Jimmy bought a second hand car from a dealer in Portslade. Portslade is chav central on the fringes of Brighton. The car cost him £4K which is a lot of cash when you’re trying to earn a living from making art stamps like he is these days.

Within two hours of handing over the money the car started leaking oil. Loads of it, all over the road. So he took it back and after a week of lame excuses and sad stories the dealer gave it back to him with the gearbox taped up and no oil leaks. Two days later the whole damn engine started leaking water…






Jimmy bought a second hand car from a dealer in Portslade. Portslade is chav central on the fringes of Brighton. The car cost him £4K which is a lot of cash when you’re trying to earn a living from making art stamps like he is these days.
Within two hours of handing over the money the car started leaking oil. Loads of it, all over the road. So he took it back and after a week of lame excuses and sad stories the dealer gave it back to him with the gearbox taped up and no oil leaks. Two days later the whole damn engine started leaking water.

At this point Jimmy realised he’d been sold a lemon, took the car back and said: “Hey, you sold me a lemon so you can have this car back. Just give me my cash and I’ll go somewhere else and buy something that works like a car ought to.”

The dealer said: “Forget it.... Go make lemonade... You bought the car so you gotta have it... And no you ain’t getting any money out of me cos I don’t have it anymore.”

So Jimmy said fuck you and left the clapped out car on the side of the road outside the dealers shop thinking the guy might have some sort of cosmic epiphany and send the cash by return post. Eternal optimism is one of the things I love most about Mr Cauty.

One month and alot of trains and buses later, Jimmy decided to take the man to court cos he couldn’t bear the idea that some bastard could just sell shit cars and get away with it. So he went online, filed his case and waited for the letter to come from the court saying he’d have his day. Another month went by and still nothing had happened. Jimmy hates it when there's no action and he hates it more when mean bastards get away with things they shouldn’t. So late one night he decided just turn the whole situation around and make the car into something else. Transform that truly worthless piece of crap into a really cool piece of art and then offer it back to the dealer for £4K. A bargain price for a truely fine example of car crush sculpture. Like the Bhudda boys say: “Conquer that sad miser with generosity”

Figuring he had to destruct the car before he could transform it, Jimmy spent a couple of days hanging round with the old blokes down at the scrap metal yard on the sea front near Portslade. They have a huge demolition plant and if you’ve got it they can crush it. He told them the story about the car and watched the way all the old metal scrap went into the crushing machine and came out in big neat blocks with curved edges and sharp corners. The guys at the yard said sure they’d crush the car for him, so he had it towed down there and made an appointment for 2 o’clock on the following Wednesday to turn the useless car into something useful... Something real beautiful... Some glorious car crash crushed sculpture. He had high hopes.

So now its Wednesday and we’re driving down from London to make our date with the scrap men. It s a stinking hot day and we drive fast round the M25 with the radio playing static talking about how great the car is going to look when it was all compressed, cubed, sliced and rearranged. Jimmy still doesn’t know quite what he's going to do with the finished masterpiece but he has plan A, B and C. All of which could land us in jail if we don’t play our cards right.

We get down to his workshop in Brighton early and he starts ringing around trying to find a tip truck to transport the finished piece back to his place. There aren’t a lot of tipper trucks for hire in Brighton so we end up driving to Lewes ten miles away where we finally find one big enough to carry the two tons of dirty metal we’re expecting to take home. We leave my car in Lewes and drive the truck back to Brighton, making it to the scrap yard just in time for the last dance.

The scrap yard is wild. A couple of acres on the docks piled three stories high with filthy metal mountains... washing machines... wheelchairs... crates... car bodies. Its crawling with neanderthal men covered in tattoos, dirt and flab that maybe their wives once knew as muscle. We aren’t allowed to take photos and we definitely aren’t allowed to film. All we can do is witness.

No-one can hear much of what’s said cos there’s just a continuous roar of trucks in and out dumping and collecting scrap, but we manage to get hold of the guy who’s our connection and he escorts us like a hot date to the front of the queue. We see Jimmy's car gleaming in all its slutty thoroughbred glory at the far end of the yard. Above the car looms an enormous claw on the end of a 100 foot cold metal crane. Word’s gone round the yard that there’s this crazy artist that wants to turn his four thousand quid car into some sort of art shit, so everyone downs tools and comes to watch the crushing. It’s starting to feel like there’s a gang rape about to happen.

Eventually one guy shouts out a command and the huge metal claw arcs across the summer sky and lands with glorious precision on top of Jimmy's car. It pauses for a moment, teasing and twitching.... and then the claw shudders and heaves and rips into the sides of the car; Squeezing and tearing the body. The skin punctures like a tin can... So easy... So sweet... Next the claw just picks the entire two tons of car up and lifts it with gentle grace into the metal crushing machine. I look over at Jimmy and he’s laughing, and then the bloke standing next to him starts laughing, and then we all start laughing uncontrollably and it just feels great. One of those perfect moments in time. Hallelujah.
Ten minutes later the car emerges out of the crushing machine and it looks like crap. It doesn’t look anything like we’d imagined. No-one’s laughing anymore and Jimmy looks worried.

Its nothing like that beautiful compressed sharp edged cube we’d wanted. What we see is a huge long piece of partly compressed and half heartedly mangled metal, plastic and vinyl. Dirty old rag bits hang off it and flap around. It just looks like a piece of shit... Rubbish. It don’t look like art.

Jimmy inspects it and tells them it looks crap so they put it through the crusher again. This time it comes out a bit better, but still nothing like we’d imagined. So he gets them to cut it in half and puts the best half on the back of the truck. Jimmy pays the money, gets a destruction certificate and we drive out.

We’re both confused. Pissed off and feeling ugly.

We start driving along the sea front with the mangled , abused car block on the back of the truck and we've only gone about 500 yards when Jimmy suddenly bangs his hand on his chest and starts groaning.

“Shit... I’ve got this big pain in my chest and I want to throw up.” he says.

His face has gone white and it’s obvious something is seriously wrong with him. We pull the truck over to the side of the road and I get him to lie down on a bench telling him to just breathe long and slow but thinking oh Jesus he’s having a heart attack and I’m going to have to get that stinking hunk of metal off the truck all by myself.

We call the NHS Direct line on his mobile and some nurse talks him through what’s happening to his body.

She says “Oh maybe you are having a heart attack. Call a cab and go directly to your nearest hospital.”

At this point we abandon the entire art project along with all the other harebrained plans he has. We leave the truck with two wheels on the pavement pointing in the vague direction of France, and take a cab to the A and E at the Sussex County Hospital.

Next thing you know they have Jimmy on a stretcher wired up to a cardio machine and doctors are taking blood samples and making him piss into big glass bottles. They can’t figure out what's going on with him and we don’t tell them where we’ve been or what we’ve been doing, so they say he has to stay all night in the observation ward.

The place is a suburban war zone. Cracked out boys with heads split open, screaming at the nurses... Old ladies shouting for bedpans and some woman opposite moans and moans in pain every thirty seconds like she's auditioning for a lead part in a snuff movie.
We spend the whole night in half sleep lying on a narrow bed too scared to take our boots off in case someone thinks we might want to stay for longer than we have to.

We wait for the results of his blood tests.

We wait to make sure he's not about to die of a battered heart.

Its scary as shit but we giggle just to pass the time anyway.

In the end a late night doctor says everything looks fine and he can go home. So we do. Pick up the abandoned truck which is exactly as we left it and dump the crushed car in the early morning light outside Jimmy's workshop. As we’re washing the oil out of the back of the truck with buckets of cold water and detergent I tell him it feels like we are washing away the traces of some dirty murderous crime.

He says “It’s just art babe - art always feels dirty."

We spend the next twenty four hours holed up in London recovering from the crushing. We put the heart attack shit down to an allergic reaction to bad art and momentarily forget about it. Jimmy’s still firing ideas round like hes shooting clay pigeons on the wrong side of the milky way but eventually he decides on an open air exhibition of his bad art piece. The venue for the exhibition is the double yellow lines on the road outside the car dealers shop in Portslade. Jimmy chats up some woman at the council and for eleven quid gets a plant parking permit which means he can leave the cushed car on the side of the road for a week without someone towing it way. I think he's still hoping the dealer will fall in love with his bad art and want it installed in his front garden as a water feature or something. Jimmy has an incredible ability to move from complex philisophical ideas to Disney and back again before anyone else has had time to make a decent cup of tea.

By Thursday my interest in his mad scheme has waned so Jimmy gets a train back down to Brighton and spends the next couple of days bludgoening the one and a half tons of dirty metal and plastic into shape. I get on with my life back in London but he keeps calling in the middle of the night seducing me with the virtues of angle grinders and MIG welding gear and despite my better judgement manages to lure me back into his chorus line for the grande finale. Hes obsessed. He’s a on a roll and theres no stopping him. It turns out Steve at Aquarium has offered Jimmy 4K for the piece but Jimmy says no he wants to sell it to the dealer and only to the dealer. Undeterred, Steve writes a letter to the car man saying hell buy it off him for 4K plus a pound because that way Jimmy gets his car money back from the dealer..the dealer makes a quid and Steve...well.. Steve ends up with the mangled piece of old metal shit in his gallery and is 4K and one pound out of pocket. It’s a plan constructed with strangely distorted but beautiful logic and as long as the dealer gets with the programme it could all turn out just fine for everyone.

The exhibition is all set for Monday... the invites have all gone out and then, like some good fairy in dirty jackboots, who should turn up in Brighton the night before but the legendary Gimpo. Him and Jimmy go back a long way from money burning to cow lynching and they've got an easy understanding about the way each other operates when they pulling off a performance. Gimpo mostly makes art films these days and he's come down to document showtime as well as help with the logistics of getting the bad art piece from the workshop down to the dealers shop. Jimmy can’t sleep and wakes Gimpo and me up at seven in the morning of the show. We don’t mind cos its already another stinking hot day and the tin can workshop is hotter than a Samoan sweat box so all we want to do is get out of there.

The three of us drive to some nowhere place in the country to pick up a hire truck with a crane hoist on the back that Jimmys already booked over the phone. The only trouble is the truck a whole lot bigger than it was supposed to be and the alleyway to the workshop yard where we left the crushed car is pretty narrow. For a moment the plan feels terminally doomed until Jimmy says oh shit who cares we'll just do it and if we have to wipe out the hundred yards of fence up the side of the workshop then so be it. He never liked that fence anyway. Jimmy and Gimpo drive the oversized pick up back to the workshop and as soon as they get there Gimpo starts banging on the neighbours doors and marches everyone onto the street to move
cars so he can have a good shot at getting the truck up the alleyway. Its tighter than a ducks ass but somehow he manages to manouvre the truck up the alley and position the crane directly above the crushed car without totally destroying any of the buildings. Its a military ballet and Gimpo is the prima ballerina. The neighbours all cheer and clap and then dissappear back into their houses to watch from behind net curtains.Theres still hours to go before we have to take the car down at the exhibition and despite it being the hottest June day in English history Jimmy insists that he and Gimpo have to rehearse their crane manouvres out in the yard. What follows is two long hours of boys and toys. Crane up, crane down…crane an inch that way and crane an inch another way. They are clearly in some macho heaven so I leave them to it.

Half an hour before we’re due to do the deliver the piece Jimmy gets a phone call saying the car dealer has blocked the front of his shop. He looks worried. Gimpo and me exchange glances knowing each other is thinking oh yeah its so good to just be in the chorus line when things go to custard. One second of treacherous guilt encrusted doubt later I volunteer to drive down and check out the shop. When I get there its apparent whoever called was at the wrong car dealers in the wrong town. The road in front of the shop is clear so I position my car on the yellow lines where we want the art thing to go just to be sure no-one else takes the place. I sit in the car listening to some doctor talking about stem cell research which would be interesting anyother time but now. All I can think of is whats going to happen when the car arrives and the dealer sees it. Are we going to have a glorious star spangled happy ending or are we going to be attacked by a bunch of irrate mechanics weilding crowbars?

Thirty minutes later Jimmy calls to say Gimpo and him are coming up the road in the truck I move my car out and they move in. From there it just goes like clockwork. Its a performance of true genius and beauty. Jimmy operates the crane and manouvres the huge lump of crushed car from the back of the truck and positions it perfectly onto the double yellow lines outside the car dealers shop. People appear from nowhere with cameras, traffic stops and the locals come out to see what freak of nature the circus has brought to town. Everyone’s laughing and joking and while Gimpo unhooks the hoist from the car Jimmy strides into the dealers shop with a letter laying out the new offer. Hes high and hes happy. He slaps the letter on the counter and calls out to the dealer imagining they’ll embrace each other like long lost brothers and skip happily up the yellow brick road together leaving the court case and the dirty piece of bad art behind them. It doesn’t quite turn out that way. The shop is strangely empty and the two old mechanics shuffle in from the back room seemingly oblivious to the mayhem on their front doorstep.

"You looking for the boss?” they say.
“No mate ... he’s gone on holiday ....won’t be back for a week.... maybe longer ...you can come back then.”
You gotta hand it to the dealer . He’s smart.The plan deflates like a badly mended tire. Jimmy leaves the letter with the old boys anyway and comes back out to have one last look at his masterpiece which actually looks pretty good for a piece of bad art.

He kicks it nonchanantly, laughs, climbs up into the truck and drives slowly up the road. You get the feeling its gonna be a long hot summer.




In the intervening week two things happen. First the council says they will not extend Jimmys permit to keep the crushed car masterpiece on the side of the road and secondly the dealer makes it clear that he is open to negotiation despite being completely baffled by the whole scenario. By now I’m starting to feel really sorry for the poor car dealer. He has just never dealt with the likes of Mr Cauty before.
A phone call ensues and Mr Colin Berryman,the car dealer, accuses Jimmy of loosing him 1.5K in buisiness over the last week. This seems reasonable until Jimmy points out that perhaps he lost the revenue simply by being on holiday for the week. To this Mr Berryman has no answer so agrees to meet Jimmy and Steve the following Friday at 2 0’clock to sort the whole matter out once and for all.

Friday comes too soon and I have to regretfully decline Jimmys invitation to accompany him on this, the final journey. So in between supervising the distribution of several tons of ready mix concrete in London and trawling the sales racks at Harvey Nics looking for mecca I track Jimmy’s exploits in Brighton by phone and text.

The texts from him to me go something like this:

7:00am…Making breakfast for kids and Gimpo
8:00am…Got kids to school...first in the playground...sad
8:10am…Daisy (Jimmy's daughter) is sick…no school. She's with us on the truck
9:46am...Picked up a lorry and we’re driving to Crawley to pick up a crate to put the car in
10:21am…Lost in Crawley
10:30am…Crawley is not a good place to be lost in
11:02am…Got the crate…Shit its big!
11:29am…Daisy has figured out I spent almost 3K on hire cars since January…Fuck!
12:55am…Got Steve from train station.
1:10pm…In caf having premeeting meeting
1:48pm…County Cars here we come!

And then I hear nothing. Dead line. No texts. Nothing.

I’m on the 137 bus by this time heading back from the promised land with nothing but a pair of black lace designer knickers that are two sizes two small and all I can think of is what the hell is going on in Brighton and wishing I was there. At 2.30 he rings me and shouts "I got the money!"

He's shouting so loud on my phone that the whole bus load of people can hear him and I’m shouting back and people start looking at me and shifting uneasily in their seats, but I don’t care because his excitement is like an infectious disease that I really want to catch.
"So what happened. Tell me what happened" I say

"Well, me and Steve and Gimpo went into the car dealer’s office and we sat down at his table and its all very friendly. He said he didn’t have a clue what we were on about, but yeah ok, he’d give me 4K for the piece 'cos he doesn’t really want to go to court and neither do I. Trouble is he didn’t have any money on him. So then Steve said he’d loan Mr. Berryman the 4K so Mr. Berryman gave me the cash and Steve got an IOU. Then Steve gave the IOU back to Mr. Berryman and got the Bad Art piece in exhange. Well anyway…we all got confused especially when at the last minute Steve decided to charge one pound interest on the loan. But it was great…cash everywhere…all over the table. It was like some weird game of poker and I’m not quite sure how it happened but I won the jackpot."

"So then once I had the cash in my pocket we all went out onto the pavement, put the crated up car art on the back of the lorry and Colin was patting me on the back and we were all shaking hands and I’m even thinking of giving him an Artist of the British Empire medal.”

"Hey Jimmy that’s so fantastic. Congratulation!" I say.