Convertible Cash

The clouds are fleecy and few, the temperature reads a balmy 68 degrees, and just 10 feet away in a Nolensville Road car lot sits a sleek merlot-red 2002 Spyder convertible. Now there’s just the fine point of haggling. “Will this be cash or credit,” inquires the dealer in a thick Middle Eastern accent.

“Oh, cash.”“Well, then, if you have cash, the car could be yours for $6,500.”Uh-oh. “Actually, that’s a bit more than I was planning to spend.”“Oh,” the dealer says. “What did you have in mind?”“Um…$600!”

As I was escorted from the lot, I realized that I had set myself a narrow, perhaps futile goal. Six hundred dollars, in our current swish around the crapper of commerce, barely tops off the tank in a Hummer. And here I was, trying to flat-out purchase a convertible as cool as the one I drove through high school—a cherry-red 1965 Dodge Coronet—for basically a month’s lease on a Lexus.

As an American, though, I am guaranteed the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of a sweet, sweet ride. And pursue it I did, armed with $600 worth of economy-stimulating muscle. Despite a morning of trawling car lots such as Cut Rate Motors, E&S Auto Paisano and Discount Motors (“Home of the $150 Down Vehicle”), I came away no closer to my top-down idyll. Nevertheless, there were electronic frontiers left to explore.

One is the Metro surplus auction site at Nashville.gov (ebid.nashville.gov/auction), where you can bid on vehicles of all sorts, makes and oxidization levels. No convertibles were available when I checked, but for a brief shining moment I could have had a 1986 International tri-axle dump truck (“scratches and dents all around, has rust all around, interior poor, Engine Leaking Oil and Smokes”) for $561. You could almost smell the stimulus.

Instead, I skipped to Craigslist, the nation’s online junkyard, where nobody blinks when you try to purchase transportation sight unseen for the cost of a splurge at Outback. Sure enough, there was a 1986 Dodge 600 convertible in Antioch right off the bat for $500. Yes, it came with a few caveats. (“I was told the engine was good…obviously I was lied to….”) But if you’re the sort of hardy motorist who isn’t scared off by such trivialities, you too could be riding in open-air splendor. Just ask the tow-truck operator if you can sit in the back.