Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  He got his license from the city—the Planning Commission found that he’d met all of its demands, and approved his continued operation without discussion. But Bootleggers remained the wellspring of a million worries. Arney sold Maxwell’s in June 2010, a few weeks after he opened the downtown saloon—that being a logistical decision as well as a financial one, because his tiny crew could not run three restaurants, especially with one of them twenty miles away—and then, to his great chagrin, saw his new venture fail to thrive. Bootleggers boasted the same home-style southern menu that had proved so popular at Maxwell’s, along with a full bar, a pleasant and unique atmosphere, and lower prices than those next door at Havana, which was doing quite well. Still, it was as airy as a hangar on nights you could barely squeeze into neighboring places.

  He shut it down after nine months.

  ARNEY MIGHT HAVE been able to weather the vagaries of the restaurant trade if it hadn’t been for a much greater distraction, his most pressing, next to which Cynthia Hall and the Bar Task Force and the Chevy’s fate seemed piddling concerns. He was in financial trouble, big trouble, and his situation was getting worse by the day.

  America’s real estate collapse, which had loomed large as far back as 2006, was in full effect two years later, and it had cleaved deeply into Arney’s wealth. He was in hock to several banks for most of his roughly one hundred properties, and though most of his loans required interest-only payments, he was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with them.

  His biggest creditor was the Bank of the Commonwealth, based in downtown Norfolk and led by people Arney held in high esteem. Its chief lending officer, Stephen G. Fields, had been among the bankers who lunched at Maxwell’s, and by January 2008 had arranged loans to Arney totaling more than $7 million. Arney considered him a friend and a key to his success.

  Through Fields he’d come to know Edward J. Woodard Jr., the bank’s CEO and chairman, whose bullish enthusiasm for downtown Norfolk had helped spark its resurrection. Portly, bald, and avuncular, the Portsmouth native had held his post since 1973, when at thirty he’d become the youngest bank president in Virginia history. Arney revered him, telling me once: “When I think about Mr. Woodard I get real emotional. There’s nothing negative I could ever say about Mr. Woodard.” In his home office Arney had big, framed photographs of himself with both men. The bank even gave him an office in its headquarters building, a five minutes’ walk from the restaurants.

  In 2008, behind on paying down his existing debts, Arney pulled a trick akin to using one credit card to pay down another—he borrowed more money to cover his delinquencies. With the bank’s blessing, if not at its behest, he took out new loans totaling $514,000, and late in the year, an additional $150,000 line of credit through a “nominee borrower,” a third party who assumed the note on Arney’s behalf. He fell behind again, and the bank gave him more money, anyway—a $5.72 million loan to complete his condo project on the site of the old rogue car lot, and another big pile of cash to buy a condo that Woodard owned and wanted to unload.

  In October 2009, the Federal Reserve found the bank’s lending practices unsound and forced its officers to create a reserve account of nearly a million dollars to cover losses likely to result from their many loans to Arney. That didn’t stop them from making more: They fronted him $2.17 million to buy the vacant four-story, bank-owned building next door to Havana where he hoped to put his gentlemen’s club, and two months after that they okayed a $100,000 line of credit through straw borrowers so he could get square on past-due mortgages—including the one on the building he’d just bought.

  In two years, Arney’s loans from Bank of the Commonwealth had doubled, and he was falling faster and deeper into a financial whirlpool. And it seemed that he wasn’t the only customer in such straits, because now the feds and state regulators took an active hand in the bank’s affairs. Woodard was forced to step down as chairman, and in July 2010 he and his fellow officers promised in writing that they’d not loan any more money to certain troubled borrowers, Arney among them.

  Damned if the very next month the bank didn’t ask Arney to buy a pair of vacant buildings it owned, and offer him another $325,000, again through nominee borrowers, to finance the purchase and to pay down some delinquent bills. But now a reckoning was at hand. The bank had been bled out, and by the fall of 2010 failed to meet the industry’s standards for capitalization. Its book value dropped by nearly seventy cents on the dollar. Woodard was forced to retire. Fields was fired. The FBI moved in. Its agents seized Arney’s loan papers and checking account records.

  This distraction promised to linger.

  In the midst of his sharpening panic for cash, Arney decided to sell much of what he owned. He had a wee-hours epiphany that he owned too much, had become slave to his possessions, he told me—that if he died in bed at that moment, as he lay there thinking, it would take his family years to sort out his estate, assuming they could do it at all. So he decided to get out from under the most troubled of his real estate, and a great many of his cars. Maybe especially the cars: He owned cars stashed in garages and warehouses all over town, cars he’d bought on a whim and hadn’t thought about since, even some he didn’t particularly like. “I don’t even know how to tell you how much shit I’ve got,” he told me. “I was addicted to buying car stuff. I mean addicted.”

  His paradigm shift, as he called it, extended to Moyock Muscle, which was still crammed to its edges and where he faced a mandate to thin out his herd anyway. Early in the year, Currituck County had put Arney on notice that when he opened the car lot nine years before, he’d failed to obtain a conditional use permit, a document required of all such enterprises, and was thus operating illegally. Getting such a permit required expensive and time-consuming labor to bring the lot into compliance with the county’s ordinances.

  Arney appealed the decision, and was summoned to a July 2010 meeting of the Currituck Board of Adjustment. No way it was right that he should get such a notice after doing business for so long, he told the board. The county itself had been unaware of his breach. He should be left as he was.

  The Board of Adjustment disagreed. He’d not be granted an exemption. That decided, the panel turned to the question of whether he qualified for a permit. Presenting the case against him was Brad Schuler, a slightly built and youthful county planner. Moyock Muscle was endangering the public health and/or safety, he told the adjusters. It lacked handicapped parking and fire lanes. And it injured the value of nearby property, because Schuler and his colleagues felt it met “the definition of a junkyard or salvage yard.” Arney was annoyed by few things more than the characterization of his car lot—his celebration of Detroit’s genius, his salute to American history, his patriotism—as a junkyard. He took a strong and instant dislike to Schuler.

  The board denied him the permit. To stay in business, he’d have to back his cars away from the property’s edges, move them off the septic tanks scattered underground, open fire lanes through the inventory. Plant shrubbery. Establish order. Another distraction was the last thing he needed, but Arney threw himself into meeting the county’s demands. Which takes us back to where we began: Two months later, Schuler and his boss showed up at Moyock Muscle.

  A WINDY, OVERCAST morning in mid-March 2011 at the car lot’s northeast corner, where the wagon sits on the concrete pad outside the body shop. It is stripped bare: Painter Paul and Bobby Tippit have pulled off the doors, tailgate, and hatch, removed or knocked out the glass, yanked the steering column, slipped the gauges from their homes in the dash. Paul has reinforced the remaining core, which is light enough to roll with one hand, with one-inch steel pipe—four pieces across the door openings and two crosswise across the cabin, one under the dash, the other linking the B pillars. Even so, the Chevy is frail: Paul leads me to the car’s rear, where he points, glaring, to two spots, newly exposed, where the tailgate hinges attach; all that remains is a feeble web of wet-looking rust. Below the lacework I can make out a pair of steel b
races that bolster the floor and helped support the tailgate’s weight. They’ve disintegrated, too. “It’s bad,” he mutters. “It’s terrible.”

  But with a lot of effort, replaceable, if not fixable, and the boss is willing to make the effort. Paul wheels a plasma cutter, his own piece of equipment, onto the pad beside the car. The device blasts compressed gas through an electric arc, creating an extremely hot—well, not a flame exactly, but a crackling, blue-white glob that’s neither gas nor liquid nor solid, the sort of stuff that makes up the sun. It can cut through steel with greater ease than a blade without the noise and mess.

  Paul trips the arc, and a bright cone erupts from the torch’s nozzle, sputtering in the wind that sweeps across the lot. Crouching outside the right rear door opening, he touches the cone to the floor pan near one of the attachment points for the rear seat, the contact throwing off evil electric snaps and pops and sprays of tiny, smoke-trailing fireballs, and slowly inches across the rotten metal. The torch leaves a molten gash in its wake, smoldering with the reek of overheated wiring and burnt toast.

  He cuts a fifteen-by-fifteen-inch square, interrupted once during the twenty-minute task when the plasma ignites some coating or debris on the floor pan’s underside, and he has to whip off his welding helmet and extinguish the fire, and several times when sharp westerly gusts snuff the torch. It is slow work, wordless, wearying. He finishes the square, shifts forward to the right front of the floor, and carves out a larger rectangle, a foot by two; afterward he runs a handheld cutting tool called a whiz wheel along the blistered wound to slice away the few burrs that here and there hold the piece in place, then pries the rectangle free with a crowbar. In places the metal rips like paper.

  Back to the plasma torch, Paul cuts out the strip between the existing holes, another square that climbs halfway up the hump, then a triangle beside the front door sill. Once they’re out of the way, he redeploys the whiz wheel to cut through the front door sill. He continues the cut all the way through the rocker panel, sparks and powdered rust shooting from the small, fast-spinning wheel, then does the same to the rear door sill, then runs the wheel through the base of the B pillar between the front and back doors. Several blows with a sledge knock the rocker to the concrete. The right B pillar now dangles from the roof, held stiff by the bracing Paul installed.

  He climbs into the cabin, pulling the plasma torch in with him, and squatting on ground that just a few minutes ago was invisible under steel flooring, starts on the left side. The plasma torch whooshes and cracks. The whiz wheel squeals, throwing shrapnel. Metal groans as Paul pulls, bends, and pries it free. A green-brown cloud hangs over the car. On the ground beneath it is a carpet of rust, metal shavings, and ripped felt insulation more than an inch thick. Most of the old floor pan is a stack of ragged sheet metal.

  LATER IN THE week I watch as Paul uses the whiz wheel to cut away the bottom five or six inches of skin from three doors, to which he’ll graft new steel—a sheet of it now leaning, raw and unblemished, against a wall in the body shop, eighteen-gauge in thickness, far heftier than the tinny stuff shrouding a new car—or, for that matter, most modern vehicles not intended for battlefield duty. His actual patching of the doors will wait until later. He’s cut away the portions holey with rust in preparation for the next major task, now that the floor has been completely removed: sandblasting the paint, putty, and surface rust from the Chevy’s core and everything that attaches to it. Bobby Tippit and his teenage son Andrew are outside on the concrete pad, grinding and sanding the wagon’s rear quarters. Blast media, as the abrasive grit used in sandblasting is called, is expensive; they’re removing some of the body’s coarser blemishes in the interest of avoiding waste.

  Their efforts have yielded archaeological evidence of a sad episode in the wagon’s past, likely dating to Mary Ricketts’s ownership. Sanding on the left rear quarter, out on the fin, has descended through the paint to expose silicone body putty, aka “mud,” used to hide imperfections in the metal—goes on wet, can be smoothed to match its surroundings, dries as hard as cement. There’s a lot of it, which appears as beige patches beside the steel’s dull silver. This fin was crinkled in a collision, Paul says, and evidently a hard one. He points out little round points of beige, betraying holes where a dent puller was slipped through the creased skin, hooked inside, and yanked outward, undoing the bends. Not an especially good repair job, but typical, he says: The shop in question achieved only a rough approximation of smoothness before leaving the metal as it was and troweling the mud on thick.

  While we’re standing at the end of the fin, he notices that in addition to being filled with silicone, the left rear of the car bulges. It’s slight, something a casual glance would miss, but when he shows me how to use the top of the fin to draw a bead down the car’s side, there’s no question that something odd is going on with that quarter panel. It occurs to me that this is the same strange twist that Chris Simon noticed in the car back in the nineties.

  The blasting commences a couple of days later. The tool for the job is a strange contraption the size of a lawn mower, with a gasoline-powered air compressor mated to a tall cylindrical tank, in the top of which is a hole for the media. A hose fitted with a nozzle branches from the device. Auto restorers employ varying grits depending on their objective—one can spray ground walnut shells, cornstarch, or fine glass beads to remove paint, or a “soda blast” of baking soda for finer work on smooth or delicate surfaces, or various weights of sand—from the last of which Paul has chosen a middling grade, suited to the Chevy’s oxidized, pitted skin.

  We roll the wagon twenty yards from the shop, to keep Paul’s work area free of windblown sand. Bobby Tippit fires up the blaster’s motor and gets to work on the firewall, the nozzle issuing a deafening whoosh when he’s a foot from his target, a rising shriek as he pushes closer. The nozzle carves a surprisingly narrow path through the old green paint—roughly a quarter inch wide—so stripping requires a steady back-and-forth in short sweeps; you clear a block of two square inches, then another, and so on, so that your rate of progress is about equal to coloring a car with a crayon.

  Paul and I look on as Tippit is enveloped in a caul of airborne sand. He’s wearing safety glasses, but no other protective gear, as he leans face-first to within a foot of the blast and receives a brutal exfoliation from its ricochet. It has to hurt—his face is scoured a bright pink in minutes—but he works all day and doesn’t seem the least bit fazed.

  It takes several afternoons to blast the core and the body’s detached components; after Tippit has thoroughly stripped a piece to bare metal, its rust holes gouged free of even a micron of decay, Painter Paul sprays on a coat of light green, bare-metal primer; left unprotected, the raw steel would don a sweater of rust overnight.

  A TIDEWATER SPRING is an unpredictable affair, with dark and chilly days followed by swampy warmth—midday temperatures topping ninety degrees, the relative humidity climbing until it achieves a level at or very near cruelty. The weather now turns. The tin roof and sides of Moyock Muscle’s body shop amplify the sudden heat’s discomforts: In its airless chamber, even the lightest shirt soaks through in minutes; socks and underwear dampen and bunch; cascading sweat stings the eyes, slickens the grip, drops sizzling into fresh welds, and on the skin it combines with pulverized rust and whatever flies off the whiz wheel to form a grimy poultice. A couple of ancient floor fans produce a noisy breeze, but little relief.

  Such are the conditions as Paul dons a welding helmet to perform the initial repairs to the wagon’s battered husk. Bare-chested, sheathed in sweat, he cuts rectangles of rusted-through steel from the rear wheel wells, which arc along the sides of the cargo hold, then welds fresh metal in their place. Welding is intrinsically dangerous, in that it involves heat, a lot of heat—enough to transform the two edges being joined to a red-hot goop, and to fuse them with a third molten metal, which is produced by a wire fed into the middle of the conflagration by the torch itself. The process creates dangerou
s gases and blinding light, which are problematic as well, but to a shirtless welder, burns pose the greatest hazards. Paul’s torch throws fat, fiery sparks back at his bare skin as he carefully seals the edges of each patch. Shouted obscenities greet those that make it through the sweat. He shouts a lot. Still, he doesn’t pause; he keeps his head down, gaze fast through the helmet’s smoked glass, his torch’s business end inching slowly along the seams. When he’s used a pneumatic grinder to clean up the new joints, the repairs are so smoothly integrated that I can’t detect them with a hand swept over the wells.

  Next, he inspects the roof, where Chris Simon’s ancient fiberglass patch has given way, leaving a rust-edged, two-by-three-inch hole. It’s at a point in the right rear corner where the roof slopes in two directions, to side and rear. Fashioning a patch from new metal, he decides, would take a lot of time and trouble—unnecessary, as he has an alternative.

  He and Bobby Tippit roll another ’57 Chevy wagon from Moyock Muscle’s front lot to the concrete pad outside the shop. It’s a 210 four-door assembled in Los Angeles. Despite its birthplace, where rock salt isn’t needed to melt snow that never comes, and car bodies thus tend to hang on to their good looks, it seems to be in far worse shape than our wagon. Its paint, ivory on cola brown, is invisible for the rust that cakes its every exposed surface, and most of its unexposed ones, as well. It’s only by checking the doorjambs that I discover it was brown. A vestigial corona of the ivory survives around the gauges, though the rest of the dash is as bad off as the exterior.

  Happily, some of the California car is solid beneath the rust, including the right rear corner of its roof. Paul uses the whiz wheel to resect a foot-square chunk. He cuts a matching hole in the roof of VB57B239191, trims the graft to fit, then positions it with tack welds—small, widely spaced links that enable him to arrange its exact placement before embarking on the long, laborious task of filling the seams around the entire wound. When he’s finished grinding the welds smooth and covers the patch with a spray of primer, I’m again unable to tell old metal from new; it’s so perfect a repair that I have to duck my head inside the wagon and look to the ceiling, which is not yet primed, to reassure myself that yes, he really did patch a hole there.