The Last Open Road

by Burt Levy

  Colin St. John sold just about everything that crossed the Atlantic at one time or another (including such gems of European automotive artistry as the Renault Dauphine, Hillman Husky, Humber Super Snipe, and the usual assortment of Fiats) but his main stock in trade was always Jaguars and MGs. Business was better than good, and West-bridge moved to larger quarters in 1951. Colin made himself a lot of money during the 1950s.

  But success in the car business came naturally to Colin, since he "grew up in the motor trade" (as he called it) and knew all the ropes to pull, fancies to tickle, and angles to shoot. His father owned a garage near London that sold rough, high-mileage Rolls Royces and Bentleys to people who probably should've bought a new Ford instead, and Colin learned at his father's knee that the key feature in any automotive transaction was the split between how cheap you could buy and how high you could sell (after bumping out a few dents and covering it all with a quick-and-dirty respray, anyway). Barry Spline told me a great story about a would-be gentleman who bought a well-abused Bentley from Colin's dad, then tried to return it the same afternoon after hitting a pothole and knocking a chunk the size of a league ball out of the rocker panel. Underneath was nothing but a huge rust crater filled with wadded-up newspaper. As you can imagine, the guy was pretty upset. "Look at THIS!!" he screamed, waving his fists under Colin's father's nose, "You told me this car was in absolutely PRISTINE condition!"

  "Oh, and I truly thought it was," Colin's dad told him, real sincere and disappointed-like. "The agent I bought it through has always been totally reliable in the past." He wrung his hands as though his entire faith in human decency had been savagely trampled. "Just imagine," he continued softly, shaking his head, "the scoundrel swore it came from an estate sale. Told me the motorcar belonged to a third cousin of the duke of Windsor himself! Why, to think anyone would have the brass to patch up a Bentley with putty and old newspapers...."

  "Old?" the guy bellowed, grabbing Colin's dad by the necktie, "why, this is YESTERDAY MORNING'S BLOODY FIRST EDITION!!"

  Of course, Colin's Manhattan dealership was entirely different from his father's used car garage in England, on account of the new car and used car businesses were, to use Colin's words, "as different as chalk and cheese." After a few shots of scotch, he'd explain at length how "every used car is unique—has its own character, its own perfume, its own romance—while every new automobile is essentially ident-i-cal to every other blasted one they push off the assembly line. The only real differences are color and trim."

  "So?"

  "So, indeed!" Colin would snort, tamping a fresh wad of Cavendish into his pipe. "The price of a used car is governed only by the glimmer in a chap's eye or the faintly detectable quickening of his pulse, whilst the profit on a new car is sadly subject to the eternal and inescapable laws of supply and demand."

  Colin St. John understood those laws perfectly, and that's why he kept every shipment of new Jaguars stashed in a windowless meat truck garage on the other side of town. All except one, that is, which he would place on the little twelve-by-sixteen Oriental carpet in front of the fake maple partition that separated Colin's "showroom" from the rest of the Westbridge shop. That's how every single XK120 Colin had came to be "absolutely the last one in the country." And he wasn't above taking multiple deposits (or multiple futures on "the next one coming in") and using the money for general operating expenses. Plus there was always a story. A little romance. Like, "This particular example was ordered for the Earl of Buxton. He summers in the Hamptons, don't you know. But the poor chap was killed in a hunting accident before he could take delivery. Happened just a fortnight ago. Most unfortunate business. On Safari in Africa with his new bride (don't think she was a day over eighteen—it was quite the scandal in the House of Lords) when the poor devil got himself trampled by a charging bull elephant. Bloody gun jammed. A shame, really. And the lads in Coventry worked so hard to match that precise shade of royal blue from the family crest."

  Colin's upscale New York customers ate it up.

  But the real money at Westbridge didn't come from selling cars. No sir. It came from the maintenance and repair business they generated once those Jags and MGs were out prowling the streets. That's because if there was one thing a Jaguar or MG needed with great regularity, it was to be fixed. Especially if it belonged to some country-club rube who grew up on a diet of substantial American cars like Packards and Lincolns and such, and even more especially if it spent a lot of time scuffling around Manhattan in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The more cars Colin sold, the more sick ones came stumbling and coughing and wobbling their way through the service entrance, desperately in need of attention. Tune-ups, lube jobs, valve adjustments, timing chains, clutches, generators, voltage regulators, gearbox synchros, cylinder heads—it was all money in the bank to Colin St. John. Easy money, too, since Colin wasn't above cutting corners, and fully appreciated the ignorance of stylish, high-line New Yorkers when it came to nuts-and-bolts mechanical stuff. Why, fastening up a simple loose wire could be good for the price of a brand-new starter motor (so long as you kept a can of shiny black spray paint stashed behind the service counter).

  The hard part—always—was finding competent, reliable mechanics who could actually fix the damn cars. Let me explain to you how it is with automobile mechanics. I personally divvy them up into three distinct categories. First off, you've got your basic Shadetree Butchers. Old Man Finzio was a Butcher, even though he ran a gas station for a living. But most Butchers are home-garage amateurs who only bring their cars to a professional after they've already made a godawful mess out of whatever they were trying to fix in the first place. Butchers can be counted on to snap studs, shear bolts, strip threads, wedge bearing races in cockeyed, and turn every electrical problem into a stinking, smoldering glob of molten plastic and charred insulation. No self-respecting mechanic likes working around a Butcher, and cleaning up after one is even worse.

  One giant step from the Butcher is the Parts Replacer. Parts Replacers know their way around an automobile all right, but they don't comprehend at all how car stuff really operates. To them, every mechanical component is like a sealed vault filled with some kind of rare magical pudding that makes it work. So they invariably start yanking off old parts and throwing new ones at a problem until it either goes away or the car's owner declares bankruptcy. God certainly must have loved Parts Replacers, because he made so many of them.

  And then you've got the Fixers. The maestros. The Real McCoy. Fixers can diagnose a hiccup in your carburetor or a death rattle in your crankcase just like a medical doctor, and then go in so slick and clean that when they're done, you can't even tell the car's been worked on. Except that it runs better than ever. A Fixer can even make parts. "It's all done, Mr. Jones. The choke cable was sticking because it was going over-center, so I made a new bracket to bring it in at a better angle."

  Those guys are hard to find. And even harder to keep.

  And it was difficult to locate top-notch foreign-car mechanics who could meet the stringent Westbridge employment standards. To begin with, you had to be foreign. It didn't matter exactly what kind of foreign (except for maybe Eskimo) but it was absolutely essential to have an exotic, offshore look and some sort of impossible-to-understand foreign accent. Part of the image, don't you know? Plus not just anybody could learn how to fix cars the Westbridge Way. For example, not many mechanics know how to repair a car so it runs perfectly when it leaves the shop, yet assure that something totally unrelated will break, fail, burn out, or fall off within a maximum two weeks time. And a West-bridge employee had to uphold the time-honored tradition of returning every car with at least one greasy handprint on the upholstery or a smear of Permatex sealant matted into the carpeting. Most important of all, a job could never, ever be finished on time. Colin was a real stickler about that, since it was the cornerstone of the carefully-nurtured relationship between Westbridge Motor Car Company, Ltd., and its trendy, upscale clientele. Due to these rigorous standards (not to menti
on low pay and lousy working conditions) the Westbridge technical staff amounted to an endlessly-rotating parade of thickly accented grease monkeys that included, at one time or another, a Graham, a Raoul, a Vito, a Hans, one each Martine and Bjorn, two Hugos, a Philippe, and even a Juan. All in less than a year.

  And then there was Sylvester. Sylvester Jones. He was a colored guy from Harlem who worked at Westbridge on and off from the very beginning. Although he didn't have much in the way of formal training, Sylvester was a natural-born handyman who'd lived out of a toolbox most all his life, and hard experience had left him with a keen practical sympathy for machinery. Even Uncle Sam's Army recognized Sylvester's talent, and they had him wrenching on everything from Jeeps to tanks to the broken jukebox in the officers' club bar during the war. But then the war ended, he got his discharge, and it didn't take long to discover that he was shit out of luck as far as finding any kind of civilian job with a title, future, or decent take-home wage attached. Sure, a lot of it was because he was colored, but you had to factor in that Sylvester Jones was a surly, argumentative sonofabitch with a little bit of a drinking problem. Not that Sylvester ever saw drinking as a problem. No sir. He considered it more of a hobby.

  Then again, he had a lot of things to drink about. His wife was already on the chubby side when they got married before the war, and she put on another two or three pounds every month he was away in the service. So she was not exactly the kind of woman you dream about coming home to (unless your tastes run to the fat lady at the Barnum Bailey Circus, that is). And the cute little twin babies Sylvester left behind had likewise turned into a sticky, bawling, foul-smelling pair of toddlers. Plus it wasn't long before his big fat wife had another set of twins on the way. "Sheee-it!" he'd shrug with a bewildered sense of pride, "Ah jus' shoots doubles ever' damn time. It mus' be in the genes here, see," and he'd nod toward the bulge under his zipper like it was a prize bowling trophy or something. But there wasn't much work around town for a handy colored guy with special jeans like Sylvester Jones—just cruddy factory jobs and stuff—so he kind of split up his time between drinking half-pints of sweet wine and fixing broken-down cars to sell on the cheap in Harlem. Sylvester made pretty good money doing that, but it wasn't steady and every now and then his lard-ass wife would get after him to find a job with a regular paycheck. In fact, it was on exactly such an expedition that Sylvester wandered past the old, back-alley Westbridge garage one Tuesday afternoon in 1949, just as Barry Spline was attempting to yank a stubborn transmission out the bottom side of a Mk. V Jaguar sedan. Barry worked pretty much alone in those days, and just between you and me, he was never real good at grunt work. Oh, he could tune an engine razor sharp or true a wire wheel so's it'd spin like an electric motor, but when it came to the heavy, knuckle-busting in-and-out jobs, he was better off letting somebody else do it. Which is exactly what must've run through his mind when that Jag tranny popped loose and landed on top of him, pinning him under the car. "Help! Help! Help!" he screamed into the cast-iron driveshaft flange that had come to rest across the bridge of his nose. Sylvester heard the commotion and came in to see what all the fuss was about, and in two shakes he had the car jacked up a foot higher, freed the shifter where it was snagged on the carpeting, unscrewed the speedo cable, and dragged Barry and the Jag's transmission out by the heels.

  He was hired on the spot.

  Of course, Barry could only offer Sylvester Jones a position as a car porter, on account of he was colored. That went without saying. Now car porters are the guys you see knocking around the back of car dealerships washing cars and cleaning floor mats and changing license plates—you know, nigger work—but it wasn't long before Barry Spline and even Colin St. John realized what a talented guy Sylvester was when it came to automobiles. He understood sick machinery, and could usually see right through all the blackened oil and busted metal to the root cause of every breakdown and failure. And nothing intimidated him. Not Jaguar valve adjustments or Bentley bottom ends or anything else on this earth that ran on four wheels and an internal combustion engine. "They's alia same upside down," he'd explain with a wolfish smile, "jes' like wimmen."

  Although Sylvester Jones's official title remained "car porter" for as long as he worked at Westbridge, he was the best damn mechanic they ever had. And everybody who worked there knew it.

  "I say, Sylvester, could you pop over and 'ave a look at the voltage regulator on the one-twenty in my stall?"

  Sylvester'd be lying on a creeper under some Jag or MG, and he'd sputter when he talked because he always had the butt end of a Lucky Strike poking up out of the corner of his mouth. "Aw shit, man, jus' push the damn blade down. Same as on my old Plymouth parked in the lot out there. Sheee-it!"

  And Graham or Raoul or Vito or Martine or whoever would wander back to the car they were working on and know exactly what to do next—even if they hadn't the slightest notion why.

  To be perfectly honest, Sylvester Jones wasn't a particularly nice edition of a human being. He had a mean streak a mile wide and didn't like anybody "messing with him." "Don't mess with me," he'd tell Graham or Raoul or even Colin St. John himself. And, if they knew what was good for them, they wouldn't. In that respect he was a lot like Butch (although Butch would've given me a solid punch in the nose for suggesting he was similar to any sort of colored person).

  Sylvester's dark moods came and went like the weather, and probably had something to do with his shitty job, his 360-pound wife, his four kids, his occasional side girlfriends, a mean dice habit, and most especially drinking the old sauce. Every so often, Sylvester'd get himself a king-sized thirst and more or less disappear for a few hours. Or days. Sometimes a week, even. But he always came back. And each time, regular as clockwork, Colin St. John would fire him. I swear, Colin must've fired Sylvester once or twice a month. "You're bloody fired!" he'd holler, his cheeks going all ruddy pink. "Do you understand?!"

  "Fine wit' me, man," Sylvester'd sneer right back. "Dat's jes'fine wit' me. Sheee-it!" and he'd walk out the door. Then Colin would look around at all the sick automobiles in his shop and wonder how the hell he was going to get the damn things fixed without Sylvester Jones.

  So when Sylvester shuffled in a few days later to pick up his tools and paycheck—eyes all yellow and bloodshot, hands shaking just a little, Lucky dangling from his lower lip—Colin would inevitably be ready to grant him "one last chance. Just one more." Sylvester'd nod and grunt and blow his nose in his hand while Colin rambled on (like it made a damn difference, you know?) and then they'd shake on it and Colin'd head for the can to wash the snot off his hand while Sylvester went back to fixing whatever needed to be fixed so he could earn enough money to take care of his family, his dice game, his girlfriends, and maybe disappear with a bottle again the next time he felt like it.

  I learned most of what I know about fixing foreign sports cars from Sylvester Jones. Not that he'd ever sit me down and teach me stuff, but if I asked the right questions—like, fr'instance, why Big Ed's Jag was fouling its plugs and blowing sooty black clouds out the tailpipe—he'd first off growl and shake his head like I was some kind of prize-winning moron, but then he'd show me what was wrong and how to fix it. Barry Spline couldn't always do that. Not even for money. When Barry talked, he wrapped everything up in that snooty brand of English they use in the British shop manuals, and sometimes I got the impression he didn't really know what he was talking about. But Sylvester could pick up something—like the S.U. carburetor that was sitting on his workbench the first day I met him—and explain how it worked in language an ordinary knucklehead wrench-twister from Jersey could understand. He stuck one lumpy finger into the throat of that S.U. and worked the piston up and down so I could see how it made the needle move up and down in the jet, giving more fuel as the engine inhaled more air. It was simple, really. Then Sylvester showed me the starting carburetor, which was nothing but a little solenoid doohickey on the rear float bowl that let extra fuel into the manifold to richen up the mixture when t
he engine was cold. That's what was making Big Ed's Jag foul its spark-plugs all the time. The damn solenoid wasn't shutting off like it should when the engine warmed up.

  Like I said, it was simple.

  3: JULIE

  BIG ED was thrilled when I finally got the starting carburetor problem sorted out on his Jag, and for a reward he decided to lend me his Caddy convert so I could take Julie out on the town. Can you believe it? Like I explained, Julie and me had gotten pretty friendly around the Sinclair, but we'd never had what you could actually call a date. One reason is I never got up the nerve to ask her, but a lot of that was because I didn't have a car to take her anyplace. Needless to say, my old man was not about to lend me his Mercury, and you'd have to be a real doofus to ask a girl to walk to the movies. Especially the drive-in. Then this one Saturday afternoon—right out of the blue—Big Ed tossed me the keys to the white Caddy and said, "Hey, why don'cha take that Julie out someplace nice, huh?" and slipped me a couple saw-bucks to take care of the expenses, too. You don't find many guys who'd do a thing like that for their garage mechanic. "Have a swell time, kid," Big Ed grinned as he climbed into the Jag (which was purring like a well-fed kitten, if I do say so myself), but then he grabbed a fistful of my shirtsleeve and added: "You put so much as scratch on that Cadillac and I'll rip yer goddam head off an' use it for a bowling ball."