Bernie Fineman, Original Motor Mouth

by Bernie Fineman

  ‘What? No I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes you did, you proposed!’

  Next thing I know, when we got back to England all of her family, the bloody ‘Blume Mafia’, were there to greet me. I thought ‘I’ve got to put a stop to this’, so she went back to her parents’ place and I went to my little bachelor flat in Hendon, made a few phone calls to the lads to arrange a night out, and thought, ‘Great, I’m out of here.’

  Three hours later I get a knock at the door. It’s Lisa with her suitcases. She moved in there and then. And we’ve been together ever since! Lisa definitely helps keep me young, she’s fifteen years younger than me. When I told the guys in the garage I was getting married one of them said, ‘Why don’t you marry someone your own age?’

  I said, ‘I can’t, they’re all dead!’

  When we were first married money was tight. We lived in my little flat in Hendon but wanted a place that was ours rather than mine. At the garage we had a 24-hour breakdown service and recovery truck, so I speak to the guv, tell him I want to be on 24-hour call, and so he lets me take the truck home with me. We agree to do a 60/40 split with any breakdowns and if it can’t be fixed roadside, a good job will be a 40 per cent bonus if the car is brought to the garage for repair.

  In seven days I did just ONE breakdown, so I decided to be a ‘Motorway Pirate’. This is a lonely and risky job, cruising up and down the M1 motorway looking for breakdowns. Now I realised that this ain’t no way to start a marriage, so I restricted my on-call times to three nights per week. I got some small jobs: tyre changes, run-out-of-fuel gigs, and tow-off-the-motorway jobs, plus the occasional accident recovery.

  I shared the profits with the guv, and to be frank it brought in a small yet good addition to our household, but ‘Her Indoors’ was getting pissed off with me working night and day, and it affected my health as well, what with only getting an hour or two’s kip some nights. So I gave it up after a month or two. But it was a real experience, cruising on the open road, not knowing when the next job might turn up, living by your wits and the luck of being in the right place at the right time.

  Eventually Lisa and I saved enough to move into a small house in Hertfordshire, and did all the decorating ourselves, and tried to make the place look homely. One Sunday we have an almighty row, as couples do. Now Lisa is a sweet lady, but believe me you don’t wanna mess with her. It goes on and on and on and on, until she states: ‘THAT’S ALL YOU WANT ME FOR – COOKING, CLEANING AND FUCKING!’ And with that she strips off all her clothes, runs around the room, then out into the garden and carries it on, ranting and raving.

  Mr Cool me, I just lock the patio door, and she is still naked – I bet the neighbours loved it. I refused to let her in until she calmed down. After that peace was restored and we both saw the funny side and laughed. Lisa has to have a sense of humour, living with me.

  I’ve been married to my wife Lisa for thirty years now. She’s the only person on earth I’d ever let talk down to me, I just shut up and take it. Nadine, our daughter, is twenty-eight now, bless her, and married with a beautiful baby girl called Chloe – I could pick her up and eat her! Here’s one quick story that involves Nadine, and is possibly the most extraordinary coincidence I have ever known.

  When I was a lad we used to all go to the Coronet Club in St John’s Wood (now a very swish café/restaurant called Richoux) on a Saturday night for a bit of dancing and how’s your father. In those days it was two shillings and sixpence (15p) to get in, and you got a free record! One night we all squeezed into my mate’s father’s car and my ailing Triumph Herald, registration number YMC 600. We looked hot, all bathed, Old Spice aftershave and an itch between the legs for some action. We arrived, paid, and searched around for some likely candidates. I spotted a good ’un: Mary Quant-type hairstyle (a very fashionable look back then), all made up and Mmmm she had lovely legs.

  ‘What’s your name darling?’ I asked her.

  ‘Sandy,’ she replied.

  ‘Hello Sandy, would you like to dance?’

  ‘OK then.’

  We took to the floor like Fred and Ginger (Astaire and Rogers – a film star couple, famous for their accomplished dancing onscreen) and ‘twisted’ to Chubby Checker – a sixties pop star who invented his own dance of that name. Obviously I’m hoping to impress and maybe get back to hers or mine for a bit of rumpy-pumpy, so I ask Sandy if I can give her a lift home. She enthusiastically agrees but it was only a bit later on that I found out why. She lived in fucking Cornwall!

  Being a geezer I could hardly change my mind – and I did really fancy her – so I stupidly said, ‘No problem.’ Except there was a problem. I only had my Triumph Herald and in those days Cornwall was a seven-hour drive away. But she offered to pay for the petrol so I took her home.

  When we got there I was knackered and in no fit state for any physical exertion, so I slept on the couch and met her mum and dad when they got up the next morning. I think they were rather impressed with my selfless offer to see their daughter home safely so we got on quite well.

  We all went for a walk and then sat down for a nice Sunday lunch before I set off home again at 5 pm. I got home at midnight and was up again a few hours later to get to work at Thomas & Draper. Of course, everyone thought I was a fucking idiot when I told them I’d been to Cornwall and back in the last twenty-four hours! But it was worth it in the end, as Sandy and I continued a long-distance relationship for the next few months, taking it in turns either for her to come up to London or for me to head down to Cornwall.

  The friend of hers that she was visiting when she was in the Coronet Club then got engaged to my mate Rod, it was the ‘thing to do’ in those days. So I said, ‘Why don’t we get engaged too?’ And she said yes!

  When I told my dad he said, ‘Son, you’re nineteen, you’re hardly earning any money and you’ve only got a battered old Triumph Herald. Rather than get married why don’t you spend the money on buying a new car instead?’

  My dad spoke a lot of sense, so after thinking this over for a couple of days I broke off the engagement to Sandy and traded my Herald in for a Sunbeam Alpine!

  At the time one of my famous clients was a singer called Eden Kane who’d had a number one hit with ‘Well I Ask You’ and his brother was also a singer called Peter Sarstedt. Anyway, Eden had a blue Sunbeam Alpine that I was working on at the time and I absolutely fell in love with it, loved it more than Sandy in fact, so that’s why I got the car!

  I never gave Sandy much of a second thought after that, until about forty years later when Nadine brought a chap home. She was in her early twenties and this guy was a bit older, probably late twenties, and had only just split up from his wife. At some point early on in the relationship he’d obviously told his mum he was seeing a new girl and said her name was Nadine Fineman.

  ‘Fineman? What’s her dad’s name?’ his mum asked. Well, you can only imagine Sandy’s face when her son told her it was Bernie. Probably she was just as astounded as I’d been when he and Nadine told me who his mum was.

  Fuck me! You could’ve knocked me down with a feather!

  Turns out that Sandy eventually left Cornwall for good and moved to London, got married and had a family. But still, what are the chances of two people who live at opposite ends of the country having a teenage romance and forty years later their children coincidentally meeting and dating as well? To this day it still freaks me out when I think about it.

  That was the first time Nadine nearly gave me a heart attack and she’s done so a couple of times since too. When she passed her driving test I bought her a VW Polo, serviced it, put alloys on it, blinged it up. It was her pride and joy.

  A few weeks later me and Lisa are out for dinner with our good friends Phil and Sharon when we get a phone call to say that Nadine has been in an accident. There’s five of them in the car, she’s gone round Mill Hill roundabout, lost control, clipped the kerb, and the car’s flipped upside down and skidded twenty feet on its roof and hit a tree. The m
otor is barely recognisable as a vehicle but all five of them walked away from it without a scratch, not even a bruise – an absolute miracle.

  The other time she had an accident was when she was driving home from her job in a Bureau de Change at City Airport one night along Allum Lane, a steep and narrow road, and a white van veered over into the wrong lane and hit her head-on. Again, her car was a total write-off, about two feet shorter than it had started out, but miraculously, still Nadine walked away without a scratch.

  Someone, somewhere is clearly looking down on her but I hope to God she doesn’t have another incident, otherwise it could be third time unlucky. You remember I said how my mum’s hair went completely white when she heard about my dad’s car accident? Well, I don’t have any hair, but if I did have, God knows what colour it would have been after Nadine’s exploits!

  So I’ve got a wife, two daughters and three granddaughters: I’m surrounded by women!

  No wonder I’m bald and stark raving fucking mad!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  GOING PLACES

  The motor trade is a relatively small industry, so you can build a reputation quite quickly, but you can always lose it just as fast. By the late seventies I was making a good name for myself so if I lost a job, with a few phone calls on a Saturday and Sunday, come the Monday I was back in work.

  I had heard there was a vacancy at the Ladbroke Grove Motor Company. It was run by a couple of brothers, the garage was spotlessly clean and they did repairs for cars that were more your everyday Fords and whatever, so when I joined – and with my client base – they started getting the Jags and Astons in, which they were well chuffed about.

  Back in the late seventies, Ladbroke Grove had a large immigrant community, as it still does now. The thing about garages is that we see all walks of life coming in, for if you’ve got a car it doesn’t matter who you are, at some point you’re probably going to have to take it to a garage.

  So where in the East End I had some loyal customers from the Blind Beggar, in Ladbroke Grove it was the Yardie boys. These were gangsters of sorts, but the new breed. In the East End in the sixties it wasn’t about drugs, it was about protection rackets, extortion and robberies. In the West End it was the Caribbean immigrant crew pushing drugs and no doubt a very different operation, but they had many of the same values as the old East End gangsters. They were always polite and respectful and if you looked after them they looked after you.

  These were big, hard guys, but had clearly never done a day’s work in their lives yet were still able to drive around in blinged-up BMWs. Go figure. So as they drove round Ladbroke Grove they saw all the nice cars that we were now bringing in through my contacts so they started bringing their pride and joys in too. Andy, one of the owners, was very wary of them but, me being me, I get on with everyone, so I got speaking to them and over time built up their trust and so soon enough they were bringing nearly all their business our way.

  These were all the ‘Faces’ in the area, the guys who ran things. Eventually, one of them said, ‘You’ll never have any problems round here.’ Lots of businesses were getting broken into but once the word got out that they were bringing their cars to us we never had a moment’s trouble.

  The rule with dealing with guys like this was to keep your eyes and ears open but your mouth shut. Payment was always done in cash, they would have bagfuls of notes, and they would always give us a little extra to buy a drink. I remember one time one of the big boys needed some major work done on a Cadillac and when I finished I got a £50 tip – not bad at all in those days, and at Christmas it was bottles of champagne.

  The main man was a guy called, I won’t say his real name, let’s call him ‘K’. He was a man-mountain, obviously worked out a lot, with long dreadlocks down his back, immaculately dressed in charcoal grey suits, grey shirt and red tie, gold chains and rings, plenty of bling, always wearing hats, even Stetsons! His watch was so big it looked like he had Big Ben on his wrist.

  K would be chauffeur-driven everywhere and virtually every time he came in he had a different car, and sat in the back with smoke pouring out from a big fat joint. He was like the Jamaican Godfather. K would always say the same thing. If I did a good job he would say, ‘Bernie bwoy, dis ting is blouse and skirts!’

  Blouse and skirts? I’m used to Cockney rhyming slang, and it can be odd at times, but I could never get my head around ‘blouse and skirts’ but I took it to mean I’d done a good job.

  Occasionally you’d get a car in with a particularly big dent in the wing. Whether it was a football that had hit it or someone’s head I never knew. As before, it was ‘ask no questions, tell no lies’. Sometimes they’d say specifically: ‘Don’t go in the boot’ and you wouldn’t, not even out of curiosity – it was much better not to know.

  They had money and they loved their cars, those boys. K had a Cadillac Seville with a full leopard-skin interior, even the ceiling, carpets, and steering wheel. In fact the only thing that wasn’t covered in leopard-skin were the furry dice hanging off the rear-view mirror. The other cars I particularly remember were his Chevy Monte Carlo and Corvette Stingray, you didn’t see too many of them around. He had different cars all the time and one day I said to him, ‘What, have you got your own garage?’

  ‘No maan, I just like me cars.’

  Around this time a mate of mine thought he’d spotted a gap in the market when it came to the Corvette Stingray. They were coveted cars but very expensive to buy in the UK, and of course they were left-hand drive. He was importing them and getting them converted once they were here, but he wasn’t happy with the quality of the cars that were being sent, and the expense of getting any parts sent over was cutting into his profit margins. So, one day he says he wants to go out to Miami and source the cars himself and would I go with him to check they’re all kosher and do the conversions out there? He tells me he’ll split the profits with me.

  It’s a tempting offer but I said I needed a wage, I need to live. In a flash he slams five hundred quid into my hand and says, ‘There’s plenty more where that came from. You be the mechanic, I’ll be the businessman, we’re all going to earn some folding.’

  So he was going to pay me hand-over-fist to leave the dirty East End and move to Miami. They say that if an offer comes along that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Well, this was the exception to the rule, it sounded good and it turned out to be even better!

  Seven days later I’m in Miami. Wow, what a place! The sun was always shining, the women had long legs, nice round arses and an accent I didn’t understand. Fortunately, they love mine! I’ve never seen as much action before or since as I did in those months in Miami.

  But back to the cars for a moment. We go to see some Corvettes and check them out, but of five we see only one that is any good, and it’s very expensive. We walk along Biscayne Boulevard feeling a bit dejected, and I hear someone from within a garage shouting ‘Motherfucking English crap!’

  Curious now, I venture into the garage, and see this so-called mechanic trying to get a rear axle shaft out of a MGA 1600, and he’s thumping the axle casing with a massive club hammer. I step inside, he turns round, faces me and says, ‘Who are you, what do you want?’

  I reply, ‘Sorry, I heard you swearing, “fucking English cars”, so I just had to get a look at what it’s about. I’m a mechanic, so would you like me to show you an easy way to get the axle shaft out?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ he says, ‘I’ll get you a beer.’

  By the time he comes back with the beer, the axle shaft is out. ‘What the…?’ he gasps ‘How ya do that?’

  Just then the MD walks in, his name is Giancarlo Seri, and he asks me who I am. The mechanic tells him he had problems with this car and this here guy helped him. Giancarlo offers me a job on the spot but I tell him I’m here with a mate, we want to buy Corvettes and ship them to the UK, then convert them to right hand drive, and make a good profit, as there is a big demand there.

  He says, ‘Well, y
ou take the job, I will get you the best price Corvettes, convert them here and ship them to the UK, you can earn good money, an apartment, and a car.’ Fuck me, these Yanks move fast! And it didn’t stop there. Within a couple of weeks I have my green card so I can work in Miami legit.

  Soon I have a small apartment right near Key Biscayne, I show Bill (my English car-buying mate) some trade secrets, and then I introduce Giancarlo to my UK suppliers for English car parts, and he ships them out to Miami at a third of the price. We start getting very busy, particularly with Jaguar XK 150s, 3.8s, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. I’m earning double what I earn in the UK, meet some great people, but I wonder how Giancarlo got me a work permit and green card so quickly. I feel he’s ‘connected’.

  This is confirmed when he introduces me to his brother, who turns out to be the chief of police. Now, this brother drives a Jaguar 3.8, a $50,000 car, not bad on a copper’s wage. Seems the coppers there live a life of luxury, but it explains why he was eager to sort out the green card for the English mechanic so quickly. He tells me, ‘If you get stopped anytime, tell the officers to contact me personally, but don’t abuse it.’

  I met his daughter, she was stunning, mouth-watering, and a real Miami Princess spoilt type, whom I ended up knobbing as she fancied the pants of a bit of rough, namely me. It was a one-off, and she took me out to dinner at this expensive seafood restaurant, which would have cost me half my week’s wages.

  Giancarlo wants to have a staff meeting at French’s, a local Italian restaurant (yeah, called French’s!) one Monday night. We all arrive sharp at 7.30 pm and are ushered to a table in the corner. The Guv arrives with two other BIG blokes, all broken noses and padded out suits. We all sit down and discuss how the business is going, when Giancarlo drops a bombshell, saying, ‘Some motherfucker is stealing from me! I want answers now.’

  We all look round at one another, and then he says, ‘I have to make an example of this.’ And with that Clint, one of my fellow mechanics, is picked up by these two big blokes and taken outside. What happened I don’t know, but I never saw Clint again, and no one talked about it, ever. You read about the Mafia – was Giancarlo anything to do with that? I don’t know, or want to know for that matter. All I do know is that everyone knew him, he was respected, and very well connected. Many people came to the garage, had appointments with him, and left with smiles.