Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Bobby Tippit enters the shop in tiny steps, woozy from an hour’s weed-whacking. Together they lift the right front door and slide it onto its hinges, Paul sitting on the car’s floor to guide steel tongues into slots, then bolt them fast. Once hung, the door hangs low, overlapping the rocker panel by a quarter inch, so Paul takes a foot-long section of four-by-four and with it, cushions the blows of a hammer he wields in his other hand to drive the rocker downward. It budges a little, but not enough to permit the door to close.

  Okay, Paul says, fine. He loosens the screws binding the rocker to the B pillar until it shifts with a shove from above, then gives it a few good whacks with the hammer and wood block. Still, the door overhangs, and when he loosens the rocker further it falls to the concrete with a clatter. Cussing, he enlists Tippit to hold the rocker hard against the edge of the floor pan while he adjusts its position to accommodate the door and rescrews it to the floor. A couple of tack welds restore its union to the B pillar.

  Still, the door won’t close. It isn’t the body that needs adjusting, Paul decides, it’s the door—so he opens it wide, slides a jack under its trailing edge, then raises the jack, bending the hinges into compliance. “These motherfuckers are a pain in the ass,” he tells me as he and Tippit smoke cigarettes and give the metal a few minutes to adjust. “It ain’t like a new car, where you can adjust the hinge every way. These old sons of bitches, you have to play with them.”

  When he lowers the jack, he faces a new and opposite problem—now the door sits high or the rocker low; the gap between them is a quarter inch too wide. “It just takes time,” Paul says, shaking his head. “I mean, I got a USA rocker and I got a Chinese aftermarket floor pan, so you have to kind of fiddle-fuck with it.”

  The next day, having triumphed over all four doors, Painter Paul spends several hours welding new metal into places where the right rocker panel meets the body—its fore and aft ends, its triangular connection with the B pillar—and making the whole assembly seamless. He’s just starting on welds to the left rocker when Arney and Skinhead stroll into the shop. A couple of days, Paul tells the boss, and he’ll have the body complete, free of rust and patched with new metal. Everywhere, that is, but in the tail. Arney nods. The back ends of old Chevy wagons tend to be the first sections to rust, and their replacement is a chore, the parts hard to find, none of them cheap. In recent days, Paul and Arney have scavenged a ruined ’56 wagon on the front lot for a few minor elements of the cargo hold, and the mail has brought new replacement panels for the jamb surrounding the hatch and tailgate. Paul plans to rebuild the hatch itself, which is holed through with rust but salvageable.

  The original tailgate is beyond repair, however, and a replacement has been elusive.

  “I’ve exhausted all my resources,” Arney tells me. “I’ve called everybody I know, looking for a tailgate. Looked all over the Internet, me and Victoria. You look at all the pictures, and they’re all rusted.

  “I found one for $450 that once you fixed the rust, which was fixable, it would cost so much that fuck it, I’d just as soon buy a whole car and cut it up.” He doesn’t much trust online deals, anyway: “You can’t feel that motherfucker. You can’t touch it. Just about the first thing people have told me about buying a car on the Internet is, ‘It didn’t look like this in the pictures.’ ”

  But maybe, just maybe, his luck is about to change, Arney says. Just this week, he’s learned of a man in Gloucester County, Virginia, about sixty miles north of Norfolk, who has a ’57 wagon for sale. This fellow, name of Dixon Smith, wants $2,500 for the car, which he reports is in good shape. When they talked by phone, Arney says, he asked about the tailgate. It’s strong, came the reply. Straight. Arney told him he’d be by.

  He’ll go up there, he tells Paul and me, and maybe the car will have not only a tailgate, but also other stuff Paul can use. There’s the strange bulge in the left fin, smaller than before, thanks to Paul’s efforts, but detectable still—it could be that it’ll be easier to cut a fin from this Gloucester car, rather than try to warp the original into shape.

  Get the tail’s issues addressed, and it won’t be long before this car’s ready for paint, Arney observes. And though he isn’t 100 percent decided on it, he’s thinking that he probably won’t return the car to its original color scheme. The two-tone green doesn’t pack enough of a wow factor. It lacks sex appeal. You wouldn’t see the car coming and think: Holy shit.

  I suggest that burgundy and cream would look sharp. Arney nixes the idea. “I don’t care for a burgundy car,” he grumbles. “I don’t care for any kind of burgundy or red.”

  “That’s true,” Paul says. “He doesn’t.”

  “Let me tell you why,” Arney says. “Because whenever somebody fixes up an old car, what color do they paint it? Red. Every motherfucking time.”

  I ask what color he’s considering. He doesn’t know. I ask whether he’ll stick with a combination available in 1957. “Maybe. But maybe it should be a 2011 color,” he replies. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Over the past seven weeks I’ve had maybe six chances to relax my mind, and on four of those, I’ve thought about this.”

  ON A SUNDAY late in the month Arney, Skinhead, and I climb into Arney’s rollback—a large flatbed truck, the bed of which tilts and extends hydraulically to accommodate cars, two or three to a load—and we head to Gloucester. Arney has three stops planned, culminating with the ’57 he hopes to buy. First up: The home of Charlie Apperson, retired telephone lineman and active car collector, in a pine forest near the town of Croaker, Virginia. Arney is interested in a ’65 Chevy short-bed pickup that Apperson owns; our host, clad in T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, shows the truck to him, then leads us on a tour of his property, which features cars parked under two carports, in two freestanding garages, and scattered all about the yard under a blanket of pine needles.

  When Apperson lifts the door to one of the garages, we’re confronted by a squadron of baby birds cheeping on the concrete floor. As they hop for cover, Arney mentions that we’re headed up to Gloucester to see about a wagon. He asks Apperson if he knows the car. Apperson nods. He’s walked around it, he says, though he didn’t look close. “I’m planning to cut it up for another wagon,” Arney tells him.

  Apperson frowns. “It might be too good to cut up,” he says. “It’s a good car.”

  Arney shakes his head. “It’s not too good for me to cut up.”

  We visit the other garage, where Apperson is restoring a ’56 Chevy convertible, then cut back across the yard. “That truck,” Arney says, “if you decide to sell it to me—”

  “I’ll sell it to you,” Apperson interrupts. “We just have to come up with a price.”

  “Well, Charlie, I think we have a price. I think twelve hundred is a good price,” Arney tells him. “You owe me six hundred. I’ll give you another six hundred, and we’ll take it out of here today.”

  “Let me think about that,” Apperson replies, “because I’m not sure I want to sell it for twelve hundred.”

  “I’ve got the rollback right here, and I’d really like to put two vehicles on it,” Arney says.

  “I want to think about that,” Apperson says again.

  “I’m just trying to help you out,” Arney says. “That twelve hundred could come in handy. You could use it on that ’56 convertible.”

  Apperson chuckles. “Yes, I could.”

  They reach an accord. Arney will take the pickup today and pay the balance when he returns for the truck’s bed in a couple of weeks. He’s happy with the purchase as we pull back onto the road. “In this economy, you have to watch every fucking penny,” he tells me. “That fucking paradigm shift, it changed my fucking life. I’ve walked away from a lot of real estate, a lot of cars, a lot of deals I never would have walked away from.”

  We head to the northwest, turn off a state four-laner and onto a skinny farm road, and after a mile or so pull up in front of a shed in a cornfield: Chris Byrd’s shop. “Charlie Apperson and Ch
ris Byrd are both buddies with the guy who owns the wagon,” Arney tells me. “All these ol’ guys who live up here are buddies. You do a deal with one of them, and they all know all about it within an hour.”

  Skinhead, from the truck’s backseat: “Charlie’s probably on the phone with Chris right now.”

  While Arney negotiates with Byrd for another old pickup, Skinhead and I talk with Byrd’s son, Ben, a meaty fellow with a Brother Ezekiel beard and the tic of saying “I ain’t mad at you” when he means “I understand.” Skinhead mentions that he doesn’t have a car at the moment. “I ain’t mad at you,” Ben says. “I know how it is.”

  “I’m riding a bike full-time these days,” Skinhead says.

  “I ain’t mad at you,” Ben replies.

  Skinhead says he likes the paint job on Ben’s truck: It’s matte black, to hide dings.

  “I ain’t mad at you,” Ben agrees.

  We join the others in the shed, which is piled with ancient factory-issue car radios and crawling with cats. Byrd says he wants five hundred dollars for the truck. Arney offers four hundred. “Well,” Chris says, “what do you say we split the difference, say four-fifty?”

  Arney shakes his head. “Nah. I don’t really need it. I’ll take it down and put it on the lot and it might be a long time that it sits.” The men jaw for a while before Byrd caves. Okay, he says—four hundred will do. As we pull away, Arney is energized. “That truck was well worth four hundred. Well worth it. We bought and we bought well.” He happens to know, he says, that Byrd paid two hundred for the truck. “So he made two hundred. Everybody did well.”

  He’s in a fine mood as we arrive at Dixon Smith’s place, which is at the end of a narrow dirt drive that wriggles this way and that through swampy forest before diving deep into a vine-draped hollow. Our quarry, a dark blue 210 wagon speckled with rust, sits high on a trailer in front of Smith’s modular home.

  As Arney and I stride toward it, Skinhead jockeys the rollback into position. Close up, the car is crusted with bird droppings, sun-bleached, and smells of hot metal and mildewed carpet. Arney opens the tailgate. The inspection lasts less than a second. “Skinhead,” he hollers, “you’re all right.”

  “What?”

  “You’re good.”

  The whole tail of the car is rusted out. The frame around the gate, as well as the bottom of the gate itself, contains a lot more oxygen than iron. “This won’t work.” Arney sighs. He’s muted as he and Smith walk around the property, looking at other stuff Smith might want to sell. When they return to the rollback, Smith tells Arney he’d really like to part with the wagon. “The car, it’s got a lot of usable parts on it,” he says.

  “It’s got some good stuff on it,” Arney allows, “but at that price, it’s a little heavy. At most, that’s a thousand-dollar car.” Smith says nothing. Arney waits.

  Smith remains silent.

  The negotiation is over.

  “I don’t know what the fuck,” Arney fumes as we thump back up the drive. “Chris Byrd said it was nice. Charlie Apperson said it was too nice to cut up. And when I talked to Dixon on the phone, I asked him if the tailgate was in good shape. He said it was real good.”

  Darkness falls as we head back into town on the interstate, Arney wondering aloud where he might find a tailgate. Skinhead reminds him of a fellow in Norfolk who, several years back, had a warehouse filled with ’57 Chevy parts, a good many of them wagon components. I glean from the conversation that Arney did something to anger the man, who swore off doing further business with him; he later died and left the warehouse and its contents to his girlfriend. “She won’t deal with me,” Arney guessed. “She knows he wouldn’t have wanted her to. You’ll have to talk to her, Skin.”

  Skinhead says he’ll make the call first thing in the morning. Arney seems satisfied, but as the city rises around us he has a new idea—we could stop by the house of a Chevy collector who lives off Little Creek Road. It’s on the way, and we just might get lucky. He asks Skinhead if he has Dave Simon’s number stored in his cell phone.

  He does not, so we pull up unannounced outside the home of the Chevy’s tenth buyer. Simon answers Arney’s knock, recognizes him right off, and joins us in the driveway as lightning flashes and thunder booms with growing menace overhead. The two discuss Arney’s predicament. Simon sympathizes: A good tailgate, he says, can be tricky to find, even more so at a good price. Unfortunately, he has none, and offhand doesn’t know anybody else who has one, either.

  While they’re talking, Chris Simon steps out of the house. It’s been seven years since I saw him last, but he hasn’t changed much—he’s still a “long-haired, troublemaking-looking kind of guy,” as Dave Marcincuk put it, and still quiet and friendly. He seems pleased that the wagon’s salvation is under way. “I still have a couple parts for that car,” he tells me. “I still have the Colonial Chevrolet tag that I took off the back of it.” His tone suggests that he might not have fully recovered from having to sell.

  Over the next few days, Skinhead tracks down the girlfriend with the warehouse, but obtains no tailgate. He and Arney chase other local leads, one after another, to dead ends. When a week’s passed since the trip to Gloucester, Arney orders Paul to scavenge the fairly straight tailgate from a ’56 two-door wagon on the Moyock lot. It’s an option Arney would normally be loath to choose, as a two-door wagon is far rarer than a four-door, and is thus a strong candidate for a future restoration, and which he makes now only because the current project is otherwise at an impasse.

  Paul gets to work on the tail.

  15

  LATE ONE BREEZELESS and stifling summer night I meet Arney at a vacant double storefront he owns at the edge of downtown Norfolk, five blocks from Havana. When I step inside, I find the place gutted, its walls bare brick. A skinny fellow with shaved head and neck tattoos rides a jackhammer, fracturing the concrete underfoot, and Arney uses a crowbar to uproot the broken floor behind him. He is covered in sweat and pulverized cement, which floats around him in choking suspension.

  This is one of the buildings his lenders at the Bank of the Commonwealth convinced him to buy from them last year, as the bank teetered toward collapse. Now he’s racing to put it in shape to rent or sell it, to get out from under its mortgage. It doesn’t look to be a fast job, as the century-old building is both overbuilt and undermaintained. The cracked and uneven concrete floor, which has to go, is seven inches thick.

  “If I’d ever known it was going to be so tough owning so much motherfucking shit, I’d never have done it,” Arney wheezes, dropping the crowbar. “You just have to work so hard.”

  His relationship with the bank is high in his mind, and for good reason. The institution’s declining health has been the subject of accelerating press coverage since April, when the bank disclosed that a federal grand jury is investigating its practices, and its bosses have denied him any additional cash, which has put him in an ironic bind. As a young man, he’s told me, he performed collections for loan sharks. “I borrowed thirty million from banks, and now here it is, thirty years later, and I’m having to borrow from a loan shark,” he said. Without the loan he got from this private citizen, he wouldn’t have made payroll at the restaurant, so he viewed it as a necessary evil. But its price was high—12 percent a month. A month. Besides which, in his experience loan sharks tend to be “completely sick motherfuckers.”

  On the relative cool of the sidewalk, Arney tells me that the feds have pulled Virginia Klemstine before the grand jury, and agents have spoken to his real estate agent, as well as a lawyer with whom he’s done some business. It’s clear to him that they want to put him in jail, though he doesn’t see how it could happen. The bank offered him loans. He took them. Who wouldn’t? “When they’re done,” he predicts, “I’ll be able to tell everybody that the FBI investigated me, and I’m squeaky-clean. So it’s kind of nice, really. Sort of like getting a colonoscopy.”

  Within days of this conversation, Arney cuts a deal that enables him to ha
nd several of his troubled properties back to the Bank of the Commonwealth in lieu of foreclosure, a maneuver that reduces his debt to $2.4 million—the bulk of which is tied up in the tracts containing Moyock Muscle. He is visibly lighter on his feet.

  Days later the bank announces that its shareholder equity is lost, and soon after that the state shuts it down. The feds estimate that the failure will cost taxpayers more than $260 million.

  Arney betrays little concern at these developments. When I see him at Havana, he reports that he’s been giving nearly unbroken thought to the wagon’s color scheme, and he thinks he’s hit on a winning combination: titanium gray with bright silver accents. He painted a 1955 Chevy pickup in such manner a few years ago, and was pleased with the results. With that, he produces a snapshot, and we spend the next fifteen minutes discussing how sharp that old truck looks.

  FOR THE TIME being, the wagon is sheathed in ghostly gray primer as it squats, mostly assembled, at Moyock Muscle. The front clip from the donor car is bolted in place, the hood attached, all the doors hung; Painter Paul now turns his attention to the first step in rebuilding the tail, which is to install the heavy steel braces that will support the hinge assembly for the tailgate. He slithers under the car with the torch.

  Outside, Bobby Tippit uses a sledge and a pry rod to disconnect the two-door wagon’s tailgate. He’s already drilled out the bolts; only rust and habit are binding the parts now, but they’re tenacious, and by the time he’s finished, Paul has completed the welds and is grinding them smooth. Shotgun sprays of white-orange sparks ricochet crazily around the wagon’s bare interior.