Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  This provenance, as Arney sees it, is central to the car’s value, right up there with its beauty, its mechanical merits, its storied place in American culture. He has watched the travelers pull off Route 168 to meet their pasts long enough to understand that the wagon transcends mere transportation, or performance, or design. It tells a story. It is a story, that of individual Americans, traces of whom it carries in its blemished skin and worn upholstery—their joy and anguish, hard days and easy, childhood and old age. Each dent and tear recalls a scene, a plot twist.

  So it is that the Chevy heads the list of Moyock Muscle heaps that Arney has deemed worthy of rescue. Of all the choices on the lot, it’s this one he says he’ll next spend tens of thousands of dollars returning to its former glory.

  TOMMY ARNEY AND I go back to 1993. We met two nights after Christmas that year at his go-go bar, the Body Shop, to which I ventured as a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot, the daily newspaper in Norfolk. Arney had made news of late, having taken Virginia’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board to court over an arcane state regulation that prevented him from serving hard liquor; he could pour beer and wine into his customers all day and night, but for reasons understood only by the ABC, he could not dispense the hard stuff in the presence of a woman’s exposed midriff or buttocks, both of which were essential to his business model. So he’d fought the law, the law lost, and I went to the Body Shop that night to talk to him about it.

  I stepped into the bar with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation, because all I knew about Arney was that he’d supposedly manhandled a police dog. I’d heard two versions of the tale, both of which painted him as an almost comically fearsome character. One had Arney biting the dog before it could bite him, thereby removing a goodly portion of the creature’s ear and compelling it to quit the fight. The other, less specific account had him so demoralizing the animal that it fled for cover under a police SUV. Both versions ended with the German shepherd emotionally crippled and retired from service.

  The Arney who waited for me in the bar’s perpetual dusk looked as if he could vanquish an entire pack of timber wolves. He could have passed for a pro wrestler. Dark ringlets spilled to his shoulders. We shook hands—his, hard and thorny and enveloping mine—and took up seats at a table near the stage, where a slim blonde in sequined bra and panties was lying on her back and thrusting her hips to the wildly amplified bass beat of an old Culture Club song.

  “I love the Body Shop!” Arney yelled over the music. He smiled, cranked back a Michelob Light, and I noted that his wrists were as big around as wine bottles. “I tell that to my girls all the time: ‘I looove the Body Shop!’ ”

  Over several hours and beers he explained why he so loved it. Despite what I might think, he told me, the go-go business wasn’t about sleaze or sex. It wasn’t predatory or immoral. What it was, really, was a safe, nurturing platform for male bonding. “The guys in a go-go bar, they’re in there either talking about work or cars. They’re not talking, really, about girl stuff,” he said. “They’ll look up at the runway and enjoy the girl. They’ll tip her. But they go back to playing their game of pool, or talking about cars.

  “Don’t misunderstand me: The guys come in to see the girls. But they come in to see the girls and relax. And as they relax, they talk about things they enjoy talking about.

  “Which is cars.”

  I met the station wagon ten years later. Suffice to say for now that in the course of another newspaper assignment I encountered the Chevy when it was still on the road but in rapid decline, its prospects bleak, and came to know it well. Even so, within a few months the car and I lost touch, much as I’d fallen out of contact with Arney after our first meeting; though I had fond memories of him—of his humor, and the canny intelligence that lurked in his eyes, and his lecture linking Detroit and pole-dancing—and though I kept an ear open for word on what he was up to and how he was faring, we’d exchanged hellos only once in the intervening decade, when I ran into him at a local supermarket.

  Then, in 2009—five years after meeting the car and fifteen after meeting Arney—I was reacquainted with both machine and man at once. It happened that Arney knew the wagon, too; what’s more, he knew that I knew the car. And he told me that he planned to fix it up. He’d start before the new year—meaning January 1, 2010.

  Not long after, I learned that there was another label people hang on Arney with some regularity: distracted. The new year came and went. In March, he vowed that he’d jump on it in April. In April, he told me that he’d probably be starting around Memorial Day. To be fair, in the interim there were urgent demands on his time. For one thing, he was preparing to open a restaurant and bar, a country-western joint called Bootleggers, which involved ripping out the guts of an old storefront and draping its walls with NASCAR memorabilia and murals of Reba McEntire, Brad Paisley, and other country music stars, and hanging the new establishment’s name in massive blue neon capital letters over the door. That took time—more than expected, because Arney exchanged heated words with a building inspector over some purported code violations at Bootleggers, causing the inspector to fear for his physical well-being, which riled said inspector’s bosses at City Hall and sparked the intervention of lawyers. Come Memorial Day, the car was still slumped in the yard, shedding electrons.

  Other distractions have preyed on him in the months since. Arney owns a lot of property besides Moyock Muscle, mostly small commercial buildings in dodgy neighborhoods, which had renters until the recent economic collapse; his mortgage payments now dwarf his income, have erased his savings and shredded his net worth. Plus, there’s the gnawing reality of an ongoing FBI probe into his affairs, involving the bank loans he obtained to pay for some of those properties. The bank has tipped into insolvency, a federal grand jury is poring over its records, and Arney is aware that any moment now, the marshals might be at the door.

  Not least, he has himself to battle, for Arney doesn’t require bona fide distractions to become distracted. He has been hamstrung by a short attention span since his boyhood, has a tendency to dive into a project with great gusto, only to lose interest before—often just before—it’s finished. Moyock Muscle and a warehouse he owns across the road are repositories for a couple dozen half-restored cars, and another few that are missing just an odd piece here or there, but which, for whatever reason, he hasn’t managed to bring home.

  So it defied long odds that in July 2010 Arney used a forklift to pluck the wagon from the weeds of Moyock Muscle’s front lot and carry it around back, toward the outbuildings in which Painter Paul plies his craft. Arney slid the forks under the car off-center, so that once eight feet in the air the Chevy teetered, tail-heavy, and looked sure to backflip onto an old Dodge before a couple of bystanders leaped for the front bumper and held on. That aside, it was an auspicious day. Arney gave the car a close once-over, and while he didn’t like all that he saw—so much of the sheet metal was shot that Painter Paul faces months of just cutting and welding—he ducked under the car while it was lifted and declared most of its undercarriage “good as shit.” He was eager to start. He said it would happen August 16. Alas, the county started making noise about Moyock Muscle being an eyesore. And here we are. August 16 was a month ago. The car sits.

  Arney watches the county men leave, then walks back into the showroom. “I’ll tell you what,” he tells the crew, “that went pretty fucking well. I feel really fucking good about it. I think those motherfuckers learned something.”

  “That little dude give you any trouble?” Skinhead asks.

  Arney shakes his head. “He didn’t say one fucking word.”

  The crew chuckles.

  Okay, Arney says, enough sitting around. A recycling truck is coming by to pick up the catalytic converters they pulled out of the cars they crushed. The devices contain platinum, and there are scores of them—big money. Skinhead and Painter Paul head outside.

  Arney follows them out after a while, watches as they load the truck. The wagon squat
s nearby, dandelions thick around its wheels. Its thirteenth owner glances over its way. The coming months will decide whether the car’s story ends here or acquires another chapter. It is up to Arney, the product of a reclamation no less ambitious than that required by the Chevy, a wreck of a boy and disaster of a man transformed by will and restless ambition into what he is today—whatever that might be—to fix it, to scatter it, to let it crumble to dust, or to sell it for scrap.

  For the moment, the choice seems clear. “I’ve got a few things I have to get done,” he murmurs. “Won’t take long, but it’s shit I have to do.

  “And after that,” he says, “we’re going to get to work on that ’57.”

  2

  TOMMY ARNEY KNOWS the inventory on the Moyock Muscle lot so well that if you mention any car out there, however hidden by its neighbors, however forlorn or run-of-the-mill, he’ll know exactly which car you mean, will muster a near-photographic image in his mind and catalog of its strengths and weaknesses. He knows whether it has an engine and, if so, the particulars of that power plant. He knows whether it was running when he acquired it. He can say what he paid for it, what he’s asking for it, and what, if anything, he’s been offered for the car in the past. Often, his recollection includes a seldom-seen option or other distinctive feature, the importance of which might elude the layman—such as when I hear him tell a customer several times that a 1973 Chevy Nova on the lot has “factory-tinted windows.”

  So it is that when a customer asks about a 1956 Mercury, Arney tells him that when he bought that car, the seller cried. Or that he notices, while on the move and from thirty feet away, that a rust-chewed Firebird, partially obscured by other decaying cars in an especially disorganized corner of the lot, is missing its steering wheel—and, on closer inspection, recognizes that an enterprising thief has unbolted one of its bucket seats from the floor, evidently planning a second visit to pick it up. (“Motherfuckers!” he cries. “Some people are just sinful, ain’t they?”)

  And such is the power of his recall that within a few days of the county’s visit, as he slumps in the Quonset after hours of crushing cars in withering heat—his eyes closed, his black wifebeater tawny with salt and windblown dirt, his arms, face, and jeans veneered in grime—and he’s approached by a middle-aged fellow about a 1965 Impala Super Sport outside, he can say without opening his eyes, let alone consulting paperwork: Perfect body. Great car. The price is $7,500 firm. Then ask: “You want me to tell you a story about it?”

  Sure, the customer says, and Arney comes to life. “You ever heard of a guy named Eddie Card?” he asks. The customer is uncertain. Well, Arney tells him, Card is “about eighty years old, and he’s a crazy son of a bitch. He’s the craziest son of a bitch there’s ever been.” Card once owned a transmission repair place in Norfolk, and this car sat in that shop for thirty years—that’s why it’s in such good shape. Some years ago, Arney adds, he happened by Card’s shop and was amazed to see the old man attempting to install a transmission in a 1961 Corvette by himself. It was a heavy transmission, too, with a cast-iron shell, so Arney offered to help. Card declined the offer: “He said, ‘Get the fuck away from me, and let me be. I’ve fucking got it.’ I called Skinhead over, and he wouldn’t let either of us near the car. Told us to go fucking find something to do.” Arney grins. “Crazy as shit. But he installed that transmission.”

  His head is filled with such trivia, and he keeps it all straight despite the riot of clutter around him—which, arrayed among weeds that in some spots bristle waist-high, includes a half-dozen semi-trailers stuffed with scrap metal; stacks of chrome bumpers, wooden pallets, and warped plywood; many hundreds of worn tires, the majority still mounted to rusted steel wheels; a platoon of broken air compressors; piles of exhaust pipe and mufflers; engine blocks; fenders and hoods; eight lawn mowers, four wheelbarrows, and three shopping carts; a fiberglass septic tank; and an incalculable wealth of bolts, nuts, rods, springs, batteries, and small electric motors.

  That doesn’t include what’s crammed into the seven buildings on the property, or the dominant species of disarray, the vehicles for sale—heavy trucks, carnival bumper cars, and nearly everything between. A few are grouped according to make or model, but the bulk of the collection is squeezed wherever it will fit—a Corvair wagon between a ’56 DeSoto and an Olds convertible, a toothy ’49 Buick beside a Datsun roadster, a Lincoln limousine next to a squadron of Cushman meter-maid carts.

  Against this crowded backdrop, among so many seldom-seen competitors, the Chevy wagon might easily be overlooked. It is too common a survivor to draw attention like the Buick or the DeSoto, and too ravaged a specimen to excite. But a man who remembers something about every car on the lot was bound to be intrigued by one with a complete resume, especially if it reaches back more than half a century.

  The wagon interests Arney on other counts, too, foremost among them that he has a demonstrated weakness for the ’57 Chevy—how it looks, how it drives, how it makes him feel. This is not, in itself, remarkable, because of the thousands of automobile models that have rolled off assembly lines since the dawn of the Motor Age, of the hundreds of makes produced just in America, the 1957 Chevrolet is among the handful that, with the mere mention of its name, instantly conjures a mental image among not only car buffs but the mechanically ignorant. If you’re over fifty—and certainly if you’re over sixty—you can close your eyes and summon its details. Even if you’re quite a bit younger, the car serves as visual shorthand. To foreigners, it is a quintessentially American emblem of postwar brashness, of confidence, power, and excitement—and maybe of red, white, and blue excess, too. Show a photo of a ’57 to a kid in Punjab or Phuket or Tierra del Fuego, and he’ll know he’s looking at an American car. A teenager here at home might not know a Honda from a Hyundai, but odds are he’ll be able to pick a ’57 Chevy from a lineup.

  Arney’s feelings for the model surpass that general-population love. A neighbor’s example was the first car he remembers admiring, as a kid of five or six, and he’s owned many himself in the intervening decades; of the motor pool he commands today, his favorite vehicle is a black ’57 two-door into which he’s dropped a late-model Corvette engine. A likeness of that very coupe appears on the big Moyock Muscle sign stretched across the Quonset’s façade. Arney used to display another of his ’57s at the Body Shop—a picture window near the pool tables looked into a garage in which the car sat, polished to a mirror shine and lit like a museum’s Renoir. A quick look around his usual haunts reveals a host of lesser clues to his fandom. In his garage at home, he has a videocassette rewinding machine shaped like a ’57 Chevy, and framed on the wall is a picture of a ’57 hardtop parked outside the Body Shop, painted by a man Arney’s younger brother, Billy, knew in the penitentiary. In his home office, a foot-long model of a souped-up ’57 occupies a place of honor on the bookshelf behind his desk, and a cassette player shaped like a Chevy’s front end sits on a file cabinet. Over the office in the Moyock showroom hang several renderings of the car, painted on metal.

  On top of all that, it seems that Arney was foreordained to choose this car to save. He’s of the same vintage, for starters: At about the time he was conceived, in the summer of 1955, Chevrolet’s designers were putting their finishing touches on the classic-to-be. When he was born, in March 1956, General Motors was preparing its dies and stamping gear for the new car’s body panels. At about the point he was taking his first steps, this particular wagon’s body—welded into a tough, heavy box, then painted, carpeted, and upholstered—was leaving the Fisher Body works in Cleveland on a train car.

  What happened next is narrated by a narrow strip of aluminum riveted to the driver’s doorjamb, practically the only piece of metal on the car that still gleams as it did when new. Stamped into the metal is a vehicle identification number, or VIN, a sequence of letters and numbers unique to this Chevy: VB57B239191.

  The V indicates that the car was equipped with a V8 engine. The first B identifies it as part of
Chevy’s midlevel 210 line, the number 57 its vintage. The next figure in the sequence, the second B, announces that the car was built in Baltimore, where Chevrolet operated a gargantuan assembly plant for seventy years, beginning in 1935. When the wagon’s body arrived from Cleveland that summer of 1957, the factory was Baltimore’s largest manufacturer, with an assembly line six miles long that spit out a new Chevrolet every minute.

  At the plant’s “body drop,” the Cleveland shell was mated to a frame built in Philadelphia, an engine cast in Michigan, tires manufactured in Ohio. The VIN’s final six numbers pinpoint the wagon’s place in the production run, and thus, roughly when it came to be—most likely, late in the second week of July.

  Its chrome flashing, its two-tone paint bright, the car was rolled from the factory and onto another train, this one bound for Norfolk. Arney’s family, until then living in the mountains of North Carolina, moved to the port city at about the same time. His childhood hadn’t gone to hell at that early juncture, but that was pretty much foretold, as well. You could look at Arney’s family and see trouble coming just as surely as you could decipher the Chevy’s VIN.

  His mother’s people hailed from an isolated pocket of wooded mountainside north of Boone, North Carolina, where the nearest settlement was a place called Meat Camp. There they traded pistol shots and DNA with other tribes of the forest, and bred among themselves, as well, until generations on, when some of them moved down off the mountain, they carried some fairly serious craziness in their blood.