Free Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends by Jan Harold Harold Brunvand Page B

blonde said firmly.
    His hand was shaking as he wrote the check.
    But he couldn’t leave without asking. “Lady, I just want to know why you’re selling this car for $75. Nobody would sell that car for that.”
    She hesitated just a moment, but then she smiled just a little.
    “I’ll tell you,” she said. “About five years ago, I met and married the perfect man. He was tall, well-built and good-looking. He was an engineer. He brought home about $200,000 a year and that’s how we could afford this house and all you see here. Our marriage went well. Everything seemed fine.
    “There was just one flaw. One of our neighbors was a beautiful, sexy woman. And last week, the two of them ran off together.”
    She paused and smiled again.
    “He called me this week.
    “‘Now don’t hang up, Honey, just don’t hang up,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a good sport, and I know you’re going to be a good sport about this, too. I know I did you wrong. You deserve better, and I’m sorry. But I just want you to do me a favor: Sell the Mercedes and send me half the money.’”
     
     
    This beautifully elaborated version of a classic automobile revenge legend was written by Roger Ann Jones, managing editor of the Columbus (Georgia) Enquirer for the October 10, 1983, edition. Ann Landers published a reader’s version in a 1979 column, commenting “truth is stranger than fiction.” When she reran that column in 1990 both she and I were inundated with letters from readers who recognized a legend they had heard. So Landers then published a comment from a reader who remembered back when the story featured a $20 Packard. My own files contain mostly $50 Porsches, but also prices running from a mere $10 up to $500 and cars including Cadillacs, BMWs, Karman Ghias, and Volvos. Often the husband has run off with his secretary. In England, the story has been documented back to the late 1940s; prices range from 5 to 50 pounds sterling for either a Rolls Royce or a Jaguar. Sometimes the terms of the Englishman’s will specify that his widow sell the car and give the proceeds to his mistress. I heard singer John McCutcheon perform his own variation on A Prairie Home Companion; it began:
    One morning while reading the paper,
In search of a new set of wheels,
The classifieds had a most curious ad,
In their listing of automobiles.
What seemed like a wild stroke of luck:
“Corvette Stingray,” it said,
“Low mileage—bright red,
83 model: 65 bucks.”
     
    “Dial R-E-V-E-N-G-E”
     
    A t the sound of the beep: A Dallas wife did this two weeks ago, but it shows Houston kind of genius. Learning her husband was on a three-week stay in the Caribbean with another woman instead of in London on business as he had said, the Mrs. quietly packed up her things, retrieved a number from directory assistance, dialed it and then left the line open for the Mr. to find when his trip was over. The number? That of the Hong Kong continual time and weather recording….

     
    Garfield © Paws, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.
     
    O ne woman was visiting her out-of-town boyfriend, only to be abandoned as he supposedly went to visit his mother in the hospital. But when it was revealed that the mother was in perfect health and Mr. Two-Timing Rat actually was on a romantic rendezvous, this woman’s solution was to call time and temperature in Tokyo, then leave the phone off the hook.
     
     
    Version one was published in the Houston Post some time in 1990; version two was in a Chicago Tribune article by Marla Donato headlined “Nifty ways to leave your lover,” and published as a Valentine’s Day item on February 12, 1993. I’ve collected references to this ploy—usually used to get rid of an unwanted live-in lover—going back to 1982. Foreign versions, such as a comical poem based on the legend published in the English journal New Statesman in 1986, usually mention calling the New York City number for the