Al Madrigal

IT’S TOUGH TO ADMIT but . . . I’m frugal. I love a deal . . . because I’m cheap. Madrigal men, as far back as I can find, have always been cheap. It’s in our DNA. Our family crest has a knight shoving Tapatío packets into his sheath metal. Most likely our thriftiness comes from the fact that my Mexican grandfather, Liborio Madrigal, came here with nothing. Many immigrants come to this country with nothing. But Liborio had less than that. The only thing he had on him when he entered the state of Texas was a stab wound.

The story is—and I just learned this at a family reunion—my grandfather, a successful rancher in El Chante, Mexico, near Guadalajara, was in his house in the middle of the night. Somebody pounds on his door. My grandfather answers the door; guy stabs him twice in the side. Apparently, this was pre-peephole. I have a difficult time opening the door for Girl Scouts holding my cookies, so I’m definitely not going to open up for someone who’s stab-ready. The backstory is that my grandfather was in love with this guy’s wife and the guy wasn’t taking it so well. So he decided to employ some 1920s Guadalajaran revenge tactics. Couple of stabs.

So my grandfather says, “Not here, not here. Let’s go to the outskirts of town where all the murdering is done.” They get out there. The guy takes out his knife. My grandfather takes out his machete. Rock, paper, scissors . . . Machete beats knife. The guy is dead in one blow. My grandfather knows the guy is a nephew of an infamous Mexican general, so he gets the hell out of there, rides his horse No Country for Old Men–style into Texas, where he works with the Chinese building the railroad. If you’ve ever taken a train, you’re welcome. Then he makes his way up to San Francisco, where he meets my grandmother. Long story short, that’s why I’m sitting here now writing about the roots of my thriftiness.

I’m not suggesting that all Mexicans are penny-pinchers or that all immigrants are cheap, only that we have to do the most with what little we have—and Madrigals are no different. My dad, like a true Madrigal, loved nothing more than negotiating with people and getting a great deal. He passed that on to me and I certainly have passed that on to my kids. Dad had a taste for the finer things in life. He just didn’t want to pay full price for them.

So here are some guidelines that I learned from my father. Not because he formally laid anything out but just my own list I compiled through watching him operate.

Number 1: Prey on the new guy. You think you want the veteran salesperson. You’re wrong. That guy already has a Jacuzzi. You ideally want the person who doesn’t really know what they’re doing. You’re looking for the weak in the herd. My father would call up car dealers and manipulate his way into getting the new guy on the phone. He’d say, “I was just talking to the new guy . . . What’s his name again?” You wanna show up at the end of the month when he has to meet his quota and they want to give those guys some wins.

Number 2: Show very little interest. As a matter of fact, go a step further and insult the thing you want. “Gray interior? I really had my heart set on tan.” If it looks like you want it, they know they got you. And everybody’s gotta be down with the plan. You can’t have your spouse there saying, “Honey, you don’t love tan! Remember?! You hate the tan. Remember how you said you spit on tan? It was either gray or you’d rather take the bus! Remember when you said that?”

Number 3: Get deep into the process. Then walk away. If you don’t walk away at least once from the thing you want to buy and the person who’s trying to sell you that thing, you’re not even trying. And tell them exactly where you’re going. “I’m gonna go check out another place in—[insert shithole city right here.]” If they know you’re willing to drive to Van Nuys or Rancho Cucamonga or Stockton, they know you mean business. What you’re saying is, there are better deals out there, and if you don’t give us a better price, we’re going to go consider them. You’ve got to be the fish that got away.

Number 4: Whenever possible, have cash. Your cash needs to be organized. Your cash needs to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, ’cause you’re gonna show ’em that cash. And you want the person that you’re dealing with to be convinced they’re getting all the cash you have. “This amount in my hand, that you’re seeing, is all I’ve got. . . . And it could be yours . . . If you would just take it . . . and give me that vintage mid-century lamp.”

When I was twelve, I remember my father running into the house and saying, “I found it, I found it. And I need cash now!”

My mother had no idea what was going on. “What?! You found what?!”

“The Mercedes. Boz Scaggs is getting a divorce, and it’s ugly! He’s having a fire sale before his wife can get her hands on any of the money!”

So we went to the bank to get cash, and then we drove over to Boz Scaggs’s Russian Hill apartment as a family. And that day, my dad drove away with his 1972 dark champagne 450SEL. And that car, that was sold to him out of spite, couldn’t have made him any happier. Please imagine my little five-foot-six dad wearing driving gloves and humming “Lido Shuffle.” We got a taste for the finer things in life, but we didn’t want to pay anywhere close to full price for them.

So Boz Scaggs’s messy divorce leads me to my fifth and final guideline: Where there is deep sorrow, there are deep savings. That Mercedes wasn’t the only time a celebrity’s troubled life allowed my father to practically steal a luxury item. No, that car just whet his appetite. Now, I’m not going to say the boxer’s name. Let’s just say it rhymes with Oscar De La Oya. That boxer may or may not have gotten in trouble with the Federales, who told him to never return to Cabo San Lucas. To this day we are the proud owners of his bodyguard’s condominium. Not his! His bodyguard’s. Now, why does a boxer need a bodyguard? I don’t know. But what I do know is it’s on the sand, has a full ocean view, and currently appraises for 600 percent of its purchase price. Boom!

Remember: Deep sorrow, deep savings. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not gonna buy a murder house, but a messy divorce? I’ll take that flat-screen off your hands. To this day, when I drive by an estate sale, something tingles inside me. You see a dead grandma; I see a cabinet full of jadeite bowls. Am I right?

Having internalized the Madrigalean methods and techniques, I have proudly passed these lessons along to my children. I found the perfect opportunity with my son when he was just eight years old. The two of us were walking our dog in Eagle Rock and we stumbled upon a garage sale. Not just any garage sale. Divorced dad and his two young product-of-divorce sons. Deep sorrow? Check! On display was an entire table dedicated to kids’ toys. The tit-for-tat one-upmanship of their broken relationship on full display. Me and my son made our way over to the toy table and he noticed hundreds of Pokémon cards.

To this day, I don’t know how the game works. All I do know is that from eight to nine years old, kids love Pokémon. At exactly the age of nine, they fall out of favor, and you’re left with hundreds of unwanted cards. I knew he wanted the cards, mainly because his eyes lit up, and he started shaking, which I quickly shut down. I told him to go look at the puzzles so we could come up with a plan.

Rule number two, don’t show any interest. The two sales kids were even more excited that someone was showing interest in something on their table. And then their dad came over to supervise the possible transaction. So I asked the kids, “How much for these puzzles?”

“Fifty cents for the puzzles.”

I said, “Okay, and what are these? Pokémon cards?”

The dad then quickly explained that they weren’t just any Pokémon cards. The Pokémon cards had been divided into three categories. Category one: a shoebox full of loose, run-of-the-mill, lower-end cards. Category two: a binder filled with your better, midrange cards organized neatly in protective sleeves. And category three: a small, hardcover leather-bound Pokémon book with only the highest-quality, rare Pokémon cards. The kind only a true Pokémon aficionado or a sad divorced dad, willing to throw money at his kids’ affection, would dare to buy. The father confirmed that the book did not contain just any cards, and that his boys didn’t just casually play Pokémon at school. He had spent hundreds of dollars on these cards. They went to tournaments and, with the contents of this book, fucked up some other divorced dads and their kids. I acknowledged that they were something. I could see how proud he was of them.

It was time for rule number three. We walked away. My son couldn’t understand what was happening. Those were the best cards he’d ever seen. I produced a ten-dollar bill and explained the plan. “We’re going to go back to those Pokémon cards and we’re going to listen to everything that they have to say without saying a word. The dad’s going to talk about the tournaments again. Which I will never do by the way. I don’t care how good these cards are. He’s going to talk about how much money they spent on the cards. And how rare they are. He’s gonna try and sell you some of the cards from the shoebox. Maybe some from the binder. But when they’re done talking I want you to take this ten-dollar bill out of your pocket. Show it to the younger of the two kids. The shorter one with the sad eyes. And say, ‘All I have is this ten dollars. And I want the book.’ ”

And as that boy snatched the ten dollars out of my son’s hand, the dad looked at me as if to say, “You motherfucker. I know what you did. You preyed on the new guy.” But I was too busy holding my son’s hand, walking away, humming “Lido Shuffle.”

Watching my son execute that deal was one of the proudest moments I’ve had as a father. Sure, I was happy he’d gotten his Pokémon cards, as short-lived as his interest in them would be. But I was happier that he’d learned this skill. He was now a true Madrigal man. I knew I had passed on a lesson that would serve him well for the rest of his life. Only suckers pay full price, and Madrigals are no suckers.

I realized something else that day. We’re not actually cheap. It’s not about frugality; it’s about resourcefulness. Just like my grandfather talked his enemy into changing locations so he could win the great stabbing battle of El Chante, my father had employed his own resourcefulness and passed it on to me. And then I passed it on to my son, who used it to score some badass Pokémon cards. Sure, the stakes in those two stories aren’t the same, but the lesson is: do what you can with what you have. If my grandfather hadn’t known this lesson, I wouldn’t be here today to share this story with my own son. Knowing where I came from made all the difference.

Someday, my own grandson might be hearing a story about his father and me while he learns how to strike a deal of his own. I hope so, and I hope he remembers to prey on the new guy.