Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Like the rest of the car, the engine traced its lineage to the decision to make over Chevrolet’s dowdy image with the all-new 1955 model. The company’s old-man reputation had snuck up on it: While Ford and Studebaker dropped V8s into their cars, Chevy had been content to limp along on its ancient six, its sales goosed along by Harley Earl’s ever-changing styles.

  GM officials woke up to the cost of this conservatism as Ford’s share of the low-end car market crept upward in the early fifties. To inject new fire into Chevy’s running gear, GM recruited an engineer who’d overseen creation of a new V8 for Cadillac a few years before—an engine revolutionary for its power, light weight, and zesty performance. Ed Cole was his name. In early 1952, he was running GM’s tank plant in Cleveland, cranking out armament for the fight in Korea. The bosses offered him a ride back to autos as Chevy’s chief engineer. He arrived that May.

  So began a two-year race to reengineer the Chevy in time for the 1955 model. Cole junked all the work that had been done on the car and marshaled his people to conceive of a small V8 that didn’t know it was small, an engine that would fit into a tighter space—and thus, a sportier car—but still snap heads with a stomp on the gas.

  He and his team succeeded beyond all expectations, because just as groundbreaking as the ’55 model’s styling was the engine he built for it: a 265-cubic-inch V8 squeezed into a snug package, and lighter, stronger, and more efficient than other eight-cylinders. This was the famed “small-block” V8 that would prove the wellspring for Chevy engines of various displacements until the nineties, which was produced ninety million times over, and which inspired those that still power GM cars today.*

  Cast with a thinner husk than its contemporaries, the 265 weighed forty-one pounds less than Chevy’s old six-cylinder engine, was structurally stiffer and stronger, and turned out 162 horsepower in its most basic form to the old motor’s 136. Chevrolet called its ’55 car “the Hot One” in its advertising, and that was a pretty fair assessment. Its engine delivered. And the small-block propelled Cole, along with the car: He became general manager of Chevrolet in 1956, and eventually rose to the presidency of GM.

  By the time Nicholas Thornhill bought the wagon, he had more of Cole’s handiwork to choose from. The company still offered the six-cylinder, as well as the 265. For the 1957 model year, however, it added a variant to the V8, the same small block rebored to 283 cubic inches of displacement. Like the 265, the Turbo-Fire 283 came with a choice of carburetors; with a standard two-barrel, it cranked out 185 horses, and with the high-performance and gas-guzzling four-barrel (dubbed the Super Turbo-Fire), 220. With two four-barrels, it posted an impressive 270.

  And you could do better still. Underlining the company’s drive to snare younger buyers, Chevy supplied that one especially forward-thinking option: fuel injection. The mechanical contraption was glitchy and expensive—it added five hundred dollars to the car’s price—but it boosted horsepower to 283, achieving an automotive Holy Grail: a unit of horsepower for each cubic inch of displacement.

  Nicholas Thornhill hadn’t needed fuel injection. He probably hadn’t needed a V8 for the puttering around town that accounted for most of his driving. But it was 1957’s hearty and hallowed 283 two-barrel that resided under the hood of the Savages’ wagon in 1987.

  Homebound from a weekend NASCAR Winston Cup race in Richmond, with Picot Savage at the wheel, the Chevy overheated. Savage, who’d had a few beers at the track, wasn’t in the mood to stop. The couple made it home, and over the next few days Savage narrowed the problem to a leak in the cooling system, though he didn’t pinpoint its exact location; he kept the car on the road by frequently watering the radiator. But within a few days, Debbie and a friend took the wagon across town to the beach, and on the way back the engine exploded. It was clear to Savage that he’d be unable to fix it: When he popped the hood he found a broken connecting rod jutting from a hole in the oil pan.

  The car sat outside the house for several months before he pulled the ruined power plant and dropped a bigger motor, a used Chevy 327, in its place. The replacement was a small block, as well, a descendant of the same engine that Ed Cole had introduced in the ’55.

  For a while, everything worked. But little things started to go wrong with the car, annoying things. The gas tank sprang a leak. Savage, now using the Chevy to commute to a new job across town, found that it drained dry while he worked. He’d have to carry a few spare gallons in a can every day, and replenish the tank before setting off for home. The Savages’ relationship with the wagon thus ventured from the third stage of automotive ownership, companionable reliance, to the initial substage of automotive heartache—doubt, in which a car exhibits its first, seemingly minor betrayals of strength and endurance, and its owner is left to wonder whether his machine will perform as expected.

  Savage epoxied the leaky gas tank, but then a wire in the starter pulled loose, so that nothing happened when he turned the key. He discovered that when he delivered several hard stomps to the floorboards, he jostled the wiring just enough to make a difference, and the car would fire up. You have to kick-start it, he joked to his coworkers, but it runs good. Just the same, the Chevy was now approaching 140,000 miles, and it chugged gas like a frat boy. The couple took to driving other cars.

  The wagon sat unused in the yard for months. Its plates expired. The Savages’ place wasn’t junky, by any means—the couple took care of the yard and kept the house in good repair. Still, some of the neighbors were irritated by the sight of a derelict vehicle on the premises, and complained to the city. Suffolk officials gave the Savages a choice: License it, garage it, or move it. Savage was working at a private shipyard near the navy yard, so he drove the wagon there and left it in a parking lot.

  Weeks passed. Somebody mistook the car for abandoned and came close to driving it away. After three years of ownership, the Savages concluded that their once-prized classic Chevy might be more trouble than it was worth.

  STILL HAULING JUNK, Tommy Arney decided running a filling station wasn’t for him. He opened a second business next door that seemed a better fit—a used-car lot, which dovetailed nicely with his junk trade. It went so well that with brothers Billy and Mike he opened a second lot, Arney Brothers Wholesale, in a declining part of town, and a garage, Arney Brothers Auto Repair, a few miles away. He leased and sublet a necklace of buildings to either side of the shop.

  By the early eighties, Arney Brothers Wholesale had an arrangement with several new-car dealers to sell off their trade-ins. The brothers didn’t make much per sale, but they sold a lot of cars—fifty, sixty, even seventy on some days, most often to the many independent used-car dealers that catered to Norfolk’s huge population of enlisted sailors. A few cars came onto the lot that Arney decided to keep for himself. So began his study of the classics. The restlessness that had spelled such trouble in his schooling manifested itself now in more positive ways, at least some of the time. The brothers worked deep into most nights, augmenting their auto trade with anything that would bring a dollar. They did some roofing, sold tires and rims, and started a business training guard dogs; they needed the animals themselves to patrol their car lot at night.

  In his few hours of leisure, Arney found time for romance. His relationship with Krista deepened, even as he pursued trysts with a number of other women—a number that, by his account, was very large indeed. Krista sussed out his infidelity in 1980, broke off contact, and moved to Tampa, Florida, where her father lived. Arney turned up there and convinced her not only to take him back, but to marry him, which she did on November 21, 1980, afterward returning with him to Virginia.

  He found time for more violence, too. One day in the office at Moyock Muscle, I notice that he’s staring into space, a vague sadness in his expression. I ask him what’s the matter. “I was just sitting here, thinking about my mama,” he says, his tone dreamy. “I was thinking about this one time I was supposed to go to lunch with her—me and Billy and my brother Mike. We were going to Great
er Grinders to have subs, and I had to whip somebody’s ass.”

  This was a few months after he sold his service station to a man named Mike. Arney had agreed to leave the business’s electrical account in his name to spare Mike the hefty deposit required of new commercial customers. He stressed that Mike couldn’t be late with payments, as his own $3,500 deposit was on the line. Months later, Arney received notice from the utility that the bill had gone unpaid, and that his deposit would be used to cover the shortfall. Livid, he decided to pay Mike a visit. He told his mother that it couldn’t wait.

  I thought we were going to eat, Fern complained. We will, Arney promised, just as soon as I’m done. Okay, his mother said. Take Billy with you, in case there are more than a couple of them. And hurry. I want lunch.

  A few minutes later, he and Billy pulled up outside the station, which Mike was operating as a used-car lot. Arney walked in. Mike walked toward him, waving some paper. Arney punched him in the face, knocking him into his office, then followed him into the back room and beat him so fiercely that Billy, worried he’d kill him, pulled his brother off the man twice. Arney shook Billy off, climbed onto the arm of a sofa, and jumped with all of his boot-clad 190 pounds onto the unconscious Mike’s back. Then the brothers revived Mike, propped him into a sitting position in his desk chair, got the money to cover the overdue bill, and walked out. Mike declined to press charges.

  “We got back, I guess, in about thirty minutes,” Arney tells me. “Mama said, ‘Are you ready to eat? I’m hungry.’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I washed my hands and we ate a sub that day.

  “Yeah.” He pauses, looks into the distance. “Sometimes a guy will think about his mama.”

  Was it nature or nurture that made Tommy Arney the violent thug he’d become by his late twenties? Some of both, no doubt: When he was five or six, he says, he got his first inkling that whatever Fern’s shortcomings, his family tree was a tangle of twisted branches and strange fruit. While spending the day with an uncle in Lenoir, Tommy failed to eat every potato chip in a bag he’d opened. Offended, the uncle pulled out his signature weapon, a bullwhip, with which he could pluck a cigarette from a pretty girl’s lips without leaving a mark, if he so chose. In this instance, he intended to leave a mark. He made contact with Tommy’s fleeing torso three or four times. The leather cracked like pistol shots.

  Tommy spent the rest of the day a safe distance off, waiting for his mother to fetch him back to Lenoir. He was so angry and bewildered that while picking at the rubber sole of his sneaker, he accidentally ripped it off. When Fern saw that, she overlooked the fact that her brother had bullwhipped her son. She beat Tommy, instead.

  That was, it turns out, a rather low-key episode in family history, compared to many, many others. Some fifty years later I drive down to Lenoir, where I meet Arney’s cousin Billie Ruth Bryant, daughter of Fern’s older sister, Pauline. Billie Ruth and her husband, Steve, a twice-wounded Vietnam vet who’s witnessed plenty of violence up close—but even so, is awed by his in-laws—offer an executive summary of the clan’s congenital yen for bedlam. Such as the time aunt Ruby, according to family legend, disarmed a Lenoir cop and menaced the officer with his own sidearm. And the time two of Ruby’s children soaked her in kerosene, resolved to setting her on fire, then lost their nerve and instead threw her from a second-floor balcony, breaking her leg. Or the fusillades Ruby exchanged with her children, visitors, and Arney’s uncle Clyde—who’s well into his eighties, Billie Ruth says, but still “carries a pistol in every orifice he has.”

  Such were the family values into which Arney was born, and this accounting deals the subject only the most glancing of blows. I’ve skipped the stabbings. A stand-alone book could be written about Ruby’s husband, Colden Crump, who installed half a dozen locks on his bedroom door so that he could barricade himself inside when Ruby took to drinking white liquor straight from a mason jar, a reliable predictor of coming gunplay. A thousand lesser family disputes earn a chuckle from the survivors, such as the time Clyde slapped Ruby so hard she wet herself, and Ruby ran him down with her car in reply.

  Roughhousing wasn’t restricted to the maternal line of Arney’s ancestry. When he was twenty-seven, a few years after Fern told him that Fred Arney wasn’t his father, that the responsible party was really one Earl Thomas Green, Arney went down to Carolina to visit his dad. Green asked him for a loan so that he could pay a lawyer who was defending him against charges that he’d shot a man.

  Given his kin’s fondness for the scent of cordite, it shouldn’t surprise that Arney relied on firearms from time to time. There was the night he fired a revolver into the air to break up a roadside rumble that he and a buddy were losing against four marines (though not before he swung a heavy steel tow hook through one of the servicemen’s cheeks); the time he signaled his displeasure at a malfunctioning jukebox by putting five bullets through the machine, then borrowing a customer’s pistol and shooting it six more times in front of a horrified repair man—an act for which he received a two-month suspended jail sentence. A November 1984 parking lot hassle morphed into a chase through Norfolk’s streets, during which the pursuing Arney put a few bullets into the other car. He received a misdemeanor conviction for that.

  He came close to shooting a man who owed him money, too, a used-car dealer who’d shown no signs of paying up. Not long after Krista gave birth to their first child, Ryan, in 1982, Arney “woke up and I decided: ‘I’m going to kill that motherfucker.’ So I took a gun”—a .357 Magnum—“and I stuck it in the back of my pants.” Krista saw the weapon and intercepted him as he crossed the front yard. Please come back inside, she begged him. Don’t take that gun. She was crying. She held Ryan. Arney looked at her, looked at the baby, and “something just clicked in me,” he says, “and said: ‘Go back inside.’ ” He called the man, told him what he’d almost done. The fellow hurried to settle his debt.

  Arney stopped carrying a gun for good in 1989, he says, after Bill Taliaferro warned him that as a felon, he was pushing his luck. He didn’t much miss it. Violence was a means to an end for him, a salve to the anger that still roiled in his head and chest, and the relief and satisfaction he gleaned with his fists and feet dwarfed that which he might have experienced with the assistance of tools.

  IN 1985, ARNEY again expanded his business empire: He bought a go-go bar called Elmo’s, which occupied a low-slung cinder-block pile on Norfolk’s west side, not far from the naval base. He joked to friends that he bought it because he’d been banned from every other tavern in town, and “was tired of drinking at the damn car lot,” and true enough, his fighting has made him unwelcome in many such establishments. But more to the point, he had contemplated owning his own joint since his days cooking at the Shamrock Inn, and he had frequented go-go bars even longer: In November 1971, while still holed up in the Sunoco, not yet seventeen, he’d strolled into a club with a fake draft card and a yarn about having pulled a tour flying helicopters in Vietnam. A girl was up onstage, wearing tasseled pasties. A glance her way made him a lifelong aficionado.

  Part of the attraction was obvious. “I really liked go-go dancers,” he explains to me. “These fucking girls wanted attention. They had to have people tell them they had pretty hair, and a nice ass. Needed people to tell ’em. But, I mean, I did love their asses.”

  So there was that. And, in addition, this: Most go-go bars rarely saw violence. They were among the safest drinking spots around, in fact, because their patrons were united in a common purpose. “If I went to a disco bar, I’d get into a fight, every single time,” Arney tells me. “You’re looking at a girl. She’s got a nice, sweet ass on her. She smiles at you. You smile at her. Next thing you know, her boyfriend’s coming over and saying, ‘What are you doing, looking at my girlfriend?’ And I’d say, ‘I’m looking at her because she’s got a sweet ass on her and a pretty face—what the fuck do you think?’ And then he’s throwing a punch.

  “Won’t happen at a go-go bar. I was comfortable in a go-go bar. I coul
d relax there.”

  Arney renamed the place the Body Shop. He shut it down for a few days, scoured the interior, put in a new bar, hung signs, dressed it up. He built a menu around the titanic, one-pound Body Burger, and wired in a sound system loud enough to splinter kidney stones. He hadn’t yet reopened the bar when one early afternoon a wiry laborer in his early thirties wandered in off the street and asked for a beer. Arney gave him one, and John Nelson McQuillen, a maintenance man at a downtown Norfolk bank, pretty much never left. He loved the Body Shop to the detriment of his job, which he lost, and his marriage, which was already in trouble but soon fractured completely. Arney gave him a job as a doorman, then taught him how to cook.

  McQuillen would prove an intriguing paradox—a high school dropout and a well-read autodidact with a headful of history, literature, and the scriptures; a biker whose forearms were engulfed in tattoo flames, but who could hold his own in polite conversation with just about anyone, on a surprising range of topics; a shrewd fellow, in most respects, with a weakness for dangerous women; and a man of uncompromising loyalty who rarely saw the numerous children of his past marriages and liaisons.

  He was neither a neo-Nazi nor bald nor cut his hair especially close—in fact, he wore it in a mullet at the time—but one night at the Body Shop he asked Arney to buy him a beer, to which the boss replied: “Fuck you. Buy me one, you skinhead motherfucker.” The impromptu label stuck, in part because Arney threatened to fire anyone in his employ who addressed McQuillen by his real name.

  When Skinhead was reduced to living with his mother for a while, Arney phoned the house and asked for him by his new moniker, to which Mrs. McQuillen said: “His name is Johnny. I ought to know. I named him.”

  “Well, ma’am,” Arney replied, “I named him Skinhead.”

  The two became inseparable. Along with a couple of sidekicks, they cruised around town in a blue limousine Arney bought, wore matching, floor-length fur coats, went dining and shopping with carloads of dancers, and spent long nights at the club and venturing out to after-hours joints when the Body Shop closed. It wasn’t unusual for the pair to down a case of beer in an evening, as well as a couple of bottles of hundred-proof Rumple Minze. Sometimes they slept on the go-go bar’s pool tables; Arney eventually built an efficiency apartment on the club’s second floor, where he crashed by himself or with members of the staff.