Nurse the Hate: Car Shopping and the Reds

 

I went to buy a car last week.  It wasn’t a new car, but rather a “new to me” car.  I have a belief in buying high end used vehicles in that it is a way to help reduce the insane level of depreciation on this major purchase.  I can’t believe how many people I see that are driving around in $65,000 mammoth pickup trucks that park in front of modest houses.  I have no idea how they afford it.  They think I’m a fool because I’m driving a BMW or Porsche or an Audi, but little do they know I spent 60-75% less on my superior German car than they did on their piece of shit macho King Cab.  One must have patience in finding these cars though.  The thing is when you swim in these used car waters, it can get a little choppy.

I sniff around like a catfish looking for something overlooked sitting on the muddy river bottom.  This is not an easy search.  It can take me months.  I have test driven cars that may have never received service, were in horrible undocumented wrecks, and smelled like someone smoked a carton of cigarettes in them every week for the last 5 years.  You need to look at a lot of turds before you find treasure.  It was this motto that took me to a used car dealer I had never heard of hidden in the back of an industrial park in a, shall we say, “transitional” part of town.  

When I pulled up to the address, I figured I must have been wrong.  There were no cars anywhere.  Then I noticed a sign on a glass door.  “Legit Auto Sales”.  What the hell.  I went in.  It was a non-descript office space.  Sitting at a card table with their backs to me were a middle-aged man and I’m hoping his daughter.  She had thin hair in that greasy pulled back non-style I often see on women early in the morning by a Speedway Convenient Store near my house stopping to get their Breakfast of Champions, vape cartridges and 16oz Monster Energy Drink.  To my left sitting on a chair by the wall was a young man.  Something was off about him.  I’m hard pressed to say what, but if the police were to question me about what he looked like, the best description I could give is “he looked sorta fucked up, like something is just a little off.”  In the Great Depression, one would say “he looked a bit touched”.

The middle-aged man looked at me with a perky expression.  “Hi!  Do you work here?”.  Why no, I answered.  Do you?  “No.”  He smiled at me vacantly.  “We are here to get a car for my daughter.  What are you looking at?”  I’m looking at a BMW X1.  “Oh!  I saw that out back.  That’s a REAL nice car.”  He kept smiling.  Now it’s important to note that while this is going on, the young man sitting in the chair behind me kept having these outburst.  “Shit!  Fuck!  Cunt!  Cuntfuck!”  The man just kept chattering away to me while the daughter looked on, neither one of them seemingly noticing the steady stream of profanity coming from over my shoulder.  A door in the back of the office opened up.  A bearded man walked in.  He spoke to me with a thick Ukrainian or Russian accent.  “Hello my friend!  Can I help you?”  Shit!  Fuck!  The young man rocked in his chair and kept rolling.  The father daughter team serenely looked on at me, ignoring the young man that was losing his shit.

After I told the bearded salesman that I was here to look at the BMW, he hustled me back into the warehouse.  I think he wanted to distance me from the madness going on in the bleak little office.  Parked inside the warehouse were a couple dozen high end cars. “Yes my friend, that is a BEAUTIFUL car.  Let me show you!”  We walked out to behind the warehouse to where the shiny BMW was parked.  The car was about $1800 under normal price point, so something was wrong with it.  I just had to figure out what.  The Ukrainian/Russian guy gave me the key after I swapped him with my license and said “Go take it out and come back when you are ready.  It is a BEAUTIFUL car.  I see you later.”  I have to tell you, the car looked clean.  Maybe a little too clean.  I popped the hood, and the engine was almost sparkling.  That’s when I saw it.  The headlights were dirty, but from inside the lights.  I bet this car had been underwater.  That explained the price.  Who knows where the hell these guys got this thing.  Well, I came all the way out here.  I decided to give it a drive anyway.

I pulled out of the industrial park and made a left onto the highway on ramp.  I jammed down on the accelerator to see if the car’s turbo kicked in like it was supposed to do.  Instead, the car gave a little buckle, and the entire dashboard lit up like a slot machine.  The car shook as the engine misfired while the computer system wisely advised “service engine immediately”.  The car made a “Shunk Shunk Shunk” noise like it had been gravely wounded.  I limped the car off the highway and had to edge it back to the dealership via back roads.  It gave a little gasp as I pulled in.

“Well my friend!  It is a beautiful car, no?”  Hey man, those valves and gaskets are shot.  The car died the second I put it on the highway.  That car is totally fucked up.  “Yes.”  He was completely unfazed and his smiling friendly expression showed no change.  “It was filthy.  Oil was everywhere.  We had man put new valves in yesterday.  But good thing.  He has six months for free.  He come fix and then you take car?”  No man, I’m going in another direction.  “OK.  No problem my friend.”  Behind the office door I heard a muffled “Shit!  Dick!  Cock!  Pussy!”  I left and went home.

When you are out poking a stick into things, that’s the way it goes sometimes.  You need to know when things are just so fucked up that you should run, not walk away.  That’s my attitude on the Cincinnati Reds win total this year.  I love to bet against team total number of wins each season, effectively making me root against them all summer.  Ideally, I like to find teams that are in my time zone, and I will see creep onto my TV set every now and again.  This is where the Reds come in.  They just seem like a perfect storm.  They’re coming off their worst season in 40 years, and I am not sure why this team is going to be any better.  The pitching staff has one legitimate starter and then it’s what I like to refer to as “a bunch of guys”.  At almost every position the local media and Reds blogs are trying to put a positive spin on the season with those “Well, if three of these guys coming in from the minors can bring a spark, and those two other guys that are always hurt can stay healthy, I can see them maybe being 10 games under .500.”  Even the people being paid to generate some excitement can’t come up with anything.  There’s nothing there, and the locals are pissed.  This seems like a grim slog of a season for Reds fans.  Cincinnati UNDER 65.5 wins.

Rooting against the Reds will be fun.  I love piling on, especially on my friends in Cincinnati.  The town hates the ownership.  The ownership seems resigned to losing.  The little band box stadium will punish the Reds bad pitching on those nice hot humid Cincinnati nights.  There’s nothing like laughing it up when some crappy reliever comes in and lets a defeat roar into the stadium to snatch a clear victory.  It’s the best part of summer.  Now, on the other hand, I am going to take the Oakland A’s OVER 58.5 wins.  Look, there is no sugar coating this.  The A’s are going to be terrible.  They are a collection of low rent castoffs and struggling minor leaguers with an owner that just wants to move the team to Las Vegas.  The expectations are rock bottom, maybe the lowest of any team I can ever remember.  What’s the key to winning in sports gambling?  When they zig, we zag.  

The worst baseball teams still win 60 games.  It’s amazing actually.  The worst of the worst, the very dregs of the league will win about 40% of the time.  Take that to the NFL, and the absolute worst teams would go 6-11 while being laughingstocks.  Hell, the Browns went 1-31 over two years.  In baseball, they would have been 9-151, a full 51 games back from Oakland.  We don’t need much from Oakland.  We just need them to eek out a game they wouldn’t win every three weeks or so.  As a team that somehow finds a way to make do with nothing, I like them to scrap out a few more wins than expected.  It’s not going to be easy.  I will need an otherwise meaningless late September game to go Oakland’s way in a nearly empty stadium to slither out a win on this.  Look for me in my new Oakland hat in September if they do what I think they will.  I’ll wear it when I’m driving the new 70,000 mile Audi I just bought.  Treasure from the trash!  Let’s go A’s.  F the Reds.