Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  I told him my name and asked whether he remembered me. He said he certainly did. I asked what he was doing in the storefront. He said he was transforming the space into a country-western restaurant and bar. I said: “I understand you have a ’57 Chevy station wagon that I wrote about a few years ago.”

  “Yes, I do,” he replied. “As a matter of fact, we’re getting ready to fix up that car.”

  HOW MANY PEOPLE in all the world could claim to be friendly with born-again Dave Marcincuk and with Tommy Arney, who is still wrestling with the circumstances of his first birth? I reconnected with Marcincuk, five years having passed since our last conversation, and found he could name at least one such individual—Bobby Dowdy, the owner of an electrical contracting firm in Virginia Beach.

  Marcincuk had sold Dowdy his ’55 Chevy wagon, and had thrown in the ’57 as a parts car. Dowdy was not a sentimental man when it came to cars; at nearly sixty, he knew too much about them to care too much about any one. It’s an automotive truism, counterintuitive though it might seem, that the less you know about your car, about what makes it work, the more emotionally attached to it you’re likely to become. Real “car guys” might have, as Dave Simon did, a passion for a particular machine, but they don’t see it as anything but that; the more you understand the mechanics of a car, its simple logic, the easier it is to see it as a concert of replaceable parts. Not a personality. Not a member of the family. Just an amalgamation of metal, plastic, rubber, and glass.

  Dowdy was a car guy, through and through—a Chevy guy, to be specific. He’d been sixteen when he’d bought his first ’55, and had spent the years since building and racing street rods and dragsters. He’d introduced his son to racing at age nine. He’d had his daughter racing at eight. When he looked at the ’57 now, he understood that it was the hub of twelve narratives, including his own—this, he knew, was the car that had been in the paper. But mostly, he saw an inventory.

  And when he’d owned the ’57 for a few months and came to the realization that he wasn’t going to get around to fixing up his ’55 wagon anytime soon, and that the ’57 took up space he couldn’t spare, he recalled that another local car guy, Tommy Arney, had opened a car lot down on the state line, and gave him a call.

  He’d built his sales pitch, ironically enough, around the wagon’s history. This car was in the newspaper, he told Arney. This car has provenance: Everyone who’s ever owned it, all the way back to its sale at Colonial Chevrolet in Norfolk—it’s all written down.

  Arney had found that appealing. Whatever else the wagon lacked, and it lacked a lot, it boasted a feature that not many of his cars shared. They’d agreed on a price—three thousand dollars—and Arney had driven a tow truck into Virginia Beach and hauled the Chevy down Route 168 to Moyock. He’d planted it in the car lot’s front yard, amid rusted but newer Chevys and Plymouths and Fords.

  Rain had fallen on the car, and snow, and the sun had baked its ravaged paint. The tires lost their air. The interior’s metal flaked like pastry. Birds nested in the bench seats.

  Three years had passed.

  A FEW WEEKS after encountering Arney at the storefront, I headed to Carolina. A quarter mile from the house I stopped for gas at the Exxon station that occupied the corner where Nicholas Thornhill had bought the wagon. I crossed the Elizabeth River and hugged its southern branch on Interstate 464, the sky-blue cranes of the naval shipyard looming on the water’s edge, and sped into Chesapeake—once home to the truck farms and woods of Sid Pollard’s boyhood, and now a loose quiltwork of subdivisions, strip shopping centers, and crowded roads. Fifteen miles from downtown Norfolk I neared the ragged edge of suburbia’s advance, a frontier marked by a Wendy’s and a Chik-fil-A, a Cracker Barrel, Target, and Home Depot, all brand-new and built in anticipation of houses to come.

  Route 168 narrowed from expressway to four-lane blacktop just beyond. I’d never visited the car lot, but I spotted it a quarter mile before I reached it: From that distance its trucks and cars, some piled two and three high, seemed the skyline of a far-off city. On pulling in, I had to pause for a minute to acclimate myself to the sensory overload I experienced. This was in January 2010, before the county had come down on Arney, before he’d launched his cleanup of the property, and seven-hundred-odd cars were shoehorned into its every nook. They guarded the Quonset five deep. Most of the lot could be negotiated only on foot; to sell a car from amid the crowd meant forklifting dozens of others out of the way.

  I had not yet stepped from my car when my eye fell on a green ’57 Chevy wagon parked in the shade of a small house trailer that at some point in the distant past must have been used as a sales office—a wind-scoured sign reading “We Finance” hung beside the door. I could make out other old Chevys around the wagon, and figured that Nicholas Thornhill’s was among them.

  Five wagons were clustered there—a couple of two-doors, including a completely trashed Nomad, and three four-doors. None of the latter looked to be my quarry. Two were rusted almost to powder. The third, the green car, had a hood decorated with a painted arabesque, a sort of automotive tramp stamp.

  The wagon I sought had to be elsewhere. Over the next hour I explored every square yard of the lot, turning sideways to squeeze between some old hulks, climbing onto the bumpers of others for a better sense of my whereabouts, retracing my steps to ensure that I’d left no merchandise unexamined. I found no other ’57 wagons.

  I returned to the green car, wondering whether Arney had been mistaken; the color matched, but nothing else. No way could this be the Chevy I’d known. No car would have, could have, gone to hell so dramatically in so short a time. No car this bad off was drivable just five or six years before; to look at it, this thing hadn’t moved under its own power in twenty. It was only to confirm this certainty that I opened the driver’s door, found the VIN on the jamb, and wrote it down.

  An hour later, back at home, I dug through my files for my notes from five years before, and found my request to the DMV for title information. The letter included the Chevy’s VIN: VB57B239191.

  A match.

  Photo Section

  Two “sweet, smooth, and sassy” Chevrolets from the company’s iconic 1957 model year star in a magazine ad that pushes an image along with Detroit iron—the safe, carefree, got-it-made life of the American suburbs. The new subdivisions seemed like heaven after years of economic depression, war, and housing shortages, and made a status symbol of the station wagon, the SUV of its day.

  The sales staff of Norfolk’s Colonial Chevrolet admires a new ’57 Bel Air convertible in the dealership’s showroom a few months before Nicholas Thornhill walked onto the lot in search of a station wagon.

  (Joshua P. Darden Jr.)

  Sid Pollard’s niece, Christy, rides her trike past the Chevy, not long after third owner Pollard overhauled the car and enlisted Frank DeSimone—destined to be its fourth owner—to repaint it in the late seventies. The only visible blemish is an unpainted repair behind the front wheel opening.

  (Sid Pollard)

  Mary Ricketts, the wagon’s funny, funky sixth owner, who loved the car but lacked the wherewithal to preserve it.

  (Mary Jo Rothgery)

  Dave and Chris Simon stand with their Chevys at a Norfolk classic car gathering, c. 1998. Though still good-looking from a distance, the wagon was now rusted, dented, missing chrome, and in rapid mechanical decline.

  (Chris Simon)

  Dave Marcincuk poses in the wagon’s empty engine compartment during the eleventh owner’s attempt to rescue the car, December 2004.

  (Bill Tiernan/Virginian-Pilot)

  The wagon vegetates at Moyock Muscle in January 2010, a year before thirteenth owner Tommy Arney embarked on its salvation.

  (Earl Swift)

  The car open to display its flaws, July 2010.

  (Earl Swift)

  The wagon’s ravaged interior.

  (Earl Swift)

  Young Tommy Arney with his mother, Fern, in 1959.

  (Tommy A
rney)

  Tommy and Krista Arney during their courtship, 1970s.

  (Tommy Arney)

  Victoria Hammond, who came to work for Arney as an exotic dancer at age twenty. Within a few years she managed all of his businesses and was central to his crew.

  (Victoria Hammond)

  John “Skinhead” McQuillen poses with Arney at the Body Shop, the successful go-go bar Arney operated in Norfolk for a dozen years. Skinhead walked into the joint as a customer, and stuck around to become Arney’s right-hand man.

  (Tommy Arney)

  Arney poses at the Body Shop in December 1993. The torso on the right belongs to Victoria Hammond, then a year into her tenure.

  (Martin Smith-Rodden/Virginian-Pilot)

  Some of the inventory at Moyock Muscle.

  (Earl Swift)

  The shop area at Moyock Muscle. Arney lifts the wagon from the front lot and carries it by forklift to the body shop overseen by Painter Paul Kitchens, July 2010.

  (Earl Swift)

  Painter Paul blocking the car, September 2011.

  (Earl Swift)

  Painter Paul, right, and Bobby Tippett after dropping the new floor pan into the Chevy’s core in the spring of 2011.

  (Earl Swift)

  Arney examines a V8 that will power the wagon, but which is here still attached to one of several “donor cars” that he scavenged for both mechanical and body parts. Originally installed in a 1966 Nova, the engine would be the wagon’s fifth.

  (Earl Swift)

  Skinhead and Arney dismantle the donor car, spring 2012.

  (Earl Swift)

  The wagon ready for paint, June 2013.

  (Earl Swift)

  Paul preps the wagon for paint in the wee hours of June 28, 2013.

  (Earl Swift)

  Arney and Paul roll the painted car from the paint shed.

  (Earl Swift)

  A confident Arney arrives at federal court for his July 2013 sentencing. Arney’s appearance ended a long-running legal drama, and one of several vexing distractions that slowed his progress on the Chevy.

  (Bill Tiernan/Virginian-Pilot)

  Arney with the Chevy at the reunion of former owners, July 2013.

  (Earl Swift)

  13

  THE SPRING OF 2010, a few months before the county’s visit to Moyock Muscle, found Tommy Arney facing crises major and minor that unrelaxed his mind and fouled his concentration. First was the conclusion of a long battle he’d waged with Old Dominion University over three of his commercial properties near the campus, including the darkened Body Shop building. ODU wanted to redevelop the area with a mix of stores, restaurants, and apartments, but its offer to Arney—$1.47 million—was less than half of what he thought he had coming. When the sides couldn’t reach a deal, the city had condemned the property.

  Arney had pushed the fight into court, only to lose there in February 2010. The affair gobbled up time he might have spent on the Chevy and overlapped with another time-sucking dispute: At Bootleggers, where Arney was hurrying to finish the build-out and open for business, a city inspector found that a new spiral staircase was ill-designed and lacked some necessary permits, and that a balcony railing violated safety standards. Arney told the man he’d make them right. As he remembers it, the inspector replied that he’d better, or the restaurant wouldn’t be opening—said it twice, actually, which Arney judged to be too often, and which prompted him to ask the man, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” and to suggest: “Get the fuck out of my building.”

  He was following his guest toward the front door, the two of them still discussing the matter, when the inspector complained that Arney was raising his voice and should stop. Arney replied that he wasn’t raising his voice, which caused the fellow to again insist that he not raise his voice. That’s where it ended. The man left.

  The following day Arney got a call from one of his lawyers, Pete Decker III, who said he’d just spoken with Cynthia Hall, the municipal attorney whom Arney had labeled a “crazy bitch” years before. She’d been super-angry, Decker reported. She’d told him that the inspector was a former marine and thus unaccustomed to experiencing fear, yet had felt it keenly when eye to eye with Arney. The man had believed his safety to be in jeopardy. She had thought about putting Arney in jail.

  Decker insisted that Arney apologize. He and the inspector made peace, after which Arney raced to make all the changes mandated by the city, and thereafter received the all-clear to open Bootleggers for business on a provisional basis, pending final approval a few months hence. But as the evidence will show, he did not achieve anything like peace with Cynthia Hall.

  At roughly the same time, Arney pushed the city’s blood pressure to a new spike when he splashed a neon sign across Bootleggers’ façade that Norfolk planners considered too big and bright next to those of its neighbors, the nearest being Havana and a Subway sandwich shop. He was called before the Planning Commission, the vice chairwoman of which declared the electric blue lettering “out of line.”

  Arney responded with a surprise tack. The problem wasn’t that the Bootleggers sign was too big, he said, but that the neighbors’ signs were too small. “We’re actually going to change the Havana sign as well,” he testified, “because as soon as Captain Skinhead—he’s worked for me for twenty-five years—as soon as Captain Skinhead saw the Bootleggers sign up, he loved it so much he said: ‘Tommy, we need to take and do Havana’s sign big as well.’ So we’re going to do that.”

  “Oh, you are?” the vice chairwoman asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Arney told her.

  The vice chairwoman intimated that Arney would have done well to seek permission before erecting the sign. “When you were a child,” she suggested, “there were many times that you played a game called ‘Mother, May I?’ ”

  “Not me, ma’am,” Arney said. “Didn’t have a mother.”

  The meeting raced downhill from there, with Arney assuring the panel that he’d sue if he didn’t get his way. “It’s like y’all are telling me,” he said, “[that] if you come into my business and you don’t like our chicken, you can come in and tell me I’ve got to change my menu.”

  The Planning Commission disagreed, voting six to zero to force the sign’s removal, which required Arney to appeal to the City Council. He prevailed there, but not before spending a lot of time in preparation with his lawyer—which, again, was time he couldn’t devote to the wagon.

  No sooner was Bootleggers settling into a routine than the Bar Task Force swooped in on the saloon. Arney wasn’t working that Saturday night, but Ryan and Slick were, and called to say that Cynthia Hall and a squadron of officials had just filed in, were snooping around, and had asked to see some of the restaurant’s paperwork. Arney, in his truck at the time, asked Slick to hand the phone to Hall. The lawyer refused to speak with him. Now of profoundly unrelaxed mind, Arney left a raging voice-mail message for the city’s liaison with downtown business owners, during which he called Hall a “stupid motherfucking cunt.”

  Another man might have been more circumspect with his feelings, as Bootleggers was still operating on a provisional license to serve alcohol, but as Arney explained to me: “I wasn’t born kissing ass, and I wasn’t raised to kiss ass, and if you tell me I have to kiss your ass, well, fuck you—I’m going to fight you.” The next day, he got another call from Pete Decker III. All hell’s breaking loose, the lawyer advised. I just got a call from Cynthia Hall. She said you called her an MFC.

  MFC? Arney said. What the fuck is an “MFC”?

  A motherfucking cunt, Decker replied.

  Pete, Arney said, I did not call Cynthia Hall a motherfucking cunt.

  Tommy, there’s a recording, Decker told him. They have it on tape.

  I promise you that I did not call her a motherfucking cunt, Arney said. (Reader, you can see where this is going, can’t you?) I called her a stupid motherfucking cunt.

  Decker insisted that he apologize, so at a meeting the following week, Arney did s
o: Angry though he remained over what he regarded as the task force’s harassment, he told Hall he was sorry he’d called her a stupid motherfucking cunt, explaining that he’d lost his temper and said things he didn’t mean. As the men remember it—and this is a point on which their recollection differs with the municipal attorney’s—Hall said that she did not accept his apology and walked away.

  That further incensed him, Arney says. In the following weeks he couldn’t help stewing about the way Hall had marched into Bootleggers like Eliot Ness leading the Untouchables, about the disrespect the city had shown to the owner of a million-dollar restaurant who every year contributed fat sacks of tax money to that very city. He decided to take his grievances public, and that he wouldn’t wait.

  Arney’s appearance before the City Council came just two days before Norfolk was to decide Bootleggers’ long-term fate. He wasted no time getting to his point. If he’d been working when Hall and company showed up, he told Norfolk’s eight top officials, “I honestly would have gone to jail.”

  “I’d like for somebody to tell me: Who gave them this power?” he said. “They’re horrifying. They’re ridiculous”—what with their “badges on chains around their necks, guns on them,” and their “Gestapo-like tactics,” and that leader of theirs, whom he called a “little Hitler.” The following day, the newspaper carried a story saying he’d “declared war on the Bar Task Force.” The mayor was quoted calling Arney’s remarks “completely inappropriate,” and Hall said she found them “offensive and inaccurate.”