At first, I thought the man in front of me had begun to bark. He was of indeterminate Middle Eastern origin, and the NPR station that played in the used car lot was airing a report with more bad news from Palestine. I was briefly concerned that these two events were connected when I began to hear a word within the guttural outbursts. “Wugghguuh” slowly registered in my mind as “Wolfgang,” who soon materialized, in the form of a voice shouting up the stairs of the dingy one-room office. Wolfgang shouted something back that I could not decipher, and the salesman to whom I had been speaking responded snarkily: “if you get a moment, there’s a customer to see one of your cars,” and then smiled graciously at me. I pondered what this could mean, exactly.
I was soon to find out. Wolfgang himself, a mechanic in his late 20’s (who would have been handsome if not for the sheer volume of nose hair) dashed up the stairs and led me around the corner to a 15 year old BMW. It was a tiny, brittle-looking red automobile, and for the next quarter of an hour, I heard all about it. He explained at length about all the parts of cars I don’t understand, and even propped the hood to show me. I nodded and tried hard not to look like a complete rube. At the end of hearing all about the transmission and engine and wheels and this and that, he mentioned that the car was a manual.
“That won’t work,” I told him. He countered by telling me that he had another just like it, but automatic. I’m not sure how one person could be so unlucky as to have two cars just like this one. The other one was also without wheels. “I took them off the other car to put them on this one” he said, in his careful, measured, German flavored speech. He had offered me the red car, either $2000 not running, or for $3500, he would fix it. I passed.
I had thought that Los Angeles didn’t have a lot of international diversity, but shopping for cars on the west side, I was proven wrong. In addition to Wolfgang and his colleague, I met a South African guy who couldn’t have seemed less interested in his car lot, and guys from Mexico and Spain.
I saw a Japanese woman about a sporty little Prelude (she explained that she had raced it, successfully, in her gym’s lady’s car race competition), and I met a New Yorker with a Mazda Protege who was weird enough to be a country unto herself. When I left her apartment, she pulled a shopping trolley in front of the door and explained that it was for “extra security.” I realized I still had her pen, so hesitantly went back and knocked. The door, which was still cracked, never opened, but her hand darted out the crack and grabbed the pen, and she thanked me curtly and raspily, telling me the pen, which was a cheap one with an ad for a car dealership on it, was “a favorite.” I had a few horrifying moments in the parking garage where I thought I was trapped, and the prospect of being caged and kept as an ingredient to be mixed in with newt’s nose and frog’s liver in a cauldron upstairs suddenly loomed large. I called my friend, who had come with me to see the car but had been forbidden by the woman to drive with us, and she came up to the door and pulled hard, which freed me.
Tonight, I’m going to see a Honda Accord, but I’m optimistic about this one - with a little luck, I’ll live to tell you about it.
If you want to find me when I’m not working this weekend, it would be a safe bet to head for Little Tokyo - this is the weekend of Los Angeles’ annual Tofu Festival. As dubious as it sounds, there’s lots of fun to be had. There’s live music all weekend, “celebrities”, and soy reconfigured in more ways than you can count.Last year’s theme was “Fresh Naked Tofu,” which had a certain ring to it (and made for some fun t-shirts) but this year, the festival organizers have opted for the theme “Tofu Ninja” (I’m not making this up, the picture is priceless) with the subtitle “Unlock the Secret Power of Tofu.”
