King of the Dinosaurs: 1975 Cadillac Fleetwood Talisman

Bob had a hangover.
As hangovers go it wasn’t really that bad a hangover. The problem was that the root cause of the hangover probably wouldn’t go away with ethanol’s lesser cousins over the next few hours.
The problem was Bob sold Cadillacs. As a matter of fact, Bob sold lots of Cadillacs even though his desk was off under the OK used cars sign. He sold Caddies to both the richest families in town, well richest if you define richest by most likely to buy a Cadillac on any given morning. One had a lock on “the used food byproduct stream” as they put it. The other made a surprising amount of money as “paving contractors”. From what Bob heard both were eager to pursue opportunities in the fast-growing recreational medication field. Bob also had a third steady business supplying the local funeral home where business was booming on account of Bob’s other two groups of customers killing each other, often in ways that deprecated the value of their cars to less than scrap if they ever got released from evidence.

Bob couldn’t repeat the sales pitch about stain-resistant fabrics without pretending to see some wildlife doing some particularly clever thing out the window to account for an otherwise out-of-context grin.

So anyway, yesterday afternoon the used food family was having a memorial service for one of their many cousins. Said cousin, in a remarkably improbable series of events, started to choke on a stone-like foreign object in a grinder sandwich he was eating at his desk, jumped up and ran down the hallway just as a new hire opened a door,. The cousin bounced off it, broke through a window and fell two stories into something called a digester which would have only been an embarrassing story along the lines of “and then I was in deep shit” if at hadn’t been for the fact he was choking on some mystery component of his sandwich. That and the weird thing that the new hire who was the only witness to this strange series of events turned out to be some son-in-law of the head of the paving contractor/exploring opportunities in the fast-growing recreational medication market family. Strangely as it this wasn’t weird enough, that guy died the next Tuesday when he was decapitated in a freak runaway 3 cubic yard trash container accident.

Apparently, as Bob understood it, the second family was not invited to the memorial “not a funeral, what do you think falling into a digester leaves you with?” but attended anyway. One thing led to another, words were exchanged, then bullets, and the next thing you know all Bob’s customers were either dead or in jail.
None of this was Bob’s problem other than the fact that he had gone out on a limb and ordered the ugliest, most expensive Cadillac that he could, knowing that one of his three customers would buy it just to stick it to the other two.

Bob caught his mind wandering. There it was wandering through traffic on it’s way to the in ’n out burger across the street and it wasn’t even 11:00.

Suddenly there was the sound of God’s own laundry bag ripping apart the seams, or maybe it was just the residual acetaldehyde and fusil oil messing with Bob’s head. Then Bob heard the sound again, “definitely God’s laundry bag” thought Bob, before reflecting that if God had a laundry bag it certainly would not have seams followed in rapid order by:
Does God do his own laundry?
Does God even have laundry?
What is God’s laundry soiled with anyway?
Does God even wear any clothing at all and if so, is it seersucker?

Then that sound again but now Bob’s brain was able to fix the source in the service area. As Bob considered the implications of Cadillac authorized service technicians moonlighting doing god’s laundry on company time he started walking carefully towards the service area keeping in mind the recent demise of his customers.

Now there was the sound of a woman shouting. Something about cutting somebody’s balls off. Bob was getting confused. To the best of his knowledge castration was not a Cadillac authorized service although he had heard that the full service on this year’s climate control system was comparable. And was god a woman? Didn’t god have other ways to arrange for castrations or was that circumcisions? Bob got the two confused all the time.

As he walked out to the service area ramp Bob saw that there was a smallish woman standing next to a Ferrari 365 GTB/4 “Daytona” going on at some length about visiting an Imaginative string of indignities on someone he gathered was her husband. As Bob reflected upon it God would definitely have a Ferrari 365 GTB/4 as a daily driver, but the woman who had driven it into the dealership was not comporting herself in a particularly god-like manner.

The smallish woman seemed to be slipping into the realm of rational discourse in what Bob’s mother always referred to as “your indoor voice” which made Bob think of Iggy Pop. Iggy Pop’s indoor voice always seemed to fill up all of the indoors to the point of there being no indoors left. The woman with the Daytona likewise was taking up a lot of space for someone her size.

“I want to trade this in on the most expensive flashiest car you have as a surprise for my husband”

“Well as luck would have it I have this Cadillac Fleetwood Talisman that just came in right here. It’s a special order car but it has become available on account of changing market conditions. As you can see It’s a very special automobile with a Medici velvet interior and…”

“Whatever, I’ll take it. Can I have it monogrammed? I’d like YFS painted on the doors”

“Your husband’s name is?”

“Melvin Ward, but YFS is for You Fucking Scumbag”

“I see”

Bob wasn’t quite sure if he was seeing anything at all, the light at the end of the tunnel, or an oncoming train, but his head was feeling a little bit better, or it would if Ms. Big For Her Size and even louder than that would calm down just a little. On the other hand, Bob was fairly confident that Melvin Fucking Scumbag would indeed be surprised. Probably not “surprised and delighted” as the woman at the district spring sales training off-site was going on about, but definitely surprised.

“And If I traded this Ferrari in, Melvin wouldn’t be able to just come in next week when he gets back from his weekend with that alleged ‘personal assistant’ and return the Cadillac for it would he?”

“Well there would be a pretty big hit just on account of the depreciation when you drive it off the lot ( Bob had this weird feeling. Ms. Ward seemed to be smiling at the part where most customers frowned, but then again most customers didn’t introduce themselves in screaming reveries of emasculation) and getting it monogrammed would be another huge hit. You should probably wait on the monogramming. Wally who does all our pin-striping is on vacation in the upper peninsula for the next week anyway.”

“Oh I can have my pilot pick Wally up”

“He’s on a small island”

“In my seaplane”

Well, the presumably soon-to-be-former Mrs. Scumbag was focused on her goal, Bob had to give her that.

“Anyway if the Ferrari is still on the lot, he could, of course, buy it and we don’t really get a lot of traffic looking for an automobile like that on a long weekend…”

“But if, for instance, you bought it…”

“I couldn’t possibly afford it”

“I’ll give you a $5000 tip, that should cover it. I’m pretty sure it needs a new muffler anyway, did you hear it when I came in?”

The precincts of Bob’s mind that had been toiling on the epistemology of God’s laundry put that aside to focus on the situation at hand. Bob was going to unload a car with the appointments and general size of a small bordello that an hour ago he was probably going to get fired over. He would be ending up with a for all practical purposes free Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona except for maybe tax on $5000. He might even get a killer commission on the Cadillac Fleetwood Talisman. Maybe even quit his job, drive the Daytona out to the coast and get a job at a Ferrari shop.

“I think we can make this work. My manager is out to lunch so I’ll just write all this up myself”