, fake sales name.

I sat down in the back row next to Woody. He was sipping from his Pete’s Coffee espresso cup. “Welcome to the shitstorm,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “Yesterday Max filled me in about the management shake-up. He also said they pay every other Friday. I gotta tell you, Woody, I’m a happy camper.”

“You won’t be, pal. I met with Butler yesterday afternoon and had a talk with him. Your new boss is a one hundred percent gold-plated ball-breaker. He bumped five of the old staff while I was out on the lot talking to a customer. Just walked in with his huge belly, holding that dumb-ass pink coffee mug he carries that’s shaped like a pair of tits, and points at the staff: ‘You, you, you, and you, and you, too. See me in my office.’ Half an hour later their desks were cleaned out and they were gone. Ba-boom. All bumped on the spot.”

“How come?” I asked.

“It’s the car business, pal. Heads roll. Max let me know that Rhett is changing the schedule too. I guess he’s trimming the fat by cutting the staff. That’s how a dealership can fire five people in one day. Charming shit, right?”

A FEW MINUTES
later, as the wall clock got to eight, the room was populated by the rest of the sales staff: four more guys and one girl, the ones who had not been fired in the latest show-of-power car-business purge. Then, the great man himself entered with Max behind him, carrying a clipboard to make notes and Butler’s coffee cup with the tits.

“I’m Rhett Butler,” he snarled with a capped-tooth grin, “for those who don’t know me yet. I’m here to increase sales. My goal and Max’s goal is to up our gross by twenty-five percent in the next thirty days. That’s what they pay me for. You’ll soon find out that I’m hard on salespeople. But I have another side too—I’m also a greedy son of a bitch. I’m here to make you and me a shitload of money. If you produce, we’ll get along and you’ll make bigger bucks than you ever did before selling iron. If you don’t, you’re down the road. Understood?”

Most of us nodded.

“Next thing you should know: all days off are canceled as of today. Max has your new work schedule. Do it, Max.”

Max handed Rhett his coffee mug with the tits, then pinned the new schedule to the corkboard by the door.

Rhett kept talking: “Bottom line, no more weekends off. No more banker’s hours. No more split shifts. One shift a day for everybody. Bell to bell. And from now on, everybody works weekends. All salespeople will get one day off a week. A weekday.”

Next to me, Woody groaned.

“You! You got a problem? Let’s hear it!”

Woody rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything, so Rhett snarled again: “Right, that’s what I thought!”

Then he went on. “Also, now hear this: if you have to come in on your day off to deliver a car, then you’d better be here
at the store
to deliver it! If you are a no-show for a delivery and your customer arrives to pick up his vehicle, the salesman who delivers your car will get credit for the sale and also get your commission. Understood?”

Moans and grumbling from the asses seated in the classroom chairs.

“And here’s the new dress code. This includes all managers: no more casual dress on weekends. From now on it’s dress shirts and ties for the guys, skirts or dresses or slacks for the women, seven days a week. If you arrive out of uniform you will be sent home. Understood?”

Dead silence from the staff.

“Last thing, the demo car you are driving is not your car. That vehicle is for sale like everything else on this lot. It belongs to this dealership. Just because you drive it for your own use does not mean it belongs to you. It is a dealership spiff—a free gimme. And if the inside and outside of that car is not one hundred percent clean at all times, you will receive one ding on Max’s attendance sheet. If you get two dings, you’re a pedestrian for the next thirty days. That means everyone, sales managers included.

“Okay, now here’s the deal with the ups: from now on everyone has their own sales area on the lot. No more number system. The number system is a joke. Max will assign each of you an area on the lot. Your personal patch. You are to be outside on the lot at all times on that patch unless you got a mooch in the box or you are at your desk, working a deal or making call-backs. Any mooch that stops in your area to check out a car, that mooch automatically becomes your up. And there will be no skating other salesmen. That shit will not be tolerated.

“Here it is again. Listen up: if the mooch stops in your area by a car, then he’s your up.
If he stops
. If you are caught skating in someone else’s area, and a sale is made, you will lose that sale.

“Okay, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Any questions?”

TRUDY, A TALL
and skinny saleswoman in a short skirt and tight blue top, had a question and held her hand up.

“Excuse me, Rhett,” she said, “I go to my second job twice a week at five o’clock. I have to be on time. Can I work something out?”

Rhett smiled. “No exceptions. Zero.”

Trudy rolled her eyes.

“Now, all of you, check the board to see what your new day off is. Last thing: we have a new bonus policy at Sherman Toyota. Here it is.
This is the good news, so listen up, kiddies!
Beginning this weekend, the salesman who delivers the most cars will get a five-hundred-dollar cash bonus. And from now on, any salesman who delivers three cars in one day gets a five-hundred-dollar cash bonus. And any salesman who delivers ten cars in one week from now on will receive a five-hundred-dollar cash bonus in addition to his commission. And from now on, the first sale of the weekend gets a five-hundred-dollar bonus. In cash. All cash bonuses are off the books.”

This information brought wide smiles from most of the sales force—all except Woody and Trudy.

Rhett went on. “This is the car business, my friends. You work for Rhett Butler now. If you give me my pound of flesh I’ll make you a lot of money. If you don’t, you’re history. It’s as simple as that. I know you think I’m an asshole. Everybody thinks I’m an asshole. I’m known all across L.A. as an asshole—a rich asshole. Play ball with me, I’ll make you a fat paycheck every two weeks. Any more questions?”

There was only one. It came from Fernando, the dealership’s only Spanish-speaking salesman. “Scuze me, Rhott. My dae hoff ez disa Sunday. Tomoro,” he said. “I got me some planz to go out of tonn. I steel got my dae hoff?”

“Meeting’s over,” Rhett barked. “Let’s go to work.”

AFTER EVERYONE HAD
left the room only me and Woody remained in the chairs. He made a face. “See what I said: This sucks,” he said, “in plain fucking English. I got dinner with my sponsor twice a week. I go to two noon AA meetings. Now that’s all down the shitter. I move an average of twenty cars a month for this joint. I’ve been the top guy here for months. My weekends and nights are now history—that means I start going to late-night AA meetings. Until ten minutes ago I had a sweet deal.”

“I hear ya,” I said. “Mercury retrograde.”

“What? Mercury-fucking-what?”

“Forget it.”

“Look, screw this shit, JD. I’m outta here. I’m done. I’m going home.”

“What for?”

“To make some phone calls. I’ll have another gig in a couple days. No big deal. Effective immediately. Rhett Butler and his plaid sports jacket can suck my ten-inch dick.”

Woody unhooked his demo’s car keys from his key ring and handed them to me. Then he pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. “Do me a favor, pal, and give those to Max. I’m calling a cab to take me home.”

“No so-long to Max and Rhett? No kiss-my-ass? Nothin’?”

“Don’t you get it, JD? In the car business you’re a turd—a photo mug shot on a bulletin board. Those boys don’t give a rat’s ass about us. Tell Max I’ll be back to pick up my check.”

Then Woody stood up and held out his hand. “Anyway, good luck, pal. You’ll need it. I hope you make some money. See you around.”

THE RAIN STARTED
coming down half an hour after the meeting broke up. I had retrieved my tie from Mom’s Honda, then I watched from the showroom as Woody got into his cab.

Rain came down for the rest of that day. Steady. It was Saturday—the best day of the week in the car business. The rain killed everything. The weather forecast was for two more days of it. I was the only male salesman that day technically in uniform. Skinny Trudy had gone into Max’s office to plead her case about her second job. Five minutes later she, too, had cleaned out her desk.

By noon most of us were soaked and none of us had had one legitimate up. Three or four service department customers came into the showroom to wait but none of them wanted to buy cars and were just killing time. They picked up brochures or eyeballed the polished iron, got a free cup of coffee, opened and closed the doors and kicked the tires of the cars on the floor, but there was no action at all.

Max and Rhett both stayed in their offices watching sports on TV and the sales staff, me included, after getting drenched outside, spent the rest of our time reading or talking on our cell phones. An hour later Fernando and I played penny-and-nickel draw poker but that got boring quickly. At three o’clock Rhett marched out of his big office and passed out literature on the Avalon and the Prius. He told us to spend the rest of the afternoon testing each other on our hybrid product knowledge.

By six o’clock, with no business at all and the rain still coming down, Max told us all to go home, that the store was closing early.

SEVEN

B
y 9:30
A.M
., two days later, after the rain finally quit, I had sold my first car and made the first sale in three days for the Sherman Toyota dealership. My mooch turned out to be a couple originally from Mexico City. They drove onto the lot in a twenty-year-old Toyota pickup that was a beater—no trade-in value. It was my area of the lot and the people stopped at a five-year-old 4Runner SUV, so I got the up.

This greatly pissed off Fernando, my poker-playing sales buddy, in our mutual area, because the couple were obviously Latinos and up until that day, he had been awarded all Spanish-speaking customers. But now, since Rhett had reshuffled the deck and I had greeted the customers, Fernando was SOL and he didn’t like it—or me.

After I said hi to the couple, Fernando ran inside and bitched me out to Max, yelling that I was skating him and was stealing his customer. Max called to Rhett in the big office and Rhett yelled back, “Hey, if they speak any fuckin’ English at all, then JD gets the up. It’s his patch too. He greeted them first. Case closed.”

AS IT TURNED
out, Tomas Valenzuela was a landscape guy who had his own business manicuring the lawns and flower gardens of the rich and fabulous in Brentwood. Martina, his wife, was pretty much his interpreter and kept the checkbook in her purse.

I’d spent my own free time studying up on the 4Runner line so I knew a little bit about the SUV. But instead of talking about the excellence of the car, I did what Woody had suggested in one of our conversations after an AA meeting. Woody’s advice was, “Just give the mooch the price and then start talking about them, what they like. Forget the bucket seats and the cruise control and the fucking GPS and all that crap. Ask the mooch how long he’s been in L.A. Ask him where he lives. How many kids he’s got. Does he like sports? That stuff. Remember, the car sells itself. People already know what they want when they come on the lot.”

So I took Tomas and Martina on a demo ride up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, then across Lincoln Boulevard, with him behind the wheel. We talked about their kids (with Martina interpreting) and the landscaping business and then I asked her about her teacher’s-assistant job, and how they liked living in Southern California. And then—you have to do this as part of qualifying the mooch—I asked if they’d ever bought a car before on payments and how much down they intended to pay. The only things I didn’t discuss on the ride with Martina were world peace and her bra cup size.

The price I gave Tomas and pretty Martina from the typed flyer in my sports jacket pocket that listed all the prices for the used cars, was $11,995. This, I discovered later, was five grand over what the car was actually worth (what Sherman Toyota had paid for it). So the profit on the sale would be $5,000 at full price, less the dealership pack (the amount it costs to refurb the car and the cost of bank interest for retailing the car on the lot).

Tomas never blinked when I told Martina to tell him the retail ticket price. It was the first car they’d ever bought off a car lot and he and Martina were worried about their ability to get financing from our bank, so any price objection seemed to be settled right there.

When we got back to the car lot I took them inside to my desk and helped them fill out the credit application and got them each a cup of coffee. For a mother who said she had two boys, pretty Martina had a great figure beneath her snug black blouse and tight skirt.

They decided that the car would be in Martina’s name. She was the one with the credit cards. So she took out her checkbook and wrote out a good-faith check for the four-thousand-dollar down payment.

With the paperwork and her check in my hand, I walked into the sales office and showed the deal to Max, who, before looking over the paperwork, reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a ridiculous-looking faded pink fly-fisherman’s cap and put it on. Then he looked through his sales manager’s window at my customers.

“Okay, now I’m ready,” he said. “First deal of the day: we take no prisoners, right, JD?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“Pretty girl,” he said. “Did you ask her if she sucks cock? We’ll make my blow job part of the deal?”

“Look, I got lucky,” I said. “I’m just glad I got the up.”

Now Max looked down at my paperwork, saw the check for the 4K down payment, then made a face that registered glee.

Opening his finance sheet, he found the highest interest rate at the top of the page. Then he ran a computer credit check on Martina.

Five minutes later my boss had her printed-out credit report with her credit score. She was spotless on her two credit cards, a Mastercard and a Visa, and had never missed a payment on anything. Martina’s credit score was a 721.

Max then wrote down a number on the front of the paperwork folder I’d handed to him: $469.00 (a total of over $22,000 for four years’ worth of payments, plus the $4,000 down payment). The profit on the deal had just gone to over $17,000.

Max circled the payment and the number of months—$469 x 48—with his black magic marker. “Tell these delightful wetback foreigner cocksuckers they can drive the car home today. All Mrs. Valenzuela needs to do—after performing my BJ—is sign the contract. JD baby, you just buried your first mooch, big time. If she signs the contract you’ve got yourself one helluva big pop on your first sale in the car business.”

“She’ll sign,” I said. “They want the car. I can smell it.”

Max was beaming. “Like blood to a vampire,” he sneered. “Four million spics in L.A. and ninety-nine percent of ’em are fucking grapes—perfect mooches.”

I took the contract and paperwork back to my desk and pushed it across to Martina. “Four sixty-nine a month,” I said with a straight face. “Can you afford that payment?”

“Jess, iz okay,” says Martina. “We cah do it.
No problema
.”

I liked Martina a lot. She was the decision maker, the brains in the family. “My boss says you can take the car with you right now, today, if you sign right down there by the X,” I said.

Martina and Tomas smiled at each other. They apparently had a nice relationship. Then pretty Martina wrote her signature across the contract, slowly, in bold script. Sherman Toyota had just sold a four-year-old 4Runner at more than the price of a new one.

Next, on Max’s instructions, I marched Martina and Tomas into the finance manager’s office, which was next door to Max’s sales office. The finance guy was Mickey Goldman, one of the management henchmen Rhett had brought with him when he took over as general manager four days earlier. Mickey’s name was in shiny gold letters on the fancy plaque stuck to his office door.

After I left the couple with Mickey, he further buried Martina and Tomas under the company’s biggest, nearly worthless extended warranty contract, for another hundred twenty-five per month, for forty-eight months.

Caveat emptor, especially in the used-car business.

MY COMMISSION ON
the sale was $2,550, plus the $500 cash bonus. Max called me into the office an hour later and handed me my commission voucher. He was still smiling. “Look, guy,” he said, “they won’t always be this easy. Those spics were a total laydown. They never knew what hit ’em. But you did a good job. Keep it up.”

Then Max got up, adjusted his pink fishing cap, and walked me down the hall to the big office overlooking the sales floor. Formerly Max’s office, now Rhett’s new office.

Rhett was eating one of three In-N-Out burgers and watching the Dodgers cream the Diamondbacks in the second game of a three-game series. Game one had been rained out.

Max tossed the sales folder on Rhett’s big mahogany desk. When Rhett saw that Max was wearing his fisherman’s cap, he grinned. “Okay, I see you guys got something for me? Make it good.”

“Boss,” Max yelled, “Fiorella here just put away the first kill of the day. Over seventeen K profit!”

Rhett checked over the paperwork, then smiled broadly. “Nice work,” he said. “Nice deal. Now you boys go get me ten more and we’ll have a decent fuckin’ day.”

“I intend to be the best salesman at Sherman Toyota,” I said. “Top man. I’m here to make money.”

Rhett looked at Max, then shook his head. When the commercials came on, the big boss muted the TV sound. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of hundreds. A big roll. He counted out five bills and waved them at me. “These are yours, kid.”

“I’m no kid,” I said.

“Whatever. Don’t be so touchy, Fiorella. Look, I can smell a good car man. You’ll do okay here. Just calm down. Show up on time and keep your nose clean. And do whatever Captain Kangaroo in that goofy fishing hat tells you to do. I taught him everything he knows. Ha-ha!”

I scooped up the money and stuffed it into my new pants.

“Hey, Max,” Rhett snarled, pointing at the TV screen, “I’m about to dump two large on the fucking Diamondbacks! I hate Arizona.”

Max smiled. “What’d I tell you? Never bet the Backs.”

“Goddamn right.”

OUT ON THE
sales lot, with Max and Rhett out of sight inside the dealership, potbellied Fernando, fifteen feet away, began to hassle me. “Hey, esshoe,” he hissed, “don’t jou neber try tha chit again. Jou skated me.”

“Kiss my ass, fat boy. Fair is fair. You heard the guy.”

“We gonna zee ow tuff jou are. We gonna zee. Jou wait for later. We gonna zee.”

THAT AFTERNOON MAX
had hired a new saleswoman. Her name was Vikki Martin, a total L.A. cutie. Dark blonde with frilly curls and dressed to the nines in a tight-fitting skirt, and with red nail and toe polish. Midtwenties. Her low-cut black blouse advertised her two (what I was sure must be) aftermarket D cups.