Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

He lowers the body onto the stacks, and the wood succeeds in sparing the floor’s weakest points. But the load is tail-heavy, so we spend twenty minutes stacking four-by-fours under the wagon’s rear end, trying to get it level. The wood is warped, the pile unsteady; it takes several attempts before we hit on the correct combination of planks and blocks to bear the tail’s weight.

  Paul backs the Bobcat away. A light breeze is sighing in from the west, and with each of its breaths, the car rocks gently on the trolley and its wooden cushions. Moving with an almost wide-eyed urgency, Paul loops nylon straps through the door openings and under the trolley’s rails, ratchets them tight. We both breathe easier. “This ain’t going nowhere,” he says, performing a quick walk-around inspection, “as long as I can get this bitch inside.”

  We ease the Chevy across the pad, careful to apply our hands to the trolley, rather than the car itself, lest we shove the load out of balance. We face a moment of dread at the threshold to the body shop, where the building’s floor is an inch higher than the concrete outside; I pull, Paul pushes, and with a running start we thump our cargo indoors.

  I find myself lying awake that night, tormented by the possibility that the duct tape has already failed, that the Chevy has slumped sideways on the trolley and crashed to the shop’s floor, bending itself worthless. But the tape holds, the car survives, and when I next see it, a few days later, Paul has used the Bobcat to again hold it aloft while he bolts it to a rotisserie—a wheeled cage of heavy steel girders that, as the name suggests, holds the wagon like a chicken on a spit, so that it can be barrel-rolled onto its left and right sides. With the help of all available hands—Arney, Skinhead, Bobby Tippit, and one of Tippit’s boys—he turns the car so that it hangs left side down, and tightens the rotisserie to hold it fast.

  The restoration’s second phase begins.

  16

  OCTOBER’S END FINDS Painter Paul, wearing a stocking cap and long johns against the damp chill that has abruptly replaced the summer’s heat, welding shut the small cracks and holes on the wagon’s underside, painstakingly inching his way from the car’s tail to its nose as it hangs driver’s side down on the rotisserie. He grinds the welds smooth with as much care as he did on the Chevy’s skin and interior, despite there being little chance that anyone will ever see, let alone notice, the near perfection he attains. As he did on the visible portions of the car, he muds and sands the joints between the cargo hold and the new tailgate jamb, the floor pan and the toe boards.

  Grinding without goggles one afternoon, he catches a flying sliver of steel in his right eye. It turns a solid, bright red, swells up overnight, and weeps all the following morning, until Paul reluctantly gets his mother to come by Moyock Muscle and drive him to a doc-in-the-box, where the metal is tweezed free. Inside of an hour he’s back at work. He spends the balance of the afternoon grinding away blobs of dry glue on the wagon’s ceiling, once anchors for the cloth headliner.

  Through these weeks of labor on the suspended body, the wagon’s chassis sits in the shed next door. Bobby Tippit is ready to sandblast it, after which Painter Paul will repair and paint it. But before that can happen, Paul tells me, Arney and company have to strip it down to a bare frame—minus its suspension, exhaust, all of its lines and wires. “Which’ll take fucking forever,” he adds.

  Actually, I learn in speaking with Arney that the chassis has gone untouched not because he’s distracted, but because he’s mulling an idea Skinhead had shortly after Painter Paul cracked the Chevy in half—namely, that the Michigan donor car has a fine frame lurking beneath its body, and it would be a whole lot easier to use that, rather than the wagon’s original chassis, because the new engine, transmission, and suspension are already bolted to it.

  No one would be the wiser, what with the frames being identical in every respect. And it would save a week’s work, at the least, because Plan A requires that Arney separate the donor car’s body and frame, strip that chassis, then bolt much of what he’s just removed onto the wagon’s frame, after stripping it, too.

  But Arney, who rarely gets sentimental about a car, decides against the easier course of action. He’s already spent a lot of money and Paul’s time on returning the wagon to its former glory, and he convinces himself that swapping out such an essential element of the Chevy for no other reason than convenience would be wrong.

  Besides, the original chassis is in strong condition, which becomes clear when the crew finally relieves it of its suspension and steering gear. Only a little surface rust speckles the frame rails, which are each made of two pieces of thick steel rolled into C shapes and welded together to form a square cross-section. “I was expecting to find some holes in the motherfucker,” Paul tells me. “But it’s really pretty clean.”

  Arney is even more enthused when he stops in for a look. “I’m amazed at this motherfucker,” he crows, as Paul shows it off to him on the shop’s floor. “You can sandblast it if you want to, but I’m not sure you even need to. You could just power-wash it.”

  “Why?” Painter Paul asks. There’s the slightest tinge of challenge in the question. He’s spent months perfecting the wagon’s body, and I can imagine that he’s not inclined to recombine that handiwork with a frame that hasn’t been afforded similar attention.

  “Well, I mean, it’s in such great fucking shape,” Arney says.

  “Okay,” Paul says, frowning. “I mean, I’d like to get all that rust off it.”

  The new Tommy Arney evidently smells an argument in the offing, and decides that Painter Paul holds the high ground. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay. Sandblast it, Paul. You’re right.”

  WITH THE BODY coming along so quickly, Arney again rethinks the paint. He, Skinhead, and I are sitting in the Quonset office one morning when he announces that he’s grown disenchanted with orange, and now favors a metal-flake gold. Maybe.

  “Gold would look good,” Skinhead says.

  “That same gold that’s on the truck back there,” Arney specifies, referring to the GMC pickup Paul finished just before starting work on the Chevy, and which eight months later remains engineless in a shed out back.

  “That’d look real good.” Skinhead nods.

  “With maybe a cream color as the accent?” I ask.

  “An Indian ivory,” Skinhead suggests.

  “Nah, not Indian ivory,” Arney replies. “I don’t want too bright a white. That shit’s too bright. But, yeah—something like that.”

  We suspend further discussion. A primary task looms—to turn the car on the rotisserie, Painter Paul having completed all work possible with the wagon suspended driver’s side down. We walk back to the paint shed, where we join the rest of the crew assembled for this primitive and potentially dangerous operation: Paul, Bobby Tippit, and Tippit’s son Anthony, who is fourteen but big for his age. Even with so many of us crowded into the small space, we seem understaffed, for the wagon is not centered on the rotisserie; it is bolted to the spit at the points where its bumpers normally reside, so that the load’s off balance. Rolled to the left, as it is now, its default tendency is to roll farther left, until its roof smacks the floor. Turning it onto its right side will require us to lift the car’s weight—close to a ton—until the Chevy sits upright, high on the spit. Then, when it’s balanced at the top of its arc, we’ll have to run to the rotisserie’s far side and gently lower the car until it hangs perpendicular to the floor. One slip, and gravity takes over—and the car rolls unchecked, crushing anyone in its way. The prospect of crippling injury is real.

  We all line up along the Chevy’s roof and fasten gloved hands to the ceiling or a doorjamb, and wait, muscles tensed, as Painter Paul loosens one end of the spit, then runs past us to the other end. Skinhead says: “It’s about to get real heavy.” Paul undoes the last bolt.

  It gets real heavy.

  Four of us emit involuntary gasps.

  Arney, his tone almost breezy, says: “Okay, let’s lift.” Each of us shoves hard against his piece of car, groaning. Some
body mutters, “God damn shit.”

  “Let’s go,” Arney orders. “Let’s go. Let’s go.” The car slowly rises, each of us grunting and yelling, taking turns to search for handholds lower on the car’s left side as it swivels toward us. “Come on!” Arney barks. The left side inches upward. Paul, watching our progress from the rotisserie’s end, announces: “You need to come onto this side.”

  “It’s gotta be on top, first,” Skinhead says through clenched teeth. We keep pushing, until the load lightens all of a sudden—the car is at the top of the arc, sitting high and upright on the rotisserie. Arney booms, “Go,” and Skinhead slips to the other side. Bobby Tippit follows. “Go,” Arney says again, and young Anthony deserts us. Three pairs of hands now support the car’s right side, preventing it from rolling too far. Arney lightens his grip, testing the car’s balance, then leaves to join the others. I’m left alone on the car’s left side, a human chock, all too mindful that if the load were to shift back my way in more than the slightest fashion, I’d be powerless to stop it. The roll would be sudden, and I wouldn’t be able to outrun the roof as it swept downward like a scythe with a ton of force behind it.

  As this image sharpens in my mind, the car lifts out of my grip: The other four have pulled the body’s right side toward them, have toppled it onto their hands and are now easing it toward the floor. They slow as the roof becomes vertical. Painter Paul hurries to refasten the bolts that lock the rotisserie.

  Afterward, most of us have a look at the GMC pickup. It shares an outbuilding with the cars Paul offered as evidence that Arney often fails to finish what he starts—a beautifully painted but engineless 1967 Mustang, and a 1965 Impala convertible lacking an interior. The pickup’s metallic gold skin twinkles in the shed’s fluorescent light.

  We watch as Arney circles the truck, eyeing the paint’s depth, nodding. “Yeah,” he says. “That color will be fine, Paul.”

  HALFWAY THROUGH THE second week of November, Arney and Skinhead have returned to the business of appeasing Currituck County. I find them in front of the Quonset, rebuilding the distributor on a 1962 Bel Air six-cylinder so that they can get the two-door sedan running—which will enable its easy movement in the days to come, as they jockey the inventory around the lot.

  “I want to put something in so they’ll leave me the fuck alone,” Arney says of the county as he works under the hood. “But at the same time, this is my first experience at kissing ass, and I’m finding it really difficult to do. And I’m confused. I don’t know how much of it I can do.”

  On a recent visit to the courthouse he met with Ben Woody, Currituck’s top planner—the polite, bearded fellow who visited the lot fourteen months ago with Brad Schuler—and learned that getting the county off his back was going to require a great deal more work than he’d performed to date. He’d have to draw up a site plan of the property, reflecting all the changes the county demanded, and submit said document to the county’s Board of Adjustment for its approval. And if and when the board granted that approval, he’d actually have to make the property conform with the plan; that is, if his drawing depicted shrubbery planted on the property’s edges, per the county’s wishes, real shrubbery would have to appear in the same spots at the real Moyock Muscle.

  Arney had to get busy, Woody told him. The site plan was months overdue. The inventory was still too close to Route 168; they had to be at least twenty feet from the right-of-way. He’d planted nothing. If a fire broke out on the back lot, pumpers wouldn’t be able to get through the sea of cars up front to extinguish it, because Arney had cleared no fire lanes. “My goal’s not to beat you up,” Woody said. “My goal is to see you comply with the ordinance, so that we can call it a day and be done with it.” He felt, he told Arney, “like we’ve been dealing with this forever.”

  The visit was not without good news: Arney learned that if he played nice, the county would reduce his $78,000 fine to just $5,000. Even so, he left the courthouse irritated, and he remains so as he and Skinhead work on the Bel Air. Woody, he tells Skinhead and me, is “a troublemaking whore” whom he “can’t be around no more,” because he doesn’t “want to get so mad that I do something that I’m going to regret.” He says this as he’s stripping the end of a wire, in a tone that borders on the pitying. As for Brad Schuler, he says he would “like to take him and just pinch him like a little bitch.”

  His displeasure notwithstanding, the following Saturday he and the crew back the inventory away from the Jersey wall fronting the lot, then use the Bobcat to drag the wall’s eight-foot sections away from Route 168 and reposition them exactly twenty-two feet from the highway’s edge. When they’re finished, the wall runs straight as a rifle shot, and the row of cars just behind it, evenly spaced on gravel swept free of litter, includes some of the best-looking merchandise on the property. He also visits a local firehouse and asks how wide its trucks are, and carves lanes a couple of feet wider through the inventory. Arney is pleased, and expects the county people to feel likewise. He’s done more than they asked. How can they not?

  Currituck County surprises him. At a meeting with its fire, wastewater, building and planning officials, Arney learns that he’s moved the inventory away from the road, rather than the right-of-way. His latest efforts have planted the Jersey wall and front rank of cars barely two feet outside that line. He has eighteen to go.

  Arney accuses Woody of telling him differently—or at the least, of not setting him straight. “When I moved them, I called you on the phone” to report they were twenty-two feet from the road, he says. “I’ll be honest,” Woody starts to reply, but Arney interrupts: “You can’t be honest with me.” He’s tried to do right, he says, bitterness evident in his voice. He crushed and hauled away 338 cars to satisfy the county. He spent several days creating fire lanes to satisfy the county. He’s moved his front wall to satisfy the county. And months ago Woody told him there’d be no fine, he says, “and the next thing I know, I have to go to court and I have a seventy-eight-thousand-dollar fine.”

  Woody complains that he’s being called a liar, but he fails to cool Arney’s fire. The Board of Adjustment is “a joke. It’s like a kangaroo court.” Any suggestion that he park inoperable vehicles behind the Quonset is “impossible.” When one of the officials tells Arney that based on the number of buildings on the property he’ll need thirty-nine marked parking spaces, Arney, mishearing him, agrees to the demand by saying, “I’ll give you thirty-six spaces.” When another official corrects him—“It’s thirty-nine”—he’s outraged: “What—so it’s thirty-nine now?”

  So passes the hour. “I don’t bother anybody,” Arney tells the officials, by way of summary. “In nine years there’s never been a complaint in the county about Moyock Muscle. People love Moyock Muscle. All the sudden I have to jump through a bunch of hoops when I’ve been doing business there for ten years.”

  His cars resonate with people, a lot of people, he tells them, and you’d understand that if you appreciated that among these machines are “the car that your mother drove, or your grandfather, or that you enjoyed driving years ago yourself.

  “If you don’t have that in your mind,” he says, “then you can’t understand classic cars—or American history.”

  He leaves disgusted.

  At the rear of the property, Painter Paul, excused from participating in most of the improvements up front, works on the Chevy. He grinds smooth the knobby welds that bind the frame’s girders, fills the cracks between the welds, sands everything smooth. He suspends the frame between the paint shed’s wall and the Bobcat’s forklift blades, and sprays it with two coats of shiny black acrylic enamel paint. Wearing a respirator, he passes his spray gun back and forth over the frame, his pace neither slow nor fast—swaying, heel lifting on the trailing foot as he stretches to extend the spray’s reach with the opposite hand, eyes sharp for dull spots that signal sealer peaking through the enamel.

  He shrouds the body in heavy paper and tape, then sprays its underside with two co
ats of urethane primer and a stratum of sealer. The following morning, he lays on two coats of acrylic enamel, which takes days to dry; when the boss stops into the shed hours later, the paint still glistens as if wet.

  “It’ll be a long, long time before anything happens to this,” Arney tells me, then points out how tight and sanded-smooth and rustproofed all the joints between the bottom’s various panels are. “Look at all these seams, the way he’s done it. You don’t see it that nice at the fucking factory.” Paul acknowledges the praise with a modest nod.

  Arney steps back a few feet to admire the undercarriage from afar. “If we took this car to any auction, when they roll it over the camera, this is what you’d see,” he says. “I think it looks great, Paul. It looks great.” Paul allows that he’s satisfied with how it’s turned out.

  “You see,” Arney says, turning back to me, “what I’m doing is teaching Paul to be a restorator. Before, Paul was a master painter. But now, I’ve taught him how to restore a car. A master restorator—that’s what he is now.” I glance at Paul, who offers no response.

  While the body dries outside, car and rotisserie bagged against the elements in plastic, Paul hangs smaller pieces of the Chevy’s mechanical gear from a rope strung across the paint shed, then paints them in rustproofer—the A-arms and front coil springs, ball-joint assemblies, the brake drums. He primes the inner wheel wells and two small pieces of body that will be visible through the grille.

  After six days the paint on the car’s belly has cured to a hard, glossy shell. He rolls the rotisserie and its load back into the paint shed, unbags it, and sprays the car’s ceiling with primer, then rust-resistant white paint.

  IN MID-NOVEMBER 2011 rains arrive with such persistence and force that Paul must work for more than a week straight with the rolling doors on both the paint shed and the body shop pulled shut, and with a mountain of gear (that in the course of a sunny day typically spills onto the pad) crammed inside. In the body shop, the frame, balanced on the tea cart that a few weeks ago held the body, occupies much of the floor that isn’t already cluttered with Paul’s workbench and rolling tool chest, the Camaro, the sandblaster and piled bags of blast medium, leaning sheet metal, and the Chevy’s fenders—and snaking over, under and around it all, Paul himself.