He told her the radiator would be fixed the next morning, but instead Antonio arrived at the dealership just after sunrise and saw a text message from Paul. “Boss, I’m not going to make it in today,” he wrote. “I’m not feeling good at all.”
“Can you at least do the radiator?” Antonio asked.
“Yeah, around noon. Can I get a ride?”
Antonio tossed his phone on the desk and started sorting through his customer files for overdue payments. “Problems. Problems. Poor people and their problems,” he said. He had begun his career in the car industry straight out of a housing project, hoping to transcend his own poverty. He washed cars, detailed interiors and finally got hired as a salesman on a dealership floor in Oklahoma City. One year, when the economy was booming, he sold enough cars to win a trip to Las Vegas, but he never felt comfortable with his gelled hair, his tie and his fake leather shoes. He decided to move to Lawton for the low cost of living and opened his own used dealership with the help of his wife and four children as they grew into adulthood.
Their plan was to sell a car to anyone who could pay $1,000 upfront — “a pound down, a rack back, a G for me,” Antonio told his customers. But lately, nobody in Lawton seemed to have that kind of cash outside of tax season, and Antonio had taken on loans and run into his own credit problems as he tried to keep the business alive. The tariffs had arrived like a slow leak — not a headline crisis, but a steady constriction that made every deal just a little worse for a dealership already on edge. He had started opening on Sundays to drum up more business and bargaining against himself, sometimes accepting trades as collateral or a few hundred less for a down payment so he could keep up with his own monthly bills. “I’m just a poor man trying to make it,” he said. “I am my customers.”
He looked out the window at the empty lot and started searching through Facebook, trying to track down buyers who had skipped out on their payments. Some people moved out of state with his cars and tried to disappear. Others totaled their vehicles and stopped paying. More than half of Antonio’s customers eventually managed to pay off their loans over two or three years, but almost as many fell behind and eventually had their cars repossessed.
“You’re 75 days past due,” he wrote to one customer. “Hurry up and bring me a chunk.”
“Your phone’s disconnected and you’re 38 days behind,” he told another. “What’s up? Throw me a bean or two.”
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