by Earl Swift
He earned extra money by moonlighting as a bouncer at a disco called the Oar House, catercorner from the old Sunoco station. He proved to be an accomplished dancer, and popular with the young women who patronized the club. One night he chatted up a cute, dark-haired girl, just out of high school, who appeared at the door in search of a friend inside. “When are we going out?” he asked her.
“Never,” she replied. She reappeared a week later, and again he asked her out. She said no. When he asked a third time, she assured him that she would not change her mind, because she could see that he was the very picture of trouble.
Chalk one up for young Krista Ridenour’s instincts, because it was while working the club’s door that Arney perfected the use of his hands. He’d toss a troublemaker into the parking lot, the ejectee would throw a punch, and Arney would lay him out. A customer would speak insolently to him, or at too high a volume at too close a distance, and Arney would reset the parameters of the exchange with a flurry of strikes. He gained valuable practice at other nightspots, too. He’d go out with friends who were not fighters, and step in if any trouble came their way—which it almost surely would, because pretty soon, he found himself enjoying the mix-ups. Pretty soon, he came to expect them. Pretty soon, a day seemed idly spent if it didn’t end with a fistfight.
Conduct yourself in such fashion, and it isn’t long before you no longer have to seek trouble; it comes calling on its own. It happened so predictably that Arney grew bored with one opponent; he’d take on three, four, a half dozen at once. He made a game of it: He’d go into a bar with a friend, and the friend might get hassled—or, if not, a hassle might be prodded to life—and Arney would sidle up to the purported antagonist and say, with a warm smile, no hint of menace: Hey, what seems to be the problem? Are you giving my friend trouble? Some back-and-forth might follow, often culminating with the antagonist assuring Arney that he was going to whale on Arney’s friend, to which Arney would say: No, sir. No, that’s not going to happen, because he’s with me, and if you’re going to be whipping any ass tonight, friend, it’s going to belong to yours truly.
Tell you what, he’d say: Let me buy you and your friends a beer. Drink the beer, think about things for a while. And if, after you finish that beer, you still want to fight, bring your friends along and we’ll go outside and have some fun. It amazed him that so many guys drank the beer he’d bought them, then came back and said, Okay, let’s go outside. Without fail, they regretted it: After a couple of punches, Arney slipped into an altered state, much as he had in that grade school coatroom down in Rocky Mount—a feral place, in which he was blind and deaf to everything but the task at hand, in which he felt no pain, held nothing back. Time slowed, taking everyone else’s punches and reaction times with it, while his own hands and feet became blurs. His blows were fearsomely hard and accurate; he knocked out most opponents with one. Even fights in which he was significantly outnumbered usually ended in seconds.
He did not always leave the field unscathed. At twenty or twenty-one he fought a six-foot-five opponent in the parking lot of a foosball parlor, and as he tells it, the man jammed his thumb into Arney’s left eye socket and worked the digit in past the first joint. Arney had never felt such pain, and realized that if he didn’t act fast the man would use the thumb as a lever to pop out his eye. Bent over at the waist, held fast by the neck, he grabbed the only thing he could reach, grabbed it hard, and with a roar, tore it free. His opponent immediately collapsed, his scrotum opened, testicles spilling loose.
Arney collapsed onto the man’s chest, punched him several times in the face, then vomited on him. He heard sirens, and had just enough time to stagger to his feet and punch one of the man’s friends before fleeing the scene.
On rare occasions he was defeated outright, such as when he was bludgeoned with a plank and knocked out cold. Even in that case, he didn’t stay beaten. He spent months afterward asking around at bars about the responsible party. When he found him, they talked. “We kind of became friends, really, for a couple of minutes,” Arney tells me. “I said to him, ‘You remember cracking a motherfucker over the head with a board?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I sure do.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m that motherfucker. And I’m going to fuck you up.’ ” Arney beat him “next to death,” he says: He broke the man’s ribs, his nose, and his jaw, and “tried to break one of his legs, but I couldn’t. I hurt my ankle trying.”
He felt good for a little while after such a victory. The bad hand he’d been dealt seemed to hurt a little less. The rage subsided. But not for long. “I was a dangerous motherfucker,” he says. “It was that anger controlling me. That anger took over. I was capable of delivering punches so hard and so fast that people didn’t know what hit them, and I’d just keep doing it. When that switch got turned on, it was just like turning over a 427 Chevy big-block engine.”
Despite that, he returned to the Oar House from a weeks-long stay in the Norfolk jail to find that the dark-haired young woman he’d pursued now agreed to dance with him. She had a great smile, a nice figure, and a wholesomeness that he found powerfully attractive: She was the nice girl he’d never been able to get. Arney and Krista Ridenour became a couple.
He hauled a lot of derelict cars, and in the effort to flip them, to fix them just enough that somebody would take them off his hands at a profit, he got handy with engines and transmissions and body work. He bought a gas station on a busy Norfolk corner. His mechanical skills sharpened.
Arney found peace under the hood: An engine followed hard-and-fast rules, its parts working in a predictable choreography; bolt its components together properly, fine-tune a few variables, and it was sure to fire up. No guesswork. No gray areas. Working on cars, he enjoyed some small measure of control over his environment. No matter how out of control the rest of his life might be, he could depend on a repair job to center things.
Which was good. Because the rest of his life was almost completely out of control.
7
IT’S ONE THING to sell a fine old car and replace it with something reliable and long-lasting. It’s another thing to sell a fine old car, one that draws admiring glances and comment wherever it goes, and replace it with a charmless pile of automotive scat. Sid Pollard’s decision to swap the Chevy for a Renault Alliance was one of those another things.
The best that can be said about his choice is that it was a new car, and presumably safer. But it’s also true that human nature drives us to seek complication when our lives become ordered and comfortable, and the Renault may have appealed on this count, for the Franco-American contrivance was nothing if not complicated—poorly designed, badly built, underpowered, and outclassed by its Japanese competitors.
It looked like a winner on its introduction in 1983, with a price tag of $5,595, dirt cheap even then, and styling that was uncluttered, if not exciting. It fused European pedigree and American jobs: The Alliance was assembled by Renault-controlled American Motors in Wisconsin. “Nearly 1½ million hours of development and testing and over $200 million invested in American Motors’ Kenosha assembly plant have produced a sophisticated small sedan of European breeding and American manufacture,” Renault/AMC boasted.
It covered thirty-seven miles on a gallon of gas, which remains impressive thirty years later, in the age of gas-electric hybrids. And there was the Motor Trend honor: The Alliance was “the best blend of innovation, economy, and fun-to-drive we have seen in almost a decade,” gushed one of the magazine’s editors in the “Car of the Year” issue. Car and Driver, only a little less enthusiastic, named the Alliance to its own “10Best” list for 1983.
Yet for all its attributes, Sid Pollard’s new purchase was a bad one—sufficiently so that Car and Driver formally apologized to its readers twenty-six years later, admitting: “The car was trash.” A glacier could outrun it. The engine would have been outgunned by a weed whacker. Within a couple of years, by which time its various reliability and quality issues were obvious, its sales were nosediving, and the car had
earned a secure place in history’s long roster of automotive mediocrity—comprising, unfortunately, all too many of the vehicles offered to the public over the 120 years of the horseless carriage.
It was almost, but not quite, flawed enough to earn a spot among the diabolically bad, those rare offerings that get absolutely everything wrong and so win a certain perverse admiration among collectors. The Trabant, East Germany’s smoking, squealing, eighteen-horsepower admission that, okay, maybe the West was onto something. Older Fiats of any model before the automaker’s retreat from the American market in 1984, just ahead of torch-bearing mobs. The Lada, which combined Fiat engineering and that famed Soviet attention to fit and finish. The Triumphs, MGs, Austins, and Rovers of the late sixties and seventies—Dickensian in their glorification of hardship, pot metal, and decay, with wiring so notoriously vexed that its supplier, Lucas Electrics, was known industry-wide as “the Prince of Darkness.” (Several websites are devoted even today to Lucas humor. Examples: What’s the Lucas motto? “Get home before dark.” And “Lucas: inventor of the intermittent wiper.”)
Any such list is incomplete without the explosively bad Ford Pinto, or Chevy’s much-ballyhooed and universally reviled Vega, a subcompact that drew its looks from its sexy big sister, the Camaro, but otherwise seemed a GM experiment in just how flimsy, rust-prone, ineptly designed, and casually built a car could be. Or American Motors’ uncompromisingly ugly and shoddily engineered mid-seventies showpieces, the Matador, Hornet, Pacer, and Gremlin: “Where’s the rest of your brain, toots?” And let’s not overlook the Yugo, a cheapie subcompact so dreadful that it sullied the reputation of an Eastern European dictatorship.
One thing the Alliance had going for it: It didn’t torment its buyers for long. Within a very few years, almost all had rusted through, failed mechanically, and vanished from the American road. Even in junkyards, they’re rare sights today. Poor Sid Pollard regretted selling the Chevy almost immediately. A couple of years later he saw his old wagon in traffic, a pretty blonde behind the wheel. Sitting in his Alliance, he was almost moved to tears.
As for Frank DeSimone: In the years since he first painted the car, he’d moved his business out of his mother’s garage and into a shop in an industrial corner of Portsmouth, where he did high-dollar restorations, patched up exotic wrecks, and handled insurance repairs for big law firms. He parked the ’57 in the shop’s fenced yard, tinkering with it between other jobs.
Like everyone associated with the car to this point, DeSimone was a Portsmouth boy. At about the time he’d met Sid Pollard, a friend had asked him to help ready his car for painting, and the work had come so naturally to DeSimone, and had been so much fun, that he’d decided to take it up full-time. He and a buddy had gone into business together, DeSimone handling bodywork, the friend playing mechanic. When the partnership split, DeSimone had a reputation for quality repairs. He started doing fancy paint schemes and custom modifications—he built a car for the country-rock band .38 Special—and hired some top-notch body men to work with him.
One of his guys had a friend who now and then would drop by the shop, a fellow named Picot Savage. Sometimes Savage would bring his wife, Debbie, with him, and from the moment the two laid eyes on the wagon, they wanted it. DeSimone wasn’t sentimental about the car; to him, it was a machine—a nice machine, and a stylish one, but ultimately replaceable. So, just a few months after acquiring the Chevy, he obliged them. He sold it for $1,500.
FOR ALL OF its modernist flair, the wagon was in many respects decidedly old-school. It relied on cast iron and thick steel, anemic paints and primers. Its moving parts were quick to wear, and it had a lot of them. A host of mechanical devices—prone to inexactitude in the best of circumstances, and poised for catastrophic failure in the worst—performed tasks now handled by computers and solid-state gear. Rust feasted on its doors, fenders, its frame and floor. And though Chevrolet did not advertise the fact, parts of the wagon—the rear of the backseat and part of the cargo bay’s floor immediately come to mind—were made of wood.
So by 1984, when Picot and Debbie Savage bought the wagon, it was aging rapidly beneath its deceptively fresh-looking skin. Its odometer had ticked into six figures. Chunks of its roof and body had been replaced with putty—automotive silicon, spackled on then, as now, to smooth imperfections in its metal. Road salt and coastal rains had chewed its floor pans thin, and in places, almost translucently so. Most troubling of all, its mechanical heart was about to fail.
The Savages lived in Suffolk, a southeastern Virginia town made famous by the peanut—Planters, of Mr. Peanut fame, was headquartered there, and the legume dominated local agriculture and factory jobs. When the Chevy was new, the burg still retained some of the character of a rural southern outpost, with a compact and self-sufficient downtown of mom-and-pop stores, and sharply segregated neighborhoods (black and white parts of town were literally separated by railroad tracks), and a population that earned its keep with its hands. The wicked city centers of Norfolk and Portsmouth, twenty-odd miles to the northeast, had seemed much farther away; indeed, either was considered a punishingly long morning commute.
In 1984, however, America was a land transformed by the previous quarter century’s explosion in car ownership. Two-thirds of U.S. households had owned one car in 1957; now, more than two-thirds had two. Suburbia had advanced in ever-greater rings from the central city, had nosed up against Suffolk’s edges a decade back, and was now swallowing the town like an amoeba; the once-distinctive community was fast becoming part of a greater metropolitan whole, indistinguishable from its neighbors and bound to them by a web of high-speed roads.
Picot Savage had seen a similar transformation firsthand. Born in 1953, he was the fourth generation of his family to live in Churchland, a farming village not far from where Sid Pollard’s subdivision sprang up outside Portsmouth in the fifties. His great-grandfather, the son of a North Carolina preacher, had been pastor himself of the Churchland Baptist Church. His grandfather, a World War I veteran and the county surveyor for decades, had named many of the area’s roads. He evidently favored birds and bird dogs, though one subdivision, carved out of an aunt’s property, was crisscrossed by family names, including a Picot Court. Picot—rhymes with “hike it”—was the recycled surname of a distant cousin in North Carolina. It always confounded people. When a teacher called the roll for the first time each year, Savage knew that a long pause was his signal to say, “Here.”
When he was a youngster, Churchland’s center consisted of a few buildings clustered around two-lane U.S. 17 at its meeting with tracks of the Norfolk & Western Railway: grocery, drugstore, gas station; a restaurant and a little beer joint; and (here’s how rural it remained) a grain storage silo and a blacksmith shop. Savage’s grandmother lived right in the middle of this knot. A room added to her house served as post office.
The village didn’t last long past the time Savage was old enough to remember it. After his mother died, just shy of his seventh birthday, he and his father and his father’s new wife moved into a brick rambler in one of the new housing developments fast colonizing the area’s truck farms. The blacksmith shop disappeared. A strip shopping center replaced many of the buildings at the old village’s heart. The state widened U.S. 17, the remaining truck farms became schools and parks and neighborhoods of curving streets and cul-de-sacs, and pretty soon it all looked like everywhere else.
Picot spent most of his childhood in the brick rambler. Physically, the new Churchland probably wasn’t much different from the suburban picture offered up in Leave It to Beaver, but his boyhood ended with a sharp turn from the TV script: His parents separated, and he moved first into the homes of some school friends, then into his own apartment. He was a junior in high school.
Every day he walked to his classes, and from school to an afternoon job at a gas station, and he kept doing it until he graduated in 1973. His grades were not good enough for college—his attendance had been steady, but his efforts had been directed t
oward having as much fun as possible—so he went to work as a pipefitter. And did well: Three years out of high school, he built a house a few miles to the west in Suffolk, in a little knot of suburbia still ringed by cropland and nurseries.
The same year, he married Deborah Jo Brantley, the pretty daughter of a prominent Portsmouth community leader. He’d met her through a friend of his who lived across the street from her, and had been smitten on the spot: She was two years older than he was, fun-loving and adventurous. It was a solid pairing. He had a good sense of humor, was quick to laugh, wasn’t one for sitting around. They took up residence in the house, Savage’s father in an apartment that Picot built into the place.
Debbie was a civil servant at the Norfolk Naval Air Station when they met, then moved to a civilian job at a big naval medical complex on the Portsmouth waterfront. In time she left government service for work as a florist at a nursery near Sid Pollard’s boyhood home in Green Acres. The Chevy became her daily driver on the commute into town. It was Debbie whom Pollard saw in the car after selling it. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he knew her: The two had attended the same grade school and junior high, when she was still a brunette.
The Savages were unaware that the Chevy’s power plant was soon to give up the ghost. Though nearly thirty years had passed since it was bolted onto the wagon’s frame in Baltimore, that model of engine had proved itself a Chevrolet mainstay—one could still buy it new and, in fact, can still do so today. It was rumbling under the hoods of millions of cars. It was simple, tough, and seemingly indestructible.