EXCERPT: The Last Open Road

By Burt Levy

(Editor: It’s been a busy summer for our favorite novelist, Burt “B.S.” Levy. Fresh from his induction into the British Sports Car Hall of Fame – alongside racers David Hobbs and Brian Redman, no less – and his invitation to serve as Honorary Starter at the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix, Burt contributed to OpenRoad an excerpt from his cultclassic racing novel The Last Open Road for ideal summer reading.)

Colin St. John came to these United States in early 1946, carrying a slight limp that was a souvenir of The Big One and deep, empty pockets he intended to fill with Yankee greenbacks. He was a tall, elegant-looking English gent with leather patches at his elbows and the aristocratic bearing of a stiff buggy whip. Colin always wore one of those snappy tweed caps “whilst motoring in an open car,” and was forever puffing on this big, curlicue Swiss pipe with little silver dangle chains and perforated tin breeze lids. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. And the way he talked! Like a blessed duke or prime minister or something. Why, it made you feel like some kind of crude, boorish New Jersey Neanderthal just listening to him.

The disappearing act Colin pulled that first time I drove up to the Westbridge shop was part of a carefully orchestrated scheme he worked on every new prospect. By vanishing the moment you appeared, he set the idea in motion that he was a very busy fellow who really didn’t need any additional business—thank you very much—but if you wanted, you could wait around for a chance opening to appear in his frightfully busy schedule (pronounced shedge-yewel).

You did have an appointment, didn’t you?

I got to know Barry Spline and Colin St. John pretty well, and spent a lot of company time listening to Colin tell exciting World War II adventure stories in that fancy British accent of his. Once Colin saw I was spending some serious cash in the parts department, he’d flash me a behind-the-hand wink and draw me off to the side for a semi-private snort of scotch. Especially if it was around lunchtime or toward the end of the day. Colin kept a couple souvenir shot glasses from Niagara Falls and a bottle of Glen-Something-or-Other scotch hidden behind the service counter (where everybody and his brother knew exactly where it was) and it was a sign that you had indeed joined the Inner Circle when Colin St. John invited you to “share a swifty” with him.

“Care for a swifty, sport?” he’d say as he poured a couple quick shots down Niagara Falls. Personally, I thought Colin’s fancy scotch tasted an awful lot like mineral spirits, and suspected he might be topping up the bottle now and then with whatever was on sale at the liquor store down the street. So I put a little pencil mark on the label one day when Colin wasn’t looking, and would bet you a double sawbuck he’s got that same damn bottle today, still precisely two-thirds full of the cheapest rotgut Scotch, Irish, Rye, Canadian, or Old Kentucky sour mash whiskey he can lay his hands on.

He doesn’t think Americans can tell the difference.

Like everyone else in England, Colin had a rough time of it during World War II. That’s where he got his stiff-legged limp (which some-times—I swear! —seemed to move from one leg to the other) along with the most astounding collection of eyewitness combat stories you ever heard. A couple snorts would get him rolling anytime: Up against Rommel in North Africa! Barely scraping out at Dunkirk! Taking on Goering’s finest in a shotup Spitfire! Cheating death with the bomb-disposal lads! They were all true, too. Every single one of them. That’s because Colin heard them all firsthand in the hospital ward where he spent the majority of 1943 after falling off the tailgate of a truck in a dark London alley while unloading a shipment of black-market creamed chipped beef. I guess it was touch and go for awhile and there was some question as to whether Colin would ever walk again (at least before the war ended, anyway), but a Luftwaffe bombardier brought about a miracle recovery one night when he accidentally dropped a thousand-pound incendiary smack on top of the hospital wing. Colin amazed the entire staff by being first man to the far side of the lawn, handily beating out an Army surgeon who’d been something of a track star at Cambridge.

After the war, Colin St. John journeyed to America to seek his fortune (or anybody else’s that might be available—he wasn’t real particular in that respect) and opened a little back-alley foreign car agency on the west side of Manhattan, just off the George Washington Bridge. Colin decided to call it Westbridge (get it?) and the moniker was just perfect for a lah-de-dah British sports car shop, on account of it sounded so upper crust, blue-blooded, and snooty. Jaguar customers expected that sort of thing.

Colin’s foreign car business grew and prospered over the years in spite of high prices, shoddy service, and the business ethics of an Armenian rug merchant. That’s because every single playboy, sugar daddy, and black sheep heir in the greater metropolitan New York area just had to have himself one of those sexy new Jaguars. Or at the very least an MG. As Colin explained repeatedly to every virgin sales prospect: “A true sport requires a true sports car,” and the rich, trendy, fashionable types around town were all ears.

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 waved his fist under Colin’s father’s nose,

“You told me this car was in absolutely PRISTINE condition!”

“Oh, and I truly thought it was…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…the scoundrel swore it came from an estate sale. Told me the motorcar belonged to a third cousin of the Dsuke of Windsor himself! Why, to think anyone would have the brass to patch up a Bentley with putty and old newspapers....”

“OLD??!!!” The guy grabbed 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 the retail car business worked. “You see, every used car is unique—has its own character, its own perfume, its own romance—while every new automobile is essentially i-dent-i-cal to every other blasted one they push off the assembly line. The only real differences are color and trim.”

“So?”

“So, indeed! Boil it all down to essentials and you realize that 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. For example: “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.

For more, go to lastopenroad.com