Roger’s Reality: The Camper Saga, Part 1

By Roger Owens

When Mom passed and the dust had settled, with the usual bickering over her estate, we got some money and I decided to get us a camper. Cindy and I had always thought we would go back to a pontoon boat for our retirement, but it was clear we are no longer up to boating. Plus, we would be limited to the waterways nearby. But with a camper trailer, we would be going back even farther, to our days as master tent campers. We had it all, double inflatable mattresses so you’re just like in a bed, reading lights, side tables, fans, shower, our own toilet, and a separate room in the tent to put it in. I mean, we were pros. In the intervening years we rented motor homes several times, and the ease with which we could get into the wilderness and then just pack up and leave impressed us greatly. So, a camper it would be.
    We ended up buying the first trailer we looked at, but not the first time we looked. It was right across from my office on the main coastal highway, US 1. It was less that two years old and we wondered why the first owners had sold so quick. It was, is, practically unused. The first time we looked at it, Cindy complained a little about the cabinets that open upwards, because she can’t hold them up and get what she wants; she’s short. Little T-Rex arms, she jokes. The older guy who’s showing us says the lady was diagnosed with, uh— I hold up my palm. We’ve had enough diagnoses, thank you. Cindy is standing there missing a breast, for God’s sake. But, the older guy is saying, the lady couldn’t make the bed, it’s surrounded on three sides in this small camper. I’m thinking, what, this guy have a broken leg? I’ll make the damn bed myself. Then I see where the previous owner had jackknifed it and put a perfect round dent in the hardest part, the tongue beam, and I wonder if it was Mom, or Pop, who really couldn’t handle the camper.
    After looking at several more places, we came back to the first one, because we had decided already that it was the one we wanted. Cindy says now that we really got it for the bunks in the back, because the bottom bunk is the dog bed. No room for dog beds on the very limited floor space, so apparently, we got this particular camper for the dogs. I’m good with it; I just wish we could bring our cats too.

Cindy is never allowed to speak when we negotiate something for sale. She has no idea how to get a good deal; simply put, she is incapable of lying. Even a little. It’s one of the things I love most about her, but until I muzzled her, she cost me money. She gushed over a fridge for sale, and when I asked the guy about a deal, he laughed in my face. “You’re stuck, boy, or Momma is gonna beat your ass.”

    This time, at the camper place, she had somewhere else to go, so we took separate cars. After a little more bitching to the salesman about the cabinets, she gives me a peck, hops in her convertible, and drives away. The salesman steps from the camper just in time to see her zoom off, and he looks at me like a schoolboy who has missed the bus. “Isn’t that your wife? She’s with you, right?” I look at him, and the salesman in me, considerably better than the one in this fellow, smiles like the rising sun. He thinks he just saw this sale fly away, when in fact we had decided to buy before we drove in. He thinks Momma is pissed, doesn’t want the trailer, and if I buy, I’m in trouble. That’s how salesmen think. I have him by the short hairs, and I know it, but he doesn’t. He turns, looking at me as if I too might disappear like smoke, and clumsily starts trying to close me, at a price about a thousand higher than what the older guy had quoted us.
    Okay, so now I know this guy is a player, even if he’s not that slick at it. I was selling pest control and termite jobs when he was tossing papers off his bike at 5 a.m., and I know the more you get the customer to pay the more your percentage is. He’s a Sunday chicken, so I decide to pluck him good. I tell him to the penny what the older guy, who it turns out is one of the owners and has a soft spot for us old farts, told me a week before was the selling price, and as the salesman stutters, I’m thinking I’ll start at a number a couple thousand lower and go from there. Have you heard the term “deer in the headlights”? He says, well, let me go ask. He comes back and tells me, “They said okay.” I’m as surprised as he is. I just hide it better.

    So, we have the “boat,” as we have decided to call it. As we had always planned, since our first trip to Costa Rica, we have named her “Solo Bueno,” meaning “it’s all good.” It’s not proper Spanish. We don’t care. It’s from the old ex-pat American surfers and coke freaks in Quepos, on the southern Pacific coast, who are about as likely to know Ukrainian as proper Spanish. Cindy has it tattooed where her left breast used to be, backwards, in her own script, so she can read it in the mirror. She doesn’t care if you can read it. It’s not for you, it’s for her.
    This story is not over. I’ll be back another day. Soon.

Copyright © 2021 by Roger Owens