The Waiting Room

Posted on August 27, 2002 in Encounters

Circumstance brought me back to the waiting room at the local Nissan dealer. My replacement CD player came last week and they had time to install it today.

No one except for the salesmen looked good first thing in the morning at an automotive dealership. Faces bent into frowns. Arms clutched chests. The television blared loudly, injecting the political philosophy of Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger, with a long needle directed through the sutures of the skull at the general region around the pituitary gland. A faint odor like moustache wax wafted in, but from where? None of the customers dressed for success. They wore t-shirts, old pants, sandals, shoddy shoes, absurd shorts.

They looked at each other out of the corner of their eyes. No one wanted to be caught looking, especially not at the diminuative blond. They drank coffee from paper cups, pretended to watch the television, glanced at the newspaper, or folded and unfolded their yellow service orders. One man, with a faint sliver of a moustache, went out to be with his pipe for a bit. When he came back, he laid the tiny piece of briarwood on the seat next to him, folded his hands on his lap, crossed his legs, and concentrated his restlessness into making slow circles with his foot.

An older man, who tried to look young by wearing a white golf shirt and keeping his whitening blonde hair uncombed, walked in. “Shuttle?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the blonde, raising her hand.

“Shuttle?” the old man repeated. “Shuttle?”

The blonde pulled her hand down. “I thought you said ‘Michelle’.” She blushed because we all knew her name. The driver left with another woman.

Deep,sharp voices murmured unintelligibly on the intercom. Service advisors came to inform customers about the state of their cars or to leave paper. “This is what we are doing,” you’d hear them say. They would mutter words like “engine” and “oil change”.

It was an odd feeling to be sitting in a clean room next to new cars. It seemed all wrong to me. Cars should be outside, I felt, not straddled atop rough fake marble tiles. There needed to be grease and oil spots stippling the floor, which should have been polished concrete. That symmetry that was free of the clutter of tools and unwanted junk disturbed me. There should not have been potted plants or a receptionist sitting inside a cubicle. I wondered: Do they housebreak them? Do these things have engines? Do they neuter them first so they don’t spray?

Salesmen sauntered through en route to the coffee machine and stopped to check a pink box for donuts. A large black man, dressed in a white shirt, gold eyeglass frames, and startling crinsom pants, came by, offering us bottled water and a larger selection of donuts. He kept saying “Yes, suh. Yes, suh” in a white-people-pleasing voice. I hadn’t seen his like since I left North Carolina. The other salesmen loved him. He sang “Zippity-doo-dah” for them. Was there an inside joke? I wondered. Was he his own intentional parody or did he fall for a lie that deserved to be long dead? Did this schtick of his sell cars?

Personally, I would run from a salesman wearing red slacks and singing like the Br’er Bear from Song of the South.