the set-up: a true story

work in progress: this is the story of the day my parents and i were set-up while looking at used car.

we were looking at a mazda four door car. it was about the right price and the gentleman on the phone sounded older and asian. now, i try not to be prejudice but if i'm about to compliment an age group and an ethnicity, then that sort of makes being prejudice okay right? well, deal with it, i'm about to stereotype, (a little foreshadowing, the speaker will get what she deserves in this little tale of stereotyping and karma, so just hang tight). this gentleman had the soft, broken english voice of an older chinese man, which to me translated to: a good driver. let me explain. the elderly are a dicy group. they can either be wonderful drivers in the sense that they move quite slow and often don't leave the house and even when they do leave their homes, it's usually not during rush hour because they don't work. however, on the other hand, some elderly drivers are speeders, unable to properly gage how much pressure they are putting on the pedal (this isn't 'Nam, no one's going to get you if you're a bit slow), or perhaps they move too slow, afraid to be driving in this fast paced, maddening world. in addition, their eyesight is usually poor and their reaction time, well, let's just say a car doesn't turn quite the ol' horse and buggy used to. i was banking on this gentleman being like the former, a cautious, stay-at-home type. what encouraged me to this conclusion was his supposed ethnicity, Chinese. the asians know how to take care of things, i mean look at that rock wall they put up a while ago, the great wall of China, that thing has lasted...not like Berlin...but i digress again. the Chinese take pride in things they own, an ox, a chicken, a wife, a car. therefore, i concluded, this vehicle must be in good shape if a little, old, Chinese man is the owner.

when we arrived in downtown Hilo, the car was parked outside a demolition repair shop which, ironically, was fairly dilapidated. bad sign number one. however, since we drove an hour and a half to see this vehicle, i thought we should at least give it a shot. we walked around the car. it looked a bit run down, grime covering the body of the vehicle, but then again, i expected that from something quoted at under 2000.00. what was definitely more dirty than the vehicle was the suspicious specimen crossing the street next to us. perhaps we would not have noticed him if he wasn't staring so hard at us like some two-bit psychic trying to bend a spoon. furthermore, it appeared that this man hadn't seen a shower in sometime and considering that he came out of the bushes to cross the street only to re-enter into bushes on the other side, i felt like i was living the first couple minutes of a CSI episode. this man would be the harbinger for a set of ever queerer characters to enter this little story.

not more than thirty seconds passed since the bush man crossed the street, when we heard a slurring cry, "eh! eh! car!" except the 'r' wasn't really pronounced so it sounded like some loony bird was on the loose. "eh! eh! cah! cah!" and sure enough, it was one strange bird. a dented and rusted green mini van choked and huffed up to us. this vehicle looked like it had been involved in some extreme mini-van battles, a gladiator of the motor vehicle world, and it had lost, by a lot. the driver was in, if it can be believed, worse condition than the van. she stuck her head out the window, folds of skin cascading down her neck like layers of hot carmel on a carmel apple, and make-up so thick, she looked like a clown with two black eyes. she wore a low cut top that revealed too much of the wrinkled, spot covered pythons one may have called "boobs" about 15 years ago. "eh! you like da cah?" it took me a moment to process what she was saying, perhaps because i felt sucked into the vacuous space that was her wide open mouth. you see, teeth are the polite white picket fence guarding the cavernous opening of the mouth which ultimately leads to your mushy, personal insides. but this woman's fence, that is to say, her teeth, were mostly non-existent. perhaps they were taken by the state, in an effort to reclaim the entire real estate of her face which she had, in her time of obvious hard living, abused and failed to pay the proper taxes of acceptable social hygiene. whatever the case, there was one thing i was certain of, i felt dubious about this entire situation.

she repeated her question, "you like da cah?"
"yes, yes we want to look at the car" all this time i thought, "this woman does not look like what i imagined a little old Chinese man would look like".
"i selling dis cah for my boss".
"okay, well we want to test drive it" my dad chimed in.
"oh you like drive da cah?" i certainly wasn't to pay for something i didn't test drive which i assumed was fairly obvious.
"you follow me to my bosses house and we get da papahs"
"why don't we stay with the car?"
"i gotta get da key dat's why. you follow me to my bosses house. we get key, den drive cah".
i looked down at the woman's hands and she is clutching a bottle of pills. "we'll stay here and wait". bad sign number two.

the woman drove off and my dad turned to my mother and i and told us, "get in our truck, roll up the windows and lock the doors". to be honest, i usually find my dad to be overly paranoid and hostile, however seeing the woman's death grip on that bottle of pills, i could actually understand his concern. we were about to get into the car when we saw a medium sized black man crossing the street. now, let me pause here because i don't want to be conveyed as a racist; i am merely reporting the facts. this was a BLACK man. i know this because in Hawaii, especially on the Big Island, black people are like griffins, you don't see them everyday, and if you do see one, you take notice, it could be ten years before you see a different griffin. so when i say this man was black, i mean, he was black and what makes a black person stick out more than being compared to a griffin? expecting him to be Chinese. yes, this man, we found out was the owner of the elderly, Chinese man voice we heard on the phone a mere two hours ago. all my perceptions raced to me, each one smacking me like a overzealous nun at a Catholic school.

my dad signaled for us to get in the car and drive to a different location. he would stay and test drive the car. we left and parked around the corner. "i think we just got cased" my mother said. "a total set-up" i replied. even ashton kutcher couldn't be that convincing, rather, this was a real life scam. we sat thinking through the whole scene. of course someone would case a used car. people come with cash on hand all the time for these sorts of deals. it's expected. i had cash on hand. i started to wonder about my dad and this man. we had tried to call the seller when we first arrived and he said he would be over in five minutes. only after the woman in the mini-van left did he suddenly come walking across the street from the same area as the gawking man who came out of the bushes.

as i was processing all this, we saw dad walk up to the truck. "let's go" he said.
"so i'm guessing it's a no go with that car"
"that whole thing just really creeped me out"
"yeah, i think it was a set-up"
his voice elevated, "hell yeah it was a set up. i tried to get out of the car and found out that the driver side door was locked. i couldn't unlock it. you can only unlock it from the outside. i was stuck in there. the seller had to get out and unlock the door for me". he paused, "i mean, what kind of car unlocks only from the outside?"
we looked at each other. bad sign number three.