It's Always A Pleasure To Encounter A Decent Salesman. By Jeff Smith SOME PEOPLE HAVE to live in trailers. I know they don't want to; I know that given their druthers they'd be sipping anisette in the conservatory of the summer house at Nag's Head and watching Joaquin trim the topiary, but occasionally cash-flow problems force folks to adjust their lifestyles to something in non-ferrous metals. I myself have had occasion in the past to cast metaphorical stones at trailers and the sort of people who live in them. But that was before I underwent a reversal of fortunes and wound up a canned sardine myownself. The mist was lifted from my eyes. I see mobile homes now as the salvation of the rent-slave. In the used mobile home market particularly, one can buy a container with bedrooms, indoor plumbing, a kitchen and room to tilt back your Barcalounger and watch wrestling, for less cash money than a second-hand pickup truck. And it's yours. You're no longer paying the landlord's mortgage payments. Suddenly you've got equity. (Sure, it's dwindling as your trailer depreciates, but if you can keep the kids from kicking their hacky-sacks through the walls, you'll be able to live out your retirement in it.) This is a better deal than paying rent every month and having not even a tax-deduction to show for it. So when my friend Manuel came over a few weeks back and asked if I could front him the money to buy this "pre-owned" mobile he'd found, I agreed it seemed like a good idea. Manuel and his wife and two kids were living in a travel trailer the size of four-horse Stidham, and paying $250 a month at the park where it sat. (As an aside, to give you an idea just how "reasonable" canned living can be, when Manuel sold this travel trailer--where his family had been living for nearly two years, mind you--he got only $350 for it. Three-fifty for a home. Of course it had no title, which brought the price down.) Anyway Manuel drove up to Tucson with the five large burning a hole in his pocket and sat down with Jeff Radin at AAA Homes Inc. and signed our lives away. Manuel's trailer was a trade-in on another of AAA's deals. It was sitting in Nogales with another family in it, but Radin told Manuel it would be delivered to the park in Patagonia the following week. Manuel took a couple days off work, hired a few brothers and friends to help take the wheels off of it, and waited. No show. He drove to Nogales to find the trailer still sitting there and the other family still sitting in it. "We ain't leavin' till our other trailer is ready," they told him. Manuel told me and I called Jeff Radin and told him. I also reminded him that Manuel had paid the full pop, up front, and that he had promised delivery the day previous. Frankly, I was thinking this was another of those deals like with Manuel's cuñado, Erasmo, when Erasmo got hosed on the used truck, except he and I finally took it back to the Shylock in Tucson and got most of his money back. You may have read the couple of columns I wrote about that situation, and used-car dealers' dealings with non-English-speaking customers of modest means in general. Anyway I was getting that old half-queasy, half-pissed, 89 percent muck-raking avenging angel of the print medium feeling again, and I tried, with all the subtlety at my command--which you probably can tell is not much--to convey this to Jeff Radin. Without resorting to out and out threats or extortion. Either Radin has one of the most intuitive minds in the manufactured housing industry or he is a saint or both. I am inclined to think the best of him. Because he immediately owned up to having made those promises and wanting to make everything right by Manuel. How about a check for a couple hundred to cover his lost work time and the cash he gave to his crew of wheel-removers? How about we get that old family moved into their new home and get Manuel's trailer into Patagonia and parked--realistically--first of next week? That would be nice. And fair. And they did it. But the truck driver just parked the thing in the middle of the park, and no way in hell could Manuel and his buddies horse it over to where it needed to be hooked up. Another couple dozen phone calls to Jeff Radin--whose voice was becoming as familiar over the phone as my ex-wife's--and another crew was lined up to scootch the trailer sideways into place. But they charge a couple hundred. Manuel meanwhile had been called away by work in Flagstaff, so I unilaterally said 'Go' and Jeff Radin said he'd pay half of these latest costs...just to be fair. I said cool. So we all get to live happily ever after, and I never even had to threaten to rip anybody's guts out in the public prints. Or promise to say anything nice. Except for my friend Nora, who has nothing to do with trailers or anything else in this column except she's moving to Pasadena this week and made me promise to write one last rant before she left that said nothing but nice stuff. Done.

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