Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  I look out to Route 168, clogged with beach-bound traffic, where the rollback is waiting to turn in to Moyock Muscle’s main entrance. The Chevy hovers above the cars and pickups around it, orange paint bright enough to cause corneal damage. It’s what I imagine a nuclear meltdown to look like.

  Jeff Simmons’s eyes widen. “Oh my God,” he whispers.

  “Where?” Patricia asks, looking around.

  “There, on the truck,” he says. His eyes are glued to the car as Arney swings the rollback into the lot. A few days ago, when I called Simmons to propose this reunion with his old friend, he told me that he missed the wagon terribly. “I still talk about that car,” he said. “I’ve made some stupid decisions in my life—I can rank the five stupidest decisions I’ve ever made. And selling that car probably ranks number one.”

  A few seconds later I run into Picot Savage, owner number five, who’s watching as Arney backs the rollback toward the building, tilts the bed, slowly unspools the Chevy to the ground. Savage wanders around to the car’s nose, where the Simmonses are taking pictures. “It’s beautiful,” Jeff Simmons says. He sniffles, rubs his eyes, moves a few yards off, and stands for a minute with his back to us.

  “He just lost his dad,” Patricia explains. “And he loved this car.”

  “I got some memories of that car, too,” Savage says. “Some good, some bad.” The Simmonses laugh. “Did you actually drive it?” Savage asks them.

  “I got it running,” Jeff Simmons says, but adds that he drove it only to get it home from the pawnshop—and at that point it was smoking, trembling, and he could barely see the road from the collapsed front seat. “But I loved it,” he adds.

  “When I got it, all it needed was to have the chrome strips attached,” Savage says. “I had them, but they just weren’t on the car. That’s all that was wrong with it.”

  “I liked it better when it was green,” Patricia says.

  “Nah, I like it this way, too,” Jeff counters. He shakes his head. “Beautiful. If I won the lottery right now, I’d buy it.”

  Up walks Nicholas Thornhill’s daughter-in-law, Ruby, now ninety, with her daughter, Janet—to whom the Chevy’s first owner pointed out black cows on Sunday drives fifty years ago, and claimed that they made chocolate milk. Ruby peers at the bare metal interior through the right front window opening. “I’ve ridden in this car a lot, let me tell you,” she says.

  “Oh, yes,” Janet says, grinning. “Me, too.”

  “I like the colors,” Ruby says, studying the Tangerine Twist. “It’s a little bit loud, but so what?”

  “Why not make it loud?” Janet agrees.

  I introduce them to Sid Pollard, who has ridden down to Moyock with his girlfriend, Liz, on motorcycles. Janet immediately recognizes Pollard’s name: “You bought the car from Bruce,” she says, meaning her brother, the car’s second owner, who was called out of town today.

  While they’re getting acquainted, Arney talks with Dave and Chris Simon, both of whom are eyeing the car with their arms folded across their chests. Chris, whose muttonchop sideburns have achieved almost feral wildness, tells me that he’s living with his folks these days and restoring a four-door hardtop on the property. With three ’57 Chevys parked outside, not counting a wagon that Dave has been attempting to transform into a car-pickup hybrid, the Simon place has recaptured its Battleship Row past.

  I stroll among the guests, eavesdropping on conversations, sharing their excitement, gratified that everyone seems happy to be here. I knew ahead of time that some past owners wouldn’t make it today. Nicholas Thornhill, obviously. Bobby Dowdy, owner number twelve, who told me he’d be out of town. Alan Wilson and Al Seely, the seventh members of the fraternity, who not only live hundreds of miles away in Albany, Georgia, but are grieving the loss, just days ago, of Seely’s mother.

  I’m disappointed I won’t see those two, because I’d like to congratulate them: On Valentine’s Day 2013, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the brunch at which they met, Wilson proposed to his longtime partner and Seely accepted. They’ve had their share of challenges—Seely shut down his design business in the spring of 2013, after several lean years—but they have three grandchildren, who call Wilson “Gramps” and Seely “Grumps,” and they live in a modernist house that Seely admired for years before they bought it. Life is pretty good.

  I also knew not to expect Mary Ricketts, with whom I spoke a few times after interviewing her back in 2004. In one such conversation, the car’s sixth owner told me that she’d just seen the wagon up close, eleven years after selling it. “It was like visiting an old friend,” she said. “I had my little moment.”

  Most recently, I called her in May 2011 to suggest we get together. She said she’d been feeling poorly, but promised to call when she recovered. The following month, I ran across her obituary in the paper. Struggling with her stroke’s aftereffects, bruised by several job losses and demotions, she’d plunged into a depression the year before and holed up in her Norfolk apartment, eating infrequently, drinking constantly. At her death, she’d dwindled to vapor.

  Much of the conversation at her memorial centered on her funkiness, her love of kitsch, her appreciation for midcentury style. An urn containing her ashes occupied the middle of a table arrayed with fossils from her life—photos, books, musical instruments. Prominent among them was a framed photo of Mary with the Chevy.

  I notice Dave Marcincuk standing alone at the wagon’s tail, squinting at the car as if he’s trying to work out a puzzle. I walk over to him. Since selling the car, Marcincuk has won the love of a Christian woman, to whom he proposed two weeks after they met. They married in 2006 and had a daughter two years later. He’s still a garbageman for the city of Norfolk, and still lives in his little Craftsman cottage, which looks a lot more put-together these days. Life, he said, “is more wonderfuller than I could have imagined.”

  He was surprised to hear of the reunion when I called him a few days ago. “I thought that car was a total loss,” he told me. “The ’57 was worthless, really.”

  “So,” I say now, nodding at the wagon, “what do you think?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m just overwhelmed by the amount of work,” he says. He searches the gleaming Chevy for something—anything—familiar, and shakes his head again. “There’s no clue that this is the same car,” he says, “other than your telling me that it is.”

  Indeed, the wagon’s every telltale tic has been erased. The flaws that Marcincuk once obsessed over have been cut out, welded, replaced. If I didn’t witness the transformation myself, I might not buy it.

  But I did.

  “Believe me,” I tell him. “It’s the same car.”

  LATER IN THE day, a short while before Moyock Muscle locks up for the weekend, I find Tommy Arney alone in the Quonset, taking stock. The big neon Bootleggers sign is mounted on one wall, facing a sign across the showroom that once advertised another of his bars, Tommy’s. A ceramic “No Smoking” placard from his first gas station hangs over the office. An old, smoke-stained print of Jesus that he found in a back room of the Body Shop is on display between two pieces of NASCAR memorabilia.

  “I came in here yesterday, and I was just looking around at all this, thinking about all I’ve done in my life,” he tells me. “The feds’ll come in and take all of this shit.” Just yesterday he surrendered the family’s Mercedes. In the coming days he’ll turn over his giant red pickup and a couple of Corvettes, including a rare 1963 model he gave his son for his twenty-first birthday. Any time now, an army of government agents might descend on the lot to take everything here, down to the pictures on the walls, after which he expects the bank will claim the property.

  “But that’s okay,” he says. “I protected my family, and I protected Victoria. Everything else is just bullshit.” Havana will continue to operate with Slick as the boss, and Skinhead will stay chief of the kitchen. The feds have agreed to spare the Arney Compound, so that will remain intact, assuming the mortgages are paid. His
family and crew will hang together.

  And once he’s again a free man, they’ll start over. They’ll rebuild. He’s done it once. He can do it again. “I can’t wait to get there,” he tells me. “I can’t wait to go to prison. I want to get this shit started so I can get it done.”

  Bill Taliaferro called him a day after his sentencing with a plan to extend the time before he reports, but Arney says he stopped him. “If they’d take me today, I’d go today,” he says. “I asked them, ‘Can’t I just go right now, and get this motherfucker started?’ And they said, ‘No, Mr. Arney. You have to wait.’

  “I got to bail, buddy. I got to get this shit started. I’ve got shit to do.”

  As for the Chevy: It isn’t seized. I’ve seen the government’s forfeiture papers myself, and can attest that the VIN of the ’57 Chevy wagon they list does not match that of the wagon. Arney signs VB57B239191 over to Al Godsey.

  I’ve often seen the wagon’s fourteenth owner at Havana, usually in the kitchen, but exactly what he does to earn his keep has eluded me. When I ask him a few days after the reunion, he’s uncertain, himself. “Our situation isn’t really like working for somebody. It’s more like a lifestyle,” he says. “It’s not like we have titles or anything. We’re just here, you know? I try to look out for Tommy, and he looks out for me.”

  He’s known Arney so long that he doesn’t remember how they met, but it was during a time when he frequented after-hours joints—“seven days a week,” he says—and Arney did, too. He first came to work for the boss twenty-one years ago, not intending a long stay. “It isn’t a career, really,” he says. “It’s more like just going through life.”

  Godsey obtained the title in exchange for two thousand dollars and the cost of all parts necessary to build out the car, he tells me, adding that the crew will perform any labor involved at no charge. Even so, “It’s going to be a little while before I’ll have the money to be able to complete it,” he says. “We’re not rich right now. But little by little, we’ll turn it around. It’ll get done.”

  Two thousand dollars, I think to myself, for a car in which Arney figures he’s invested forty thousand. As the thought lingers, Godsey offers that “it’s a good deal for me, and it’s a good deal for him.”

  I ask him how that can be. “It doesn’t go anywhere,” he says. “It kind of stays in the family.”

  And then it makes sense.

  “So when Tommy gets out,” I say, “will you sell it back to him, if he wants it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Godsey replies. “If he wanted it, I’d hand it right to him.”

  I’m betting he’ll want it. He may not have driven the Chevy before beginning his sentence, as he’s promised so many times that he would.

  But just you wait: He will, once he’s out. He’ll take the wagon out onto the same streets where it logged its first miles, into a city and a world much changed from Nicholas Thornhill’s day.

  He’ll drive that motherfucker.

  Acknowledgments

  AUTO BIOGRAPHY HAS been part of my life, to one degree or another, for nine years—an admittedly crazy amount of time to devote to any project and about nine times longer than I expected to spend on this one. It has not been my burden alone: All along the way I’ve pestered the book’s cast time and again for details of their lives, have wearied my mentors with worried musings on story structure and pacing, have exhausted the patience of friends who no doubt prayed for me to find something else, anything else, to talk about.

  So, to anyone who has crossed paths with me over this book’s long gestation: Thank you. And I’m sorry.

  A few folks made contributions vital to the story’s completion, as well as whatever merits it might enjoy. First among them is Tommy Arney, who as I write this is an inmate at the Morgantown, West Virginia, Federal Correctional Institution: Without him—and minus his candor, his enthusiasm for my questions, and his intercession on my behalf with his friends and relatives—there’d have been no story to tell. Arney understood that readers would shrink from some aspects of his past, but he never wavered in his commitment to share it. I salute him for that, and look forward to buying him a beer when he’s next allowed to drink one.

  Those close to him likewise endured my presence, often when they were under significant stress. Krista, Ryan, and Ashlee Arney treated me as a family friend. Victoria Hammond, John “Skinhead” McQuillen, and Paul Kitchens helped me in uncountable ways and never failed to make me feel welcome; I likewise could rely on the good cheer of Virginia Klemstine, Al Godsey, Krystle Andrassy, and Ron Young. I’m grateful, too, to Bill Taliaferro, the late Peter G. Decker Jr., and Pete Decker III.

  The twelve previous owners of the car and their families trusted me with their stories and made for varied but always gracious company. I am indebted to all of them, but especially those whom I subjected to multiple interviews. As Mary Ricketts died in 2011, I relied on the recollection of others for my reconstruction of her youth. Thank you, Charmaine Clair, Martha Clements, Don Harrison, Julie Hill, Billy Ricketts, Mary Jo “Joey” Rothgery, Kenny Rowe, Barry Scott, Marianne Vest, Sandy Wood, and Carrie Ziegfeld.

  Experts filled the chasms in my knowledge about GM, Chevrolet, and automobiles in general. I thank former GM workers Leo Heid, Skip Shiflett, Henry Marshall, and Tom McDonough; Dan Reid; and folks who walked me through the discussion of authenticity in chapter 14—Loren Fossum, Patrick Krook, Ronn Ives, and Richard Todd.

  I wrote this book with the support of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, through a fellowship at the University of Virginia. Writing at the foundation and living on the Lawn at UVa are experiences for which I will always be grateful. I especially thank Rob Vaughan, the foundation’s president.

  At Goucher College, I received essential counsel from four mentors on the story’s overall shape, as well as the ideas lurking behind the action. I will be lifelong fans of Jacob Levenson, Suzannah Lessard, Tom French, and the same Richard Todd I mentioned before. Thanks, too, to Rebecca Markovits, Brian Mockenhaupt, and Mike Capuzzo.

  At Norfolk’s Virginian-Pilot, I received help from Tom Shean, Maureen Watts, Jakon Hays, Patrick Wilson, Larry Printz, Denis Finley, and, especially, Tim McGlone.

  This story benefited immensely from the sharp mind and pencil of Maria Carrillo, my longtime editor at the Pilot, who has followed VB57B239191 for as long as I have. Maria edited the paper’s December 2004 series about the car, then agreed to read the first draft of what you now hold in your hands—and it’s far, far stronger for her having done so.

  My dear friends Mark Mobley and Laura LaFay read early drafts and gave me suggestions that have made this a different and better book. I’ve subjected them to exhausting chatter about the story, far beyond the limits of friendship, but they’ve stayed interested and helpful and continue to take my calls.

  Four other friends commented on essentially complete versions of the manuscript. Thank you Diane Tennant, Walt Jaschek, and Cindy and David Fuller.

  My agent, David Black, has heard me go on about the wagon since I first met the car. No one has worked harder or longer to help me refine my thinking on this story, and he was tireless in his efforts to find a home for it. He’s the best there is.

  At HarperCollins, the book found a champion in Peter Hubbard, who talked it up among the company’s various divisions until the like-minded Cal Morgan took it on. Peter was smart and encouraging in his every contact with me, and edited the manuscript with panache. This is his baby as much as mine.

  Finally, friends and family kept me on track during the years I spent reporting and writing the story. I thank my folks, E.V. and Gerry Swift of Bedford, Texas, who were intrigued by the tale from the beginning (despite my dad’s misgivings about its “rough language”); Joe “He Gets All the Facts In” Jackson of Virginia Beach; Boyd Zenner, Ros Casey, and Bill Womack, who brightened my otherwise monastic year in Charlottesville; the aforementioned Cindy and David Fuller of fair Verona, Virginia, who treated me to weekends of lavi
sh meals and wonderful conversation; and my friend and brother Mike D’Orso, who opened his Norfolk home to me during my 2012 reporting trips back to Tidewater.

  I owe special thanks to my daughter, Saylor, who has known the story’s cast and followed its action for much of her teens, and who buoyed me with frequent visits to UVa; and the lovely Amy Walton, who was excited by this project from its start, so long ago, and has been its enthusiastic booster all the while, despite its demands on her fiancé’s time and attention—and with whom I am thrilled, at last, to share its completion.

  Notes

  This is a work of nonfiction, which is to say that I’ve made none of it up. Its characters are real people, identified by their real names—though in a few cases, I’ve dropped last names to preserve the privacy of minor characters who haven’t had contact with the story’s main players in many years. I’ve also left the doctors who treated Tommy Arney’s cancer unnamed, in the interest of keeping an already large cast at least a little easier for the reader to manage.

  Whenever possible, I’ve sought out multiple sources for the story’s various turns. I witnessed most of the scenes and conversations related here, and have based my description of those events on copious notes that as a rule I typed into my computer very soon after. In these cases, I have used quote marks around the speech of the participants, which signals my confidence that I’ve captured verbatim what was said. I have also placed quote marks around speech in a few scenes that I did not personally witness, but reconstructed with the help of multiple participants, and about which the participants agree. Further, if quoted speech is included in a larger quote—if, for instance, I quote a character recalling a conversation—I’ve punctuated the interior quote for clarity’s sake.

  In some instances, I have recounted speech without the use of quote marks. You should interpret these passages as reflecting the gist of what was said, rather than the exact phrasing. In some cases, I’ve chosen this device simply to compress a long and complex exchange into its essence; in others, I’ve done so because the participants did not remember their exact wording, but did remember the overall content and character of what was said; in a few spots, I’ve done so because corroboration was impossible, and I’ve thus relied on a single source—more often than not, Tommy Arney. In the last case, I’ve noted in the text that a scene is “as Arney recalls it,” or “as Arney tells it,” or something similar.