Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  It’s in this setting that he works on the doors, grinding and sanding them in preparation for a slathering of mud as the wind howls outside and a cold draft wafts through the building. He slips a canister of Fusor, a heavy-duty automotive seam sealer, into a dispenser resembling a caulking gun, attaches a long nose to the device, and injects a ribbon of green-gray goop into a gap in the bottom of the door, where the outer skin and interior panels meet. At its widest, the space measures an eighth of an inch, but that’s a freeway for rust if left as it is. He smooths the Fusor with a finger, then plugs in what appears to be an industrial blow dryer. This heat gun is necessary because the body shop’s air and the door’s steel are cold, conditions that Paul tells me will cause the sealer to “take fucking forever to dry.” The heat gun’s blast is hot enough to turn the air wavy a foot in front of its nozzle, and to briefly check the damp chill that’s descended over the room.

  He has a propane heater on hand, but its tank is empty, and a search among the discarded tanks littering the ground outside turns up no trace of gas. So with numbed fingers, his breath visible, Painter Paul passes two days finishing the doors, and with Skinhead’s help, uses the Bobcat to roll the wagon so that it sits upright on the rotisserie. He spends another three days sanding the doorjambs, first the left side, then the right. It’s close to finished, he says. He’ll be painting the car inside of a week.

  Just a few remaining details require his attention. One is the spare tire well, which ranks among the car’s least visible metal: It’s a round tub that hangs below the cargo hold, its bottom angled nose-down toward the bow to facilitate easy removal of the spare, its contents hidden beneath a cover and carpeting. But the tub is rusted through, and Paul decides a simple patch will sell the car short; the wagon’s future owner, whoever that might be, might pull the spare one day, and would surely notice the condition of the well. How affirming to find it as perfect as the rest of the car; how disappointing to find a crude sheet-metal bandage lurking down there.

  So he cuts away a rusted flange encircling the well’s mouth, welds fresh steel in its place, grinds the welds smooth and shiny. He fills in tiny rust holes with the torch as the shed’s walls and ceiling go crazy with blue flashes and black shadow. He hammers at one troublesome weld while holding a maul beneath it, looking every bit a modern Paul Revere.

  The lowest point of the tub, its nose, has sustained the greatest damage. Paul draws a rectangle around the rust holes there with a permanent marker, then carefully slices the rectangle out with his whiz wheel. The piece is curved on two planes. He hammers it flat, then uses it as a template to cut its replacement from the new steel.

  He now has to replicate the original’s complicated curvature. The tool for the job, called a planishing hammer, runs off the shop’s air compressor and features a round hammerhead that beats up and down at high speed; you can manipulate sheet metal under the thing so that it beats it into a curve, or several curves at once. The downside is that this bending creates an eruption of thumps, screeches, and scrapes so loud that I suffer real and alarming pain and run outside—and from the pad it’s still so insanely loud that I retreat farther across the puddled back lot.

  Paul, wearing no ear protection, stays on the job, bending the rectangle along one axis, curling it along the other. It takes the restorator hours to get it perfect.

  ON A LATE November Saturday, Arney and Painter Paul shuttle cars in and out of the Quonset, seeking a more efficient parking arrangement. Among the vehicles they remove from under the building’s dim fluorescents and into the bright light of midday is a 1970 Nova painted an aggressive, glossy orange called “Tangerine Twist,” and when Arney sees it gleaming in the sunshine he announces: God damn, I like that color. That’s the color we’re painting that ’57.

  Paul orders the paint. Arney has blown his thirty-day forecast for the paint job by more than a month, but now he seems impatient to get started. Paul will “cut in” the paint around the doorjambs, the rear opening, and the engine compartment while the Chevy is on the rotisserie, he tells me. Arney and Skinhead will put together the chassis, including the engine and transmission from the donor car, and the body will be lowered over it and bolted down. They’ll have an auto glass specialist come in to install new windows in the car. None of these tasks is complicated, he says. None should take long. They’ll “throw some color” on the car inside of four weeks. “Yes, sir, buddy,” Arney says.

  But now a strange series of events unfolds, starting on November 28, when I notice that while Paul is blocking the Chevy’s hood in the body shop, a new car has materialized on the concrete pad outside; Bobby Tippit is using a power sander on this interloper, a 1974 Dodge Charger that is decrepit with rust, inside and out.

  The Dodge is still there late in the week, when Paul fires up his paint guns and applies two coats of Tangerine Twist, in all of its energetic glory, to the wagon’s four doors. He trims the window frames in an off-white, and shows the doors to Arney on December 3. The white is too bright, Arney tells him.

  And he tells him something else: He wants him to work on the Charger parked outside the shop. “It’s a piece of shit,” Paul mutters two days later, when I drive down to Moyock to watch him finish the last bit of sanding on the wagon, and instead find him with the Dodge. “Everything is gone. Everything.” Later that week, I find him cutting out a big piece of the Charger’s left quarter panel. “I should be finishing up the ’57,” he complains, “but Tommy’s pulled me off it.” Three days after that, he’s still on the Charger.

  That evening, I find Arney, Skinhead, and Bobby Tippit in the workshop at the Quonset’s rear, performing triage on a Jeep Wagoneer flooded in saltwater during Hurricane Irene. With them is mechanical wizard Eddie Card, an octogenarian wearing two hearing aids. Everyone, and Arney in particular, seems to be in fine spirits as they examine the Jeep’s exhaust and quiz Tippit on whether he performs household chores in his little shack across the highway—such as washing the dishes, for instance.

  “I don’t wash my ass,” Tippit replies, “so why would I wash any dishes?”

  Arney turns my way. “It’s true,” he says. “Bobby don’t like to take no showers.”

  “I don’t like water,” Tippit explains.

  Skinhead, to me: “His kids don’t take showers, either. One of ’em was telling me he hadn’t taken a shower in seven weeks.” Tippit notices my stunned expression. He yells: “I worked on roofs in 160 degrees!”

  “Bobby says he sweats so much, he don’t need to take no showers,” Arney tells me.

  Tippit chatters on until Eddie Card, annoyed, tells him: “If your mouth was a fucking impact wrench, it’d take you no fucking time to do this job.”

  I detect nothing to suggest that Arney has lost his ardor for the Chevy project. He speaks breezily about the car. He expects Paul will be cutting in the paint on the doorjambs any day.

  But the next morning, and the two after that, I phone Painter Paul to find out whether he’s working on the wagon, and he tells me he’s spending the day on the Charger. When I call on the fourth morning, Paul tells me he’s not going into Moyock because he’s been laid off.

  What? I ask.

  “Tommy fired me,” he says.

  What? I ask again.

  “He fucking fired me. He accused me of doing drugs on the job.”

  The charge doesn’t make sense to me, and I say so. I’ve watched Paul do the seeming impossible in saving the wagon. I’ve seen him do it day and night, regardless of the weather, with a drive for perfection that has amazed me. He has never seemed the least bit addled.

  Painter Paul has an alternate explanation. “He’s broke,” he says. “He can talk about me doing drugs all he wants, but the bottom line is that he’s fucking broke.”

  17

  MOYOCK MUSCLE SITS dormant, the Quonset and body shop dark, the Chevy split between the buildings. Weeks pass. The holidays come and go. The gate out front remains padlocked when, early in the new year, Arney faces
a climax in his long and frustrating intercourse with Currituck County: The Board of Adjustment will weigh his ongoing breach of its zoning ordinances on January 12, and unless he takes dramatic action, the results will be ugly.

  So Arney has his surveyor draw up a new site plan for the car lot, depicting the changes the county has demanded, and two days before the reckoning drives to the county courthouse with Slick to meet with Ben Woody. The planner seems relieved that his tussle with Moyock Muscle may be nearing an end. “I’ll be happy to set this behind me,” he tells Arney from behind his desk. “This has not been pleasant.”

  Arney replies that it’s been no picnic for him, either. “This has made me so bitter that I don’t think I want to continue in the car business, and that’s heartbreaking to me,” he says. “I am so upset by the way that I have been treated for doing nothing wrong. Now, if I’d killed somebody or robbed somebody, I could understand completely.”

  In fact, he’d love to sell the property to the county right now, if Woody’s interested. Right this minute. He’s not joking. “I’ll offer to sell it to you for exactly what I owe the bank, which is $1,821,000,” he says. “Give me six months to get out of there.”

  That’s something Arney will have to take up with the county manager, Woody says, and turns the conversation to the site plan that Arney has unrolled on the desk. He notes, approvingly, the trees around the lot’s periphery. He applauds the fire lanes. But there are a few adjustments that still need to be made to the drawing and to Moyock Muscle itself. Those portions of the lot used for public display and sales have to be paved. Arney will have to build a lagoon to collect stormwater runoff. And any inoperable cars will have to be invisible from Route 168. Woody draws a line on the site plan where Arney might build a fence to screen them. Fine, Arney says, he’ll build the fence.

  The county manager, Dan Scanlon, sticks his head in the room and seems pleased that an accord is at hand. Arney seizes the moment. “Sir,” he says, “would you like to buy that property?” He’s planning to shrink his business, he explains, “to the point that I can move everything across the street and abandon that property. Do you all need any?”

  Scanlon is noncommittal. Woody steers the conversation back to the site plan. So, he asks Arney, you understand that once all these changes have been made to the site plan, and the Board of Adjustment approves it, you have to make the property match the drawing, right? “I will do everything I’ve told you I will do,” Arney assures him. “I’m a man of my word.”

  The next day, Arney and his surveyor are back at Woody’s office to deliver the revised plan, and Arney has a suggestion. He could build additional fences, he says, fences the county hasn’t demanded, along Moyock Muscle’s sides and back—and if he were to do that, perhaps the county could forgive the five-thousand-dollar fine. Woody is not authorized to make such a deal, but he passes along the request to his boss in an email.

  Comes now the day of the Board of Adjustment meeting, and Arney and Slick arrive girded for battle. She sits before the all-male committee in a blouse that exposes a dramatic expanse of décolletage. Arney is exceedingly polite as he addresses the panel, most of his comments sounding a single theme: “I’ve done everything that they asked me to do, and more.” He goes on long enough that a board member finally tells him: “I don’t want to cut you off, but I don’t want you to get a sore throat.”

  The discussion that follows is friendly. Generous, even. The board appears moved by Arney’s cooperation. It votes to grant him the permit he needs to operate with one condition, and that is that he meets with the county’s technical people within two weeks to decide how to address stormwater runoff on the property. It almost lets him slide on that, but the staff insists that the gravel Arney put down in front of Pop’s house is “impervious,” and thus requires environmental remedy.

  Arney is buoyant as he leaves the meeting. The county is off his back. His bureaucratic nightmare is over. He so relaxes his mind that he doesn’t give Currituck and its demands another thought for months.

  IN EARLY FEBRUARY Arney reveals that he’s contemplating a change in who will do the wagon’s interior. Bobby Chapman does fine work, he tells me, but he can be stubborn, “and if he doesn’t get his way and doesn’t get the long end of the stick, he pouts.” In Chapman’s place, he might hire a fellow known as Crazy Junior, who brings some baggage of his own: “He drinks twenty-four/seven, he’s as big around as a fucking toothpick, and he has a fifties hairstyle,” Arney says. “But he can do some fucking upholstery.” As for the chassis: He vows that he and Skinhead will jump on it in less than a week.

  Once again, he finds his time demanded elsewhere. A prospective renter materializes for a long-vacant, two-story building Arney owns on a sketchy corner in Norfolk, last occupied by a unisex hairstyling business downstairs and a couple of apartments up. Arney spends most of the next two weeks on-site. The tenant wants the ground floor emptied; Arney buttonholes men as they saunter by on the sidewalk and offers them cash to sweep, bag rubbish, wipe the walls. The tenant also wants the ground floor to be windowless, so Arney has Skinhead board the big picture windows out front, then nail siding over the entire façade. The result is jarring. It might pass for a blockhouse, were Arney to add a few slits here and there for rifle barrels. Soon, a rumor circulates that explains the tenant’s desire for privacy—said tenant is the Hells Angels, who will use the ground floor as a local clubhouse. I call Arney. He confirms the rumor, hastening to add that the club’s members aren’t the monsters they’re thought to be, that “they’re real nice guys” who want only to be left alone.

  Nice or not, the Angels receive a cool reception from Norfolk officials, who suspect that Arney and/or his tenants have performed work on the building without the necessary permits, and deploy a squadron of code officials, fire marshals, and building inspectors to have a look. Arney arranges to meet the inspectors there. On the way, he calls to invite me, too.

  I note several unmarked Crown Vics parked outside the building and a couple more across the street as I approach the front door. My knock is answered by two men with comprehensive neck tattoos. I ask whether Arney is on the premises. Not yet, one replies. I thank them. The door shuts.

  A few minutes later it reopens, and out file several inspectors. They’re chatting among themselves on the sidewalk when Arney roars up in the rollback and pulls to a squealing stop in a neighboring parking lot. He jumps from the cab and strides toward the building, stepping off the curb and into busy Granby Street without so much as a glance at approaching traffic. One car, its nose diving as it brakes, comes within a foot of hitting him. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  One of the city’s men steps forward, hand extended—the same inspector Arney allegedly menaced at Bootleggers eighteen months back. He and Arney speak quietly for a couple of minutes, after which Arney powwows with the tattooed men I met at the door. They’re agitated. The inspectors are going to force them to make all manner of changes, one tells Arney, adding: “It’s going to cost us twenty grand just to be able to move in.” Arney advises him to relax his mind. If the Angels are mindful of the fine print of city code when installing electrical lines and plumbing, and true to Norfolk’s fire regulations, and careful not to change the residential character of the upper floor, they should be just fine.

  Which might be reasonable advice, except that Arney fails to grasp just how stridently Norfolk officials reject the prospect of Hells Angels in the neighborhood, and how steadfast is their insistence that the city’s building codes and zoning ordinances be followed to the letter. When Arney tries to cajole, bluster, and strong-arm a path through the red tape, he finds himself in a meeting with his old nemesis, Cynthia Hall, to whom he makes the mistake of saying that he doesn’t much care if the Hells Angels are “murderers, rapists, drug dealers, or if they screw donkeys,” as long as they pay rent.

  Hall asserts in a letter to Bill Taliaferro that that might be the least of Arney’s mistakes. “Mr. Arney has been harassin
g and intimidating city staff and his actions must cease,” she writes. “Following city staff to their vehicles in an attempt to intimidate them will not be tolerated. Additionally, threats made by Mr. Arney to me regarding me being careful because I was ‘pissing off powerful and important people’ will likewise not be tolerated. I will assume for now that Mr. Arney was not authorized by the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club . . . to threaten a city attorney.” Norfolk, she writes, is “governed by the rule of law, not by thuggery tactics.”

  In mid-March, by which point it’s clear that “persons continued to go into the building at all hours,” as Hall puts it, and that “Hells Angels ‘probies’ were seen standing guard at ‘parade rest’ outside,” inspectors descend on the building and paper its exterior with notices that it has failed to meet various city codes and is thus unfit for habitation.

  Arney figures that the only thing that makes the building unfit for habitation is that it’s the Hells Angels who want to inhabit it. He says he hears as much in several meetings with city officials, who assure him that no matter what he does to the place, the Angels won’t be partying there, period. He mulls whether to take the officials to court or let the bikers look after themselves. “It’s not really my fight,” he tells me at Havana one night, “but I hate to see the motherfuckers get away with something like this.”

  A few days later his lawyers convince him to end his role as middleman, and he calls the leader of the local Angels to let him know. The city “hates Tommy Arney, period,” he tells the biker. “They should never have put those stickers on that building. But they put them on the building because they don’t like you and they don’t like me. And I think it would be better for you to fight one fight than to have both of us try to fight two.”