Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Another car squatted beside the Chevy by then, and Marcincuk had a new obsession.

  A FEW MILES to the south, the new, relatively straitlaced Tommy Arney found his energies unexhausted by his duties as proprietor of a neighborhood pub, so he diversified with a host of sideline ventures. He opened a bar in Norfolk and erected an enormous neon nameplate reading “Tommy’s” on its façade. It didn’t bring a timely return, so he shut it down and recycled the sign on a used-car lot, at a former Texaco station on a soggy river bottom a few blocks from Mary Ricketts’s girlhood home.

  At about the same time, he opened a hair salon with a woman who’d been cutting his own thinning locks, and when that didn’t work out—she lacked his round-the-clock drive—he transformed the space into Pedro’s, a shop devoted to the sale of Mexican pottery that he and Skinhead fetched on epic road trips to Laredo, Texas. He and the crew took on demolition jobs, house painting, roofing, hauling junk.

  Arney acquired properties by the dozen, some of them down-at-heel houses and apartments that he fixed up and flipped, others small commercial spaces, cheap to buy and easy to maintain, that he gutted, modernized, and rented out. Real estate provided an almost certain route to financial independence, Arney believed. Whatever the gaps in his formal education, he understood that property, bought at the right price, was a safer place for his money than just about any other investment.

  So he bought until he had close to one hundred pieces of real estate scattered through Norfolk, Chesapeake, and just across the Carolina line. He tended to deal with the same bankers for all of his land deals, men he knew and had come to trust—and who understood that Arney was a man of his word and that they had better be, too. Pretty soon, he’d acquired such a reputation as a landowner that lenders keen for his business took to lunching at Maxwell’s, just for the chance to talk with him, to forge a relationship.

  His passion for these wide-ranging interests was intense but seemed puny next to his unflagging zeal for the automotive trade. Nothing brought Arney the satisfaction of horse-trading for an old car, fixing it up, and reselling it at a profit. Enjoying it at his Norfolk car lot was short-lived, however: The presence of 518 vehicles on a creek-side property surrounded by homes earned the city’s unhappy attention, and with that came a visit from a petite blond municipal attorney named Cynthia Hall. Their first meeting did not go well. Hall, apparently immune to Arney’s charms, informed him that he’d have to remove the cars, and she wasn’t much interested in negotiating. He lost his temper and called her a “crazy bitch.” Hall slapped him with a court action aimed at shutting down his rogue operation. The judge sided with the city. Arney and Skinhead hauled away the cars.

  So in 2001, Arney turned his attention to acquiring property for a more ambitious car lot, and scouted locations where he might answer his calling without interference. His search took him south across the state line to Moyock, which seemed promising: It was an unincorporated dot on the map, more a wayside than a town proper, its ragtag businesses sowed loosely along Route 168 among cropland, slash pine, and dark patches of swamp. Any name recognition it enjoyed outside of Currituck County had come with the recent arrival of Blackwater USA, a private company that gained some notoriety, not all of it welcome, in the early days of the Iraq War. The outfit trained members of the military, government contractors, and police in shooting, hand-to-hand combat, and other martial skills on a seven-thousand-acre preserve west of the settlement. If the wind was blowing right, the bark of gunfire might drift from over that way.

  Arney bought a lot alongside Route 168, a mile into Carolina, then added an adjoining property in 2002 and another the year after. The biggest tract, of about two acres, included the Quonset, which had seen its first service as a drugstore and later use as a lawn equipment sales and service outlet. Next door was a tract of roughly an acre that had once been home to Outer Banks Motors, a used-car lot. Its sales office, a small trailer, still stood on the property. And adjacent to its rear was the third, squarish tract, on which stood a small modular home and three large metal sheds—formerly the fabricating plant of a company that designed and built custom trailers.

  So began Moyock Muscle. He filled the properties with cars he bought cheap or got for nothing and offered them at sums he judged to be reflective of their value. He, not the Blue Book, set the prices—which is to say, the figures he soaped onto the windshields tended to the high side. If a customer seemed to be good for a car, and understood its place in history and the challenges he’d face in restoring it to factory freshness, and was eager to take on the job anyway, Arney was inclined to settle for less. He was open to barter, too: If a prospective buyer could offer construction supplies, say, or restaurant gear, or a piece of real estate in trade, Arney was ready to deal.

  Then again, if he believed a car to be rare or otherwise interesting, he could be stubborn. “It might sit for a year,” he’s explained to me. “Might sit for two years, three years. But someday, somebody will walk in the door and say, ‘I’ve been looking for that car right there. How much?’ ”

  Life was about trading, and he was good at it. Nothing he owned wasn’t for sale. No possession was so valuable that he wasn’t willing to part with it, if the separation made financial sense, and his family and crew were reminded of that on a regular basis. Case in point: Ryan was driving a ’98 Mustang convertible Arney had given him, a sharp-looking car sheathed in metallic blue paint. A girl working at Maxwell’s wanted it badly, and made clear she was willing to pay for it. Ryan found himself surrendering the car.

  In 2005, Arney bought a fourth piece of land, next to the former used-car lot and in front of the former trailer plant: the longtime residence of the recently deceased Julius “Pop” Jennings, consisting of a home fashioned from two fused beach bungalows centered on nearly an acre of lawn. Jennings had promised the place to Arney in the event of his demise; they’d even agreed on a price. The acquisition gave Moyock Muscle 430 feet of frontage along Route 168. The inventory spilled into Pop’s front yard, which Arney covered with gravel, and his side yard, and out back of the house.

  Arney made a final, essential addition to the property: He hired Paul Kitchens, whose brother had been doing some painting for Arney. While in high school, Painter Paul had apprenticed in the body shop of a local Chevrolet dealership, and had blossomed into a bona fide artist with sheet metal and paint. He’d run into some trouble, in the form of cocaine and charges that he eluded police and whatnot, and had spent four years in state prison. He hadn’t had a driver’s license since 1988. But he was careful, thorough, and ingenious in his work, an expert with a welding torch and plasma cutter, a paint gun, a palette of putty—and at making the most of the rather primitive conditions in Moyock, where his paint shed was fashioned of tin and a couple of old rail cars.

  While Kitchens worked his magic, Arney and Skinhead greeted their public up front. Yankee traffic to the Outer Banks was funneled through Moyock, and in the summertime it thickened to a viscous ooze. Those trapped in the snarl had time to study the cars that Arney deployed in the front ranks—the explosion of chrome on a ’49 Buick Special, an old Chrysler in two-tone blue, a convertible Olds, an ancient Chevy Suburban. Arney had business cards made, reading “We Can Build Your Dream” and listing his cell phone number along with Ryan’s and Skinhead’s, and he’d hand one to anyone who broke from the traffic for a look around.

  If he hit it off with a customer, he might hand him a second card, which Ryan had designed and given to his father as a gift. “Tommy Arney,” it announced in large type, “Master Consultant.” Below were his specialties—Finance, Real Estate, Auto, Liquidation—ending with: “Life Coach.”

  SPEAKING OF RYAN: When he was eighteen, Arney bought him his own place, a town house not far from Maxwell’s, where Ryan was working full-time as a cook. He stayed there for a year, then rented a house from Slick, where he threw epic all-night parties and drank a lot of beer and for a year or two lost his way.

  He emerged from
this wayward chapter committed to getting an education and to whipping himself into shape. He moved into a brick rambler on a curving lane in a pocket of suburban Chesapeake that, despite rampant home building and commercial development all around it, retained a little of the rural character that just a few years before had characterized the hinterlands around Norfolk and Portsmouth. The house was surrounded by fenced pasture. A gate next to his driveway opened onto a barnyard and a big wooden horse stable.

  Arney owned the house, as well as another rancher down the street. Over the next couple of years he bought a third house on the lane, then a fourth—the last a roomy, two-story place that had been built by a local doctor, with four bedrooms and three and a half baths and a big, bright kitchen, and into which he moved with Krista and daughter Ashlee in 2005. He filled the stable with six full-sized horses and four miniatures. As the family rarely rode them, they amounted to large pets. “All they do is shit and eat,” Arney admitted, “but they’re nice to talk to, and nice to look at.” He put Skinhead in one of the spare ranchers, Painter Paul in the other.

  Twenty-five years had passed since Arney’s flight from the orphanage, and his triumph over the circumstances of his youth was at hand. He owned a town’s worth of properties and lived on a small ranch. He ran a successful restaurant and pursued his life’s passion in Moyock. He had a cadre of loyal followers. On paper, he was worth millions.

  Little of that was liquid, but he was achieving the American Dream. He was enjoying the Middle Class Ideal. Make that Upper Middle: In the immaculate Arney home, a baby grand piano occupied a corner of the living room. No one in the house played, but still—a baby grand. It was sculpture. It was beautiful. It was immense.

  If there was a note of melancholy to his success, it was that his mother didn’t live to witness its highest heights. She and Strickland had married and had a couple of kids together, and for years, Arney put them up, rent-free, in Norfolk, first in a trailer and later in a house he owned. He’d worked hard to restore his relationship with Fern, picking her up every other week to take her to the beauty parlor and to lunch. They’d become as close as they could be, given her limitations in the maternal love department, before her death in 1998.

  But the rest of his kin saw. He lived in a style that folks back in Meat Camp and Lenoir couldn’t have imagined, that seemed another life altogether from that of the troubled boy they’d known. The new house had a room over the garage that Arney set up with two pinball machines, an arcade game, and a stereo. One Christmas, he bought new Ford Thunderbird convertibles for his son and daughter, and when Krista mentioned that she liked them, bought one for her, too—he later reckoned he spent $145,000 on presents that year. When Ryan told him that he viewed his T-bird as “a girl’s car,” and wouldn’t drive it, Arney sold it to his son’s girlfriend for $25,000, or $17,000 less than he’d paid. The amount he lost is more than I’ve ever spent on a car.

  Arney’s hunger was unsated. In 2008 he bought, in Ryan’s name, a pair of Cuban-themed restaurants called Havana, one in Norfolk and the other in neighboring Virginia Beach. He resold the beach location but kept the Havana on downtown Norfolk’s Granby Street, at the center of the renaissance still under way in the city’s long-neglected heart.

  The crew was stretched tight. Slick not only put in double shifts behind the bar at Maxwell’s and Havana; she collected rent from Arney’s growing roster of tenants, paid his dozens of mortgages and tax bills, administered payroll and health benefits, and shepherded title transfers on his car sales and purchases. When Arney bought a property that needed cleaning, she did her share of sweeping and painting, too.

  Skinhead rarely had a waking hour off the clock. He’d put a full day at Moyock Muscle or roofing or stripping the insides of a recently acquired building, then a long night in the kitchen. Painter Paul rose at dawn, fed and cleaned up after Arney’s horses, put in an eight- or ten-hour day at Moyock Muscle, then tended to the horses again before calling it quits. He also cut the Arney Compound’s eleven acres of grass.

  By necessity, Arney was stingy with vacations and sick days. On a visit to a chiropractor, Skinhead discovered he had a bullet in his neck, a souvenir from a painful scare he’d endured in November 1977, when he was twenty-one. In the wee hours one morning he’d been held up at gunpoint, and on producing only pocket change had been tossed into the trunk of his own car and kidnapped. The robbers had driven around for several hours before announcing they would turn him loose; they’d popped the trunk and, while Skinhead shielded his eyes against the bright light of midmorning, shot him point-blank, twice in the face and twice in the chest. They’d then closed the trunk and driven around for a while longer before heaving him off a bridge into a shallow creek.

  Near death, he’d crawled up the creek’s bank, earning the attention of a passing truck driver. The newspaper ran a huge photo of Skinhead splayed out on a sidewalk as paramedics worked on him. He’d spent eleven days in the hospital. The guy who shot him died in prison.

  Thirty-odd years later, one of the bullets in his chest, which had been left in place, had somehow migrated into the muscles of his neck. Skinhead underwent outpatient surgery to have it plucked out, and was recovering from the procedure when Arney phoned. “You going to lie around all day?” he asked.

  “I just had an operation,” Skinhead replied.

  “You had that bullet in you for years,” the boss said. “You really going to let that little inch-and-a-half scar keep you in bed?”

  “It would be nice,” Skinhead said.

  “It ain’t happening,” Arney told him. “Get your fucking ass up. We got to go to work.”

  THAT SAME SPRING that he acquired Havana, Arney was already busy with other business ventures. He prepared to convert the bottomland on which he’d had the rogue car lot into a twenty-seven-unit, upscale condominium development. He bought more property, some of it residential, some commercial. And his long and wistful retirement from the business of “gentlemen’s entertainment” seemed to be nearing an end. He declared publicly that downtown Norfolk would benefit from the presence of what he called a “cabaret”—a place offering food and drink and stage performances by scantily clad, beautiful women—and that he’d be just the man to run it. “If you put a nice gentlemen’s club in downtown Norfolk, it would say nothing but ‘welcome’ to travelers,” he told a reporter. What he had in mind, he elaborated, was a classy place with valet parking, a ten-dollar cover charge, and a dress code.

  His proposed venue was a recently closed bar two blocks from Havana. When the owner, who’d leased the place to Arney, caught wind of his ambitions, he took the property back. With that, Arney arranged a $2.17 million loan to buy a four-story building next door to Havana, and in the summer of 2009 launched a formal campaign for his concept among city officials and business leaders who’d have a say in any application for a liquor license on the premises—and who’d worked for decades to scrub away Norfolk’s “Shit City” image.

  It was a hard sell. Arney’s efforts closely followed the forced closure of two waterfront bars for excessive rowdiness: the city’s Bar Task Force, a squad of building inspectors, health officials, city planners, and fire marshals led by Cynthia Hall—the same city lawyer with whom Arney had tangled over his car lot a while back—had swooped in on the bars and found them loud, drunken, violence-prone, and out of step with Norfolk’s emphasis on good, clean, family entertainment.

  The Bar Task Force had also shut down a lounge in the very building Arney hoped to use for his cabaret; Hall and her lieutenants had cited the place for health and fire code violations. Arney nonetheless presented himself and his cabaret plans to the Downtown Norfolk Civic League, stressing that the club he had in mind would include neither private rooms nor lap dances—nor, for that matter, any physical contact between patrons and employees. He upped his proposed cover charge to twenty bucks.

  The civic league president said Arney had proved a great neighbor at Havana. The mayor praised the restaurant. B
ut the cabaret was doomed. Seven of the City Council’s eight members said they would not support it. A gentlemen’s club, no matter how high-end, did not mesh with the city’s long struggle to make its downtown a focus of municipal pride.

  Arney left his new building vacant, awaiting more receptive times, and leased the much smaller storefront on the other side of Havana. It, too, had housed a bar recently shut down by the city, a nightclub catering to a mostly black clientele. Arney figured it would be a good location for a country-western saloon that served traditional southern food—collard greens, catfish, country-fried steak.

  Bootleggers, he called it. He and his crew gutted the interior, hired a muralist to decorate the walls, installed a DJ booth over the front door, and cleared space for a dance floor. It was a gamble—nothing like it had been attempted in downtown Norfolk. That only made it more of a draw. “If you don’t gamble, what can you win?” he later told me. “I’ve been gambling all my life. If I didn’t gamble, I can tell you I wouldn’t be standing here right now. I’ve gambled with life itself.”

  The naysayers, the doubters—city officials, politicians, bankers—had no gumption: “If you put three dollars here and a thousand here, and you tell a banker, ‘You can have the three bucks—or you can have the thousand dollars, but you might get slapped,’ he’ll pick up the three dollars. He don’t want the risk.

  “Hell, I’m going to pick up the thousand dollars,” Arney said. “Go ahead and punch me in the face ahead of time. I’m going to pick it up.”

  12

  I’D OWNED TEN cars when my path first intersected with the wagon’s. On occasion I’d wonder what had become of those I’d unloaded over the years: Were they coddled by their present owners, as I had coddled them? Garaged and fresh-looking, or worn, beaten? Where had they traveled? What adventures had they seen? This musing eventually led to my contemplating a story for the newspaper built around a single old car and the otherwise unrelated people who had shared it. In the early summer of 2004, I decided to make some exploratory calls on the idea.