Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  “The FBI?” I ask, not sure I’ve heard him correctly.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “They’ve been investigating me for a couple of years.” He is suspected of having pulled some funny business in his dealings with a local lender, the Bank of the Commonwealth, the poor health of which has been the subject of numerous stories in the paper lately. He’s not sure, exactly, what they think he did—he’s heard varying accounts—but the bureau has assigned a couple of agents to sift through his affairs. “I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong,” he says, “but I’ve had people tell me, ‘Tommy, once they decide to go after you, they don’t like to stop.’ So I don’t know.”

  The upshot is that he has a lot to do and to think about, he says, and he doesn’t have room in his days for the car. We sit, staring at each other. I’m confused by the news, because until this moment, Arney has spoken with unbridled enthusiasm about the project. I haven’t said anything in reply when, without explanation, he suddenly plucks his cell phone from the bar, flips it open, and dials Painter Paul. “Paul, how much do you have to do, still, on that pickup you’re working on?”

  A pause. “Oh, really?” Another, longer pause. He turns to me. “He says he’ll be done with it in four or five days.” The wheels turn for a few seconds. “All right,” he finally tells Paul. “Finish that motherfucker, and don’t start on anything else. I want to start that ’57.”

  SID POLLARD WAS a child of the new postwar suburbs—which is to say, he was a product of the automobile age. His father, Sidney Pollard Jr., was an electronics engineer and mechanical wizard who, like the Thornhills, worked at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard during the war. At the yard the senior Pollard met Sid’s mother, Sarah Pretlow Darden, who was part of an old Virginia family; her first cousin was then the state’s governor.

  Married during the war, the Pollards lived for a few years in a Norfolk apartment a few blocks from Colonial Chevrolet, then built a house on Portsmouth’s sparsely developed fringe, five miles away—a two-story brick bungalow on more than an acre of land, in a new Portsmouth subdivision called Green Acres. Old-timers still called the place the Wright B. Carney farm, and it looked the part: When the Pollards moved into their new place, just before Sid was born in 1950, the neighborhood was an island of fescue and azalea amid rows of soybeans, corn, and tomatoes, and abounding woods, and fields busy with deer, raccoons, skunks. The biggest highway in that part of town, U.S. 17, was two lanes wide. Most of its traffic was farm trucks.

  Young Sid learned how to use a peashooter and a slingshot, and to hunt snakes with a BB gun. He built tree houses and forts and underground hideouts roofed in plywood. Books did not come easily to him, but some things did: He could handle tools and machines instinctively, and by the time he was ten he could fix anything broken on a bike. He took after his father in that respect. His short, quick-tempered old man retreated most nights to his basement workshop, where he worked wonders on anything with wires. Sid often borrowed his dad’s gear to repair bikes in the yard, and on unhappy occasion the old man ran over his own tools with the lawn mower. Eventually, Sid the elder stopped letting Sid the younger use his stuff.

  Sid passed through junior high as the woods around the bungalow fell, and shadeless subdivisions of split-levels and ranchers and two-story colonials coiled around Green Acres and filled the farmland across U.S. 17. Construction started on a new high school for all the kids moving into these new houses, whose families were part of an exodus of whites from Portsmouth’s center. When the school opened, Sid was in attendance.

  After class, he honed his mechanical skills. He bought two junk Renaults for ninety dollars and, with his dad’s help, cobbled a single decent car out of their parts. He tinkered with other castoffs, but acquired a morbid fascination with Renaults, a French make with a reputation for idiosyncrasies—to put it charitably—in design, engineering and performance, and pushed himself to solve ever more complex and vexing problems. Before long his father was telling him, Son, you’re a better mechanic than I ever hope to be, and paying Sid to work on the family’s cars.

  Just about here, his path veered from the middle-class ideal. He was still in high school when he married for the first time. It didn’t last long. After graduating in 1970, he took classes at a junior college for a couple of years and held a succession of jobs that didn’t last, either: delivering appliances, driving a forklift, running a bike shop, fixing machinery at an iron and metal firm, molding the plastic backs of nineteen-inch TVs on a General Electric assembly line. He went into air-conditioning and refrigeration work, and in 1974 landed a post at the shipyard. A year later he married his second wife, Sheila, a secretary at the yard. They were living in a duplex not far from Nicholas Thornhill’s little cottage on the western end of town—now, thanks to the spreading suburbs, the middle of town—when in 1976 he bought the wagon.

  Pollard got to work. He had a Portsmouth machine shop bore out the Chevy’s engine. Another shop turned the crankshaft. He rebuilt the transmission himself. He used baling wire to tie down the errant spring in the front seat, then contact-cemented a piece of matching vinyl over the hole. He replaced the dashboard clock. His father fixed the old tube radio.

  He tackled the rust by taking the car to a friend, Frank DeSimone, who ran a body shop out of his mother’s garage. He and DeSimone had met a half dozen years before, when both worked for the appliance place; they’d hit it off the day they met, and had spent a lot of time together, on the clock and off—they and their wives had done some nightclubbing together in nearby Virginia Beach. DeSimone filled the Chevy’s holes, then sanded and repainted the whole car. Pollard finished the overhaul with a new set of radials and Bel Air hub caps. The bill topped $1,500, a sizable sum for the time, but the car was now as sharp-looking as the day it came off the line: chrome gleaming, metallic paint fresh, interior pristine.

  The wagon became his daily driver to the shipyard, a commute that took him through Portsmouth’s middle. It was a bleak passage. The central business district, like those of many older American cities in the late seventies, seemed to dribble away a little more each month—stores closing, movie theaters shutting down, shoppers fleeing to the new malls in the hinterlands, which now pushed beyond his parents’ place in Green Acres. The older neighborhoods near downtown were blighted eyesores.

  But he only had to endure the depressing views for a few minutes each week: In 1977, he and Sheila bought a house out on the new suburban frontier, and weekends took them the other way. Pollard, keen for waterskiing, added a trailer hitch to the Chevy and used it to haul a ski boat to the rivers and lakes in the countryside to the west and south. He and Sheila didn’t need a motel room. When they folded down the Chevy’s backseat, its cargo bay was the size of a double bed.

  LIKE NICHOLAS THORNHILL, Sid Pollard built a garage behind his house for the Chevy. He stayed true to the car’s maintenance schedule. The lust he’d felt on acquiring the car, and the love he’d had for it over the succeeding couple of years, had settled into abiding affection by now. The wagon was a trusted companion and, after his second marriage ended in 1979, his sidekick on solo weekend adventures. Some days he’d steer it onto the expressway and mash the accelerator until the speedometer needle lay hard to the right. He’d take it onto the old ditch-lined roads that wound through the swamps down by the Carolina line, skinny farm lanes not yet outrun by the subdivisions of stapled-together houses spilling from the city, and take the curves hard enough to make the tires squeal.

  He was, in other words, entering the third stage of ownership, as had Bruce Thornhill before him—a point at which some owners refer to their cars by nicknames, dress their interiors in custom and often funky touches (seat covers, replacement floor mats), paper their tails in bumper stickers. It’s the most comfortable stage, in that one’s car is not so pristine and hallowed that a nick prompts tears, or overnight parking on a city street causes an interruption of sleep, but the vehicle in question is still sufficiently youthful and solid that its relia
bility is no cause for doubt. It’s a time for relaxation. You might let the dog ride in the back without first covering the seats. You let your kids eat and drink without making a fuss about it. It’s not a disaster to drive around with a little grime showing.

  And because it’s trusted, because the relationship between owner and machine is so intimate in this stage, one’s car can become a sanctuary, and a tabernacle of hopes, dreams, beliefs. Exhibit One: I find a 1964 Nova parked on the apron outside the paint and body sheds at Moyock Muscle. It’s a bitter day, windy and overcast, and I check the Nova’s doors more to escape the weather than to explore the car. It’s open. I slip into the front passenger seat.

  The interior smells of mildew. The upholstered door panels have been ruined by moisture. The driver’s has rotted away completely; the others are curled and stained and soggy. I glance overhead. The headliner, the Nova’s fabric ceiling, is missing. Rusty steel struts that once held it in place still span the underside of the roof. Wedged beneath one of them, directly over the middle of the front bench seat, is a little bundle of paper.

  I pry it loose, unfold it. It is composed of four slips of rough white stationery, on each of them one or more words rendered in blue ballpoint, in a woman’s hand, vintage unknown.

  “god,” the first reads.

  “be sleepy,” the next.

  “become silent.”

  Last, “moneo, monere, monui, monitus”—various forms of the Latin for warn, advise, remind.

  Words to live by? A small shrine of important life lessons, placed in this ravaged old sedan by a past owner? I can only guess. I can’t decide whether that owner slipped the bundle under the strut while the headliner was undergoing some long-ago repair—so that these magic words were sealed, invisible, inside the car, like a time capsule—or drove the beater without the fabric covering, and with the car’s rusted steel exposed.

  Either way, I marvel, she vested her car with these mantras. She made a temple of it, a spiritual refuge.

  I’m about to leave the Nova when I notice a second tiny packet of paper under a ceiling strut behind me, over the backseat. I carefully ease it out, fold it flat. It’s a Chinese takeout menu, and evidently it’s not that old: Chicken with broccoli is priced at $4.75. A two-liter bottle of Pepsi is $1.99.

  So, okay, I think: This suggests that Ms. Spiritual Past Owner drove a beater with a bare metal ceiling—the headliner’s fabric wouldn’t have rotted away in the few years since this menu was printed. She hadn’t secreted her bundle of inspiration beyond view, after all; she’d jammed it under a metal strut that hovered just overhead every time she drove. And Chinese food, it seems, was important to her—given its placement, only a little less important than the seemingly deeper “god” and “become silent” stuff.

  But I decide, as I climb out, that I’ll stick with my first interpretation of the mantras. Some people really like Chinese food.

  SID POLLARD DATED now and then during the year following his divorce, but it wasn’t until December 1980 that he found new love. He was at a New Year’s Eve party where the host, lacking fireworks, pulled out a gun and started firing it into the air. Pollard decided at the same moment that it was time to leave. He drove to a nightclub on the Portsmouth waterfront and inside met a Baptist minister’s daughter named Sherrye Sheffield.

  They dated for fourteen months before marrying in March 1982. Both were youth directors of their church, and they’d use the wagon to haul the congregation’s youngsters on trips to the bowling alley and such. The kids, who loved riding in the car, called it the “Green Hornet.”

  Then, nine months after the Pollards married, Sherrye gave birth to the first of their three daughters. Mary Beth’s arrival presented her father with a quandary, for the wagon was not the vehicle of choice for hauling around an infant. It lacked air-conditioning, for one thing. Worse, it failed to make any concession to passenger safety. The dash was unpadded steel; all that separated the car’s occupants from their metal surroundings were a few microns of green paint. Metal knobs jutted from the instrument panel, poised to snag, rip, and puncture skin. The steering column was an unyielding lance aimed at the driver’s breastbone; in a head-on wreck, he’d be a kebab.

  Seat belts were entirely absent. Though Nash had made them standard on its cars in 1949, and Ford had introduced them as an option in 1956—to great fanfare, if not great sales success—GM hadn’t been moved to follow suit. “GM declares that when its engineers are convinced that something should be added as a safety feature, the feature is made standard, not optional, equipment,” Fortune explained in June 1956, adding that in the case of belts, the company had “misgivings about their value.”

  Value, that is, in exciting the customer: Ford found that only 10 percent of its buyers shelled out extra for its seat belts. Not surprisingly, GM was cool to investing in vehicle features that “the vast majority of motorists” would neither buy nor use, as an independent study found was still the case in 1958.

  Pollard had not seen fit to second-guess the automaker’s decision to skip belts. He could have added them now, but even then, the car’s safety would have fallen short of what he demanded in any vehicle carrying his new baby. This might seem counterintuitive: Nowadays, cars of the fifties seem to be built like tanks. But the truth is that the Chevy’s size and heft and thick steel armor did not protect its occupants at all well. Tank or no, the wagon wasn’t designed to absorb impacts, as modern cars are; it was built to outmuscle any obstacle it met, to retain its shape and integrity while winning the showdown with telephone poles, light standards, bridge abutments, and other vehicles. Today’s cars are accordions. This was a battering ram.

  This approach had romantic appeal, but suffered from two shortcomings. Instead of being absorbed, the forces generated by a collision were transferred through the Chevy, and into and through its passengers. And because it was not designed to collapse in a predictable, rational fashion, it deformed in surprising and often disastrous ways when the stresses of an accident proved too severe for its beefy constitution.

  There’s no better demonstration of this than an experiment conducted a few years ago by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the nonprofit outfit that conducts the crash tests that yield safety ratings for all cars sold in the United States. In 2009, the institute rolled a 1959 Chevy Bel Air four-door sedan into its test facility in Ruckersville, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge north of Charlottesville, and pointed it at a smaller, seemingly anemic 2009 Chevy Malibu. Each car was then sent speeding head-on at the other at forty miles per hour.

  Unless you were a physicist, materials expert, or civil engineer, you might have watched the distance closing between the cars confident that the Malibu was about to be creamed. The ’59 Bel Air was a behemoth: The cast of Riverdance could jig across its hood without leaving a dent. By comparison, the new car seemed built of little more than foil, and weighed a full two hundred pounds less than its forebear. But the test, which was conducted as part of the partying that marked the institute’s fiftieth anniversary, yielded some major surprises. The damage to the passenger compartment of the older Bel Air was horrific: The steering wheel was thrown back and up at the dummy in the driver’s seat, striking its head; the A pillars instantly collapsed, slamming the roof down on the dummy’s skull and throwing it into the unpadded dash; the windshield blew out; the driver’s door flew open; the front seat tore loose from its moorings and flew forward, wadding the dummy like paper; the space below the dash crunched shut on the dummy’s legs.

  The Malibu’s passenger compartment, meanwhile, remained intact. Its airbag deployed, cushioning the dummy at the controls. The doors and windshield stayed put. Video cameras inside both cars made clear that the Bel Air’s driver would have been gravely injured in half a dozen ways, if not killed on the spot. The Malibu’s occupants might have recalled the collision as a truly rotten experience, but they likely would have limped away from it.

  So Pollard was right to worry. And
he had a second pressing concern about the Chevy, that being that seven years after his initial restoration of the car, rust had reappeared around the top of its roof. Battling it would mean pulling out the headliner, now more than a quarter century old and as fragile as gossamer. Pollard decided he didn’t have the will to launch another overhaul.

  He decided it was time to buy a family car. He’d sell the wagon and an automotive trifle, a ’77 MG roadster that shared its garage, and buy a new Renault Alliance, a subcompact sedan that Motor Trend had named its Car of the Year. Pollard’s old buddy Frank DeSimone was over at the house one day and happened to ask about the Chevy, and Pollard allowed as to how he was looking to unload it. The price: five hundred dollars.

  And like that, DeSimone became the Chevy’s fourth owner.

  OVER IN NORFOLK, Tommy Arney, back out of jail, spent his days rebuilding generators and starters at an electric shop, and earning just enough to pay the rent, buy soup, and set aside a few dollars each week for a car. He was dissatisfied by this meager existence, eager for change. When opportunity presented itself, he was ready.

  Every day, junk dealers came into the shop with ruined starters and generators, and in conversations with these older men he learned, to his astonishment, that for each piece of junk they moved they were paid twice. One customer paid them to remove junk from a property. Another paid them for that junk—recycling outfits bought scrap metal, glass, plastic; salvage yards bought old cars; and businesses such as electric shops bought spent components that they might rebuild at a profit.

  Arney recognized his future. He traded one hundred dollars and a 1960 Chevy Biscayne wagon for a used pickup, and started hauling junk. He had hustle, worked constantly. In short order he bought an old GMC wrecker that he had to crank by hand; hoisting loads required so much muscle that after a few months his right arm was visibly bigger than his left.