Bob Servant (14 page)

I told the manager that I was a major local business success story and if he gave me permission I could get a hundred local Big Business Wigs signed up the Executive Club. He started on about bank procedure and I took off my jacket. I'd worn one of Frank's nephew's t-shirts so it was tight over my muscles. With the fingers of my left hand I did the Slow Caterpillar routine up my right bicep and looked him in the eye and whispered, ‘Do you eat meat?' He folded like a pack of cards and said I could have that day as a trial run.

The first thing I did was rename the Executive Club as The Executive Winners Club to make it punchier. The manager went off to change the forms and I found a marker pen and wrote ‘The Winner's Enclosure' above the stationery cupboard door. He grumbled a bit about that but the bank was opening so he gave me the forms and left me to it.

Straight away I started working the crowd and showing them the forms and asking them if they'd like to come into The Winners Enclosure. It was tough going. The most common reasons people gave for not joining me in The Winners Enclosure were that they were happy enough with the bank account they had, or they didn't
like how small my t-shirt was or that they knew for a fact that The Winners Enclosure was the bank's stationery cupboard. When you're faced with narrow minds like that a lot of people would have given up but I kept going and finally I got a few people to at least join me in The Winners Enclosure for a chat.

Unfortunately there were a couple of problems with The Winners Enclosure that the manager had failed to tell me. It was too small to have seats in it so the customer and I had to stand quite close to each other. And there wasn't a light. Because I was having confidential discussions I obviously had to close the door and some of the customers just didn't have the confidence in themselves to handle the overall situation.

What with all the screaming the manager started to really let himself down, saying how my trial was over and I had to go. Needless to say he was too scared to come out from behind the glass so I hit back by trying to steal the pens but they were on chains and I ended up having a glorified tug-of-war with the pen holders which wasn't how I wanted things to end but it was the manager's fault that it did so. Either way, I got one of the pens off eventually, held it up and snapped it in two to show him it was a Metaphor, and then walked out the bank with my head held high.

Looking back, it's a shame that the manager fucked up the Executive Winners Club. I'd like it to have succeeded not for the glory, although that would have come in spades, but for the fact that it would probably have been good for me to have had a bank account.

You see the thing about my money is that I've never really paid any Kriss Akabusi. I've always meant to pay Kriss Akabusi, I mean it's not like I don't use the streetlights and I suppose the Army keeps me as safe as anyone else, but I never paid any Kriss Akabusi on the window-cleaning money so I just never bothered paying any Kriss Akabusi on the cheeseburger money either. But the way I see it is that, yes, maybe I've not paid as much Kriss Akabusi over the years as I could have done, but I've also given a lot of other people jobs. I'm sure some of them will have paid at least a little bit of Kriss Akabusi so that's something I can throw back at the Kriss Akabusi boo boys.
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Wogan's 47th Birthday
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57
See
The Dundee Courier
, 3 August 1972 – ‘
Singer “Surprised and Honoured” By City Gesture'.

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You may notice this last paragraph reads a little strangely. I have substituted the name of the British athlete Kriss Akabusi for a word that, if left unaltered in the copy, could have seen Bob prosecuted by the relevant national authority.

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Photo courtesy of Bob Servant's private collection, all rights reserved. Inscription on back of photograph reads: ‘Wogan's 47th Birthday, 3 August 1985. I lent Frank £5.'

The Cheeseburger Wars came in two parts. There was The Cheeseburger Civil War and The Cheeseburger World War, but the important thing to remember about both is that there wasn't any fighting. Not a single punch, not one karate chop. They weren't like the wars you get in books or in the Top Ten Wars lists that it's fashionable to talk about at parties. The Cheeseburger Wars were fought using words. Words became bullets and people's mouths became guns.

The Cheeseburger Civil War was a war of rumours and it all started, surprise surprise, because of money. By 1986 Dundee had finally reached its limit for cheeseburger vans. Every man and his dog had entered the trade and suddenly things got very tense. The relationship between van owners became like a failing marriage. You don't trust them, you stop talking to them and you start to stockpile mince reserves. If we saw another van at the traffic lights we'd look straight ahead, if we bumped into one at the garage we'd pretend to read the paper and if we overtook one on the Kingsway dual carriageway we'd close our eyes until we were past which was dangerous but saved embarrassment.

What I call The Great Silence only lived for a few months before it was drowned by The Rumours. No-one knows where and when The Rumours started but the first time I was aware of them was one day when Frank and I had parked up at Baxter Park next to the Rock Hudson statue
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and a friend of Frank's came over and asked if we had
anything other than monkey meat. Frank said he wasn't sure (because he's a tool) and I asked the guy what he was talking about.

He said he'd heard a rumour we only sold monkey burgers. Frank's pals are often soft in the head, he meets most of them at adult swimming lessons, so I didn't take much notice until later that day when a woman in Commercial Street called me the ‘Pol Pot of the monkey world' and a couple of kids in Kolacz Crescent asked if we were ‘the Tarzan van'.

From there The Rumours were just ridiculous. There was the one about our Limeade being stolen from a children's home, that stuff about us being diehard Idi Amin fans (I'd followed the guy's career but I'd never been an out-and-out fan) and then all the nonsense about me having a false neck. I never understood how having a false neck would affect the quality of my cheeseburgers but you can't debate with these people. And anyway I didn't have a false neck. And I still don't.
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I knew The Rumours were coming from the other van owners but it was impossible to track down the culprits. I had to act and I did what any self-respecting local businessman does when he finds himself in a sticky spot. I bribed councillors.

Dundee City Council had finally set up a Cheeseburger Van Licensing Committee in an attempt to get some control over the situation and I found out the names of the three councillors that sat on it. They were Tuck Cummings, Gripper Wright, and Swapper Coley and as soon as I had their names I went to work.

The thing about corruption is you have to get inside the mind of the person you're corrupting and then pull his or her levers as if they're a forklift. The first forklift I had in my sights was Tuck Cummings and I was in a strong position because he was a notorious cheeseburger fan. At first I did the Pretend To Be Passing By routine when he got home at night and gave it ‘Oh Councillor Cummings come and have a cheeseburger'. Then I'd ‘forget' to ask for his ‘money' and soon he was having a ‘free' burger every day.

I let it go for a week then gave him a cheeseburger and a bill for nearly twenty pounds. He was furious and said he thought I'd been giving him the burgers for free. I said ‘Why would I?' He said ‘Because I'm on the Cheeseburger Van Licensing Committee.' I said
‘I like the way you're thinking,' and took back the bill and we looked at each other for a long time (but not in a saucy way) and slap, bang, wallop, he was in my pocket.

With Gripper Wright it was about identifying his weak spot which, as anyone in Dundee could have told you, was monkey bars. Like anyone who has lived a little knows, monkey bars are the heroin of the playground and Gripper had got hooked at an early age. He'd had some recognition
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for his swinging before age caught up with him and he'd gone into politics instead.

Dundee's monkey-bar scene centres round the Dawson Park bars which for local swingers are like Hampden Park and Dunkirk rolled into one. They're so popular that weekends are Kids Only but when Frank and I found out Gripper lives round the corner from Dawson Park our ears pricked up like rabbits.

Early that Saturday morning we went and holed up in the bushes beside the tennis courts. Those bushes give a grandstand view of the monkey bars but Frank was annoying me by saying stuff as if he was in the Army and I was just about to call the whole thing off when Lo And Behold we saw Gripper Wright skulk through the gate. He had a quick look about then let out the most magnificent scream (later agreed by me and Frank to sound like a Red Indian) and ran at the bars. It was a wonderful sight and we gave him a few minutes out of respect for the performance then crawled out the bushes and walked over. ‘Having a good time up there, Gripper?' I asked and slap, bang, wallop, he was in my other pocket.

That was two councillors down but I hit a problem with Swapper Coley. The guy was a real Goody Two-Shoes, even all the swapping he did was for charity,
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so I knew I was going to have to come up with something special. Frank and I tailed him home from the council and the one thing I noticed was how cold he looked. It was getting into winter and the guy didn't have a big coat on. If someone doesn't wear a big coat in winter they're either mad, a hard nut or in between big coats. Swapper wasn't a hard nut (you could tell by his walking style
which was pretty desperate stuff) and he wouldn't have been allowed to work on the council if he was mad, so I had my way in.

The next day Frank and I went up to Debenhams. We went to the Big Coats department and saw there was only one duffel coat left so I distracted the girls with a story about Gavin Hastings while Frank nicked the duffel and slipped away. I asked the girls if they had any decent duffel and they said that there was one left and we all walked over and then they started with the Hands Over The Mouth and Lock The Doors There's Been A Robbery stuff and I was giving it Eyebrows Up and What's All This About material in return.

Sure enough it made the paper
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and we gave it a few days to calm down then went and laid the duffel on Swapper's doorstep with a note saying it was from ‘An Admirer'. We hid in a bush and took photos of him trying it on and looking all pleased with himself. For the next week we kept an eye on Swapper and you should have seen the guy, showing off to the neighbours and stopping for chats just so he could get a compliment on the duffel.

Swapper Coley
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After the week was up I put him out his misery. I waited till he was halfway up his path then stormed up behind him like Roger Cook and gave it, ‘Having a good time in the duffel councillor, having a good time in the duffel?' He was all cocky and said that yes, he was having a good time and I was welcome to feel the material if I was another duffel fan. I took out the newspaper article about the theft and the photos of him wearing the duffel and held them in his face. ‘Touché,' I said, which later I regretted as it would have been better to say, ‘Game, set and match.' Either way, I had Swapper Coley by the balls.

With the Cheeseburger Van Licensing Committee under my control I soon put an end to The Rumours by having the licence revoked of any van owner that I didn't trust. The message got through – Bob Servant was in charge and he wasn't in the mood for jokes unless they were his jokes. With fewer vans on the road everyone was happy. Van owners were talking to each other again and there were plenty of punters to go round. The Cheeseburger Civil War was over but I barely had time to draw breath before the arrival of The Cheeseburger World War. It was like getting the better of Chris Eubank, walking round the corner and being clotheslined by Frank Bruno.