Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  If it wasn’t the suburban ideal, it wasn’t far from it.

  THE FIRST TIME Mary Ricketts’s friends saw her behind the Chevy’s wheel, they reacted much as she had on her drive home from the Savages’ place: She and the car seemed a natural partnership. Here was a woman who decorated her home in bobbleheads, who’d long incorporated retro touches in her wardrobe, who played Roy Rogers yodeling tapes over the PA at work. Who, when stress caused her hair to thin, fastened a fake eye to her scalp and asked a friend to check her head for the source of an itch back there.

  And who could be impetuous, sometimes to the point of brinkmanship. She had demonstrated as much in the foregoing two years, because by the time Ricketts bought the Chevy her life had again seen dramatic change: With little warning, she had bolted her Portsmouth home—and Billy and Britton—for quarters in Eclipse, a fishing hamlet on the James River, ten miles to the west. Her impetus was a young man she’d come to know on weekend visits to the village—a good-looking fellow, lean and muscled, with a Tom Selleck mustache and, more important to Ricketts, a quick and comic wit. She’d fallen hard for him. “Cur,” she’d told Ziegfeld shortly after leaving her husband, “you know how it is when you realize you’re not with your soul mate.”

  Ricketts rented a converted garage not far from the water, and in time moved into her beau’s riverfront rambler. She immersed herself in Eclipse’s insulated, hard-partying culture, and her boyfriend’s circle of friends embraced her with equal gusto: Queen Mur became central to boozy, laugh-filled weekends of play on and near the water, of blue crab and cold Coronas and Bob Marley on the box.

  The wagon seemed Detroit’s ode to beach parties, so it, too, earned a key role in sun-soaked Eclipse afternoons, and—no surprise—was the most obvious vehicle in the village from the first day she drove it in; the Chevy didn’t exactly recede into the background, there or anywhere else. It was missing its clock (which had been replaced with a cheap plastic digital model, affixed to the dash with an adhesive strip) and one of the chrome strips down its flanks (which the Savages included, unattached, on selling the car), but was otherwise intact and smart-looking at thirty. Strangers waved, nodded, smiled as she passed.

  Ricketts adored it. And despite all the minor annoyances the Savages had suffered with the Chevy, it didn’t give her any reason to feel otherwise, at first. It proved a reliable ticket to and from work. It was so fast that when Ricketts dared to floor the gas, the roar and thrust of the powerful 327 under the hood and the sensation of so much hurtling bare metal thrilled and terrified her, and she never did it again. It gulped down gasoline but in other respects was ideal for road trips, including memorable journeys down windswept two-laners and a rough-water ferry to Ocracoke, an island on Carolina’s Outer Banks. She’d materialize at Ziegfeld’s place to take her on “mystery rides,” their destination unknown to both of them.

  Britton, who eventually joined her in Eclipse, called the wagon “Godzilla.” Her friends called it “Dinosaur” and “Sweet Pickle.” Ricketts tended to talk about it as if it were alive, akin to a pet; in a snapshot taken in Eclipse, she lies, smiling, on her side across the car’s hood, head supported on a fist, a couple of dogs cavorting around the front bumper—Mary with friends.

  Ricketts imagined the Chevy would be a fixture in her life right up to her death: When depressed, she and Ziegfeld talked about ending it all in the wagon, in the style of Thelma and Louise, the movie heroines who committed onscreen suicide by launching a 1966 Thunderbird convertible into the Grand Canyon. They worried that the ’57 was too stoutly constructed, however, and that they’d end up alive but crippled.

  That was an illusion, as Ricketts came to see. The Chevy hadn’t been garaged for four years when she bought it, and now spent another five-plus in Eclipse without protection from the weather, and without the sort of slavish maintenance any car of its age required. Rust again bloomed along its sills, around its rear hatch, behind the wheel wells. It sprang up on the rocker panels, first as innocuous sprinkles, then gnawed hungrily into the passenger compartment’s metal floor, its progress obscured by carpet and seats.

  Decay wasn’t the only force working against the wagon. Ricketts and Britton were crossing the long U.S. 17 bridge over the Nansemond River one day when the hood suddenly flew open and crashed against the windshield, scaring the wits out of both of them. The hood was ruined; Ricketts scavenged a replacement from a six-cylinder ’57, which lacked the wide, chrome V that advertised a V8. Other mishaps came along: As big and heavy as the wagon was, it was a chore to maneuver at low speed, and Ricketts backed it into a telephone pole on one occasion, and banged into equally stout objects on others, so that it acquired dents and a crinkled left fin.

  Then, round about 1992, the running gear began to announce its age with surprising and inconvenient failures, and Ricketts’s relationship with the Chevy departed the third stage of ownership (companionable reliance) and reentered the fourth (heartache), and its first substage, doubt—which, you’ll recall, the Savages had experienced in the closing days of their tenure with the car. It was still a reliable means to get to work and other nearby destinations, but Ricketts could no longer trust it for impromptu ventures out of town.

  Worse, her long relationship with her boyfriend betrayed some mechanical flaws of its own. No need to belabor them here; suffice to say that Ricketts moved out of Eclipse and into a big house in Norfolk owned by a close friend, Julie Hill. A few months later, her boyfriend begged her back and she went, only to leave again. She was heartbroken by the split. Never bashful around the bottle, she now drank with ambition. On one occasion, a drunk Ricketts took a spill and blackened her eye.

  Her return to Julie Hill’s home brought the car to within a quarter mile of Colonial Chevrolet’s old corner, which was now occupied by an Exxon filling station. Hill nursed Ricketts’s wounds for several months, until the patient decided she was ready for her own apartment and found a place about a mile away.

  It made for a far shorter commute to the discount floral supply company where she worked, which was fortunate, because once she’d settled in, the Chevy seemed to require attention continuously. She took it to a family-run garage on Colley Avenue, on a stretch a little south of Tommy Arney’s old stomping grounds—a shopping district of funky boutiques and restaurants clustered around a repertory cinema. The wagon was there so often that it became something of a landmark as it awaited repair on the lot. In fact, it got so that the car sat there more than it didn’t.

  Her relationship with the Chevy thus entered the second substage of automotive heartache—disappointment, at which point a vehicle’s owner feels a growing sense of dread at the outset of every task to which she subjects it, because said vehicle all too often fails to meet the demands of said tasks, and at about which point an owner launches a committed search for a replacement.

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t much that Ricketts could do about her situation. She couldn’t afford a new car, and had little money to devote to the wagon: Her best year in the flower business yielded $33,000, and most others saw her earn well under $25,000. She scrounged together enough to make stopgap repairs, the minimum necessary to keep the car mobile, and sometimes not even that. The car spent many days on the garage lot, awaiting her next paycheck.

  In the space of two short years, her beloved wagon had gone from her most prized possession, a rolling embodiment of her style and personality, to a source of anguish. Ricketts and the Chevy now teetered at the third and final substage of automotive heartache, that being disgust, from which all but a tiny few such relationships never recover. An alternate label for the substage might be “abandonment,” for it’s at this point that a vehicle amasses so many blemishes, so many hurdles to its continued viability, that its functional value is dwarfed by the outlay necessary to achieve its function, and it thus attains greater value as scrap than transport. Automobiles that have reached this substage outnumber those in any other stage, if not those in all the others combined. Our c
urbs, yards, and farm fields are busy with rusted-out automotive fossils. Our cities are dotted with junkyards piled with their remains.

  One day in April 1994, when the garage again had the Chevy for repairs, its owner, an old-timer named Joe Scalco, called Ricketts to say that a fellow he knew had a car for sale, a 1979 Buick LeSabre—not an inspirational piece of engineering, but a spacious sedan in good condition, running strong. You might want to check out this car, he told her. It might be time to quit fooling around with the Chevy.

  Ricketts went over for a look and drove the LeSabre home. Scalco parked the ’57 at the edge of his lot, its nose pointed toward traffic, its turquoise hull visible to theatergoers, window-shoppers, and dog-walkers. That’s where it was when Alan Wilson and Al Seely came rolling down Colley Avenue and Seely announced: “We have to get that car.”

  TOMMY ARNEY WAS doing well. The Body Shop treated its military customers with particular appreciation, cultivated students from the college up the street, earned a large cadre of regulars, and he packed the place most every night. He did so well that some of his dancers—whom he shared with other clubs, for an exotic dancer never got sufficient stage time at any one venue to earn her keep—had been told by his competitors that if they continued to work at the Body Shop they’d not be welcome elsewhere.

  The solution was to control more stages, so that he could keep the dancers for himself. Moving quickly, Arney opened a second club, the Body Shop II, just outside the gates of the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, home to thousands of sailors. In a short while he took over a third bar, a dark nook that shared a roof with a sagging duckpin bowling alley, halfway between Little Creek and the main naval base. He was Norfolk’s king of go-go, with the nicest clubs and the prettiest dancers in a city stuffed with the navy’s enlisted, all of whom had cash to spend.

  He was surrounded by more women than ever. The old Tommy Arney loved them all, and he often commandeered the DJ’s booth to profess that love over the PA: A dancer would take the stage, and Arney would sigh into the mike, “Dang, girl,” or “Lawd, lawd, lawd,” and exhort the sailors and students to reward the lady’s charms with generous tips. He cajoled customers into buying meals for themselves and the talent.

  The money rolled in and life was good. It bore no resemblance to Ozzie and Harriet’s, but it suited Arney fine. Until one morning he lifted his right arm to apply deodorant and noticed a lump under the skin of his armpit. He did nothing about it for a couple of months, during which it grew in size—and in his thoughts—until he was worried enough to mention the knot to Bill Taliaferro. The lawyer was immediately concerned; he took Arney to see his own doctor, who examined the lump and announced he’d have to run some tests, including one for AIDS.

  Being busy and barely literate, Arney had not kept up with the medical literature, and was under the impression that AIDS was a disease restricted to Haitians and gays. You don’t need to run no AIDS test on me, he told the doctor. I’m a goddamn cowboy.

  That may be, the doctor replied, but you need the test. He explained the illness to Arney, pointed out that in terms of raw numbers, it was now most often transmitted among heterosexuals, and as he spoke Arney realized with a growing horror that he was a prime candidate. He’d been having indiscriminate sex with exotic dancers for years.

  He agreed to the test and left the doctor’s office in a panic. He couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. He couldn’t even fight. When, after a week, he returned for the results, it was in an almost paralyzing state of dread and fear. The doctor leaned back against his desk, folded his arms over his chest, and told him: We have a problem.

  How’d that AIDS test come out? Arney blurted. Before the doc could answer, he added: Please don’t tell me I have AIDS.

  No, the doctor said quietly. You tested negative for AIDS. But you have cancer.

  Arney was ambushed. He had not seen the blow coming, and it staggered him. When he had recovered from the shock enough to mold a coherent thought, it was of his kids: He would have to make things right with them.

  But not right away. First, he went out and got drunk—drunk enough to forget, however briefly, that at thirty-two he finally faced an opponent that stood a good chance of whipping his ass. Drunk enough to get through the day, and to sleep for at least two or three hours a night. Which is to say, very drunk, indeed—and he stayed that way for weeks, all the while ducking calls from the surgeon to whom the doctor had referred him.

  But the lump kept growing, until he could feel it there, all the time, pressing against the muscles of his arm and chest, and he realized he could no longer put off doing something about it. He called the surgeon. They agreed that he’d undergo a procedure to remove whatever was growing inside him, with one proviso: Arney wanted to be awake and aware throughout the operation. No way, he told the doctors, was he going to be knocked out. He was persuasive. The surgical team strapped him to an operating table and, using only local anesthesia, cut into his armpit. They removed two tumorous lymph nodes from his chest. Each was the size of an egg.

  The incision had to be left open for a couple of days while the wound drained; the doctors told him he’d be staying in the hospital for the interim. But lying in bed several hours after surgery, Arney grew restless. He had been too busy for too long to do nothing, so he got dressed and drove over to the Body Shop II for a beer and an eyeful.

  And as luck would have it, he got into it with a patron and had to use his right fist to knock the man out. His incision tore wide open. A tube inserted in the wound to facilitate the draining process erupted in bloody spurts. Arney walked next door to a 7-Eleven to “find something to stuff up in the hole,” as he put it, and threw the store into hysteria; the tube was firing long jets of blood from Arney’s armpit with each beat of his heart, and it was running down his side, his arm, getting all over the floor. In minutes, cops and an ambulance screeched to a halt in the parking lot. Arney stepped outside as a cop approached with the words: Sir, you’ve been shot. We need to get you some help.

  What? Arney said.

  We’re here to take you to the hospital, the cop said. You’re in shock. Just stay calm.

  What the hell? Arney said.

  Sir, pay attention, the cop told him. You’ve been shot.

  No, no, no, goddamn it, Arney said. I haven’t been shot. I had a goddamn operation this morning.

  THE BIOPSY CAME back: Arney had Hodgkin’s disease. He and Krista went to see an oncologist, who told them it was an aggressive variety of the cancer—very aggressive—and that he’d need to operate immediately to determine what stage it was in. Arney was against another surgery and said so. The oncologist replied that it was vital: He had to extract Arney’s spleen, an examination of which would reveal much about the disease’s progress; that would determine the levels of chemotherapy and radiation necessary to combat it.

  What would you do, Arney asked, if you went in there and it was just the scariest shit you’ve ever seen? What would you do then?

  The doctor replied that he’d embark on a Stage Four regimen of chemo and radiation.

  Tell you what, Arney said. You just pretend that I have Stage Four cancer, and give me the treatment for that.

  You don’t want Stage Four chemo if you don’t need it, the oncologist said. Please, believe me.

  That’s what I want, Arney told him.

  Okay, cowboy, the doctor replied. And so Arney underwent an extreme chemotherapy regimen. It was evil business: Its name, MOPP, was an acronym of four agents—mechlorethamine, Oncovin, prednisone, and procarbazine, each nasty in its own right, i.e., mechlorethamine, a “nitrogen mustard,” a variant of the stuff that blinded and blistered thousands of soldiers in World War I. For forty-five minutes every two weeks, Arney would watch the drugs drip into his arm from an IV bag, and the second the mixture made contact he could feel his insides tingle; twenty minutes later, he’d start vomiting and he wouldn’t stop for a full day, sometimes two. His hair, which had tumbled to his shoulders, started falling
out by the fistful after the second treatment.

  He didn’t want anyone to see him sick or vulnerable, so he checked into a Holiday Inn for a few days after each session. He worked out a routine with the housekeeping staff: He’d take a cab over from the hospital and they’d be waiting with the door open and a room ready, and the second he reached it, he’d be heaving. He slept on the bathroom floor. He could smell the chemicals leach from his pores as he lay beside the toilet.

  It was down on that tile, he says, that the old Tommy Arney died, and the new was born in his place. “I had not realized what pain and hardship I’d brought to other people. Chemo was my wake-up,” he tells me. “I just wanted people to respect me, but I went about it the wrong way.”

  The transformation was not instantaneous, however. Observe the periods between his chemo sessions, when a new Tommy Arney might have sought plenty of rest, good nutrition, and a safe, nurturing environment. No, sir: That did not occur. He was at the Body Shop one night and a fellow required some course correcting, so Arney walked him outside and punched him in the face. He cut a knuckle on the man’s tooth. The next day he was in to see his doctor, who saw the cut and asked what he’d done to his hand. Arney told him about the fight.

  See here, the doctor said, you can’t do that. You’re undergoing chemo. Your immune system is completely suppressed. You get an infection, and it might kill you.

  So, what do you want me to do? Arney asked him. Not fight?

  You don’t have a choice, the doctor said. It is a matter of life and death.

  So if somebody fucks with me, I have to walk away? Arney said. I can’t do that.

  The doc peered at him for several seconds before offering: What if you were to slap instead of punch?