Bernie Fineman, Original Motor Mouth

by Bernie Fineman

  I called Brian and presented my evidence to him and he eventually admitted that to try to reduce the cost of producing this ‘snake oil’ he had changed from medium and long chain chlorinated paraffin to short chain. The result wasn’t just dangerous; it also completely reduced the effectiveness of the fluid. I felt terrible because I had been duped and, worse, I had encouraged other businesses to spend a lot of money on this stuff.

  There was one other issue that we had with this snake oil, though, and that wasn’t Brian’s fault.

  Brian gets a call saying that an engine-driven power station in Central America keeps seizing, so I get sent over to take a look. The trip is a nightmare: London Heathrow to Houston Texas, then a wait for four hours to get another plane to El Salvador. This was a total trip of fifteen hours and by the time I get there I’m fucked. It’s now 10 pm at night, still blazing hot outside, and I’m sweaty, tired, jet lagged, and ready to kick arse.

  I’m at the airport, and I can’t see the guy – Christian Auer – who is meant to be meeting me. I have never met him, speak no Spanish, my mobile does not work and I have no local currency to call him from a call box. I ask at the airline desk, tell them my woe, and they call him for me. At last, I’m connected to him.

  ‘WHAT?’ he says. ‘You’re not due till tomorrow. Stay there, I’m on my way.’

  Thank FUCK for that, I think, as I’m getting dodgy looks from the locals, who are eyeing my suitcase etc. So now it’s out to customs, where I meet a customs man who speaks in broken English.

  ‘Please open your suitcase,’ he asks me.

  Inside I’ve got new shirts, short sleeved ones, trousers etc., all brand new for the trip – they’ve still got the labels on. This guy goes through them, then says, ‘Are these for your personal use?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply.

  ‘Well Señor, you could be bringing them in for resale, so you will have to pay $400 to go through customs.’

  NO FUCKING WAY JOSE, I think to myself, but he is adamant. I have to pay or he won’t let me pass through customs. I explain where I’m going, what I’m doing, and mention that the father-in-law of Chris, this guy I’m meeting, is the Minister of the Interior, Don Roberto Machon.

  After that he salutes me and says, ‘Have a good trip, Señor.’

  Amazing what a bit of name-dropping does, got ya, fella?

  Chris finally arrives one hour later, apologises, and we are off to my hotel, a little secure guarded eight-room place called Casa de Rada. It’s beautiful, all flowers and plants and a lovely lady to greet me called Stella, who is the owner.

  I unpack, shower and now it’s gone midnight, but Chris wants to take me to dinner. I would love to just go to sleep, but I’m Hank Marvin (starving) so we go to a small fish restaurant where he orders something for me off the menu. It’s called Concha de Burro and it arrives in a tall glass, and looks like mussels. OK, I think, I can handle that. Until he squeezes lime juice over it and, oh my God, these little fuckers start moving!!!

  ‘What the hell is this?’ I ask.

  ‘Just taste it Bernie, I promise you will love it.’

  Well here goes, and fuck me it’s great, all fishy and slimy, but so good. We have a beer and fresh bread, and veggies and I’m full, tired and want me bed. At the hotel, I shower again, it’s still really hot, and I’m informed that the daytime temperature is about 46 degrees, and at night it’s about 38 to 40 degrees. I try to sleep, but my stomach is going ten to the dozen, I’ve got the farts, rumbles, and I wanna be sick. I just make it to the shower when my guts repel all I have eaten, all over the wall and floor. UGHHHHHH!!!

  That’s better, I think, except for the clearing up, which I do. Then I sleep till 7 am, shower, go down for breakfast, just toast and tea, and then Chris arrives. We take a three-hour drive in a clapped out Peugeot, that’s got a rail from floor to ceiling with shotguns attached, and we’re in the middle of the jungle, at a place called Ahuachapan (near the border with Guatemala), near the power station we’ve come to fix.

  On the way Chris tells me his story. He was born French-Canadian, ex-French Foreign Legion and ex-mercenary, settled in El Salvador some twenty years ago, met a lady, married and had kids, and the only other country he can go to is Canada. Fuck me, I think, sounds like he’s a hired killer for the government. I’d better behave myself!

  In the heat, we gradually check over all the engine parts of the power station to see what caused it to fail. The bearings are virtually blue, and that’s because of lack of lubrication, but I could see that the oil that was drained out was plentiful, so it wasn’t oil starvation that caused it. I’m working with five engineers, who speak no English, so I talk through Chris, who has to translate. We eventually get the engine back in place and up and running.

  But after two days, it seizes again.

  WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON??? I wonder.

  I go back to the plant, and I don’t understand this at all. We checked everything out and all I could find was that the number 1 and number 12 big ends (the bearing surface between the larger end of a connecting rod and the crankpin of the crankshaft) had seized up, which was due to blocked oilways (the channels that permit the flow of lubricating oil).

  Now I had a suspicion, and I want to do an oil analysis, so I take a one-litre sample of it and Chris and I drive to Guatemala City, which is about four hours away. We stop at one of the laboratories and they say it will cost 300 quetzal (the local currency) and it will take two days for the results. But for 1,000 quetzal we could get it in four hours. We take the second option and after two hours we return, and are told with a smile, ‘Señor, this is piss.’

  I say, ‘WHAT?! Is this fucker swearing at me?’

  ‘No, Señor,’ he assures me. ‘I speak English good. Your engine oil has 35 per cent human urine.’

  Now the oil being used in this engine costs over £250 to fill it. It turned out that what these engineers at the plant were doing was filling the base with oil and then peeing in the intake to bring up the level, then adding cheap reclaimed oil, and then selling the new oil! Cheeky fuckers.

  We take our results to the plant manager, and, after a further two days of building the engine, all the engineers are sacked, and the correct oil is fitted. To date, there has never been another problem reported. They’re happy, and I get an intro to a company in India.

  My reputation is spreading. I do more work and am flown to Bombay, Delhi, Karachi, Calcutta, to do similar work on outside power plant engines. So I land in the UK after being away for two months, tired, happy and dying for an English cuppa and a kosher bacon sandwich. I’ve got more air miles than Alan Whicker, but I get yet another call to go to El Salvador. This, you’ll remember, became that infamous trip I mentioned earlier, when there was a military coup, and when I lost my mum.

  After all this I was done with travelling for a while, but I knew I’d been lucky to experience so many other cultures. In El Salvador, for instance, the law of the land is that everyone carries a gun or machete and you protect your own property. If someone is stealing from you, then you shoot to kill, not maim.

  Chris, as I’ve said, was an ex-mercenary, so he knew what he was doing in these matters, and he always carried a gun strapped to his ankle as well as one in his jacket, and he kept a sawn-off shotgun in the car. He was married to the daughter of the Minister of the Interior. One day she was in the car with their two young children when a guy ran up to them, opened the passenger door and tried to steal her handbag, but before he could grab it she shot him straight between the eyes, right there in broad daylight.

  Obviously, Chris’s wife didn’t know if he was going for the handbag, her or the kids, and she wasn’t waiting to find out. The culture over there is ‘another dead Indian, more tortillas for the rest of us’ and with her father also being the Minister of the Interior, no more was ever said about it. In countries like that death is part of life, so to speak. It was like the Wild West sometimes.

  By contrast, Cuba couldn’t have been mo
re hospitable and, of course, you don’t need me to tell you that with all those classic cars driving around I felt like I was in heaven! There were 1959 Ford Zodiacs that looked like they’d just come out of the factory, and everyone was so proud of their cars that they kept them in perfect condition, no matter how old they were. The people out there didn’t have much, but they were rich in generosity and friendliness. They were under tremendous pressure all the time to eke out a living, but they were genuine and worked hard.

  I am sure that Cuba can be just as dangerous as El Salvador at times, and there is plenty of poverty, but I never received anything but a warm welcome. I was there to help the local distributor, Gary, promote the Effects product, but he would often find himself in trouble with his repayments to the company, so Effects were continually threatening to go over and seize his stock. He rightly pointed out that if they wanted to come over to Cuba and take stock back out of the country, he’d love to see them try!

  Gary was paying the company what he could for this ‘snake oil’ and so were his clients. Sometimes they were paying money they couldn’t really spare, and it was those guys, the customers and Gary, that I felt most sorry for when I realised I’d been duped. It was them who were going to be left with broken engines on which they relied for their livelihoods. I regret it to this day.

  With my foreign adventures over for the time being, over the next few years I worked at various garages around London as a senior mechanic, foreman or consultant, but it was always the same: when work dried up the most expensive employee had to go and that was usually me. So eventually I took the bull by the horns and decided to open my own garage.

  After a few weeks searching I found a small garage in Belsize Park. So here I am, I have my own client list, a couple of cars ready to go, and bang, crash, wallop, I’m in business. I’ve got two ramps there, a small space out front for parking, a little office at the back and flats above, so there’s no working after 6 pm, as I don’t want to disturb the new neighbours. I decorate the place all bleach white, red ramps and half the walls red. I call up some clients and away we go.

  First thing Monday morning two cars turn up, both Jaguars, needing a service and some other stuff. I call the local suppliers and yes, they will supply me on a weekly basis and with a limit of £250-worth of goods.

  First two jobs done, I’m paid and have a tidy profit of £350 – not a bad first day’s work. Unfortunately, during the rest of the week only two other cars come in. Suddenly I remember why I never went into business before. I’m shitting it, my rent is £1,000 per month, plus electric, ground rate, fuel, etc., so I have to take at least £1,500 to break even.

  I start making desperate calls to all the clients I have worked with over the past few years, morning and night, and slowly the work comes in, and I mean really comes in. Within a month I am stacked, three or four cars a day, working on my own, six days a week. I can’t cope.

  Just at the right time a guy comes into the garage. His name’s David and he is from Australia, says he is a mechanic with ten years’ experience and seeking a job. We chat, he seems a nice guy, so I take him on: one month’s trial for £250 per week. Things go well for the month, we get on well and he is a good mechanic, turns up on time, no days off and always helpful. I tell him, ‘OK, £350 per week, that’s the best I can do for now.’ We shake hands and I even give him a set of keys.

  After a month or so he asks if can he do his own cars on a Sunday, and I say no problem, just don’t make any noise or the neighbours will complain. I remembered that I was always grateful to the garages I worked for in the early days for letting me do my own work on the side, so in the same spirit of generosity, I had no problem with David doing work for his mates in his own time. Four months down the line, David is doing well. He does his mates’ cars on Sundays, always cleans up and leaves by early evening.

  Everything’s running along fine until one Sunday I get a call from a client who says he’s just driven past my garage and it’s stacked to capacity, and there are cars queuing down the street.

  What the fuck?

  I jump straight in my car and head over. David and three other guys have cars jacked up in the street, both ramps working. All the lights are on and there’s loud banging, engines revving and I notice two of my clients’ cars are being worked on. I park around the corner and walk in.

  ‘What the fuck is all this about?’ I ask him.

  Red-faced, he tells me it’s his private work and the other mechanics are mates who’ve come to help him. I ask him what my clients’ cars are doing there on a Sunday, so he says they asked him to do them privately.

  ‘REALLY???’ I say. ‘We’ll see about that.’

  So I call them up and find out that this little fucker has been calling my clients, telling them that if they bring the cars in on Sundays it will be 50 per cent cheaper. I then call my supplier and I find out that all the parts he is using have been added to MY account. He had a right little business going on: no overheads, a ready list of clients and when they paid for parts he was putting it on my account and pocketing the cash himself.

  This is not on, so in the politest way I can muster – which isn’t very – I tell him FUCK OFF now, take your scrawny mates with you and don’t come back. I even take his car keys, as I’m keeping his car until I find out how much this cunt has had me over for. He then calls the police, who attend the garage twenty minutes later. I tell them the story, but they insist I give him his keys back, which I do. They escort him and said mates off the premises, never to be seen again.

  With bills mounting, and all the parts he has nicked off me for his private work, I’m up shit creek without a paddle. I have to find some £4,000 just to get on track with suppliers and rent etc., so – fingers to the grindstone – I work and work all on my own, night and day, until I’m straight again.

  More than anything else, this episode made me realise that I’m a good mechanic, but no businessman, so after a year I decide enough is enough. I close the business and go back to working for someone else – let them have the headaches of dealing with staff and paying bills. If you’ll worry about the money, just give me a team of mechanics and I’ll make any garage run properly.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BERNIE’S NO-NONSENSE GUIDE TO BUYING A USED CAR

  Apart from buying a house, buying a car is often the biggest purchase you ever make. Even a second-hand car can cost thousands of pounds, so going to buy a car is an exciting thing, your blood is pumping, the adrenaline is rushing, because you know you’re going to part with a lot of money and the stakes are high.

  The thing that most people do is that they buy on impulse, which is wrong. It’s love at first sight: you see the car and that’s it, it’s an orgasmic feeling: ‘I’ve gotta have that car!’

  But let me tell you, all that glitters ain’t gold. A shiny car in damp weather can hide a multitude of sins.

  Rule number one – never buy a car in the rain. When a car is wet it looks very, very shiny and you can’t really see if there are a lot of ripples in the body and scratches are hard to make out too. Without the rain disguising it you can see if the paintwork is completely flat – and if that’s the case, then it hasn’t been looked after, and you could be in for a re-spray. So never buy a car in the rain: besides getting your hair wet, you could also be buying a pup.

  Unless a car is made of fibreglass, when you go and see it for the first time, keep your distance from the salesman and take a magnet with you. Assuming the car’s made of metal, go over each panel with a magnet – if it doesn’t stick to the doors or wings then there’s a good chance it’s got a lot of filler (glass fibre body repair material) in it, meaning it’s probably had an accident.

  The majority of cars today are still made of steel. They may be a lot, lot thinner than they were years ago, but most cars on the road are still metal. However, some makes of car use various alloys and some are carbon-fibre, so if you’re not sure about a certain vehicle go online and look up the spec – i
t will tell you what composite materials the car is made from. If it’s a metal, then the magnet should stick.

  Once you’re happy the car is mostly made of what it’s meant to be made of, the next thing to do is ascertain whether it is straight. Crouch down by the rear light and look down the length of the car. If it has lots of ripples in it, it’s been badly repaired. If it ain’t straight, or the doors aren’t aligned with the panels, you’re in serious trouble.

  How much trouble? Well, hopefully not this much. Many years ago, we’re talking probably early seventies, the gorgeous and wonderful Barbara Windsor bought a Rolls-Royce for her old man (at the time) Ronnie Knight. A couple of months later she brings it into the garage, and says she’s having to change the tyres every three weeks! They were wearing out as quickly as they could put new ones on.

  When I checked the car over, the first thing I did was look straight down the wing and saw that the chassis was as bent as a nine-bob note. Not only that, but the steering geometry and components had been straightened, not replaced, and the thing was driving down the road crabwise. Bloody dangerous! You didn’t need to be a mechanic to see this thing had been in a serious accident and badly repaired, so Barbara took it straight back to the guy she bought it from, but – surprise surprise – he didn’t want to know.

  Next day I went down there and read him the riot act, and, Bob’s your uncle, he reluctantly gives her the money back. She’d bought it on impulse, all shiny and new so she thought, but obviously she hadn’t looked at it straight on. As for the dodgy dealer, well, all I can say is he should think himself lucky I went down there. There were one or two people whom Barbara knew in the East End at that time that could’ve done a lot worse damage to him than I could.

  Another tip for when you’re buying: put your hand on the bonnet. If it’s warm, then obviously it’s been recently driven. That could be genuine, or it could mean that in cold weather it doesn’t start easily. That could mean anything from a fuel injection problem to a low compression problem within an engine. Some cars smoke more from the exhaust when they are cold than when they are hot. Sometimes people try to dupe you and have the car warm when you get there, so be aware of this, and don’t be afraid to say you’ll come back when the engine is cold.