A Scotsman’s Tale: My American Life as a Car Salesman

CALIFORNIA DREAMING

A Smooth-Running, Low-Mileage, Best-Priced American Adventure

By Lawrence Donegan

Atria Books

230 pages, $24

Scottish writer Lawrence Donegan has made his career peering behind postcard facades and uncovering the comic, less-than-picture-perfect reality that resides there. In “No News at Throat Lake” he moved to a small town in rural Ireland and reported on country life there, cattle and all. “Maybe It Should Have Been a Three-Iron” traced the year he spent as caddy to the world’s 438th-best golfer. In his newest release, “California Dreaming,” Donegan immigrates to the land of sunshine and silicon to realize his fantasy of being a self-made man and thereby achieve the American dream.

Ever since he toured the U.S. 20 years ago as a 21-year-old bass player for the Scottish pop band the Bluebells, Donegan tells us, he’d been enamored with American life. He’d vowed to one day return “not as a failed musician this time but as an explorer.”

Making a pledge, though, is much easier than actually doing it. Investigating U.S. immigration laws back in Scotland, he finds only two possible routes: “You could live a life of such abject poverty in a Mexican shantytown that you became desperate enough to throw yourself at an electric fence on the Texan border .... Or you could throw yourself at the mercy of an avaricious immigration lawyer in New York,” he writes. “Both options were out of the question.”

Just in the nick of time, an old college buddy who now owns a successful computer chip company in Silicon Valley happens along. He helps Donegan arrange the immigration details and provides him with a lucrative job offer. “The starting salary for someone with your experience--i.e., none--is sixty thousand dollars a year,” he tells Donegan, “plus twenty-five thousand shares in the company.” Welcome to the land of opportunity.

Only Donegan had been hoping for something more exciting, a job to prove his mettle. His quandary is clarified when a used-car salesman convinces Donegan that there is only one way to access the genuine American dream: through sales. “When you get out of bed in the morning, you can’t bargain for your shoes, or the pants you’re wearing, or the life you’re leading,” the salesman explains. “But you can come down here and haggle for a car all day long, and if you don’t like the salesman, or his price, you can walk out the door. You know what that is? ... Undiluted capitalism--America.”

Donegan is converted. He skips the computer job and takes one at Orchard Pre-Owned Autos, a grubby place topped with a 20-foot inflatable Godzilla. “I suspected I wouldn’t make a million in the car business but I was utterly convinced I would discover the America that I was looking for.”

What he finds is a comic journey of self-doubt, moral wrestling and the payoff of indefatigability. Donegan’s is a story of survival on the asphalt jungle, and he keeps readers laughing at his foiled strivings for America’s glossy details.

Nicknamed “Scotty” for his fresh-off-the-boat accent, Donegan quickly becomes a target of ridicule as the worst car salesman ever to work the lot. He won’t give up, though, and eventually his tenacity pays off.

He graduates from being a “green pea,” or novice salesman, when he pursues a couple to a competing dealership.

“Forgive me if this sounds boastful,” writes the former journalist for the Guardian in London, “but I’ve enjoyed a varied life. I’ve played in a rock band in front of eighty thousand people ... I’ve worked for the world’s best newspaper ... I’ve birdied the 17th hole at the Old Course .... But nothing, and I mean nothing, had ever come close to the sense of achievement and self-worth I felt” at closing that sale.

“This was the America I had come to find, with Sunny slapping me on the back and Frankie telling me I was a real car salesman now.”

But there’s unease in his moral fiber. He’s shocked at what he’s willing to do to sell cars and be in contention for the biggest prize of all: being named salesman of the month. “In the world beyond the car lot I was ... good-natured and honest ... it was only when there was a sales contest to win that I started to behave erratically .... In my natural state I was ... harmless ... but pin a name tag to my tie, then set me loose among 250 used cars, and I became dangerously unstable.”

Donegan’s story is lighthearted, filled with self-deprecating humor as he takes readers along on a kind of anti-adventure.

In its more serious moments, the tale is also a caveat emptor, reminding us not only of what’s at stake when we walk onto a car lot, but what’s on the line when we buy into earnest ideals like “American dream” without first kicking the tires.