The Last Open Road

by Burt Levy

  So life was good. I had help so I could concentrate on fixing the cars we had lined up behind the shop and along the edge of the lot. I'd show up at seven ayem to write up the new repair business coming in, then walk across the street to the sandwich shop when Butch rolled in at eight and have myself a jelly doughnut and a couple cups of coffee while I leafed through the morning paper. There was a lot of interesting stuff in it, too. Stuff about a great big world out there that I'd forgotten about all summer while I was working my ass off for Colin St. John. Rocky Marciano'd won the heavyweight championship off thirty-eight-year-old Jersey Joe Walcott, and even though Walcott was from Jersey, I had to go with Marciano because he was white. Not to mention Italian. I mean, that went without saying.

  It was rough going trying to run my own show for the very first time, and I learned you can't help biting off more than you can chew because the natural surge of human greed makes you take in work you should probably turn away on account of you can't resist the lure of the old Long Green. In fact, I was starting to work the same kind of crazy hours I did at Westbridge, staying until nine or ten at night—sometimes even later!—and yet always being there bright and early every morning so's I wouldn't miss any new prospects. But at least I was making decent money, since I'd force-fed Old Man Finzio a deal where I was getting a percentage off the hourly shop rate on top of my regular pittance grease monkey wages, not to mention a chunk of the markup on parts. Plus I wasn't wasting my time on that two-hour train-and-bus ride into Manhattan twice each day. Truth is, it felt pretty wonderful having fat stacks of currency piled up in the Old Man's ancient cash register every night at closing time, and it was especially nice to have a wad of green in my own pocket come Friday evening.

  It was plenty enough to take Julie out for a real sit-down dinner and a picture show, and I always had my pick of the customer cars for transportation, since it was understood that a skilled mechanic needed to personally test-drive the cars that passed through his hands in order to alert their owners about impending service needs, developing problems, and timely maintenance requirements. Especially when those cars included sleek, sexy Jaguars and jaunty little MGs. One night I picked Julie up in Carson's black TD and whisked her off for an evening of highbrow entertainment that included antipasto, minestrone, and spaghetti with meatballs up at Bachigalupo's in the suit-and-tie part of town, followed by a trip across the bridge into Manhattan to see that new wraparound Cinerama movie on Broadway. Geez, it was like you were really on that roller coaster, you know? Other nights we'd maybe take in a regular movie on the Jersey side or roll a few lines at the bowling alley or skate around to the organ music at the roller rink. Afterward we'd drive along the Jersey shore and maybe park over by the Coast Guard station to watch the submarine races. Truth is, it was starting to get a little cold for that sort of activity—especially in an English sports car that didn't have much in the way of what a person raised on Fords and Chevys would call a heater. Those cars were never exactly cut out for that kind of duty anyway, since you had to be a bona fide contortionist to share even a little body heat in something as cramped and awkward as an MG. And it was even worse in cold weather with the top and side curtains in place. Besides, all that was starting to change between Julie and me. Oh, I still wanted to get into her pants bad as ever, but all of a sudden I wasn't in such a mad, desperate rush about it. Sure, we still made out in parked cars, and one night Julie even asked if we could borrow one of Big Ed's Caddies on account of she wanted to go to the drive-in to see Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde in The Greatest Show on Earth. Turns out it was the anniversary or something of the first time we went out to the drive-in and kissed in the front seat of Big Ed's black Sixty Special. I never would've known, of course, but women have a sort of sixth sense when it comes to stuff like that. In fact, they can tell you to the month, week, day, hour, and minute when you first asked them out or kissed them good night or made them cry or tried to cop a feel.

  Speaking of Big Ed, I had the engine out of his Jag and scattered all over the shop in crates and boxes, and, if you want to know the truth of it, I was feeling pretty nervous about getting it back together again. I mean, for all the wrenching I'd done down at Westbridge, I'd never had one of those twin-cam Jag sixes stripped to the bare block before, and, as I looked around at all the boxes of bolts and castings and miscellaneous hardware, I started to have doubts about whether I could turn it back into a living, breathing, internal combustion engine. Luckily, I had Butch around to give me encouragement, which generally amounted to disgusted head shaking and uplifting comments such as: "Ya call yerself a goddam automobile mechanic, but far's I can see yer nothin' but a crybaby sissygirl with a damn toolbox," and, "Jesus Christ, asshole, didn't I teach you anything? " In spite of his many years in the Marines, Butch didn't know a whole hell of a lot about morale. But that was just his way, and once you understood and accepted that, he could be enormous help on a serious car project. And no matter how upset he got with my rank stupidity or lack of confidence, he'd always wind up leaning his head in and showing me what I was missing so I didn't have to put things together and then take them apart umptykazillion times before I got them right.

  Roman Szymanski turned out to be a big help, too. Sure, it was a long haul to get to him on the other side of Manhattan, but he could run his eyeballs over stuff (like the engine block from Big Ed's XK120, for example) and rub his chin and move in a little closer with the magnifying lenses flipped down over his eyes and then tell me he could fix it every bit as good as a new one. And believe me, Jaguar engine blocks were not exactly easy to come by in 1952. Or cheap, either. Roman welded up the block, pressed in a new cylinder liner where the rod had blown out, and refinished the crankshaft. But he insisted we put in all new connecting rods instead of just replacing the busted one. "All same. All bad," he told me. He re-balanced all the pistons to match them up with the new one, and did a balance job on the clutch-and-flywheel assembly as well. "Zo tell me," he asked in a thick middle-European accent, "how does thiz perzon drive?"

  "Like an animal."

  "Might az well put in new clutch az long az is apart." As you can see, I had a lot of good people I could go to for advice and secondhand wisdom in my new sports car business in Passaic. But even so it was a little nerve-wracking to have engines torn all the way down like I did on Big Ed's car. I bet surgeons feel that same spastic sort of panic dancing in their guts when they look down and realize they've got somebody split wide open and it's their damn responsibility to put everything back together and close them up again.

  Which is exactly what was bothering Old Man Finzio. Turns out his doctors wanted him to go into the hospital the second week in October so they could open him up and take a look inside. I couldn't imagine what you might find inside a guy like him except for maybe lizards and scorpions and cornered rats, but I guess the doctors figured they might find something even worse. And Old Man Finzio thought so, too. He didn't say much about it, of course. Fact is, he didn't even tell me he was going in until two or three days beforehand, when I was already trying to figure some way I could finesse myself out of taking Julie to Serafina Massucci's wedding so I could sneak off to Georgia for the SOWEGA races. I guess the horror of the accident at Watkins Glen faded after awhile and I was starting to itch for the desperate, swaggering, devil-may-care fun of racing again.

  Like I explained before, it's a disease.

  Besides, I had cars down there. Well, one car, anyway. I'd finished going through Carson Flegley's engine according to that Road & Track article, milling damn near an eighth of an inch off the cylinder head and fitting bigger valves and stronger valve springs and having Roman open up the ports with a die grinder and polish the combustion chambers to a perfect mirror finish. Then I put in richer carb needles and Champion LA-11 sparkplugs and a high-output Lucas ignition coil, and when it was done, I took it for a spin over by Carson's family's funeral parlor so he could take it for a little test-drive. I left the air cleaners off, too, and although
I couldn't tell how much was actually added power and how much was just the mighty rush of air sucking through the carburetors, the car certainly felt faster. Carson thought so, too, although he had to kind of shoo me around the side of the building and sneak off for a quick ride—somber black suit and all—on account of they had a funeral going on for some bigwig local politician and he had to drive the hearse once the chapel service was over. It simply wouldn't do for one of the funeral directors to come sprinting up in an MG TD with an unusually crisp exhaust note just as they were carrying the casket out. Not even a black one.

  Big Ed wanted to go to the SOWEGA races, too. But there was just no way I was going to have his car done in time. I had pieces over at Roman's machine shop and parts coming in from England and I could see from two weeks away that it simply wasn't going to happen. But Big Ed was not about to give up, especially since this was the last S.C.M.A. race of the year (east of the Rockies, anyway) and he really felt he had to make up for his dismal performance at Watkins Glen. Like actually starting a damn race, perhaps? And when I told him his engine wouldn't be ready, he started asking if maybe there was someplace we could find another whole engine—like out of a wreck or something—but I called Westbridge and even out to the Jaguar distributor in California, and there was simply nothing around that we could pick up on a moment's notice. "That's okay," Big Ed told me, "I got an idea. . . ."

  I didn't much like the way his stogie started rolling around in his mouth.

  Sure enough, he drove up the very next day in—you guessed it!—Skippy Welcher's ex-everything XK120M. What with his new C-type and all, The Skipper didn't much need his old 120, and Big Ed was able to cut himself a pretty slick deal on it, too, especially considering it was a last-minute thing and Big Ed was in a mighty big hurry to own that car. But Big Ed could be pretty shrewd when it came to buying automobiles (Lord knows he'd had enough practice!) and he was fortunate to catch The Skipper in an unusually good mood following a regular visit by his nineteen-year-old Oriental masseuse.

  Personally, I was a little gun-shy about getting close to an automobile that Skippy Welcher had anything to do with—like I might catch some kind of creeping mental disorder off it, you know?—plus I wasn't real big on trusting Milton Fitting's wrench work without checking it over first. So I spent three long nights in the garage going over every damn nut and bolt on that car until I'd convinced myself that everything was in solid working order and nothing looked real likely to fall off or self-destruct. At least nothing I could find, anyway. And I didn't charge Big Ed a penny for it, either. "Nah," I told him as he hopped aboard for the long, hard drive down to Georgia, "this one's on the house."

  "Aw, I can't let'cha do that , Buddy."

  "No, really. This one's on me."

  "Well, geez, thanks . I'll really try t'bring it back in one piece fer you this time."

  "You do that."

  Just then Cal and Carson Flegley came wheeling up to the pumps in Carson's black TD, waving like idiots and tootling the horn. "Well, s'long," I said to Big Ed.

  "Yeah. S'long. Sure wish you was goin' with us."

  "Yeah. So do I. But what with the Old Man in the hospital and everything, there's just no way I can go. Besides, if I miss that damn wedding next Sunday, Julie'll kill me. And it'll be a slow, painful death, too. She promised."

  "I bet she did," Big Ed laughed as he pulled away. I felt part of me go with them as those two cars rumbled off down Pine Street, heading south, the MG all jaunty and upright and the Jag as smooth and sleek and silky as a wet circus seal.

  I have to admit I had a pretty good time with Julie at her friend Sarafina Massucci's wedding. And if you've ever been to a real Italian wedding, that should be easy to understand. Sure, the church service was all gushy and flowery and weepy like they always are—that part's for the women anyway—plus it was a little edgy in there since Serafina's family came from Tuscany in the north of Italy and the groom's people were pure-blooded Sicilian, so the friends and relatives split like the Red Sea when they came into church. All I could think about was how much I'd rather have been down at the races in Georgia. Even so, it was kind of nice when the bride and groom came up the aisle together and Julie snaked her fingers into mine and gave them a gentle squeeze. Afterward there was the mandatory big reception party in a rented hall, and that actually turned out to be a lot of fun. After about my third or fourth free drink, anyway. Like all the weddings in our neighborhood, it started out with the wives and girlfriends twittering around the tables like chickadees about how lovely everything was and how radiant the bride looked (even if she was a couple months gone already) and weren't the little nieces that played flower girls just precious? It was enough to make you puke if you were stupid enough to listen to it. But of course the guys never did. They bellied up ten-deep around the bar and swapped dirty jokes and ruinous stories about the hatcheck girl at the Pompeii Club over on Columbian Avenue. I guess that's one of the big differences between males and females, and you can really see it at weddings. Women like to get all teary and emotional—even when there's no reason—while male types always do their best to avoid acting sappy, even when maybe they should.

  But of course the best part was the food. North or south, Italians just love to eat, and everybody's got their own, highly vocal opinion about the basil and oil in the tomato sauce or what kind of seasoning belongs in the sausage or how hot the peppers and giardinaire should be. And that's what ends up breaking the ice. That and the booze, anyway. Speaking of which, I ran into a short, beer-gutted older guy at the bar named Vinny Grimaldi, who worked for the Teamsters Union and knew my old man from the V.F.W. or the Knights of Columbus or the Order of the Slippery Salamanders or something. "Hey, you Frankie Palumbo's boy?" he asked through a beery grin.

  I allowed as how I was.

  "Hey, he's one hell of a guy."

  I agreed as how he certainly was one hell of a guy.

  "And what a fan! Hell, ol' Frankie knows more about the damn New York Yankees than Casey Stengel himself. You should be really proud of that."

  "I suppose I should," I told him, wondering just what made the dumb, third-person act of spectating anything to be proud of. In fact, right there was one of the big differences between these people and the racers. That and the idea that this was a strictly Italian (or Italian-American, anyway) type gathering, while the racing crowd, in spite of its snooty Protestant roots, was pretty damn cosmopolitan. In a racing paddock, we were all just road gypsies, no matter if we were English or Scottish or German or French or Irish or Italian (or even Jewish like Big Ed, assuming you could get in) and most of the culture and aristocracy came out of the cars instead of down the old family bloodlines.

  "How'dja like this here wedding?" Vinny asked, just making conversation.

  "Aw, it was all right." I told him.

  "You with the bride's or the groom's side?"

  "I came with Julie Finzio. She's one of Serafina's best friends."

  "I know her. She's the gas station guy's niece."

  "Yeah. That's how I met her. I work there."

  "Well, she's one hell of a hot-looking piece."

  I wasn't so sure I liked the tone of Vinny Grimaldi's voice or the way he was looking at Julie. So I decided to let him know how things were. "Hey, watch it, OK? She's, um, she's sorta my girl, see."

  "Oh? You serious about her?"

  "Yeah," I said without thinking about it. "I think maybe I am."

  "Humph," he snorted. "How old are you, anyway?"

  "Well," I told him, kind of straightening up to make myself maybe look a little taller, "I'll be twenty pretty soon."

  "Oh yeah? And exactly how soon would that be?"

  "Uh, well," I could feel the air leaking out of my spine, "next year, actually."

  "Listen, kid," my dad's union buddy leaned over and whispered in my ear. "Your dad ever tell you why God put hair down there between a woman's legs?"

  I shook my head.

  "To hide the hook! " he bel
lowed, and all the married guys at the bar burst out laughing. Personally, I didn't think it was all that funny. In fact, I could feel my ears burning a little, just in case Julie or one of the other girls heard him.

  I had a couple more drinks and maybe a wine or two while Julie and the other girls oohed and aahed over the bridesmaids' outfits and the china and the silver patterns and all the fat white envelopes inside the little satin bag Serafina kept clutched tightly to her side. We met up again for dessert after the usual garter business and the throwing of the bouquet (Julie caught it, but I have a feeling it was rigged) and watched Serafina cut about a two-pound slice of cake and shove it in her new husband's mouth while everybody applauded and the poor sonofabitch damn near choked to death. But he was smiling. So was everybody, in fact. Except for maybe the two ushers having a fistfight out in the parking lot. But they were back around the bar not long afterward with their collars and shirttails out, laughing like hell about the shiner on one and the split lip on the other, buying each other drinks. Or pretending to buy each other drinks, anyway, since it was an open bar. Later on Julie and me danced a few rounds—mostly slow stuff, not those polka-style tarantella things where all the drunks, old people, and little kids go make fools of themselves—and I was surprised to find we were the two last people out on the floor, just kind of drifting along to a dreamy violin and accordion version of "Blue Skies." We were still there when the lights came up and the drummer started packing his stuff away.