Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Tommy had a sizable capacity for “reckless, impulsive, and aggressive behavior,” the psychologist wrote, because he felt “rejected, abandoned, and betrayed, and despairs of foster parents being found for him.” He had no interest in school, he told the doctor: “The thing he wants most is to pump gas at a service station.”

  That August, a break came Tommy’s way. Dillon officials landed him a spot at the Kennedy Memorial Home, a sprawling Baptist orphanage near Kinston, away to the southeast on the Carolina coastal plain. But in place of deliverance, he found confusion there—in the home’s strange and strict rules, in the cloying warmth of his house parents, and especially in school: Kennedy enrolled him in the eighth grade at a public junior high, and Tommy sensed immediately that he was in over his head. He hadn’t been in a classroom on a regular basis since fifth grade, back in Rocky Mount, and hadn’t finished that. He read and wrote with the competence of a small child.

  About a month in, a teacher called on him to read a passage aloud. He told her that he’d prefer that she call on someone else, to which she countered that he could read the passage or go to the principal’s office. He walked out of the classroom. Early the next morning, he walked out of the Kennedy Home.

  He hitchhiked north to Durham, and the home of a C. A. Dillon counselor with whom he’d been close. The counselor and his family took him in for the night, and he spent much of the next day there, too, discussing his situation. Kennedy Home records say that he “reached out to this family in the hope that they would make a home for him,” and that when he realized it was not to be, decided to keep running: He convinced the counselor he was headed back to the orphanage, and instead boarded a bus for Norfolk.

  Three years had passed since Fern and Strickland had taken half the family south to Rocky Mount. Tommy had not spoken since to the other half, his three older siblings, and had no idea whether they were still in town. He knew someone who might be able to tell him, however: an older woman who’d lived a few doors down from the family. When he arrived at Norfolk’s bus terminal late at night, he asked the clerk at the ticket kiosk to look up her number. The clerk replied that she was busy, handed him a phone book, and suggested he look it up himself. “Ma’am,” he told her, “I don’t know how.”

  She looked up the number. The neighbor, groggy with sleep, said she remembered him (“Where on earth have you been?”) and that she still saw his older brother Mike now and then: Mike’s girlfriend lived just up the street, and he was over there quite a bit. She paid for a cab to carry Tommy over, fed him a meal, and pointed the way to the girlfriend’s house.

  From the sidewalk he could see Mike, five years his senior, sitting in the front room. Tommy watched him through the screen door for a while, excited and scared, then climbed to the porch and knocked. He heard his brother mutter, “Who the fuck is that?”

  “How you doing?” he said from the door. “My name is Tom.”

  That’s what he called himself at the time, rather than Tommy. Not because he liked the way it sounded, but because he could spell it.

  5

  THIRTY-NINE YEARS AFTER his homecoming, Tommy Arney coasts his big red pickup down Norfolk’s Colley Avenue, a few blocks from the shack where he lived as a boy. The balance of his teens unfolded along this stretch of road, among its small storefronts, restaurants, and apartment houses; every building, every lot, holds significance. He stops the truck at Forty-Second Street, nods to a corner where a Sunoco service station once stood.

  “That’s where I lived when I got back to Norfolk from the orphanage,” he tells me. Mike Arney, happy and somewhat bewildered to see him, first cleared a space for his younger brother in his rented room, a few blocks up Colley. Within days, the landlord judged that to be one Arney too many on the premises, so Mike arranged with a friend who managed the Sunoco for Tommy to sleep in the station after hours, first in its compressor room, among bathroom supplies and cases of motor oil, and later in the women’s restroom, which had its own entrance around back.

  Tommy spent months there, slipping out each dawn to go to work for a roofing company, meeting his older brother each evening for what was often his only meal of the day, then sneaking back into the bathroom. He lost the roofing job when his bosses learned he was underage. He lost his next job at a sheet metal company the same way.

  Eventually, the cops caught up with him—he was a truant, on top of an escapee—and tossed him in the local juvenile detention home. Arney figures he was turned in by his mother, who’d returned to Norfolk with Strickland while he was at the orphanage. At the least, she notified the authorities that he was in town: “I don’t want him to get in trouble and I don’t want to get in trouble over him being here,” she wrote to the Kennedy Home. “He don’t stay with me he just stays any where he can, with his brothers. He won’t go to school.”

  Tommy again relied on Mike to get him out of trouble, and again, Mike came through: He was friendly with a two-fisted, gun-toting old Irishman who owned a waterfront pub next door to the Sunoco, and he convinced Jim O’Neil to take custody of the boy and put him up in his Virginia Beach town house. In return, O’Neil would get a worker he could pay next to nothing.

  Brokering the arrangement was a Norfolk lawyer named William L. Taliaferro (a surname that dates back centuries in Virginia, and which in the Tidewater is pronounced “Tolliver”), a former merchant seaman who’d recently passed the state bar exam after graduating from law school at Memphis State. He was fifteen years older than Tommy, and was destined to become almost a father figure to him—a mentor, advisor, and trusted confidant, as well as his attorney in scores of criminal and civil matters.

  So at sixteen Tommy went to work at the Shamrock Inn, first as a dishwasher and janitor, eventually moving up to cook. It was an austere existence: He was on the clock every day from early morning into the wee hours for twenty dollars a week, plus meals and a bed, and O’Neil, his almost constant company, was a hard-edged character with few kinds words for him. But it marked an improvement, and a significant one, over his life on the street—and, for that matter, his life before that. And it was probably just what the boy needed, because Tommy learned to cook, a skill that was to prove vital to him later in life, and because O’Neil worked him so long and so hard that he had little opportunity to get into trouble.

  In retrospect, that last part might have been of most service to Tommy. Because when, after sixteen months, he could take no more of O’Neil or the job and quit for another as helper in an auto body shop—a post he held only briefly, and which was followed by a succession of likewise brief stints shoveling coal, assisting plumbers, running a pizza joint, and rebuilding automotive starters and generators at an electric shop—he found the time to find trouble, and for trouble to find him.

  By way of example, Arney steps on the gas, aims the pickup north on Colley, pulls into a church parking lot. Across the street is a gas station that’s been converted to a Jazzercise studio. Next to it is a small frame building that once housed a bar called the Coach House, one of his mother’s old haunts. “I was out here one night, and I see this guy slap a girl outside the Coach House,” he tells me. “So I say, ‘Why’d you fucking slap her?’ And he says: ‘It’s none of your fucking business.’ And I say, ‘You don’t think so? You hit her again, motherfucker, and we’ll see if it’s my business.’

  “The guy and girl split up. The girl goes over beside the Coach House, and she’s crouched down, crying. The guy goes over to a phone booth at the Esso. I check on the girl, ask if she’s okay. She says she is, that he’s calling a ride for her. So then I walk over to the phone booth.” He points out a square of discolored concrete at the edge of the parking lot. “I punched him in the head while he was in the phone booth, then I snatched him out and beat the fuck out of him.” He shakes his head. “I was a fighting motherfucker.”

  He was that. Most of his stories from his teenage years in Norfolk involve violence. Most also share narrative details that bespeak a code of conduct, of j
ustice, that was forming in his mind. Of said code, Article the First: Don’t go looking for trouble, but if it comes your way, eliminate it. Stop it cold. Article the Second: If you must start trouble, do so as a countermeasure to intolerable behavior.

  When, outside a sub shop a few blocks from here, a stranger pulled a knife on him and demanded money, Tommy warned him against the act—and when the bandit wouldn’t back down, punched him in the head, took his knife away, stabbed him nine times in the left side, and dropped him to the sidewalk. Afterward, Tommy threw the weapon onto the roof, washed his hands in the restaurant’s bathroom, and ordered a sandwich.

  Another example: He was out drinking with his half brother, Johnny—the same sibling who’d testified against him down in Carolina—and after midnight, hungry, they pulled into the all-night coffee shop of the Nansemond Hotel, a rambling old beachfront place where Tommy’s sister Freda worked as a waitress. They’d just settled into a booth when Freda came to them, crying. She’d had to wash her hands a few minutes before, so she’d removed her rings and placed them on the counter. They were gone when she turned back around. A sailor sitting a couple of feet away had denied touching them, though no one else had come anywhere near.

  “I was a crazy motherfucker, you have to understand,” Arney tells me. “I was a mean fucker. So I walk over to this guy, this sailor, and I say, ‘Hey, buddy, why’d you take her rings?’ The guy says, ‘What’s it to you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m her brother, for one thing. And if she don’t get her rings back, I’m going to fuck you up.’ He says, ‘I’ll give her the rings back. But I’m going to fuck you up.’ ”

  They stepped into the parking lot, started to square off, and Johnny yelled that the sailor had a knife. Tommy slugged him. The sailor came back at him with the blade. Tommy punched him again. The knife hit the asphalt. Tommy picked it up. “I yelled, ‘Motherfucker, you want to stab me?’ ” he recalls. “And I stabbed him a bunch of times.”

  Justified, in its way. In this case, even the “victim” thought so: Before the police could sort out who had done the stabbing, the sailor told investigators he was to blame for the whole mess and would not press charges. Tommy walked.

  But another element creeps into these accounts of his burgeoning penchant for violence. This was a kid who might not have instigated much trouble, technically, but whose response to even mild challenge was nuclear in its intensity—he was all in, every time, with no thought to the proportionality of his response versus the other guy’s sins. Whatever said other guy had done, he got an explosion in return. He got hurt.

  The people who tangled with Arney usually failed to recognize the danger until it was too late. He topped six feet, but he wasn’t bulky with muscle, and his boy’s face and first, wispy attempt at a mustache didn’t inspire fear. Pity the smart-aleck college students who smirked at his curse-laden speech as they stood in line behind him at a fast-food joint, or exchanged snide whispers in his presence; hypersensitive about his own schooling, resentful of theirs, Arney assumed they were mocking him and beat them bloody. Pity any jerk who laughed at the wrong moment, or held eye contact too long, or demonstrated any shortage of respect for Arney and his kin, because said jerk would have to be taught some manners, and he’d pay for the lesson with teeth.

  Pity, even, the biker Arney encountered at a grocery store during this period: It’s a safe bet he didn’t suspect that his life was about to change. It was just after Arney got his first apartment, and he was subsisting on canned chicken noodle soup. He was at the store, loading a cart with a week’s worth, when, a short ways off, a greasy character in motorcycle leathers picked a noisy and threatening dispute with a much smaller man, humiliating the fellow in front of his wife and the biker’s old lady. After that, the biker evidently misidentified Arney as fair game: He strode up to him, glared at the cans piled in his cart, and said: What if I want some fucking soup?

  To which Arney replied: Have some. He slammed the man’s left temple with a soup can he’d palmed, hit him with all his might—then, as the biker lurched backward, again smashed the can into his skull, and again, and again, until blood spattered the linoleum and dripped from the shelves and the biker’s old lady was wailing and screeching for help. Arney walked away without a backward glance. “I didn’t even think about it afterward,” he tells me. “The minute I walked out of that store, it was out of my mind. I didn’t think about it again for years. I almost forgot it happened.”

  He was breaking the law in nonviolent style, too. While siphoning fuel from a parked car almost within sight of where we sit (a crime he perpetrated whenever his tank got low), he inhaled and swallowed a mouthful of gasoline, a mistake that earned him a hospital stay. Serious legal trouble was only a matter of time, and it came on Halloween in 1974, when he and his brother Billy and some friends ran out of beer while out on the town. Somebody in the car suggested that they resupply at a shuttered grocery store, so they pulled behind the place and pried open the back door. They were wandering around inside, drinking wine and eating bologna, when one of the group came across two safes in a back room.

  They forced one open. The other was too tough to crack on the spot, so they lugged it out to the car. It was heavy, hundreds of pounds—as soon as they heaved it into the trunk, the car’s rear end dropped to the pavement, and they dragged bottom as they peeled off for home. A few minutes later, a pair of patrolling cops spotted a Mercury Comet throwing up a rooster tail of sparks.

  Arney emerged from the episode a felon. He got off with a suspended sentence and probation, but not before spending several months awaiting trial in the Norfolk City Jail. It wasn’t much different from his life on the outside: Tossed into a communal cell with twenty or thirty other men, inside of an hour he’d be pounding someone senseless.

  A FEW MILES across town, the Chevy was in the comparably stable and civilized hands of Bruce Thornhill Jr., who lived in a quiet suburb and operated a busy veterinary practice southwest of Portsmouth. The Chevy had some sentimental value to the younger Thornhill, but above all it was his daily driver out the once-rural George Washington Highway—U.S. 17, a stretch of four-lane blacktop now straddled by metastasizing subdivisions and strip shopping centers. The car was thus entering a long middle age as a workhorse, its value directly tied to its reliability, its sturdiness, its ability to haul loads. It was a tool. It was a means.

  This third stage in our relationship with our cars—companionable reliance—is, in most cases, the longest; it’s the stage, too, at which many cars are put on the market and bought secondhand. It has morphed in definition and duration over the years, for just as improved medical care and healthier lifestyles have made age fifty the new forty (or even the new thirty-five), the cars of today take far longer to reach this rather unromantic juncture than they did a few years ago, and they remain in it longer.

  Consider that a modern car is barely warmed up at thirty thousand miles. A lot of new cars don’t even need a tune-up until well past that point. One can keep a Toyota or Honda or newer American car for a dozen years without a major repair, and it’s not a stretch to drive a car for fifteen and still get a decent price for it. A car of 1957, on the other hand, was middle-aged at thirty thousand miles, and was last able to fetch a decent resale price at somewhere around sixty thousand. A car reaching a hundred thousand was used up, and a rarity; on the roads of the period, that translated into a lot of hours at the wheel.

  Among Dr. Thornhill’s clients was Sidney Pollard III, a Portsmouth native and the owner of a poodle. On his visits to the clinic, Pollard often admired the doctor’s car in the parking lot. The Chevy, no classic when new, was starting to assume the trappings of one in the early seventies, especially after the success of George Lucas’s 1973 film, American Graffiti. The movie had done much to recharge the reputations of a host of late-fifties cars that were now becoming increasingly rare on the street; next to them, the styling of newer cars seemed bloodless.

  The ’57 Chevy in particular was coming into it
s own as an object of desire. Perhaps it’s because it survived in sufficient numbers to whet collectors’ appetites, unlike its contemporaries—Chryslers that disintegrated at the mention of rain, and Fords that racked up repairs with their miles, and Ramblers that no one, mindful of their reputations as economy cars, wanted to keep for long. Perhaps it took a few years for the arbiters of taste to recognize that its fins achieved a sublimity of size and shape that would elude all the competition’s designs, and all of Chevrolet’s later efforts, as well. Maybe its tough but pretty face, its full grouper’s lips, endeared it to those normally unmoved by Detroit product. It might have been the simple fact that the first millions of baby boomers, having weathered assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate, were feeling nostalgic about their teen years.

  Whatever the case, the car had become an emblem of simpler times and of Detroit’s vanishing style and swagger. The wagon called to Pollard. He was so taken with it that he shot a glance at the clinic’s lot whenever he drove past, until one day he spotted a “For Sale” sign in one of the car’s windows.

  Bruce Jr. let him inspect the goods. Pollard found a metal spring poking through a small tear in the front bench seat. A few florets of rust interrupted the paint job; in one spot behind the right front wheel, they’d blossomed into a two-inch hole. Otherwise, the car was wonderfully preserved. Thanks to the elder Thornhill’s religious maintenance, it looked much as it had the day it rolled off the Colonial Chevrolet lot, more than eighteen years before.

  Pollard took it to a friend who ran a machine shop for a mechanical once-over. Its only internal defect was a burnt exhaust valve, an easy fix. So the twenty-six-year-old Pollard became the Chevy’s third owner. He paid Thornhill three hundred dollars for it.