The Last Open Road

by Burt Levy

  Anyhow, Big Ed and me made it out to the village of Bridgehampton a little before ten, and the whole damn town was absolutely up for grabs. There were banners flying and bands playing and people all over the place—thousands of them!—and cars searching for parking places everywhere you looked. Not all of them sports cars, either. Fact is, most of the cars clogging the streets of Bridgehampton that Saturday morning were ordinary Fords and Dodges and Chevys and Mercurys that the rank-and-file rubberneckers drove out to watch the races. They were parked bumper-to-bumper up and down the side streets and overflowed onto private driveways and front lawns where local fast-buck artists were charging a quarter or more for the privilege.

  Of course, Big Ed figured his XK120 entitled us to something more than Ordinary Drool Spectator status, so he gunned right past the guys with the S.C.M.A. armbands who were halfheartedly directing traffic toward some empty fields about a mile outside of town. The armband people would take a gander at the Jaguar, see Big Ed grinning and waving his cigar around like we were somebody important, and finally leap aside when they realized he was not about to stop. Not hardly. A few of them were apparently a bit upset (at least judging by the names they called us and the way they shook their fists in the air) but at least none of them chased after us. It was slow going, though—like trying to drive down a carnival midway—and I had to keep one eye glued to the Jag's temp gauge. The needle would creep up past 200 every time we got bogged down a particularly dense herd of pedestrians, and then I'd give Big Ed a nudge in the ribs and he'd reach under the dash and punch the button for those Maserati air horns. Jeez, people scattered like we'd opened fire with a Thompson submachine gun!

  We came to this big roped-off parking area just as the Jag hit full broil, and you could see it was Race Central on account of it was filled with more damn foreign sports cars than you ever saw in your life. At the entrance was this huge yellow-and-white tent full of laughing, jabbering, glad-to-see-you-how've-you-been S.C.M.A. sportycar types getting themselves signed up and organized for the day's activities. So naturally Big Ed pulled up smack-dab in front, right between a red XK120 drophead and this pea soup—green Mk. VII sedan. We weren't there ten seconds before this skinny little twerp with thinning hair and basset-hound eyes came barreling out of the tent full tilt, flapping his arms like he was trying to take off. "Wait! Wait! WAIT!" he wailed. "These spaces are reserved!"

  "Who sez?" Big Ed wanted to know.

  "I do," the skinny guy shot back, leaning in over our windshield and staring Big Ed squarely in the kisser. "You simply cannot park here. It's impossible!"

  "Oh, yeah? Why not?" You could see Big Ed didn't like this guy's tone one bit. Neither did I, come to think of it.

  "Because these spaces are reserved for official cars." The guy had one of those nasally, upper-crust New England voices with sort of a permanent sniff to it. It was the kind of voice you'd just as soon have shut up, if you know what I mean.

  Big Ed peeled his eyes around at the other two Jags. "Saaay, how d'ya know this ain't an official car, huh?"

  "Nice try," the guy sneered, "but I know all the officials and all the official cars. Besides, you haven't got a sticker!"

  "A sticker?"

  "Yes, a sticker. An official sticker." He pointed a lump-jointed finger at the red Jag's windshield. Sure enough, down there in the lower lefthand corner was a silver-and-red wire wheel decal with SPORTS CAR MOTORING ASSOCIATION written across it in dark blue letters.

  "Oh, really?" Big Ed snorted, not sounding particularly convinced. Then he opened his door and started to climb out.

  "WAIT!" the skinny guy shrieked, his voice going up five or six octaves, "Where do you think you're GOING?!"

  "Me?" Big Ed said calmly, closing the Jag's door behind him, "I'm goin' inta this tent here and see about gettin' me one a'those parking stickers." And with that, Big Ed walked right past the skinny guy like he was a fence post or something.

  As you can imagine, this left me in a pretty awkward position, sitting there on the passenger side of Big Ed's Jaguar while this enraged parking-lot monitor glared at me full blast through his saggy little basset-hound eyes. I swear, he had his arms folded so tight across his chest that it must've damn near cut off the circulation. It didn't look like he was planning to stop anytime soon, so I eased myself out the other side of Big Ed's XK120 and more or less melted off into the crowd, eye-balling the scuff marks on my shoes along the way.

  Things didn't look too interesting inside the tent—just a bunch of high-class sportycar people drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze while they waited in line at the registration tables—so I drifted off to reconnoiter the area and maybe snoop around the cars a little. The vast majority were the MGs and Jaguars I'd come to know from Westbridge, but there were others, too. Like that Frazer-Nash thing that won the big twelve-hour race in Florida. And maybe five or six of those brutal Allards from England that carried big all-American Ford, Mercury, and Cadillac V-8s under their bulging hoods. I recognized the shiny new black one with the red wire wheels that I'd seen Sylvester and Barry Spline buttoning together, and I sort of wondered how they were doing with it. You know how it goes when you throw something together in a last-minute panic. Right next to the Cad-Allard were these two delicate-looking French Bugattis with elegant horseshoe-shaped radiators and machined alloy wheels. They were sleek as sailboat hulls, even though I heard somebody say they were built way back in the thirties. Across from them was this incredible Alfa Romeo 2900 from Italy, which was also from before the war but still a hell of a lot more exciting than any of the new cars you saw rolling off the assembly lines in Detroit. They had the hood up, and underneath was the most magnificent supercharged straight 8 I had ever seen, all done up in machined brass fittings and finned aluminum castings. Wow! Farther on were a litter of these runty-looking Porsches from Germany, all squatted down over their tires like puppy dogs taking a dump. They didn't look like much compared to the Jags and Allards (or even that old Alfa) but their owners seemed awful damn proud of them anyway. No kidding. And what a sound when all those different cars with all their different engines fired up and drove around the paddock. Each one had its own special voice and its own private song. It was like music, you know? For a guy who loved automobiles, the paddock at Bridgehampton was like a forty-acre dessert cart.

  The only hard part was figuring where to look next.

  Besides all the wonderful cars, there were real live big-screen celebrities meandering all over the place. Like who should I see standing next to a white SS100 Jaguar—not two feet away from me!—but that Dave Garroway guy from The Today Show. No lie! And I saw Jackie Cooper (I'm sure it was him!) yakking with a few of the armband people in the registration tent. And Robert Montgomery—you know, the movie actor?—was on hand to drive the brand-new Nash Healey pace car for all the races. Boy oh boy, I'd never been around so many famous, lah-de-dah people or snazzy, expensive automobiles in my entire life. Why, you could damn near smell the money. In fact, if you want the truth of it, it made me feel a little out of place. But those celebrity types blended right in with the S.C.M.A. club regulars. It was like they were all poured from the same mold, you know, all tanned and groomed and dressed to the nines in the kind of perfectly pressed "casual" clothes you see in glossy magazine ads featuring yacht parties and country-club golf outings and that sort of thing.

  Poor Julie would've gone nuts!

  Everywhere I looked around that Bridgehampton paddock, I saw people hustling like mad to get their stuff unloaded and their cars ready for the races. They were rummaging in toolboxes and stacking cases of oil and pulling off spare tires and folding down windshields (or even undoing a few bolts and taking them right off!) and laying out racing numbers with liquid shoe polish or rolls of white tape. You couldn't miss the buzz of urgency crackling in the air.

  I noticed this intense-looking older guy squatted down in front of a white XK120 like Big Ed's, putting layer after layer of adhesive tape over the
headlights. I kind of wondered what it was for, so I cleared my throat a couple times and asked.

  "Hey, uh, 'scuse me, mister, but what the heck's all that tape for?"

  The guy wheeled around and looked me up and down with flinty little eyes that had maybe a hint of mental disturbance in them. "It's for a shunt" he snapped—like it was obvious, you know?—and went right back to his taping.

  "A what?"

  But it was like he didn't hear me. He just kept layering on adhesive tape until the Jag's headlamps looked like lead characters from one of those old black-and-white Mummy movies. You could see the guy wasn't particularly handy, since not one single strip of tape went down straight or laid the least bit flat. But he compensated with sheer volume, and didn't stop until he had tape globbed on a half-inch thick over both lenses. Then he stepped back and eyeballed his handiwork like it was the roof of the damn Sistine Chapel. "Purrrrr-fect!" he purred, rolling his r's like a tomcat. "Just purrrr- fect." He swiveled around and flashed me this strange, misshapen smile with a gold tooth glittering in the middle of it. "It's for a shunt," he said proudly, puffing out his chest.

  "A what?"

  "A shunt. A spin. An off. A—heh heh—misadventure amongst the hay bales."

  "You mean an accident?"

  The guy nodded gravely, eyebrows pumping up and down. "It can happen, young man. Believe me it can. Should the worst occur—heh heh—we must keep shattered glass off the racing line. It could—heh— puncture a tire and cause untold mayhem." He waved his hand through the air so I might understand just exactly how untold the mayhem might get. Then he leaned in real close and snaked his arm around my shoulder. "This your first time, sonny?" he whispered, like we were parachuting behind enemy lines or something.

  "Uh, yeah. It is. I came up with Bi—I mean, Ed Baumstein. He's got a white XK120 just like yours."

  The guy's eyebrows just about popped off his forehead. "Just like mine, you say? JUST LIKE MINE?!! Do you realize what you're saying, young man?!"

  I allowed as how I didn't, and without warning the guy launched into a fifteen-minute dissertation on the differences between an ordinary Jaguar XK120 roadster and an XK120M Special Equipment edition. Then we got to phase two: the important differences between an ordinary XK120M Special Equipment edition and this particular XK120M Special Equipment edition, which was a certified ex-works racing car. The very one, in fact, that Creighton Pendleton the Third drove to six S.C.M.A. production-class victories in 1951! I made a point of looking real impressed, even though I hadn't a clue what M stood for or what was so damn special about Special Equipment or who the hell Creighton Pendleton the Third was. Far as I could see, the only difference between this guy's Jag and Big Ed's was it had knockoff wire wheels and no fender skirts. Personally, I thought it looked kind of naked without the skirt panels over the rear wheels. But I didn't say anything. I mean, who wanted to encourage this guy?

  Turns out I'd chanced upon the infamous Skippy Welcher, sole heir to the Welcher Waxout ear swab fortune. His real name was Reginald, but he got the nickname "Skippy" from the way his conversation regularly skipped from one topic to another. Often in midsentence. Skippy's family had piles and piles of money, and The Skipper was justly proud of the fact that he'd never worked a day in his life to earn any of it. Skippy Welcher was known as an "investment principal" in Manhattan, a "sportsman" in Connecticut, a "yachtsman" in Palm Beach, and a "pigeon" in Atlantic City, but the truth is he was nothing but a stinking-rich, ne'er-do-well nutcase who'd been born into more goddam money than he knew what to do with.

  It made you want to puke, honest it did.

  Turns out Skippy Welcher was one of the original founding members of the S.C.M.A. and made a big point of attending every single race, club meeting, and social event on the S.C.M.A. calendar. Then again, he didn't have much else to do, did he? This fine attendance record made him a real key fixture around the sport, even if nobody on the S.C.M.A. membership roster could stand to listen to him for more than two minutes at a stretch or look him in the eye while they were doing it. Believe me, people did a lot of staring off in the opposite direction whenever they found themselves around Skippy Welcher. He wasn't much of a race driver, either, in spite of being ignorantly confident behind the wheel and brave to the point of foolhardiness. The Skipper drove his cars with all the style and sensitivity of an ax murderer on a rampage, and most always found ways to break them, blow them up, or run them into the local scenery. Which is precisely why he loved the S.C.M.A., since nobody could deny him his inalienable right to be there, no matter how brutal, stupid, or ham-fisted he was behind the wheel. After all, he had all the necessary S.C.M.A. credentials: He was rich, he owned a bunch of neat cars, he showed up for all the club's events, and he hadn't killed anybody yet.

  While I was standing there gawking, this chipmunk-faced geek with Coke-bottle glasses, orthopedic shoes, and baggy olive-green coveralls with M. F. embroidered above the pocket wandered over carrying a small red toolbox and a little piece of tan sisal floor mat rolled up under his arm. Turns out it was Milton Fitting, The Skipper's own personal race mechanic. He looked like a sort of grown-up version of Howdy Doody, and likewise moved as though his arms and legs were dangling from invisible guy wires. Skippy regularly referred to Milton Fitting as "my attendant" and "my squire" all the time (like The Skipper was Sir Lancelot of the Round Table or something) and I didn't much care for that at all. But it didn't seem to bother Milton. In fact, not much of anything seemed to upset that character, and you had to figure it was because he was off in his own little world most of the time. Somewhere slightly northeast of Neptune, if you catch my drift.

  It didn't take long to reach the conclusion that Milton Fitting and Skippy Welcher were both nuttier than fruitcakes. But that's what made them such a perfect pair. Skippy Welcher needed a full-time wrench on account of he was forever bending, breaking, or blowing up his ex-works, ex-Creighton Pendleton XK120M, and likewise not too many car shops would carry a drool like Milton Fitting on the payroll. Oh, he could fix stuff all right, but he was without a doubt the slowest automobile mechanic I have ever seen. Bar none. Even the simplest jobs took him forever, and I honestly believe he worked slower than the night-shift union stiffs at my dad's chemical plant in Newark. And those guys barely move at all.

  I tried striking up a conversation with Milton—you know, one mechanic to another—but it was more or less like talking to a bowl of raspberry Jell-O. Like I asked him what carb needles he was using (just to show him I knew all about S.U.s), but all he did was gurgle and wheeze a little and stare back at me through a pair of glasses that made his eyeballs look like fried eggs. Never said a word. The Skipper made up for it, though. In fact, you couldn't shut the bastard up. Why, Skippy Welcher could peel off into fresh topics without so much as pausing to take a breath.

  Which is why I was still standing there a half hour later, listening to a highly convoluted dissertation on the relative merits of vegetable-based versus mineral-based lubricants for dual-overhead-camshaft racing engines (like the one in his Jaguar, for example) and I might as well have been a cardboard cutout propped up with a stick. The Skipper really got himself worked into a lather whenever he got rolling on one of his favorite subjects, what with every muscle on his face popping and twitching like pea soup coming to a boil and sweat beads snapping off in all directions. And there was just no stopping the sonofabitch once he got up a head of steam. I was worried that Big Ed might be missing me, but there was simply no way to disengage yourself from Skippy Welcher once he thought he had your attention. It was like having your bumpers locked with a shit wagon. So, about halfway through The Skipper's personal recommendations concerning proper waxing and polishing techniques for authentic English paint finishes, I said, "Nice t'meetcha. Seeya. Bye," and simply walked away. When I looked back, Skippy was still hard at it, yakking away into the empty atmosphere as fast as he could make the words come out.

  I found Big Ed back in the registration tent, huddled ove
r a card table with that same skinny twerp who tried to shoo us out of the "official" parking spaces. His name was Charlie Priddle, and sure enough, he turned out to be the S.C.M.A.'s Membership Chairman. Oh, swell. In fact, Charlie Priddle was on every damn committee the S.C.M.A. had. And believe me, they had plenty. Now, you have to understand that Charlie never once drove in a car race—not ever—but for some inexplicable reason, he considered S.C.M.A. club activities the most important thing in his life. And no, I didn't understand it either.

  Turns out Charles Winthrop Martingale Priddle came from some old, old, old Old Money up in Connecticut somewheres, and he owned maybe five or six of the latest, most expensive sports cars you could buy. Not one of which he could drive worth a lick. But Charlie bragged about his fancy European automobiles all the time, not to mention about how much better the racing was "on the Continent" and how much better the food was "on the Continent" and how his family originally came over "from the Continent" on the damn Mayflower. First-class, to hear him tell it.

  Anyhow, Big Ed was trying to find out how he could join the S.C.M.A., and, without actually saying it in so many words, Charlie Priddle was making it clear he didn't much care for families who arrived in this country by way of Ellis Island or believed in any off-brand, non-Protestant religions or actually had to work for a living. Which was three strikes against Big Ed right off the bat. Not to mention that, in the short period of time they'd known each other, Charlie Priddle had developed a deep personal dislike for Big Ed that had nothing to do with his occupation, religion, or family background. So Charlie was giving Big Ed the runaround. And he was pretty damn good at it, too.