Dan Hardbargain, car salesman extraordinaire
The salesman who sold me a car a couple of weeks ago, a man by the name of Dan Hardbargain, sent me an e-mail today asking how the car was running as well as informing me the flat-screen TV that comes with the car will be arriving shortly.
During our brief chats while signing papers and checking credit and all the other things you do while buying or selling a car, he told me about how he used to be in the Navy, then the Army. He was stationed in Japan where he met his wife and raised his young daughters, all of whom, he had told me, would be joining him on island within a couple of months. We joked about the best places to get drunk without making a big scene among the crowds, joked about how Japanese women really loved foreign men.
We got along fine.
Driving home from work tonight, I thought about Dan and his e-mail. I imagined his e-mails getting more frequent and more personal, the kind of letters you'd get from a person who doesn't really have any friends. Dan did mention he didn't know many people here in Guam, after all. In his e-mail he also asked for a contact number. I pictured a few phone calls mixed in with his growing number of e-mails. I'd write it off at first, I thought. Then, one day, in this alternate reality, I'd find Dan sitting outside a dive bar, alone, crying. I would be just about to walk by him before realizing who it was crumpled up and bawling. It would be Dan Hardbargain, the man who sold me my new car.
“Dan?” I ask. “From AK Toyota?”
The sobbing stops a moment.
“Huh?”
“Are you okay, man? It's me, Bobby Clark. You sold me a car!”
“Oh. Hey.”
The sobbing starts up again, slowly, quieter this time. He's trying harder to hold it in, knowing somebody had recognized him. He's stopping in his tracks, he's a bigfoot caught on tape.
“Is, uh, is everything all right?”
I sit down beside his trembling shape, both of us painted neon in the vomit of the drunken lights of bars and clubs. I look up at the sky and see nothing, not even clouds, all of heaven swallowed up by the ridiculous city around me.
“No n-not re-eally, I gue-ess. I don't know anym-more,” he says, his words given extra syllables through his sobbing. “I w-was gonna send you an e-mail when I got h-home.”
I ask what he's crying about, what he's doing here, in Tumon, looking like a discarded cheeseburger wrapper, why he isn't at home watching TV or eating dinner with friends.
“I d-don't have any f-friends,” he says. “Remember?”
He goes on to describe a crumbling marriage, a wife that doesn't love him. He tells me about a job he hates, co-workers that steal his sales and talk down to him. His apartment, he says, is so much bigger now that he knows there's no wife, no kids, to join him here on an island full of people he doesn't know. Dan sobs again, harder than ever.
So you're here in Tumon, I ask, drinking away your problems, drowning your memories in shots and pale ales? Burying your wife and daughters in peanuts and Chex mix?!
Goddamnit, I say. You're Dan Fucking Hardbargain! I shake my head at the ground. I don't know what else to say. I know what I should say.
You were my rock, Dan. You held my hand when that lady who checked my credit belittled me, scolded me about paying bills on time, blah blah blah. You showed me, patiently, where to sign my name on all those damn forms, Dan, putting little x's beside every line I needed to sign or initial. And it was you, Dan, who laughed at all my stupid jokes about how signing my name so much made me feel like a celebrity. Ha ha ha, Bobby, that's funny! I've never heard that one before! Goddamnit, Dan! You did hear that one before! A hundred times!
But I don't say any of that. I'm too fucking tired.