The first thing
I realised when looking for a car in Mexico was how crazy expensive they
were. Pieces of shit from ancient history with the doors hanging off and
exhausts dragging along the road that wouldn’t sell for even $100 in the UK , let alone
the thousand dollars plus people are asking for. Cars from the mid-nineties I
thought had gone extinct, and even cars from the eighties. For a thousand
dollars in the UK you could buy something from about 2005, with no mechanical
problems or so-called “detalles esteticos” – which I originally thought meant,
“a few scratches in the paintwork” but in reality seems to mean, “the lights
are all broken, the windows don’t work, the seats are torn to pieces, most of
the paint is fucked, and it looks like it’s been driven drunkenly into several
donkeys, at speed” – or, for like $500, you could still get something pretty
sweet, road and safety tested, “no debe-ing revistas”, and shining and driving and
smelling nice.
But that’s not
your fault that cars are pricey here. I understand: you don’t need them to have
safety tests or be road legal, or have doors or mufflers or bumpers, so they
hold their value more. Plus, they’re more expensive to begin with. Plus, people
in the UK don’t have much tolerance for old broken down cars that constantly
need fixing, and would rather drive something newer, something more reliable,
and are able to too, given it’s probably a lot easier for us to go into debt
thanks to our evil system of credit and banking.
No, none of
that’s your fault: but what is your fault – what you are guilty as hell for –
is the lame way you advertise your cars. How about “pone-ing el puto precio”
for a start? How about saying in which city the car is? How about mentioning
the model and the year and certain other little bits of essential information,
like the mileage and your phone number and whether it actually drives or not?
And why should
each and every individual respondent have to “inbox you” to get the “detalles”?
Doesn’t it get tiresome writing it over and over and over again? Just put it in
the ad and be done with it, fer Chrissake! And save yourself and the rest of us
the trouble.
Ah, those pesky
“detalles”, eh? You put your ad, you put your photos, you say, “hey, it’s pulls
good, engine and transmission both 100” – never 90, never 85, never the 67 it
actually turns out to be – all the while neglecting to mention that none of the
electrics work, that it owes 6 years “revistas”, that you don’t have any of the
paperwork, that the plates on it are from your uncle’s cousin’s long ago
scrapped scooter but, “ah, it doesn’t matter, you know a guy who works at the
licencing place who can sort it out for you, no es una problema.”
You don’t think
these things might be worth mentioning before a person comes to see? Assuming,
that is, the seller can be bothered to even arrange a meet. For that’s the
other thing, dear Mexico, with your advertisements of demuffled, windscreen-shattered,
headlights hanging by their wires, donkey-smashed twenty-year-old bone-shakers
forever “pulling to 100” – even when I’ve wanted to buy them, it’s like you
just can’t be bothered. Messages to people selling “urge” go unanswered. People
don’t show up to meet. I’ve turned up at places with a pocketful of cash and
the guy’s been like, “ah, it’s stuck behind some other
cars I can’t move and I don’t have the papers anyway, plus the battery’s dead
and…” – you’d think they might have mentioned it beforehand, right?
But still: it
all works out. This is, after all, the kind of thing I love about Mexico : that no
one gives a shit. That everything’s all slapdash and inefficient and
mindboggling. That people do retarded shit, and nobody cares, they just go
right on smiling and being mellow.
It’s a perfect
outpicturing of my own incapable inner-life.
It’s totally why
I’m here. :-)
