by Earl Swift
At midmonth he begins water-blocking the car, for which he wets down the exterior and goes over it with a super-fine sandpaper. The step takes several days, during which he also clears the shed of extraneous car parts and tools and equipment not directly related to the last complicated, make-or-break task in the Chevy’s restoration.
After paint, what’s left of the job is quick and easy. Window installation takes a day or two. The interior, which Arney has always planned to job out to an upholsterer, should take a week or ten days, tops, and relies on patterns and precut fabric. Paint, on the other hand, is a tricky undertaking—expensive, difficult, and prone to environmental interference. Extremes of temperature or humidity play hell with drying paint. An errant insect, alighting on a freshly applied coat, can necessitate hours of repair. The paint itself must be mixed with thinners and drying agents in proportions that are as much intuition as straight-up chemistry. The process requires both skillful speed and patience, along with physical stamina, artistic grace, and an eagle-eyed attention to detail. And it all comes down to one day’s work: A good day will ratify Paul’s three long years of labor to save the wagon, and a bad one will usher expensive correction.
So Paul, like all good painters, prepares for the job with an unvarying ritual born of years of practice. He wipes down the car not once, not twice, but over and over and over. He hoses down the paint shed with a power washer, removing every stray grain of dust from the car’s surroundings, lest such a grain settle on his freshly painted baby. He remasks all of the openings into the car’s interior with paper and tape, ensuring that the seal is complete. He bags the wheels and tires in plastic. He opens two small windows high in the paint shed’s rear wall, and over the openings tapes blue furnace filters, allowing a breeze to enter, but with nothing on it.
An hour before dawn on a Friday in late June 2013, I watch as he stumbles from his house to my car, in which I’m picking him up at this unthinkable hour because Arney and Skinhead are unreliable early risers, and because success at painting the car requires an early start. The temperature and humidity will climb high by midafternoon—a problem in itself—and should the heat provoke a thunderstorm, as it has on recent days, insects will seek shelter from the rain and most likely defeat Paul’s efforts to keep them out.
We beat the doughnut truck to the convenience store where we stop for coffee, and pull into Moyock Muscle at 5:20 A.M. Clouds are scudding by just a few hundred feet off the deck, obscuring a gibbous half-moon. Off in the black, ducks are quacking. Paul opens the paint shed, turns on the lights, and goes over the car with paper towels and blasts from his air hose as Pat Benatar thumps through an anthem on the boom box.
As the sun clears the trees a mile to the east, he lowers the shed’s roll-up door onto a homemade contraption that resembles a ladder on its side: It’s two feet tall by eleven wide, fashioned from two-by-fours, and in the gaps between its rungs are fitted five furnace filters—another low-tech attempt to promote a little ventilation in the otherwise airless building. He soaks the shed’s concrete floor with water, as much to keep the temperature down as any dust. He wipes down the car with prep solvent, which dissolves any lingering wax or grease. He shoots it with the air hose, waits a few minutes, then goes over it with a “tack cloth,” which in purpose is not unlike a lint roller. Then, at long last, he mixes up a pot of paint, pulls on a respirator, and locks himself into the shed with the Chevy.
The first coat is white, to create a uniform base for the paints that follow. When he opens the door to the shed and pulls off his respirator twenty minutes later, I’m struck by how good the wagon looks in a single color. Its mottled, primered skin of the past couple of years has confused the eye as dazzle paint on warships did during World War II, obscuring the pleasing length of the car’s beltline, the grace of its curves.
Paul runs a tack cloth over the car, then mixes a pot of Timor Beige and, alone in the shed, applies several coats of the paint to the Chevy’s roof, pillars, and the triangular accent panels on its fins. The tan finished, he masks the triangles with tape and paper, using as his guide the holes through which the car’s chrome trim will attach. Skinhead pulls into the lot, and Paul enlists his help in spreading clear plastic over the roof and anchoring it with tape carefully placed along the beltline. Paul mixes a pot of Tangerine Twist, and has finished laying down several coats by late morning.
These “base coats” are matte, not glossy; the paint job’s shine and depth will come with four layers of clearcoat, which Paul now hastens to prepare as the temperature outside climbs through the eighties. He kicks me out after gingerly peeling the tape and paper from the masked portions of the car and loading his spray gun. As the drying time for clearcoat is significantly longer than that for the base colors, it’ll be forty minutes before the door to the shed reopens, so I wander the lot under an intensifying sun.
The fences are down. The interior barriers, the ones the county insisted Arney erect to shield his inoperable inventory, have been toppled by the wind. I look to the lot’s perimeter, see that the fence along the northern edge is now just a picket line of steel posts, the wire ties binding them to the chain link having snapped in a recent storm. The metal mesh lays flat on the ground, weeds shoving their way through its gaps. I stroll toward the eastern property line, passing the lagoon en route. Eight-foot reeds erupt from its water. Algae carpets much of the rest, dimples in the slime betraying invisible life beneath. I keep an eye peeled for snakes.
The long eastern fence is standing, though much of it has been stripped of the plastic sheeting that sequestered the lot from public view. From where I stand, at the inventory’s edge, I can look out over a field of low cropland to a ragged copse of pine, and beyond it, a new subdivision of big homes. A few are yet unfinished, clad in bright yellow pine and Tyvek. Off to the southeast is a house much closer than the others, maybe two hundred yards from Moyock Muscle’s edge. It wasn’t there when the fence went up.
I am transfixed by these early declarations of postrecession confidence, out here on the outermost ring of suburbia. Intrigued by the notion that whatever else has changed in American life since the Chevy’s infancy—and what hasn’t?—the suburban ideal has survived, adapting in its details to shifts in taste and technology, but in its essence remaining pretty much as it was when its first blooms appeared. Three generations on, we still demand elbow room and privacy, and we still love, rely on, and are enslaved by the automobile.
Some mock the suburban model advertised by the Cleavers and Nelsons. Some denigrate it. Some note, rightly, that in an era of declining energy and rising temperatures, it may be unsustainable. Still, it remains a part of us, a fantasy of safety, order, and independence firmly imbedded in the American psyche.
I turn away from the new houses and trudge back to the paint shed, where Painter Paul is overhauling a tattered emblem of that ideal, and making it seem new.
OUR STORY COULD end here.
Maybe it should, with Arney yet unsentenced, and still lording over his crew, and surrounded every day by his beloved cars and customers at Havana—and, most important, for our purposes, with the Chevy’s salvation assured. Regardless of what happens to its current owner the car is safe; it will not be parted out or abandoned. At worst, it might be sold—and it will be an easy sell, because as we’ve already discussed, the hard work is done. The restoration is all but complete. It would be a mighty attractive buy for someone with a little bit of money.
It would be a satisfying ending, because in the hands of such a buyer the wagon would come full circle. It would return to the suburbs, most likely, to a family of means, to a place near the cultural center. It would again inspire lust. The cycles of ownership would begin anew.
Here would end a story of human ruin and redemption, of a protagonist who has himself been written off as unsalvageable, and whose struggle to rescue the Chevy from the scrap heap serves as metaphor for his own unlikely rise to pseudo-respectability. Who, in saving the car from death in a j
unkyard crusher, has rescued a little piece of American history, and preserved the long procession of hopes and dreams it represents. And whose down-to-the-last-bolt approach means that the car should, if provided a sensible level of care, last at least as long as it already has, which is to say well past its hundredth birthday.
But, no: We’ve come too far to stop now. Instead, take a minute to mull those grand, closing thoughts, and then let’s get back to the action, because there are two scenes remaining to bring this story to a proper close. We’ll preface them with a series of snapshots taken as Arney’s sentencing looms:
Skinhead gets new teeth and a dazzling white smile. Paul sands the Chevy’s thick armor of clearcoat with ever-finer paper, then buffs it to a mirror finish. Eleven days after the paint job, he rolls the wagon out of the shed, and sunshine transforms the Tangerine Twist into a visual scream that can be seen and heard two counties away. Arney has a new windshield installed, but has to reorder the curving panes that wrap around the cargo hold—when he uncrates the pair delivered in June, he finds they’re broken, and because he didn’t open the crates immediately, the company that sent them will not take them back.
Along the way, I notice in some government paperwork that the feds have adjusted their appraisals of the cars they tagged at Moyock Muscle, so that now they’re almost credible. The ’69 Camaro convertible body under the tarp in Paul’s body shop, initially lowballed at $10,000, is now said to be worth $23,100. The value of the hand-built ’81 Excalibur roadster has been boosted from $10,000 to $33,895.
I notice, too, that the feds include a “1957 Chevrolet wagon” among Arney’s unencumbered assets, which they presumably intend to seize. The document sets this Chevy’s value at $13,950.
Arney has told me he has close to $40,000 in the wagon. Can it really be worth less than fourteen grand? Confused, I ask him whether the feds are talking about the same car. Yes, Arney says: An agent was at Moyock Muscle one day, saw the wagon, and added it to the forfeiture list. “It’ll be finished,” he tells me, “and if they take it, they take it. I’d like to keep it, but really, it don’t matter. We’ll drive it.”
On July 15, a week before his sentencing, he mentions again that the wagon is on the government’s hit list. This comes in the course of his telling me that his bankers are calling the note on the Moyock Muscle properties. “They wouldn’t renew my loan, even though I made every payment,” he says. “They said, ‘We’re not going to extend it.’ So they’ll take the property that Moyock Muscle is on.
“The feds will take all the cars—all of them. They’re going to take everything—everything I’ve worked for, for forty years, will be gone. They’ll fucking take it all.
“I’m trying to get them to let me keep the ’57,” he says, “but I don’t know.”
At the end of this conversation, it seems obvious to me that the Chevy’s fourteenth owner will be the People of the United States.
But to spend time with Tommy Arney is to court the unexpected, and now comes a twist that I haven’t foreseen and don’t quite understand: Two days before his sentencing, he tells me that the wagon on the government list is not Nicholas Thornhill’s Chevy, after all—it’s some other car. Exactly which is unclear, but no doubt about it, it is not the car that he’s had Painter Paul working on for three years. The serial numbers make that plain, he says. The car on the list is identified by a VIN that is not VB57B239191. And as we’ve established earlier in this story, tags are everything.
He tells me in the same conversation that he’s out of money. Flat broke. He can’t afford to finish the restoration. But he thinks he’s found a way to make it happen. A longtime employee of his restaurants, a convivial sixty-two-year-old fellow named Al Godsey—a lifelong bachelor who keeps birds, lives in a walled-off portion of Skinhead’s house, and has been with Arney since his Body Shop days—has offered to buy the car for a modest sum of cash and the cost of completing the job.
Before I’m able to process this information, Arney has an appointment to keep with Judge Raymond Jackson.
HIS ARRIVAL AT Norfolk’s federal courthouse has the air of a red carpet event: Arney strolls in smiling, fist-bumping friends seated along the aisle, loose and relaxed and looking sleek in a fresh, close haircut and a sharp gray suit. He’s trailed by Slick, Krista, and Ashlee, all of them wearing sunglasses and high, high heels, and by Ryan and his girlfriend, Holly. The family occupies the gallery’s front bench, well-wishers crowding those behind. Slick winds up directly in front of me. “How you doing?” I ask.
“I could be better,” she admits. “I need a shot.”
Judge Jackson enters. The court has reviewed the papers filed by the defendant and the United States, he intones. Among those papers is a government motion for “downward adjustment” of Mr. Arney’s time behind bars, in recognition of his aid to the prosecution. Said adjustment would lower the recommended sentence by more than half—instead of looking at sixty-three to seventy-eight months, he’ll face twenty-seven to thirty-three.
Prosecutor Katherine Martin steps to the microphone to present the government’s argument supporting the motion. “Despite his limited education, Mr. Arney is a very smart man,” she opens. “He’s a very savvy man. He was exploiting, through his own fraud and deceit, a culture of corruption” at the Bank of the Commonwealth. But he is also a man “who’s overcome a number of obstacles,” she says, and in doing so, he has “become a devoted family man and friend.”
As she says this, Arney’s wife and longtime mistress are sitting maybe five feet apart on the bench in front of me.
Martin notes that the court has received eighteen letters vouching for Arney’s good works, and she quotes one, from Ryan. “My father has arrived here today as a loving, generous, honest, responsible, and hard-working man,” the letter reads. “He has come a long way from the abandoned and homeless teenage boy with a few cents in his pocket, living in a service station bathroom. He has never used his lack of education or poor upbringing as an excuse for any of the mistakes he has made or setbacks he has encountered.
“The day my father pled guilty and agreed to cooperate with the investigators in this case I was neither ashamed nor embarrassed,” Ryan wrote. “I was filled with admiration. I knew that day that the stress and difficulty of this situation had not changed him one bit. He has always been an honest man who takes full responsibility for his actions and mistakes he has made.”
Martin tells the judge that Arney is “readily distinguishable from other defendants in this trial,” in part because he “did not minimize his conduct, he did not blame it on others, and he did not lie about it.”
By the time she finishes, she’s made a pretty convincing case that Arney ranks among Greater Norfolk’s first citizens. Bill Taliaferro takes the mike and reiterates many of the same points, adding that his client “has expressed tremendous contrition for what he’s done.”
The judge asks Arney if he’d like to speak. He replies, “I think everything’s been said, your honor.”
Jackson peers at him from the bench. “The record reflects an ability to overcome and adjust,” he tells the defendant, “and as counsel has noted, you have been a successful businessman and a compassionate member of the community.
“You have done well with your life,” he says, which makes Arney’s presence here today all the more disappointing: “How did you somehow manage, in this point in your life, to slip into this corrupt activity and jeopardize all you had done in your life?” He answers his own question: “A lot of it was just plain greed.”
So while his situation might be “unique and different” from those of his fellow defendants, the judge says, “at the end of the day, Mr. Arney, there is a penalty to be paid.” He imposes a sentence of twenty-seven months. Arney will get 15 percent of that, or four months, knocked off if he behaves himself in prison. He’ll serve six months of it in a halfway house. In sum, he’ll spend seventeen months behind bars.
He’ll also do three years of superv
ised probation. He’ll pay more than $2 million in restitution. He’ll forfeit cash and property totaling $7.5 million and change. “You fail to make the restitution,” Jackson warns, “you’ll find yourself back in here.”
Taliaferro requests that Arney be allowed to report to prison in ninety days. Martin seconds the motion: “Some of the things on the list to liquidate, down in Moyock—it would be helpful to have Mr. Arney’s help,” she says. The judge isn’t convinced. Thirty days is plenty. “The court’s confident you can get it all done,” he says.
Arney’s exit from the courtroom is delayed by hugs, more handshakes, hearty congratulations. When he finally gets outside, he’s smiling broadly. With the exception of the thirty days instead of ninety, the session went better than he expected. He unknots his tie, pulls it off, and unbuttons not just his collar, but the top four buttons of his dress shirt, which he then pulls open to reveal a thicket of silver chest hair.
“So what are you doing for the rest of the day?” I ask him, thinking that perhaps he’s going to enjoy a celebratory lunch with his family.
He looks at me like I’m crazy. “I’m going to work, is what I’m doing,” he says. “I’ve got a fuck of a lot to do in the next thirty days.”
INCLUDING THIS:
On a cloudless and balmy afternoon a few days later, Paul pushes the Chevy out of the paint shed, and he and Arney hook it to the rollback and pull it onto the bed. I watch as the truck jounces over the back lot’s ruts, the wagon swaying on its back, then thread my way through the Moyock inventory, planning to meet the men and their cargo over by the Quonset.
On the way I encounter a couple standing under a carport next to the building. It’s Jeff Simmons, the Chevy’s ninth owner, and his wife, Patricia. Simmons is wearing a black hat and T-shirt emblazoned with patriotic eagles, stars, and stripes, in keeping with his status as a navy veteran. We shake hands. “So where’s the car?” he asks.
