This is the fourth story in a series that will run all this week.

In the bar in downtown Detroit, Kent Bunderling sat contemplating his fate.

On the one hand, Kent had the job of his dreams.  Granted, Detroit was colder than a well digger’s arse, and he never had gotten used to that.  Coworkers at General Motors told him he would, but they had lied.  The fact that the tires on his company car froze on the bottom where they sat on the concrete inside the garage was just not something a kid that had grown up in Fort Stockton could ever reconcile himself to.

Kent’s earliest memories from boyhood back in southwest Texas were of trudging to the Ben Franklin and picking out a new Tootsie Toy for a dime as a reward for being a good boy while his mother shopped at the Piggly Wiggly.  For a dime, he got to shop from the dozens of offerings in the bin, taking agonizingly long moments to choose the exact one he’d get to take home and add to the collection atop his dresser, right under the Roy Rogers lamp.  Often it was a Cadillac.  

He still had the collection in a collection of old cigar box on the top shelf of his closet, much to the chagrin of his wife.  “Guess you never outgrew cars.  But do we have to keep all these old things?” Ginger had asked him a while back.

“Do you need the room for another three dozen pairs of Manolo Blahniks?” he shot back.  Ginger saw the point that they each had their own weakness for collecting.  His, in fact, took up a lot less room.

The two of them had met in a business class at SMU, and married after each getting their masters degrees.  They moved to Detroit after Kent got hired at The General.  Ginger mastered becoming a mother and balancing kids and the duties of being an executive’s wife.  They’d settled in and had a pretty good life.

Kent had been influential during the development of the Seville program.  It had been Kent’s idea to add the fake wood graining to the face of the knobs, and it was only due his influence that the number of buttons on the tufted bench seats in the car was increased from the original 44 to 68.  “I fought my ass off for each one of those extra buttons,” he laughed with neighbors over hot dogs and Dom Perinon at the backyard barbeque.

Before long, Kent’s work on knobs and tufts had become legendary throughout the industry.  Ford had taken a run at him, trying to get him to come over and work his magic on the spare tire hump of the Continental Mark XIIVX they were developing.  His refusal to leave GM, even for the package they were offering, caused Ford to scrap the entire project.  “The hump was the feature the entire car was built around,” Phillip Caldwell told the board.  He was replaced by Donald Peterson later that year.

Jealous fellow up-and-coming young GM executives hoped Kent Bunderling’s success reached its apex in Buttons and Knobs.  They were depressed to learn the opposite when the company newsletter, General Anesthesia,  arrived on their desk.  Pictured on the front page, sitting right next to Chairman Roger Smith, was Kent Bunderling.  On the other side was an unidentified woman, later identified as a hooker.  Soon after began GM’s investment in Photoshop.  The trio were seated in the cabin of the Concord, on a flight to the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.

Shortly after the trip, Bunderling received a promotion enabling him to have the final word on all wheel covers and vinyl tops for every GM Division.  Behind his back, coworkers began calling him ‘Lord of the Landau’.  Roger received a prescription for penicillin.  

By 1981, Ginger was drinking earlier in the day than she ever had before, often slurring her words at PTA Meetings and ‘Help Keep Downtown Detroit White’ meetings, an effort to prevent snow removal during the winter months.  Kent was working late several nights a week, even though demand for vinyl roofs had fallen off substantially.  “Good God, Ginger,” he said during one particularly bitter argument “you have no idea how the game is played.  I turn my back for a minute and someone else is sitting at my desk in the corner office deciding grain patterns and narrowing down the colors we offer.  The automobile business is dog-eat-dog and I’ve got Kibbles & Bits in my boxers.”

“I know damn well what you’ve got in your boxers,” Ginger slurred back.  “Kibbles & Bits is an exaggeration.”

Bunderling thought about calling Ford and seeing if they still had anything for him in Dearborn.  The way he’d humped them on the Continental offer was still fresh in their minds though, and the call went nowhere.  Proving he still had it in him, he did some advanced work on bumper rub strips and body side moldings that won him an internal award and three week trip to Barbados, but his heart wasn’t really in it.  He took the girl from the Concord instead of Ginger.

Back in Detroit, at just about the same time the itching and swelling had gone down, Kent Bunderling found himself alone at the bar.  He’d seen the final drawings for the 1985 line-up.  He was depressed.  He found himself suffering with a case of sonntagsleerung every week.  The big cars of Buick, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac all looked like the same thing, just with different wheel covers.  And all of them had been downsized to the point that they looked like Chevrolet Celebrities, which themselves were an automotive abomination to begin with.  General Motors had lost its way.  They weren’t even going to be competitive with this new lineup.  He decided it was time for him to talk with Roger.  Tell him what he needed to know.  What he couldn’t see for himself.  He called Roger’s secretary and asked for an appointment.

“Let me see here, Mr. Bunderling,” she said.  “He is awfully busy this week.  Tuesday he’s meeting with the interior designers to go over the drawings for the new Executive Retreat.  That’ll be an all day long thing.  Wednesday he’s accepting the Businessman of the Year Award from the Chairman of Sears & Roebuck.  Thursdays are never good.  That’s the day he goes in for his ‘personal waxing’.  Looks like I can squeeze you in on Friday.  Ten is good.  Till 10:15.  That’s when he goes over the menu with Chef Renee for what will be served in the Executive Dining Room next week.  No rest for the weary!” she laughed.

Bunderling was there Friday morning, waiting outside the office of the chairman on the couch made of mink foreskins, noticing that a few more tufts and buttons would have really made the couch look better.  But also, how General Motors got to the place they were in.  At her desk, located at the far end of the waiting room, the secretary looked small and could barely be heard.  But he did make out something along the lines of “He’ll see you now.”

Inside Roger’s office, the air was heavy with the aroma of frankincense and myrrh.  He took a seat across the desk from Roger, noting the gold-inlaid ‘G’ and ‘M’ letters in the Brazilian Rosewood desk.  The ‘G’ looked like it was actually copulating with the ‘M’, but it may have been because he was looking at it upside down.  “What is it, Bunderling?  I’m sure she told you I’m a busy man.”

“Yes sir,  I just feel like it’s important we talk.”

“You got twelve minutes.”

Bunderling told him that he feared for GM’s future.  That they had gone astray.  That they were still the largest automobile manufacturer in the world, but that it was just by inertia, alone.  “Cadillac is the best example,” he told Roger.  “We’re losing market share to BMW, Mercedes, Volvo, and even Lincoln every year.  We’ve got to stop the tide.  Make cars people want, not just cars they have a habit of buying. It’s got to be more than buttons and tufts, bodyside moldings and bumper rub strips.  We are losing credibility in the market.  Our products will soon no longer compete.”

Roger turned a deeper shade of red with each passing minute.  Beads of sweat popped up on his forehead and ran down into the deep wrinkles of his face, pooling up on his upper eyelids.  That’s when Bunderling saw Roger’s tongue dart out and lick them off in a way that frightened him.

“BMW and Mercedes?  Are you pulling my chain?  We beat the crap out of the Germans in Dubya Dubya Deuce.  You think they’re a threat?  We’re the Standard of the effing World!  Volvo?  Are you kidding me?  If you want to sell safety, go to work for Trojan.  And Lincoln?  Get real!  Lincoln has never come close to touching Cadillac and never will.  Chevrolet is the damn Heartbeat of America.  As long as America has a heartbeat, it will belong to Chevy.  Pontiac builds excitement.  Buick?  Everyone would really rather have one.  Oldsmobile?  Yeah, they make cars, too.”

Bunderling could tell it had been a bad idea.  Maybe he’d scheduled the appointment too close to Roger’s personal waxing.  He knew it was not going well.

“I’m just saying, sir, we cannot rest on our laurels.  The glory days are over.  I’m hearing that Toyota, Nissan, and Honda are all getting into the luxury car market and they already build better cars for the working man than we do based on quality.”  Bunderling had about two minutes left.  “Our costs keep going up.  We pay our workers more than anyone in the world and get less productivity.  We pay for their healthcare till they die on top of it.  Those numbers aren’t sustainable.  We could go bankrupt in twenty years!”

Roger leaned back in his chair upholstered in the skins of vaquita.  He was silent.  The anger seemed to have subsided.  He was smiling.  Almost chuckling.  Then he broke out into a full laugh.  “GM?  Bankrupt in twenty years?  Good god almighty, son.  What’s gotten into you?  What would we have to do, throw ourselves on the mercy of the government and the first Black president in history to bail us out?”  He was laughing almost uncontrollably at this point.  He barely got the words, “Like Chrysler?” out of his mouth.

Kent Bunderling’s twelve minutes were up.  He knew that he’d sealed his fate at General Motors.  There was no hope in getting them to hear what he had to say, or even realize what was going on in the market around them.

Kent Bunderling resigned his position that afternoon.

He went home, and listed the house in Bloomfield Hills the following morning.  He and Ginger moved back to Fort Stockton and opened up a factory making vegan upholstery material out of cow manure and wheat husks.  Ginger had been sober for nearly twenty three years when she slipped on some raw materials  in the parking lot, hit her head and passed away after a short stay in hospice.  Kent married the girl from the Concord, photoshopped her into family photos, sold the business to his kids and now splits his time between volunteering at the Fort Stockton Animal Control Facility and hiking.

Cadillac’s market share of the luxury market dropped from over 70% in the 1950s to less than 17% in 2018.  Lincoln’s sales surpassed Cadillac’s in 1999.  GM declared bankruptcy in 2009.  Toyota became the largest automobile manufacturer in the world in 2021.

Roger Smith made between 2 and 3 million dollars a year while heading up GM.  His retirement package after exiting the company was figured to be 1.2 million annually.  GM’s shareholders lost their entire investment when the company declared abruptly in 2009.  Roger Smith has been named one of the Ten Worst Executives of all time.