by Earl Swift
Let it out of the fucking truck, Arney says he replied. I’ll choke that motherfucker right now.
11
DESPITE TOMMY ARNEY’S talk of beginning work on the wagon at once, another week passes without said work beginning, because even after Painter Paul finishes the pickup, he can’t move the wagon into his body shop—much of the floor is occupied by a partially restored ’69 Camaro convertible lacking front wheels. Arney promises to help him move it, but he’s sidetracked in Norfolk and fails to turn up.
But lo, on Friday, March 4, 2011, a combination of restlessness and frustration compels Paul to relocate the Camaro without waiting for Arney. He enlists the help of Bobby Tippit, a sun-ravaged roofer who lives in a tiny shack across Route 168 with his common-law wife and four boys; Arney pays him to weed-whack and perform odd jobs around the lot, when he isn’t furloughing him for downing beers during the workday.
The Camaro is positioned longitudinally in the building. Using floor jacks, Paul and Tippit raise the front end and jockey the car back and forth and sideways on the shop’s concrete floor until it’s wedged crosswise along the back wall. With the move accomplished, Paul fires up a Bobcat tractor with forklift blades attached to its front end, lifts the wagon from the weeds where it’s squatted for eight months, and carries it to the concrete pad in front of the shop. He and Tippit loosen the bolts holding its front fenders in place.
Tommy Arney’s efforts to rescue VB57B239191 have begun. Twenty minutes of labor on this chilly Friday afternoon foretells the first stage of the salvation to come: The car will be reduced to its elements. Nearly fifty-four years after its initial assembly, the work of Chevrolet’s Baltimore plant will be undone to the last bolt.
Never before, in all the wagon’s history, has it been torn down in such fashion; the closest thing to a restoration, on Sid Pollard’s watch back in the late seventies, saw it patched and repainted, but the car remained intact. This time, every tiny fold of metal that might shelter rust must be exposed, sandblasted, primed, repainted. Every rusted bolt and time-hardened rubber bushing, every wire, every inch of brake and fuel line must be replaced. The process of returning the car to beauty will first render it unrecognizable. As Paul tells me: “It won’t look like much.”
The work begins in earnest the next morning—Saturday, March 5, 2011—when he and Tippit unbolt the fenders and lift the heavy metal panels from the car. They disconnect the hood from its hinges, disassemble the Chevy’s grille, pull off the front bumper. They position the parts on the ground in a rough approximation of their arrangement on the chassis, creating an odd effect: The bulk of the wagon, with its engine, front suspension, and wheels fully exposed, looks guillotined, and this cluster of parts seems its disembodied head. The Chevy’s frame juts from under the engine like naked bone.
Tippit sprays the engine compartment’s bolts with penetrating oil, which transforms the rust that holds them fast into slippery brown goo. He and Paul unbolt the engine from its mounts. Then Paul wheels an engine hoist, essentially a six-foot crane, over the car’s motor, and connects its hook to the power plant at two points. He pumps the hoist’s handle, the boom rises, the chains pull taught, and the engine lifts, swaying, from its mounts. He wheels the hoist back. The engine stays put: The transmission, which is attached to its rear, is hung up on the metal tunnel in which it nests—a tunnel that inside the car creates the center floor hump under the dashboard.
Tippit leans into the compartment and pushes on the transmission with both hands, trying to jiggle it loose. He can’t budge it much: With two flat tires, the car is sitting so low that the transmission’s tail is resting just an inch off the concrete. Paul can’t adjust the boom to facilitate the extraction, because that’ll tangle the engine in its own mounts, which jut from the frame. “Goddamn it,” he mutters. “We’re doing something wrong.”
Tippit hunts down a wheel fitted with an inflated tire and swaps out one of the flats. It buys a little more wiggle room, but not enough, prompting him to suggest, “Maybe if we took off the oil filter,” or something that sounds like that. He is missing some teeth, which turns his consonants to mush. Paul nods, having tuned his ear to decipher his helper’s speech.
Tippit spends several minutes struggling with the filter before getting it loose, only to find that its absence doesn’t make much difference—the engine’s still pinned. He slides back under the car to remove one of the engine mounts, then climbs into the engine compartment and stands on the rear of the transmission, leaning back against the windshield to brace himself. Paul yanks the hoist back, and the engine finally pulls free.
An hour later they’ve removed the front seats and pulled up the rotted carpeting, and the damage to the floor pan is plain to see. Its edges no longer exist. We can see the ground, and quite a bit of it, in a dozen places. The flooring is buttressed with steel ribs on its underside; even beneath the patches of sheet metal that have survived, the ribs are chewed to nothing, meaning that the pan is too weak to safely support a load. The rocker panels—the slender strips of a car’s skin that run beneath its doors, forming their sills and the floor’s outer frame—are shot, too.
Painter Paul is glum. “It’s bad,” he says. “I’m not going to tell you it’s not. It’s real bad. I mean, you can see it.” He nods at the rocker panels. “This whole structure—the floor pan, rockers—it’s a mess. These rockers are going to have to be completely replaced.”
He swings one of the doors on its hinges. “Lots to do, and I don’t even know what we got,” he says. “I haven’t seen up under the doors yet. No telling what’s up under there, how far gone they are.” He sighs. “It’s ate up.”
“But fixable,” I say. It’s a question in the form of a statement.
He snorts. “It’s gonna take fucking years.”
“Years?”
He nods, fixes me with a grimace. “Tommy Arney’s involved, man.”
He and Tippit resume the disassembly. They slide the chrome strips from the wagon’s flanks, wrap each in masking tape, label them as to right or left side, exact location—a necessary task, as there are six strips per side. They unhook the wiring from the back of the dashboard’s gauges. They enlist one of Tippit’s preteen sons, Anthony, to vacuum the thick sweater of rust flakes from the floor and the cargo deck. “Everything has to come off this car,” Paul tells me. “It has to be a bare shell. And then once we get everything out, we’ll have to brace it—brace it front to back, brace it left to right—so that it doesn’t fold in on itself when I cut out the floor.”
Arney strolls into the shop area. He circles the main portion of the car, then inspects the disconnected front end. “You know what?” he hollers over to us. “This front end looks great.” He nods at the vent ducts that run inside the fenders, designed to carry fresh air to the passenger cabin from intake ports hidden behind the headlights. They’re “just unbelievably good,” he says. He eyeballs the front bumper, which is rusted and flaking on its underside, then returns to the rest of the car and peers at the floor for a long moment. “Well,” he says, turning to Paul, “we don’t have to replace the whole floor pan, at least.”
Paul’s eyes widen. “The ribs are all ate up,” he sputters. “They’re gone completely!”
Arney smirks. “I’m fucking with you, Paul.” They’ll replace all the floor, he says, and the rocker panels, too. Start fresh.
IT WAS SEVEN winters before, a Wednesday morning in January 2004, that Dave Marcincuk first saw the car. He was riding shotgun on a two-man garbage truck, trying to stay warm as he hooked cans to its side and sent them up and over the hopper, and there it was at the curb, all curves and chrome and turquoise paint. Right off, the twenty-eight-year-old Marcincuk was charmed, in part because in the dim morning light he misread the “For Sale” sign Chris Simon had hung in a window, thought the asking price was $56.25.
Getting closer, he saw he was off by two decimal points. Simon was asking more than six times what his dad had paid for the wagon, seven yea
rs before. He was asking more than twice what the car cost new. Still, it was a ’57, and in the few seconds he had to gaze on it before the truck pulled away, Marcincuk thought it looked to be in pretty good shape. He drove back into the neighborhood that evening for the phone number.
When he called, the man who answered said that yes, indeed, he had a ’57 Chevy. He enumerated some of his car’s strengths and flaws. The red paint, he said, was fairly new. Wait a minute, Marcincuk interrupted, this car’s green. Ah, Dave Simon said. That’s my son’s car. Chris didn’t have a phone, he explained, but perhaps Marcincuk could reach him through his girlfriend.
They made contact a few days later, and met a few after that. Quite a contrast, they were—the clean-cut, whippet-thin Marcincuk and Simon, who smoked Marlboro Reds and sported muttonchops and struck his prospective buyer as “a big, long-haired, troublemaking-looking type of guy.” But Simon was friendly, easygoing, and up front about the car’s weaknesses. It needed some work, he admitted. He’d been unable to give it the attention it deserved.
Marcincuk could see that for himself. Now that he got a closer look, he noticed that in addition to the dents, bad paint, and rust he’d seen from the truck, little remained of the rocker panels and wheel wells. The radio didn’t work. The clock was stopped.
The floor, Simon said, had given him the most trouble. Marcincuk opened the back doors, saw the boards chewed to nothing, street where steel should be. Well, he decided, this would be the worst of it. Even so, he turned to Simon, seeking reassurance. This is a good car, right? he asked. You’ve been driving it, right?
Sure, Simon said, he’d driven it. He softened on the price a little, to $5,000, and Marcincuk said they had a deal. While they were attending to the details, Simon showed off his Lego renditions of the ’57. Man, an amazed Marcincuk said as he inspected the toys, this car is you. I can’t believe you’re selling it.
It’s not like I want to, Simon replied. But I need the money.
It took a few days to get the cash together, after which Simon delivered the Chevy to its new home, Marcincuk following him through traffic. It was clear to the new owner that while his predecessor might have driven the car, he had not done so with any frequency: Simon was ginger at the wheel, uncertain—as Marcincuk later put it, “He was Driving Miss Daisy, all the way.”
The eleven-mile journey ended at his house, a cluttered monument to Marcincuk’s soft spot for castoffs: An unrestored Craftsman cottage dating to the 1920s, it was piled with old rotary-dial telephones he’d rescued from the trash, glass insulators, discarded wooden doors, disassembled TVs, and lamps. He’d found all of his kitchen appliances on the curb: an antique refrigerator that needed only a scrubbing, and a 1960s dishwasher that he fixed with a 1980s motor, and a late-fifties Westinghouse clothes dryer that not only worked but played “How Dry I Am” when its cycle ended.
The yard was crowded, as usual, with old cars. Over the years, he’d owned two Dodge Darts, a Dodge van, five Plymouth Valiants, six Chevy IIs or Novas, an Impala wagon, four Mercurys, and a Chevy pickup, not counting cars he’d bought strictly for their parts. All but a couple had dated from the sixties. All but one had been older than he was.
None had been a keeper; certainly, none had rivaled a ’57 Chevy. His business with Simon complete, the wagon’s eleventh owner parked the car beside his garage and mulled what part of it to fix first.
MARCINCUK’S PARENTS HAD seen their adult son coming. As a toddler, he unscrewed electrical outlets from the walls and picked at their insides. The elder Marcincuks, New Yorkers who’d moved to the Virginia coast two years before Dave was born, were made nervous by this potentially lethal habit, unhappy that he took apart any toy handed to him and further discomfited when he later built kinetic sculptures in the yard from bike gears, boat dollies, wagon wheels.
Chesapeake was still undergoing the metamorphosis from soybeans to suburbs that Sid Pollard and Picot Savage had seen beginning a generation earlier. A bit of a loner, Marcincuk would ride his bike out past the newest and farthest-flung of treeless subdivisions to where the roads narrowed and fields stretched flat and away, and the ruins of old farmhouses beckoned. He always found junk to drag back home. Why, his mother lamented, are you digging around in other people’s trash? His father, an electrician who built buses at a Volvo plant in Chesapeake, recognized where his boy was headed and laid down a rule: I know you’re going to go buy some old junk car and drag it into the yard and take it all apart, he told him, and you’ll lose the parts and have me run over them with the lawn mower. So you are not allowed to bring a car onto this property until you have a license. His son was nine.
He needn’t have worried. Marcincuk never bothered with a car while in high school, or as an art student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. It wasn’t until he switched to an automotive repair course that he got his first. Strange, but as good as he was with his hands, as intuitive as he had always been with machines and their parts, Marcincuk was struggling with the course—failing, in fact—when he spotted an abandoned ’64 Chevy II Nova behind a local Mercedes dealership. It was a beater, but he bought it, had it towed to school, pulled the engine by himself, disassembled it, and dropped a rebuilt engine in its place. He shined, working on the Nova. He could perform tasks before he knew what to call them. The textbooks confounded him, but show him an exploded-view diagram of a component, an engine, an entire car, and he could take it apart, put it together, make it work.
He got a job at a Montgomery Ward auto shop, another at Norfolk’s city garage, fixing and changing tires—not glamorous work, but enough to keep him occupied, pay the bills. Then, in 2000, his father suffered a heart attack and died three days shy of his fifty-fifth birthday. It took Marcincuk by surprise, and for months afterward he was confused and angry, and thought a lot about life and death, about what little he had to show for his time on the planet.
He was fixing and selling old cars on the side, and one day a stranger came by to see one he’d put on the market, a rusted Mercury running somewhat unevenly, an unpromising car. Marcincuk had pulled the pushrods out of the engine, laid them on the sidewalk, and beaten them straight with a hammer, an approach to an exacting task that has failed to earn endorsement from the Society of Automotive Engineers. The stranger didn’t buy the Mercury, but he gave the young mechanic a gospel tract and invited him to church; the spiritually wandering Marcincuk went, found comfort there, and kept going. A short time later he applied for another city job, in solid waste disposal. He mentioned that he was praying for the job to a city worker who stopped by the garage to get a tire fixed, and the man—a carpenter, as luck would have it—offered to send a faith team over to his house to help give those prayers a boost.
Three people showed up. They opened the Bible and explained how he could be saved. He had been raised by the Golden Rule, but the faith team said that good works or no, he was covered in the filthy rags of sin. Dave Marcincuk sat surrounded by all manner of treasures he’d rescued from the trash and accepted the Lord.
His prayers were answered: He got the job in solid waste, and over the course of the next three-plus years he crisscrossed the city on the back of a garbage truck. He often saw old cars parked on the curb, but rarely anything that qualified as a classic. Then came that morning at Chris Simon’s place.
First thing, Marcincuk decided the engine had to go. Someone had given him a thrashed ’65 Impala four-door, now vegetating in his yard under a veneer of moss and mushrooms and filled with all manner of rusted junk; there was actually, swear to God, a kitchen sink in its trunk. Under the hood was a ruined Chevy V8, a 283 two-barrel, the same engine Nicholas Thornhill had bought with the wagon. Marcincuk pulled the Impala’s engine and traded it in on a new one—a number of companies offer new engine cores in exchange for a trade-in plus cash—and dropped the new motor into the ’57 in place of the 327 that Picot Savage had installed after frying the original.
He laid sheet metal over the holes in the wagon’s f
loor and started working on the body, racing the sundown each evening as winter turned to spring. He straightened the bent steel as well as he could, and bought a new centerpiece for the grille. He licensed the car in April 2004. He replaced the exhaust system in June.
With that, Marcincuk started driving the car every day. He’d be up before dawn and head for the industrial park where Norfolk kept its fleet of garbage trucks, and leave the Chevy there while he made his rounds, through a city much changed over the previous few years. Downtown was now crowded with upscale homes, restaurants, and traffic, and anchored by a monolithic shopping mall. The loft condominium building where Alan Wilson and Al Seely had lived, an outpost in an urban desert ten years before, was almost lost among new neighbors. The highways that had carried flight from the central cities were clogged now, commutes to the suburbs time-consuming and frustrating, so people were moving back to town.
After work, Marcincuk would take the wagon home again. It still caused a stir. In traffic, on the move, it was easy to miss its blemishes. He was vexed by even the smallest of them, however. He pored over catalogs, pondered which pieces of the body he could salvage, which he’d need to replace. He collected vintage magazines that mentioned the Chevy. As so many had before him, he envisioned it with a restored interior, clean sheet metal, fresh paint. Which isn’t to say he had a lot of time to devote to daydreaming, because that summer, Marcincuk worked on fixing and painting his cottage, and was active at church and in spreading the Word. He wasn’t bashful about witnessing to strangers, handing out Bible tracts, explaining how his life had changed since March 2001, when he’d accepted the Lord as his savior.
Then, late in the summer, some bad luck visited man and car: The block of the Chevy’s barely broken-in engine cracked. Marcincuk parked the wagon in the yard, pulled the motor, and lugged it back to the place where he’d obtained the trade-in. The shop gave him the runaround; it took weeks to get a replacement. When he carted a new engine back to his house, it was October.
