rich cohen - "closing time"

I love this essay on the automobile industry by Rich Cohen in The Believer and namely the talk of car salesmen:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200909/?read=article_cohen

Some favorite passages:

"In my early years, between the ages of seven and fourteen, this meant a trip to Steve Foley Cadillac on Skokie Highway, in Northbrook, Illinois, which I loved, as the showroom of Foley Cadillac, unlike the shabby, product-stuffed showrooms of today, was glamour and glitz, with each new Cadillac raised on a white pedestal, where it seemed to drift, as in a cloud, above the everyday world. At some point, though, I would slip away from my father and the back-and-forth taking place in the office that salesmen, as I later learned, call “the pit,” or “the hole,” and wander among the Cadillacs, slide behind the huge steering wheels, breathe deep the new-car smell, play with the 8-track and cruise control. I look back on those occasions as Adam in his later years must have looked back on his lazy days of doing nothing and wanting nothing to do in the Garden."

"A few years later, he brought me to buy my first car. This was done as I imagine fathers in other, exotic, more interesting cultures bring their sons for that first trip to the whorehouse. I did not go to the Cadillac dealer, of course, but to the used-Honda lot a few miles down Skokie Highway. Did my father stand a foot behind me as I made this deal, nodding, frowning, monitoring? Of course he did. I narrowed the field to a 1984 Honda Civic, a hideous fishbowl of a car. It scored well in twenty of the twenty-three categories on the checklist my father had given me, hand-printed in all-caps. As I was talking numbers, eating up time, preparing “the nibble,” my father called me aside. We stood under the streetlamp, lit to dispel the midwinter Chicago gloom, as traffic whistled past."

"The room is bugged—know that. A manager in back is eating a sandwich as he listens to every word you say."