The Extreme Mistaken Identity

I spend a fair share of time buying and selling miscellaneous things on Craigslist and on eBay. Much of the stuff I hunt for is what I call local meaning I can get there within 3 hours or so. I have buying and selling like this for years and tend to travel a bit to pick different items up. Rarely, if ever, do I have problems with anybody because the people I buy and sell with are doing the same thing I’m doing which is buying stuff to fix/repair and then resell more often than not. I try not to get myself into deals that are too far away because then that just becomes more expensive in the end.

This trip would lead me to Lake Charles Louisiana to pickup a 40s Ford pickup (pictured below, picture provided from Craigslist ad) which I thought would be a good truck to finish off my 4×4 bastardization truck using my restored 70s Bronco chassis (pictured at bottom). Anyway, I had spoken with an older gentleman (spoke with a heavy Cajun accent) twice about the truck and a price of $1100.00 cash was agreed on by both of us. He told me that his nephew would contact me with the address and a good time to meet. Yesterday, Thursday, ended up being the day. I pushed for Saturday or Sunday but the nephew was hell-bent it had to be when he said. So be it, right.

The trip from my house to Lake Charles is about 2 hours so I figured it wouldn’t be too bad of a trip during the week to make. I loaded up my truck and trailer and set off to Louisiana. I wasn’t familiar with the address I was given but I did know the area of town I was going. When I arrived at my destination (as said to be correct by my GPS and the GPS in my cellphone) I was presented with the house (pictured above). Thinking there was a mistake I reset my GPS. Apparently I was at the address I was given. Thinking there was a mistake I took a picture of it and sent it to my wife to let her know I was sent on a wild goose chase. She wasn’t happy with me to say the least and explained to me I needed to figure out what in the hell was going on.

After 20 or so attempts I was able to get ahold of the nephew who explained to me that I sounded like a white cop on the phone. He further explained that they didn’t do business with white cops. I was given the address to the abandoned house so I could be checked out by friends of his. When I asked if there was a problem with me being white he told me no as long as I had the cash and wasn’t a white cop. He told me he was sending his friends over to the house to check me out in person and if I checked out then they would escort me to his uncle’s house to pick up the truck. He informed me two of his friends would be there shortly and I was to give them the cash. Once they had the cash I would get a call that it was okay to follow his friends. I was warned I better be legit because this was the wrong place to be a white cop.

Once I hung up with him I decided to just leave. In my head I ran down the scenario and it ends up with me being robbed and killed, leaving me to rot in the abandon house. Even though I did have my twins (Desert Eagle .50AE x2) accompanying me on this little excursion I was not prepared to be in an ambush gunfight with an unknown number of people. I headed out shortly before sunset to return home. I will never know who showed up for the meet and greet last night. Tell you the truth I really don’t care. I haven’t heard from the man with the heavy Cajun accent or the nephew and I don’t suspect I will either. Sad, if you ask me, that this all played out the way it did. Perhaps my wife was right, the deal just was just too good to be true. Apparently so.

I have had some time to analyze this whole thing. Since I was troubled with heavy concern that allot of assumptions were made, inaccurately I might add, about me. Okay, they assumed one thing that was right, I am white. I won’t do them the same disservice by assuming I know what race my new friends are because I never met any of them in person. Accents, slang, and how someone talks are not tell signs of one’s race. Being I was bothered still by the events, I contacted the local sheriff’s department for that parish in Lake Charles where I was given a very hardy “yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll look into it when we get an officer freed up”. Who cares, right? No harm no foul, right? Sure, I guess so.

Now that this bullshit is over all I can think is how sweet that old beast would have looked when I go done with her. So, my hunt will continue and sooner or later I will get the body I was always looking for. I think what pisses me off the most is that I never would have guessed that junk sellers would be scamming people or trying to roll people for that cash. Makes re-think how I will do business in the future for sure. What a stupid reason to get killed. But, my optimist side has thought that perhaps I drove away from a fantastic deal and there was nothing to be worried about. My realist side says I made the right choice.