The MagazineI knew a man who allowed his wife to buy the family car, a fact that always astonished me, and still does. Dealing with car salesmen, if I may say so and still elude the charge of sexism, is man’s work. Only men can be so stupid as to get caught up in the hopeless game of trying to defeat car salesmen in getting the best deal possible. This ritual of buying a car, which I myself have recently gone through, I call Dancing with Wolves, and only a man can be so foolish as to think he is likely to come away unbitten.  chris beatrice I once wrote a short story that had a car salesman among its characters. I gave my salesman the name Sy Bourget (né Seymour Bernstein) and reported that he was said to be “so good . . . that he could sell aluminum siding to people who lived in high rises. . . . He was in his mid-fifties, but looked older, especially around his eyes, which were gray and cold. His hair was white, yet his pencil-thin mustache was still dark. He wore expensive suits, flashy shirts, good suits well pressed; he had a blue sapphire pinkie ring and was never without a manicure.” By this description I hoped to make him seem quietly menacing, for slightly menaced is how I generally feel when entering a new car showroom. In my late adolescence and early twenties, I used occasionally to end the evening at one of two local steakhouses in my neighborhood in Chicago: one called Miller’s, the other the Black Angus. Around 10 o’clock, after their dealerships had closed, salesmen from Nortown Olds and Z. Frank Chevrolet would gather over red meat and brown booze, swapping stories about, as I always imagined, the foolish customers who during the day thought they stood a chance to outwit them. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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