Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Painter Paul is vocal in his dislike for the choice after applying the paint to the car’s dashboard. It looks like shit, he tells the boss—the contrast between main color and accent is insufficiently pronounced. Arney, who alternates between calling his selection “golden” and “cocoa,” encourages Paul to accept the selection, because “that’s the color it’s going to be.”

  I see it myself a few days later. The wagon, sitting high and upright on the rotisserie, has been “cut in” with paint on its doorjambs, hatch, and engine compartment—orange below the beltline, the Timor Beige above. The combination does, indeed, take some getting used to—at first inspection, the beige seems too brown, too murky. Arney is certain of his own taste, however. “Once the chrome’s on it,” he assures me, “it’s going to look fucking great.”

  My visit is prompted by a milestone in the Chevy’s restoration: the reunion of body and chassis, which Arney has assured me will happen by day’s end. That seems unlikely at noon, when I enter the Quonset to find half the showroom occupied by a chest-high heap of machinery and junk Arney has removed from a building he’s rented out. Included in the pile are battered weed whackers, a couple of industrial safes, several bucket seats, a broken wheel-balancing machine, a pallet stacked high with Ryan’s childhood toys, hundreds of bad electronic dance music CDs, and a five-foot, soft-bodied Big Bird statue chewed by mice and bleeding desiccated foam rubber from its wounds.

  It takes the crew more than three hours to relocate the stuff. Some of it winds up in a truck bound for one of Arney’s vacant buildings and some of it is thrown away; a few large pieces are simply pushed against the showroom’s walls. The boss seems stressed throughout the operation, betraying his nerves with frequent harangues at Skinhead, who seems deeply aggrieved by the attention. When Skinhead returns one salvo with a muttered crack, Arney erupts. “You smart-mouthed motherfucker,” he booms, then adds to the room: “Every day he tries to do something to piss me off. Every day he wakes up thinking, ‘Today I’m going to fuck with Tommy Arney.’ ”

  Skinhead sinks into wordless gloom, and I’m reminded of conversations I’ve had with each man about the other in recent days. Arney has hinted that Skinhead must have said something to the feds or the grand jury that he shouldn’t have, though he isn’t specific about what that something might have been. Skinhead has voiced dismay that Arney seems angry with him but won’t say why, or much of anything else.

  That Arney’s rage might spray wide and messy is understandable. The bank’s leadership took advantage of him. The feds “didn’t care about my life. They didn’t care that they destroyed me,” he’ll complain. He has a lot to be angry about, and a lot of people to be angry with.

  But it’s distressing to witness a rift widening between him and Skinhead, of all people—his constant companion, his loyal friend and lieutenant, whom he’s told me he regards as “more of a brother to me than any of my real brothers.” Who, Arney’s cousin Billie Ruth says, “loves Tommy and would do anything for him.” To whom Arney gave a new Harley-Davidson a few Christmases ago, and whom Arney has defended against all comers. “My brother Billy told me one day that he was going to whip Skinhead’s ass,” Arney confided to me a while back, “and I told him: ‘I don’t think so. You try to whip Skinhead’s ass, you’re going to have to whip mine, too.’ ” The silences and blowups of the last month haven’t been the bitchy but harmless back-and-forth that typically characterizes their conversation. This new style of exchange has prompted Skinhead to consider the unthinkable—leaving.

  “He won’t talk to me,” Skinhead told me at Havana a few nights ago. “I ask him what’s happening, and all he says is that everything is going to be all right. Well, everything isn’t all right. You’ve seen what’s on the list of shit they want to take. The car lot is on it.

  “What I don’t want to happen is for him to say, ‘Everything’s going to be all right’ up to the day it all shuts down.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not too old to start over, doing something else.”

  Now, as Skinhead sorts through a pile of old tools, Arney snatches up a light plastic hammer and raps him twice on the head with it. The blows make loud knocks. Skinhead stares at him in shock. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

  “What?” Arney says, smiling.

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?” Skinhead says again. “That hurt.”

  “It ain’t nothing but a little plastic hammer,” Arney says. “Feel how light it is.” He offers it handle-first, but Skinhead, glaring, refuses to take it. Arney gives himself a couple of light taps on the skull. His eyes widen. “God damn. That thing does hurt.”

  It’s not an apology, but it’s close enough to usher a truce as the day’s main event arrives: We troop over to the body shop and push the rotisserie and Chevy out of the building and across the concrete pad and down a dirt drive to the front lot. The new fences prevent our crossing the property to the Quonset, so instead the team steers the rotisserie onto Route 168, rolling south against the northbound traffic, appointing me to serve as flagman to wave away oncoming cars during the brisk, hundred-yard transit to the lot’s main entrance.

  Once outside the Quonset, we make a discovery that seems par for the afternoon: The Chevy sits too high on the rotisserie to pass through the building’s garage door—to eyeball it, about eight inches too high. The load can be lowered by almost exactly that distance, so it promises to be close. If it still doesn’t fit, we might buy an inch more clearance by deflating the rotisserie’s tires, but beyond that, we’re out of luck.

  Lowering the rotisserie is not a casual undertaking, because the spit must be unbolted as it was when we rolled the car several months back, with all the attendant hazards that involves. Three of us now line up on each side of the wagon to keep it from flipping or from dropping too far, too fast. As we clasp the wagon by its rockers, Painter Paul unbolts the spit and we ease the car’s tail down a few inches—just a few, lest we twist the body, bend its metal, or crack the putty in its flawless skin. He retightens the bolts, runs to the car’s front, and loosens that end, and we drop it by an equal amount.

  It’s not as much work as rolling the body was, but the Chevy hasn’t gotten lighter since then, and we do a lot of grunting and yelling as Paul refastens the bolts. It takes two more loosenings at each end to hit bottom, after which we very slowly edge the contraption to the Quonset’s door. The wagon sneaks through with an inch to spare. The showroom fills with whoops.

  The afternoon is almost spent by the time the crew transfers the Chevy from the rotisserie to the showroom’s hydraulic lift. Skinhead and Painter Paul roll the chassis below and jockey it a foot this way, a few inches that, to properly align the engine and transmission, the frame rails, the bolt holes, as Arney works the lift’s switch to lower the body, raise it again to enable adjustments on the floor, bring it back down. They finally get it right after half an hour, and for the first time in almost a year, on this Saturday late afternoon—September 29, 2012—what rests on the Quonset’s concrete floor is recognizable as a ’57 Chevy.

  Arney is optimistic about the speed and ease of the restoration from here. “I’d like to get it operable and drivable by the end of November,” he announces. “I’d like to do some driving in it.”

  IS HIS OPTIMISM well-placed? Well, over the succeeding eight weeks, Arney and Skinhead rebuild the brakes, hang a new master cylinder on the firewall, and paint the engine block in Chevrolet orange. They install new brake lines and fuel lines. They bolt new inner wheel wells and a freshly painted radiator support to the front end. They strap dual exhaust pipes and the new gas tank to the wagon’s belly, and attach a sound-deadening firewall pad on the toe boards under the dash. They rebuild the steering box.

  In other words, they achieve significant progress on the Chevy’s salvation. But come Thanksgiving, the car is nowhere near ready for the street, and that remains the case for a long while, because Arney’s
legal and financial woes dominate his time through December and January. The feds release their freeze on his real estate, which opens the way for his creditors to pursue foreclosures on his loans that have fallen into delinquency. One by one, his properties are wrested from his hands until just a few remain, Moyock Muscle among them. Only a lifeline from a well-heeled friend saves his house and the rest of the Arney Compound.

  The properties he stubbornly holds on to include the erstwhile Hells Angels clubhouse, which is still plastered with stickers applied by Norfolk inspectors. Arney’s plan is to finish its plumbing and electrical work, then have those inspectors back to sign off on the improvements, which will enable him to rent to a new tenant. But the inspectors won’t do it: Municipal attorney Cynthia Hall has assumed oversight of all official action regarding the building, and she puts the kibosh on any inspections or approvals. Arney’s feud with the lawyer becomes a consuming fixation. “I have never, ever in my life had anyone dislike me as much as that fucking cunt,” he tells me. “And I can’t figure out why she doesn’t like me.”

  He orders parts for the Chevy and has Painter Paul install the spare tire well, but it’s early February 2013, four months after the reunion of body and frame, before Arney returns to the car himself. I pull into Moyock Muscle one Saturday morning to find Skinhead and Paul laboring to reattach the wagon’s right fender. They’ve placed thick rubber pads and anti-squeak gaskets between the big steel panel and wheel well, which tightens the fit and complicates the already difficult task of mating the unwieldy fender to several parts of the car at once—to the grille, the firewall, the ductwork for the fresh air vent, and a brace that backstops the front bumper.

  They manage to connect it to the grille and bumper, but struggle to force it back far enough to bolt to the firewall. Both take up positions on the fender and shove. “Push it!” Paul grunts. “Push it! Harder!”

  “Goddamn,” Skinhead croaks. “It’s like a fat girl.”

  “You need to know how to handle those grizzlies,” Paul says. The fender and firewall meet, but Paul sees that their bolt holes don’t align. He enlarges the attachment point on the fender with a die grinder, a pneumatic tool with a spinning cylindrical head slim enough to fit into the bolt hole, until the opening’s edge matches that on the firewall. He threads a nine-sixteenths bolt through both and tightens it halfway.

  He slips under the car to fasten a second bolt low on the firewall. I can hear him muttering, “Come on, motherfucker,” as I chat with Skinhead, who sounds as if he has barbed wire for vocal cords. “I aspirated my right lung,” he explains. He went out to dinner a few nights ago, went to bed with indigestion, and “threw up in my sleep, and choked on it.”

  “Damn,” I say.

  “Happens to Tommy all the time,” he shrugs. “He’s nearly died twice. First time it ever happened to me.”

  Painter Paul scrambles to his feet, having threaded the lower bolt halfway, and examines the alignment of the fender and cowl. The fender sits a quarter inch low, so he taps a stack of three slender metal shims onto the upper bolt. Most cars hide these space-makers at their attachment points, he tells me; without them, even modern models fail to achieve the proper fit.

  The shims overcorrect the problem, so he pulls one of the three back out and ratchets the bolt down. The panels comes into line until he further tightens the lower bolt, which shifts the fender high. Paul trades one of the shims for one half as wide. Everything lines up. “Okay,” he announces. “The fender’s on.”

  Arney arrives then, as Skinhead prepares to install the wiring harness, a bundle of color-coded cords that supply juice to a car’s electrical devices—its lights, horn, gauges, radio, and not least, the components under the hood that make the whole business move. It’s simple and straightforward compared to the harnesses of modern cars, in that the Chevy lacks the computer modules that control today’s engines, their airbags and overamped stereos. Even so, diagrams of the wagon’s electrical system cover a four-by-eight-foot worktable, and Skinhead eyes them carefully before crawling into the car with a shop light and a drill to install the fuse box.

  Arney, clad in his standard black wifebeater despite the February chill—it’s sixty degrees, tops, in the Quonset—is in a quiet mood this morning. He stands for a long minute at the Chevy’s nose, gazing at the engine, before murmuring that he’ll have a radiator installed within three days, and “the motherfucker running next week.” He asks Skinhead, who is sprawled on the car’s floor, drilling holes in the kick plate, whether he needs help. Space under the dash is tight, Skinhead complains, but no, he’s fine. Arney wanders over to Painter Paul, who has encountered a problem hanging the right rear door: New rubber trim on its edges has made it too big for its frame; when he shuts it, the door wedges metal-on-metal against the C pillar.

  Okay, Arney says, get inside the car and loosen the hinges, and I’ll hold the door in the proper position while you screw them back down. Paul points out that the adjustments have to be made with the door open wide, so that he can get to the hinges, so Arney centers the loosened door in its frame, then tries to keep it from shifting as they slowly swing it open. Paul fiddles with the bolts. When Arney closes the door, it’s centered, but its lower rear corner juts out.

  Paul loosens some bolts, tightens others. Now the door’s lower edge is flush, but the window frame tilts a half inch outboard. More fiddling. The top is in line, the gaps between door and frame are perfect, but the bottom rear corner again sticks out.

  Over the next hour they experiment with a dozen different hinge adjustments, each of them failures—either that one corner doesn’t align, or their attempts to bring it flush knock the rest of the door out of true. “Well, fuck,” Arney finally says. “We’re never going to be able to get this motherfucker to hang right, because the problem ain’t the fucking hinges, it’s the fucking door.”

  They pull it off the car and set it on a shopping cart parked a few feet away. “That’s what it is,” Arney confirms, pointing to the door’s bottom edge. When Paul replaced the steel in its skin he used lip welds, the new metal overlapping the old, rather than butt welds, which would have fused the pieces edge to edge. In mudding the door to smooth the joint, he made its bottom a quarter inch too thick. Chances are, they’ll encounter the same problem on one or more of the other doors, which Paul repaired the same way.

  “So we can either get a new door, or two doors,” Arney says, “or we can take these quarters off the bottom of the doors and replace those.”

  Paul favors the latter option, and begins the unhappy task of grinding his carefully applied and lovingly sanded finish from the door. The Quonset fills with the earthen smell of ground putty. Paul and the door are enveloped in a beige cloud.

  The missteps will take two weeks, maybe more, to correct. And before Paul is far into the job, Arney decrees that the left quarter panel—the bulging fin that mystified Chris Simon fifteen years ago, and which still looks slightly swollen despite Paul’s past efforts to straighten it—has to be replaced, too.

  When I hear about all this, it occurs to me—for perhaps the hundredth time—that the wagon’s restoration might never end.

  IF THERE’S A happy sidebar to this latest setback, it comes one Saturday when I’m hanging around in the workshop at the rear of the Quonset, chatting with Arney and Skinhead as they work on a ’71 Corvette convertible that belongs to Slick. Arney’s sister Freda is visiting, too, and we talk about their Carolina hometown, which gets us onto their kin thereabouts, which narrows to a discussion about their cousin Billie Ruth, which prompts me to repeat an observation Billie Ruth made when I visited her in Lenoir: She never fails to end her phone calls to Arney with “I love you, Tommy,” to which he usually responds, “You’re crazy as shit, Billie Ruth.”

  “That’s true,” Arney says. “I like Billie Ruth probably best of all my cousins. I think Billie Ruth’s a good person. But I don’t understand why some people say they love people they don’t know. Billie Ruth knows me,
but she doesn’t know me well enough to say she loves me.”

  He looks at his hands as he wipes grease from between his fingers with a paper towel. “I tell my children that I love them every day. And I know they love me, because I’m their daddy,” he says. “I don’t remember the last time I told my wife that I love her, but she knows that I do, and I know she loves me because she’s tolerated all the crazy bullshit I’ve done over the years.” Skinhead, bent over the Corvette’s engine compartment, looks up and nods.

  “I used to think Skinhead loved me,” Arney says, glancing at me, rather than him, “but lately I’m confused. I don’t know. I think he probably does.”

  “You’re like a brother to me,” Skinhead tells him.

  Freda chuckles and says, “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”

  “No,” Arney allows, “but I think he looks to me as somewhat of a brother figure, and maybe as something of a father figure.”

  “You do remind me of my dad,” Skinhead says. “He was always calling me a stupid motherfucker, too. And he was fat.” He adds quietly: “Although he had hair.”

  “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately,” Arney says, still wiping his hands with great concentration. “I think Skinhead appreciates the fact that I can get things done. And I think that Skinhead knows from experience that I will take care of him, no matter what happens—that I will protect him, that I would never let anything bad happen to him.” He looks my way again. “And I think that’s important to him.”

  “That’s true,” Skinhead says, eyes on Arney. “Loyalty is very important to me.”

  “He knows,” the boss says, “that as long as Tommy Arney is alive, Tommy Arney will take care of him. And I think that’s kind of a nice thing. That’s why I worked so vigorously—is that the right word?—to try to get Skinhead to quit smoking for twenty-two years. Because I did not want to see him die of that nature, because as we got older, I thought we’d have some fun together.”