Things you don’t expect from the geezer filling up your car at the Chevron on Hollywood Blvd in 1981:

Ability to speak English
Ability to be English
Any intelligence whatsoever
A sense of humour

So as I stood there fillin’ up the old Cadilacs and Pontiacs and Chevies with ‘unleaded’ and regular, wearing my rather fetching blue shirt with the Chevron chevrons on the front, and I asked if Sir would perhaps require cleanage of his windscreen or checkage of his oil??? I was something of a novelty. “Are you Australian?” they would inquire. And conversation would ensue. They never spoke to Noe (Guatamalan) or Boris (Mexican) or anyone else. But to a white Englishmen they are prepared to break convention and have a conversation with an ‘unworthy’. Without actually asking the ‘elephant in the forecourt’ question of: what the fuck are you, a beautiful, urbane, educated white person with perfect Hollywood bad-guy diction, doing THIS for???

On my first day there, just round the corner from the ‘Chinese Theater’ (the one with the stars’ hand and foot-prints in the concrete) a yellow Ferrari pulled in. No gas, but can you help me with my mirror; its broken. James Coburn. My Man Flint. The third of the Magnificent 7. In ‘my’ gas station. Oh my. The following day Bobby Womack came in. Nicest guy in the world. Even worked out I was English and insisted on shaking my (greasy, oily, petrolly, tyre-pressury) hand.

I was offered jobs, given business cards, asked to be taken to dinner (women and men), propositioned regularly, and all for minimum wage.

One particularly friendly Mexican American (sounds American, looks a bit Mexican) asked if I liked ‘soccer’ because he played in a Sunday game with loads of Brits. So along I went and found my footy-fix for the next year, attended by a varying crew of players and a referee. Referee? In a friendly?? Because he loved the game and had an injury that wouldn’t let him play proper. He was John Helliwell of Supertramp, possibly the biggest band in the world at that time, 2 years after Breakfast in America came out. Welcome to California. Where superstars referee football games and Englishmen pump your gas.

Then one day a really sweet English girl came in for gas. Can’t remember her name, but she was lovely, Geordie and a nanny. To baby Lilly, sitting in the car. The child of Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenbergen. Oh. My. God. Malcolm McDowell; Clockwork Orange fame. Kubrick’s ‘If…’ one of my fave movies everrrrrr. And Mary Steenbergen who had just won an Oscar for Melvyn & Howard (really fucking odd movie), possibly the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen (but ain’t they all?) and I was in love. Again. Unfortunately not with the nanny who I seemed to be dating a bit, but with Mary. Who was funny and charming and wonderful, and the least available person ever.

So other than the shit money, the filth, the constant scrubbing of fingernails and the ever-present smell of gasoline; how could it have been anything but ‘the best job ever’? And although pumping gas can be dull, it was a proper ‘garage’ doing all kinds of technical shit to people’s cars. And we had an in-house Triple-A guy. He’d get a call for a breakdown, go pick up the car and bring it back to us. He’d get paid by the Triple-A and we’d get the work. Lou had 2 trucks, a little ‘repair at the scene’ kind’a thing and a fucking monster tow-truck. And I mean ‘monster’. He could pull (and did) a bus with it. And I used to move it round for him. 8-litre, V8 diesel. Most powerful thing ever. You could win any ‘demolition derby’ in the world. But he wouldn’t let me. Obvs.

Yet sometimes even the best jobs ever need to end. Life moves on. A day’s a long time in politics, a month was a long time at Dan Fetter’s Chevron.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx