Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Often as not, the latter was the case: He was a big guy with huge biceps, an aura of friendly menace, and an electric smile, and his dancers were drawn to him as surely as he was to them. “I would just take my pick,” he says. “There were some days I was a little slack—I was with two. But most days I was with four, five, six different women.

  “When I walked into a room anywhere, the women seemed to be attracted to me. I was fun. I was funny. I was wild as a motherfucker. I was crazy as a bitch. I was a fun motherfucker. I’d slap a guy and knock his teeth out, then go out in the parking lot and get a blow job.”

  He and Krista had been a couple for almost ten years when he bought the Body Shop, and he owed much of what was good about his life to her. Their son was nearing the age when he’d be ready for kindergarten, and they’d had a daughter, Ashlee, in 1984. His wife had proved a faithful business partner: Because he’d stolen that safe, Arney had a felony conviction on his record, and the commonwealth of Virginia was therefore disinclined to grant him a liquor license; the Body Shop’s paperwork was in Krista’s name. Just the same, Arney stayed away for days at a time, leaving her to care alone for the kids. On those days he did make it home, he spent most of his time sleeping. Twenty years later, Ryan’s sharpest childhood memories of his father have him crashed out on the sofa.

  Finally, things between Arney and Krista came to a head, and he told her that he couldn’t help his behavior—he hoped she understood, he recalls telling her, but he had to be with other women. He didn’t understand it himself. Krista replied that if he couldn’t control these urges of his, he’d have to leave. She came by the Arney Brothers car lot with his clothes.

  NOWADAYS, ARNEY TALKS about that period as “the olden days,” and his behavior at the time as “the old Tommy Arney.” The old Tommy Arney didn’t brook any challenge, any sass, the slightest whiff of discord—or, for that matter, a wayward glance, a dancer touched, or a laugh too loud. He never fought in his own bar; the Body Shop’s parking lot thus saw a lot of scores, real or imagined, settled in the quick and brutal style for which he was renowned. After closing, when he and Skinhead ventured to other bars, he’d fight indoors, with resulting damage to property.

  Each member of the crew has his or her own “greatest hits” list of Arney’s mayhem. Virginia Klemstine, who was twenty-one when she started dancing at the Body Shop in 1986, recalls the night Arney faced off with a man outside, punched him into a daze, then announced he was going to give the “motherfucker” something to “remember me by”—and grabbing him by the head, bit deep into the man’s neck, ripping away a divot of flesh and muscle. After he’d chewed and swallowed it, he asked Klemstine for a toothpick.

  That was the only time he actually metabolized an opponent, though he bit several—he incised the tip from one unfortunate man’s nose, gouged a second neck, latched on to ears. But he preferred sharp blows. He was generous with concussions.

  Skinhead was present for one storied rumble at an after-hours club, sparked when a patron assaulted a Body Shop manager with a folding metal chair and Arney launched a counterattack on the dance floor. His adversary had backup; in seconds, it was Arney versus an army, which he dispatched, one by one, with kicks and punches. The club’s staffers tried to intervene, but he’d entered that lizard state that tracked any movement as hostile, and he laid them out, too. Skinhead says that at one point, twenty-three of his opponents were down. Arney testifies that at least a dozen were knocked out cold.

  Skinhead was on hand the night a Body Shop manager got into a fistfight with a lightning-fast navy boxer, and was on his way to defeat when Arney took over with the drawled announcement: “Let me show you how this is done.” He beat the boxer with his fists, knocked him senseless against a standpipe, then ground out a cigarette on the man’s head. On another night, Skinhead watched Arney beat a man over the head with a motorcycle helmet until it broke.

  And both Klemstine and Skinhead were witness to the infamous power drill incident. Klemstine was working behind the bar when Arney asked a Body Shop regular named Jimmy to gas up her Trans Am at an Exxon station across the street—Klemstine had volunteered to run an errand for Arney, but had no gas. He gave Jimmy the keys and twenty bucks, and watched as the man left with a buddy.

  Time passed—forty-five minutes or better—before Arney realized that Jimmy hadn’t reported back. He found him skulking in the back of the bar. Jimmy, he said, why didn’t you tell me you’d returned? Well, Tommy, look, Jimmy said, there’s been an accident—I was at the Exxon station when a driver lost control of his car as he passed the place, and his car jumped the curb and ran right into the Trans Am while I was standing there, filling the tank.

  Let’s go look at the car, Arney said. He followed Jimmy into the parking lot. The Trans Am’s left quarter panel was crumpled in such a manner that Arney knew instantly it hadn’t been hit by another car: The damage ran vertically, as if caused by a pole. Jimmy, he said, do you want to tell me what really happened to the car?

  I’m telling the truth, Jimmy insisted.

  Arney sat Jimmy in the bar’s back room and dispatched Skinhead to the Exxon station; he returned a few minutes later to report that no one had seen an accident on the premises. Jimmy stuck to his story. Arney, growing impatient, sought out Jimmy’s friend and suggested that telling the truth was the healthiest option available to him. The man agreed. Jimmy, he said, had been attempting to spin doughnuts in a nearby parking lot when he’d lost control and smacked the rear end into a light standard. Arney bought the man a beer and returned to the office. I’ll give you one more chance, he told Jimmy. What happened to the Trans Am?

  Tommy, he replied, I swear on my mother’s life that it happened the way I said.

  At those words, Arney lost his temper. He slapped Jimmy unconscious, woke him up, again asked him for the truth—and when he didn’t get it, knocked him out and scanned the room for a tool to better hurt him with. His eyes fell on a Black & Decker cordless drill, bought earlier that day and charging in its cradle. The bit kept grabbing Jimmy’s blue jeans as he drilled into the man’s kneecap, so Arney abandoned the knee for Jimmy’s skull. Fortunately for all involved, the bit wasn’t up to the task.

  Arney relates such stories with a mixture of wonder and regret. He does not miss the old Tommy Arney: “My dumb ass thought that if a motherfucker disrespected me in any way, I had to fuck him up,” he tells me. “If you talked about Tommy Arney and I found out about it, I was coming. I’d break your nose or knock you out.

  “Whatever bar I walked into, I don’t care where it was, people moved out of the way,” he says. “I thought people respected me and liked me.” He shakes his head. “They didn’t like me. They were scared to death of me.”

  Perhaps the most troubling facet of the old Tommy Arney was what he didn’t do, rather than anything he did. He was a generous father, lavish in his celebration of Christmas and birthdays, and he spoke on the phone with his wife, Ryan, and Ashlee almost every day. He was not nearly so consistent in his physical presence, however. Ryan would wait for him out in front of the family’s town house, which sat on a suburban cul-de-sac; a street sign stood at the mouth of the street, and he’d turn circles on the pole while maintaining a lookout for approaching cars. Sometimes Arney would arrive and bundle the kids off to see Disney on Ice, or a tractor pull, or pro wrestling. Sometimes they’d go stuff themselves at Piccadilly Cafeteria, see a movie.

  Sometimes Ryan would stand out at that street sign for hours, wondering where his big, loud, two-fisted dad was, until Arney showed up hours late, contrite and eager to please.

  Sometimes, Ryan says, his father wouldn’t show at all.

  8

  ANY AGING MACHINERY requires maintenance of steadily increasing breadth and intensity; parts wear out, protective coatings break down, rubber gaskets oxidize and crack. This happens no matter how diligent, how devoted the upkeep; an old car will require a steadily increasing quantity of work, and a similar increase of money,
simply to maintain its current condition, however lacking that condition might be.

  Let the attention slip, and decay asserts itself with mathematical surety, its vigor at first proportional to the duration of neglect, but compounded as that duration proceeds, so that a car’s disintegration becomes an exponential proposition, accelerating as it goes. Charted, decay is parabolic, the downward slope of the line steepening as it moves to the right, eventually turning vertical—at which point, the damage is complete.

  So at thirty years old, the Chevy had arrived at a critical juncture, for it required a sixth owner equipped to meet its mounting needs. Enter Mary Elizabeth Byrum Ricketts, a thirty-six-year-old divorced mother and coworker of Debbie Savage. When Debbie mentioned that she and Picot were thinking about selling the wagon, Ricketts knew next to nothing about cars except that she’d be thrilled to have that one. What’s more, she lacked the wherewithal to retain expertise elsewhere: She teetered close to the financial abyss, and traveled a far wider orbit from the cultural center—that easygoing, no-worries, spic-and-span ideal that the wagon had once represented—than any of her predecessors.

  Ricketts knew the Chevy was a dicey choice of vehicle for the daily commute to and from her home, which was miles farther out in the sticks than the Savages’ place. She knew the $1,500 asking price would stretch her. She knew that she’d have trouble meeting the inevitable repair and maintenance bills. But Ricketts was not a slave to conventional thinking, careful decision making, or, truth be told, good judgment. She was a hippie chick, a rock-and-roller, an eccentric, a free spirit who dyed her hair maroon and laughed louder than was polite and collected bowling shirts, who wore cat-eye glasses and flamingo earrings decades after they were popular and long before they cycled back around. She had no desire for the suburban ideal of old, of her parents. Screw middle-class respectability and perfect lawns: She adored the car because to her it represented the opposite, the pursuit of fun. The Chevy was cool not because of what it did, or the image it conveyed, but because it just was.

  And oh, it was beautiful, and outsized in every respect—the exuberance of its chrome, the billowing hood that rose as high as her chest, the acres of curving glass. The rearview mirror offered a study in one-point perspective, the sides and ceiling of the car narrowing to a back window an impossible distance away. It would be handy, she reckoned, to have a backyard storage shed she could take wherever she went.

  So it came to pass that early in December 1987, Ricketts sat in the Savages’ kitchen, writing them a check. She left their place feeling that she and the machine were meant to be together. On the way home, she noticed that every guy she passed in traffic looked her way. “Damn,” she thought. “You must look really good today.”

  A quick CV of the car’s new owner: Born in September 1951, the third and final child of North Carolinians Roy Britton Byrum, career employee of a Budweiser distributorship, and deeply religious Sara Chappell Byrum, homemaker. From all indications, an unexpected baby—her sister, Sandy, was six and a half years her senior, and brother Don, eight. Raised in a house-proud, working-class neighborhood in Norfolk. Father had a yen for stylish suits and cars, the latter of which he traded in for new models every year or two; an early snapshot shows first grader Mary standing at the front bumper of a gleaming ’57 Plymouth.

  Church camp each summer. Smart, musical, and artistically gifted in school. Learned guitar. Lovely singing voice. Closest childhood friend: Mary Jo Rothgery, aka Joey, who lived across the street. In junior high, the two were entranced by the Beatles. Mary was taken with John Lennon, and baked a cake every year on his birthday; Joey preferred Paul McCartney. They drifted apart while attending different high schools.

  New best friend: Marianne Holmes, fellow member of Norview High School’s class of 1969. She and Mary often skipped class to smoke joints on the school grounds, with the expected effect on their grades. Mary had a sharp eye for design, fashion, and color, however, and planned to pursue an education in the arts. She advertised her creativity with her clothes—bell-bottoms, jeans she embroidered herself, fringed jackets. With her long, straight hair parted down the middle, her high cheekbones and strong chin, she looked like an almost-too-pretty Hollywood take on the counterculture.

  In 1967, Mary’s father died. For the next two years, she and her mother shared the family home. It was a stressful existence for both. Seeking escape, Mary spent much of her time in the company of musicians—in particular, one Wellington I. Clements III, nicknamed “Wic,” a prodigy who taught himself to play piano in an afternoon and within a month was tackling difficult Chopin pieces. Clements played guitar, too; he and Mary wound up in the same band.

  In the spring of 1969, Mary learned she was pregnant. Her mother, horrified, booted her out of the house. Mary and Marianne Holmes moved in with another girl, sharing a crumbling Norfolk apartment a couple of blocks from the old Colonial Chevrolet showroom. All three slept in the same bed. They ate cereal at every meal. Cockroaches were so abundant that the girls discovered them inside the handset of the telephone.

  That summer, Wic Clements asked a close friend’s fiancée, Charmaine Bryant, whether she might have room in her two-bedroom apartment for his pregnant girlfriend. Bryant refused to consider it. A few weeks later, Clements appeared unannounced at her door, Mary beside him. The girl told her that she planned to put her baby into foster care shortly after its birth, and to reclaim the child after she built enough of a life for herself to support it. Bryant doubted that she could pull it off, but was so moved by Mary’s sincerity that she agreed to put her up.

  Mary shared the impending birth with her childhood friend Joey in an early November letter, backing into the news with a brief discussion of Paul McCartney’s rumored death. “I been wanting to tell you something for quite a while but it’s an awkward thing,” she wrote in green ink. “Remember Wic the guy I used to sing with. Well, I’m gonna have a kid in 3 weeks. By the way are you sitting down??!” Her baby boy arrived right on schedule: December 3. Mary named him Britton Wellington Byrum. She and Marianne Holmes thought the name romantic, like that of an English poet.

  As planned, she put Britton in a foster home. She landed a job making subs at a takeout place, to which she commuted by bus. After several months, she brought the baby home; she cared for him by day, and Bryant, who pulled a nine-to-five shift as a civilian at the Norfolk Naval Station, took over when Mary left for work. Wic Clements visited Britton once or twice, but was not transformed by the experience; in short order, he eloped with a sixteen-year-old girl from Mississippi. Mary was bereft.

  Fast-forward to an evening a few months later, when Billy Ricketts, high school senior and member of an acoustic quartet, was transfixed by a striking young woman singing and playing guitar in a Portsmouth coffee shop, her repertoire a fusion of folk and blues. He returned with his bandmates, who were likewise impressed. They invited her to join them. They added a bass player, traded their acoustic instruments for electric, and called themselves Britton.

  The band played outdoor festivals, clubs on the naval base, and coffee shops, most of its set consisting of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young covers. One of its guitarists, Barry Scott, would later gain some fame with a national act called the States. But it was the other guitarist, Billy Ricketts, who made a bigger impression on Mary; when she left the band after a year, they were a couple.

  Impressions of the maturing Mary Byrum, courtesy of her friends and family: Fearless. Foul-mouthed. Outspoken. Outrageously funny. Willfully foolish. Unfazed by stares. (A favorite saying: “What are they going to do, take away your birthday? What’s the worst that can happen?”) Spectacularly creative—when she moved out of Bryant’s apartment and into her own in the fall of 1971, she took command of the space, made it remarkable, a feat she’d pull off everywhere she lived.

  She answered an ad seeking a “groovy” person to work at a vintage clothing boutique in downtown Norfolk. Got the job. A snapshot from the period depicts a willowy Mary, hair in braided
pigtails, strolling past the shop while wearing overalls fashioned from empty burlap sacks of Jim Dandy brand hominy grits. Years later her boss recalled, “She was certainly groovy.”

  Next door to the boutique, and owned by the same couple, was a florist shop, the Sunflower, to which Mary eventually moved. She would make her living from flowers for the next thirty-five years. She and Billy Ricketts married in December 1973. Billy adopted Britton, and they changed the boy’s name from Britton Wellington Byrum to Britton Byrum Ricketts. The family moved into a house in Norfolk and, when Billy’s aunt died, bought her place across the river in Portsmouth.

  Still working at the Sunflower, Mary opened a vintage fashion store of her own, Ole Time Clothiers, in a working-class neighborhood not far from where she grew up.

  It didn’t last long. On its demise, she sold her stock to one Carrie Ziegfeld, who had her own shop on Colley Avenue, within a few yards of the Sunoco station where Tommy Arney lived a few years before, and facing the Oar House, where he still moonlighted as a bouncer. The women became fast friends. To Ziegfeld, Mary was “Mur,” and Ziegfeld became “Cur.” She joined Mary at the Sunflower, then opened her own flower store; the two later bounced among several Norfolk floral companies. They danced often at the Oar House, and for a while Ziegfeld waited tables there—so it’s no stretch to imagine that Ricketts and Arney might have met long before either bought the car.

  As Mary entered her thirties, the challenges of her youth had grown distant and hazy. She and her family lived in a comfortable home. She enjoyed her work with flowers. Her son had inherited her creative streak, and was blossoming as an artist. Billy relished his role as stepfather, and stayed in shape by playing in a night baseball league.