I hear ya! I got in that situation last year of having a new to me truck that was allegedly in better shape than it actually was. For the price, I knew it was far from perfect, but when you buy something that has functional AC, and it's not functioning for long, and it's August in Houston, Texas, that's not fun.
And then when the reason it's losing trans fluid is because it's fixing to lose the trans, that's not fun either. I'm not mad at the friend I got it from, more at their family's"mechanic" who inspected it and gave it a clean bill of health ( to the guy's mom no less!). They own a lot of property in the small town in south Texas where the truck was kept, and I suspect that nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of the landlords.