Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  The two took the opposite tack. They did nothing at all.

  They left the Chevy where it was.

  It spent much of the next two years sitting on the dealership’s back lot.

  10

  OVERWORKED AND BROKE, Alan Wilson quit his solo practice for the Eastern Virginia Medical School, where he was named an assistant professor of internal medicine. He did not abandon his patients or his passions, however—in the summer of 1996, he was instrumental in bringing an experimental AIDS vaccine to Norfolk for testing. The effort earned headlines. Wilson’s work was widely recognized as heroic. He was at the forefront of the fight against the disease.

  That fall, Sentara Health System, a corporation that owned the hospital with which the medical school shared a campus and with which Wilson’s work was inextricably bound, asked the doctor for evidence that he was board-certified. It was an entirely routine request, akin to being asked for ID when cashing a check. Except that in Wilson’s case, it didn’t seem routine at all.

  He panicked. He took his old certificate, fudged the date on it, copied it, and sent in the copy. Unknown to him, the old document had been signed by a board official who’d since died—had been dead, in fact, for six years, which did not escape the attention of the American Board of Family Practice. The organization sued Wilson for forging his credentials, charging that by so doing he’d endangered its credibility. It sought $200,000 in damages. That, too, earned headlines.

  The press attention erased any chance of doctor and board achieving a private solution to the problem. Wilson quit his post at the medical school. He continued to see patients, but his diminished practice wasn’t sufficient to maintain his flamboyant guppie lifestyle. He and Seely sold their posh downtown loft. They moved first to a more modest neighborhood across town, then retreated to Parrott, a tiny burg (population 160) in southwest Georgia, where Seely continued his design practice and Wilson commuted to Atlanta to teach.

  They all but forgot the Chevy. It remained on a back lot at Bay Chevrolet in Norfolk, exposed to the elements, crumbling. And so a relationship between car and owner that in 1994 had achieved that rare fifth stage now backslid to the third and final substage of the fourth: The wagon was abandoned.

  I’ve only once thrown up my hands and walked away from a car—though, as the past owner of too many pieces of junk, I might have done so as a matter of habit. The one instance involved the demonic Triumph roadster I bought in college, which for all of its good looks refused to operate as expected, especially its brakes, and nearly got me killed every time I took it out—and which thus rendered practically no service in exchange for its purchase price of $2,450, a goodly sum at the time, not to mention all the hundreds I sank into trying to fix the damn thing.

  It is a dramatic moment, indeed, when a driver unscrews the license plates from a car’s bumper, gives the hood a fond farewell pat, and leaves a lifeless carcass on the side of the road—or, in the case of that Triumph, in the garage of my mother’s house just prior to my moving three thousand miles away. It’s a conscious breach of a strong emotional bond. It’s a surrender of responsibility. It feels a little like taking a pet to the vet to have it put down.

  The wagon sat derelict for additional months, taking up space on the lot, until finally the dealer notified Wilson that he’d have to move it. The doctor had no use for the wagon now, and no place to keep it. But it so happened that one of the dealership’s workers knew a fellow who had a soft spot for old cars, and who might be able to solve Wilson’s dilemma. Contact was made, a deal struck. And so, for the grand price of two hundred dollars, the Chevy became the property of Jack’s Classic Pawn, a sideline interest of Jack Reed Sr., the patriarch of a family-owned plumbing supply business.

  Some types of enterprise have long done well in military towns. Drive off of any big base, and you’re almost sure to encounter a clot of (a) payday lenders offering soldiers and sailors a way to cover emergency expenses between their twice-monthly paychecks, sometimes at triple-digit interest rates; (b), rent-to-own furniture showrooms, computer shops and independent car lots willing to extend credit—again, at less than competitive terms—to low-ranking service members too young, poor, or otherwise risky to qualify for a note from the bank; and (c), pawnshops, where a nineteen-year-old E-2 can get a loan against the stuff he bought from (b) to pay the fast-mounting debt he’s accrued at (a).

  Jack’s Classic occupied a particularly auspicious location on a main drag halfway between the huge Norfolk Naval Station and the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, within sight of one of Arney’s go-go bars. Reed augmented the usual pawnshop fare—jewelry, stereo equipment, cameras, and the like—with a personal passion, vintage cars. He didn’t often grow attached to his inventory, as the business required that he spruce up a car and flip it without a lot of fuss. Even so, he barely had time to prepare this car for sale. No sooner had the dealership towed it to the pawnshop and Reed washed it and vacuumed its interior, than Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Jeffrey H. Simmons happened to drive past, fall in love with it even before he’d come to a stop, and agree to pay five hundred dollars for it.

  The Chevy’s ninth owner had joined the navy a day after finishing high school in Buffalo, New York, and had spent his entire military career in Norfolk. Aside from a stint as a guard at the brig, he’d always pulled sea duty—on a destroyer tender, with landing craft, and now on the salvage ship Grasp, aboard which he’d recently helped raise the wreckage of TWA flight 800 from the floor of the Atlantic.

  Vintage cars had always excited him. Born in May 1964, Simmons had grown up among old photographs of his father in the company of stylish, long-vanished machines, and had been heartsick over the explanations he heard as to what became of them: I cracked it up. I sold it. I traded it for something practical.

  Here was an opportunity to call such a car his own, and he was not about to let it pass, even if it came at an inconvenient moment, between paychecks; he cobbled together loans from friends to meet Reed’s price. Simmons’s wife, Patricia, whom he’d met while moonlighting as a bouncer, laughed when she saw him pull up to their house in the wagon. The front seat had so decayed that he all but sat on the floor. He could barely see over the dash.

  Simmons wasn’t put off by the Chevy’s decrepit condition. It represented potential to him, achievable beauty: He need only devise a plan for its restoration, stick to that plan, and in time he’d have a classic that would wow his shipmates and turn heads wherever he took it. That he had the mechanical wherewithal to complete the project was never in doubt: The Grasp had seven diesel engines bolted into its hull, four to drive the ship and three to run its salvage gear, and Simmons repaired and maintained all of them in the engine room. He knew how to turn a wrench.

  He got to work. He knew he’d have to replace the right front fender, which was not only dented but ripped, its metal turned back on itself; he tracked down a supplier in Arizona that had a replacement front end, and started saving toward it. He made phone calls to local shops that redipped chrome, an expensive undertaking but necessary if he were to restore the rust-flecked bumpers to their original glory. The couple’s three children joined in when he worked on the car in the yard. The youngest, Tamara, handed him tools as he labored under the hood. His son Joshua spent hours trying to rub the cloudy trim back to a shine. The car excited the whole family.

  But no one more than Simmons, who on some evenings would take a beer outside and climb into the Chevy, sit with his hands wrapped around its big, skinny steering wheel, and picture its curves rust-free and sheathed in candy-apple red paint, its seats reupholstered, the carpeting fresh. He imagined its engine smooth and powerful, its brakes reliable. The car thus returned to a fifth stage of ownership. It was in the hands of a savior.

  Or so it seemed. Except that three kids and a mortgage will devour every cent of an enlisted sailor’s pay and then some. Simmons’s savings for the new body panels never grew into much. He didn’t send the bumpers off for new chrome. After
a year, he had the car running but far short of roadworthy. It spent all but a few hours of that period under a tarp beside the house.

  One day a paper materialized on the tarp, announcing that an inspector from the city of Norfolk had stopped by and found an unlicensed junker on the premises. Simmons had never bothered to transfer the title into his name, let alone buy plates for the Chevy; now, he learned, he had seventy-two hours to rectify this oversight or his beloved classic would be towed away and impounded. Ultimately, it might be auctioned off.

  Like others on their cul-de-sac, the Simmonses were within sight of the middle-class ideal, if not actually in its embrace. They lived in a comfortable house. They had good kids who attended reasonably decent public schools. They worked. No one went hungry. But in one respect they differed from most of their neighbors: They’d received such a notice from City Hall before. A few years back, while Jeff was at sea, the city had towed away a ’63 Ford pickup that had been sitting in the yard. The episode had enraged Simmons, who saw it as a case of government thievery committed while he was serving the country. He resolved that he’d not repeat the experience.

  Simmons briefly considered erecting a six-foot wooden privacy fence around the Chevy—that would stick it to the city, wouldn’t it?—but only briefly, because just then a fellow named Dave Simon, having made a wrong turn on his way to a nearby restaurant, saw the wagon and stopped to ask whether Simmons wanted to sell it. He did not, most emphatically, but he didn’t want to lose it to officialdom, either. He told Simon that yes, he might consider parting with the car, if Simon had $1,500 to spend.

  Simon replied that he did not. He could afford $900.

  Simmons wasn’t thrilled by the offer, but he felt cornered.

  They shook on it.

  HERE BEGINS SOME very strange business, that being the world of auto fanatics, of compulsive collection and mind-bending fixation on details. Here appears a species of automotive ownership far pricier and more time-consuming and more generally ruinous than we have so far encountered. Because Dave Simon wasn’t just some guy who got lost on his way to get a cheesesteak, and who happened to have nine hundred bucks in his pocket. He was a lost, hungry guy who happened to be obsessed—completely, utterly obsessed—with the exact make and vintage of car that Simmons offered. To wit: Dave Simon had owned, by his count, 284 Chevrolets of the 1957 model year.

  That bears repeating: 284. Thirteen ancient Chevys had been lined up outside the family’s house at one juncture, and there were four or five as a matter of course. Dave’s wife, Dianne, called the curb bordering their lot “Battleship Row.”

  Simon’s earliest memories included a ’57. He had a snapshot of himself at age five, playing with friends outside his family’s house in a Cleveland suburb, and visible in the garage behind him, rendered in grainy black-and-white, was his dad’s year-old 210 four-door sedan.

  In his teens, a stormy relationship with his stepfather spurred him to move out of the house and into the back of a 1960 Ford Galaxie, then into the navy. He’d arrived in Norfolk as a seventeen-year-old radioman, his high school sweetheart in tow. In 1977, he and Dianne, the new parents of a baby girl, decided they needed to swap their Dodge muscle car for some safe, sturdy transportation. Simon chose a ’57 Chevy two-door, a black 210 with a 265 V8 under the hood.

  So began the collection. He started amassing parts for the car. They filled the garage, then the house—family photos show baby Carolyn in her crib, and bumpers piled under it, chrome pieces hanging from the walls. Soon enough, he was gathering entire Chevys. He bought a four-door sedan at a police auction for $110, then a two-door sedan, then a two-door hardtop from another sailor. He traded his first ’57 for a four-door sedan that he set about restoring. Bought others, dozens of others, many wrecked or ruined, for their engines or hard-to-find components, junking or selling whatever remained.

  He found one car in a farmer’s field, axle-deep in mud, open to the seasons, its insides shot. The farmer told him he could have it if he could move it, so Simon had it towed out of its hole while he steered, sitting on a milk crate so he could see over the wheel. He owned that car three times. Once home from the farm, he took its doors and fenders, sold the remainder, and a month later got a call from the buyer asking: Want it back at no charge? The man had taken the trunk lid and stripped the dash. Simon sold it a second time to a man who needed its quarter panels and rear glass, and who gave the rest—not much more than the frame and roof—back to him. He sold that again, too.

  He embarked on restorations in his dirt-floored garage—on four-doors, mostly, because those were the least appealing to collectors, and thus the easiest and cheapest to find—and sold most before he’d finished. When he bought the wagon, he and Dianne were down to a permanent collection of just two Chevys, a bright red coupe and a yellow two-door sedan. But at one time or other they’d possessed all of the model year’s various incarnations—two-door hardtops, four-door hardtops, two- and four-door sedans, Bel Air convertibles, Nomad wagons, two-door wagons, four-door wagons. When their son, Christopher, was born, in November 1979, the Simons had taken him home from the hospital in a white Bel Air.

  Such a fixation, though unusual, was not unique. Scattered around the country were others of similar bent. A farmer named Leroy Walker in Beulah, North Dakota, traded for a used Edsel with a bad clutch in 1961, and grew so fond of the famously unsuccessful Ford that he started buying others; soon, thirty-seven acres of his spread were covered with 266 Edsels, about a hundred of which ran, and thousands of other derelict vehicles that he parted out or sold whole to finance his Edsel habit. He parked his collection in widely spaced clusters so that if a tornado should tear through the property, it wouldn’t take out his whole crop.

  Another Edsel fan, Hugh Lesley, had 160 of the cars scattered in the woods around his house in Oxford, Pennsylvania, through the eighties and nineties. New trees grew so close around some of them that the cars could be moved only with the deployment of chain saws. Other aficionados have fastened their attention on old Lincolns, Studebakers, Cadillacs. Dennis Albaugh, a billionaire pesticide manufacturer in suburban Des Moines, bought a ’57 Chevy Bel Air convertible from a golf buddy in 1998, and got the bug to keep buying; inside of fifteen years he’d built a collection of Chevy ragtops representing every year they were built between 1912 and 1975, plus a smattering of rare Chevy muscle cars—147 vehicles in all.

  Bruce Weiner, a former chief of the bubble-gum brand Dubble Bubble, collected some two hundred microcars—tiny one- and two-seat BMW Isettas and Messerschmitts and the like, next to which a modern Smart car seems a limousine, but which played a big role in getting a ravaged Europe back on the road after World War II—then opened a museum in Madison, Georgia, for a few years to show them off.

  So Dave Simon had company. By dint of sheer numbers, however, he was in the first rank of automotive obsessives. This, ladies and gentlemen, was a car nut.

  SIMON INTENDED THE wagon as a gift. Christopher was due to graduate from high school in a year and deserved a ’57, his father reckoned, to mark the accomplishment. Could there be any better gift, any greater emblem of Dave Simon’s love and pride, than to welcome his son into his weird and passionate fraternity? Probably not. But the Fates did not smile on his generosity. As he drove the two miles home from Jeff Simmons’s house, the Chevy’s brakes went out.

  Simon kept his cool. He initiated the seasoned driver’s checklist of responses to such an emergency. First he pumped the brake pedal. No luck. It slapped against the floor like a beached fish. He pumped it again. Nothing. He stomped on the parking brake. That failed, as well. Still rolling, he resorted to a drastic third countermeasure: He grabbed the shift lever on the Chevy’s steering column and slammed the transmission into park. The car slowed, shuddering as the gears ground to powder, but it didn’t stop.

  His options exhausted, Simon aimed the nearly two tons of rolling steel over the curb and across his lawn and into the chain-link fence beside his house. The fence
buckled, but a van parked beyond it did not. With that, his seventeen-year-old son walked outside to find that he owned a not-so-gently used classic.

  Its interior was littered with boxes and papers. Its right front door was dented, and its right front fender still torn. Its tailgate was bent. Its entire body seemed twisted—when the younger Simon stood at the front bumper and looked toward the rear, the driver’s side seemed to bulge a little toward the stern, while the far side ran straight. The exhaust and rear-end bearings were shot, a consequence of motionless exposure to the weather. A creeping, milky haze fouled the curving safety glass at the wagon’s rear corners. The back bumper was dented. The front seat was worn through. The sun visors had split and their foam-rubber innards turned to saffron powder that snowed onto the dash. Reversing all this decay now rested in the hands of an eleventh grader. The car was twenty-three years older than he was.

  Chris Simon was undaunted. He’d always been mechanically gifted: As a youngster, he’d ride his bike until it wore him out, then tear it down to its frame and put it back together. As he grew older, he watched for hours as his father worked in the garage. He was surrounded in every room of the house by Dave Simon’s growing collection of ’57 Chevy memorabilia. No surprise that he’d inherited a romance for the vintage. In third grade, he’d shown off toy ’57s to his classmates. Later, he’d built them of Lego blocks, from scratch—no kit, no instructions, just his exposure to the real thing as guide. One, rendered in red, was wonderfully detailed, surprisingly realistic, with a hood that opened to reveal a V8 engine fashioned from the snap-together plastic.

  Now Chris finally had the genuine article, and he dove into the wagon on afternoons after school. He repaired the transmission, rebuilt the carburetor, and got the motor running as smooth and quiet as a sewing machine. He repacked the bearings, fixed the brakes, replaced much of the front suspension. He tried to beat back the worst of the rust that now devoured the body, cutting away a lesion that penetrated the right rear corner of the roof and patching the hole with fiberglass. The patch sagged before it set, creating a small concavity, but it beat having rain pour into the cargo hold.