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BEHOLD TOMMY ARNEY: six-one, two-forty, biceps big as most men’s thighs and displayed to maximum effect in the black wifebeater that is his warm-weather fashion essential. Thick neck. Goatee. Hair trimmed tight on the sides and to a broomlike inch on top, having grown too thin to facilitate the lush mullet he favored for the better part of two decades. Big, calloused mitts roughened by wrench turning and car towing and several hundred applications of blunt-force trauma, of which dozens resulted in his arrest. Self-applied four-dot tattoo on his left wrist, signifying his years as guest of the state. A belly nourished by beer, whiskey, Rumple Minze, and buckets of both haute cuisine and Buffalo chicken wings—of the latter, seventy-two at one sitting—but ameliorated by excellent posture: He leads with his chest, shoulders thrown rearward, daring the world to take a swing at him.

Few scars, considering. Under his right arm is the ghost of a surgery he endured without general anesthesia, its healing compromised when, a few hours after he was wheeled from the OR, he snuck out of the hospital for a beer at a nearby strip club, got into a fight, and reopened the incision in such a manner that he drenched himself, the club, and a neighboring 7-Eleven in blood.

Point of information: He owned the strip club.

On his skull, a dent wrought by repeated blows with a heavy stick of lumber. Two breaks in the bones of his nose. And here and there, faded nicks recalling a melee outside a Norfolk, Virginia, sailor bar, during which he says he warned away an advancing K-9 cop by hollering, “Don’t set that dog on me, or I’ll fuck up your dog”—then made good on the threat by clamping his beefy hands around the charging animal’s neck, squeezing until it passed out, and beating the cop with his own German shepherd.

Speaking of which: He can be intemperate with the language. He once announced in court that if it were up to him, the opposing counsel would be executed. “I like to fucking cuss,” he’s said while introducing a buddy, “but this motherfucker, he fucking cusses like a motherfucker.” He called one municipal attorney on whose good graces he relied a “stupid motherfucking cunt,” then, having had time to reconsider, told her, “I’m sorry I called you a stupid motherfucking cunt.”

In the twenty years since I first met Tommy Arney, I’ve heard many labels applied to him. Crazy. Brash. A rough customer. Charming. Funny. Shrewd. A case could be made for any and all of them, to which I’d add: a scholar. He has devoted more than thirty years to study in his field. His expertise is such that people come hundreds of miles to tap it. He is a historian, a curator of memories, a student of America’s popular culture in the mid-twentieth century.

Though, admittedly, that is not the first thing most people notice about him.

A FRIDAY IN September 2010 in Moyock, North Carolina, a roadside burg that hugs the Virginia line—tattoo parlors, discount cigarette joints, prefab warehouses, and (hard to miss) Arney’s place, Moyock Muscle, a scrubby five acres crowded with roughly four hundred old cars.

Most aren’t much to look at. A few restored classics gleam in Moyock Muscle’s showroom, which occupies the front half of an oversized Quonset hut on the property’s southern edge (Corvette Stingrays, a couple of Chevy coupes from the mid-thirties, a souped-up, blaze-orange Nova), but the real trade is in “project cars”—beaters, some little more than rust-brown skeletons, sought by motorheads looking to stay busy for a few hundred weekends.

This particular afternoon finds Arney in the showroom office, eating lunch with members of his regular crew. He’s known Skinhead, his right-hand man and best friend, for most of his adult life. He hired Victoria Hammond, aka Slick, as an exotic dancer when she was twenty; now thirty-eight, she manages all of his business affairs. Painter Paul not only runs Moyock Muscle when Arney isn’t around, he lives next door to him, in a knot of suburban houses the boss owns. The Arney Compound, its occupants call it. What Hyannis Port might be like, were the Kennedys skilled at applying sleeper holds.

Lunch is muted, for Arney and company are exhausted. They’ve spent the past month trying to whip Moyock Muscle into compliance with the demands of Currituck County, the closest thing to government in this part of Carolina. The county people are displeased that among the first things a southbound traveler sees on crossing into the state is a chaos of derelict cars, some stacked three high. They’re unhappy that Arney displays his wares less than twenty feet from state Route 168, in violation of county ordinance. It’s their view that the place could use some landscaping—ornamental shrubs and trees, perhaps, or an earthen berm to soften the visual impact of massed Detroit iron going to seed. They also appear to be of the mind that Moyock Muscle isn’t a car lot so much as a junkyard. That annoys Arney. That annoys him a great deal.

Not as much, however, as the disrespect he senses whenever he speaks with them. They know next to nothing about him, don’t know that he’s a scholar, a felon, an elementary school dropout, yet they dare to condescend. At a recent meeting at the county courthouse, Arney became so irritated by a smart-mouthed and slightly built young planning official (“that little teeny fucker,” he calls him) that it was all he could do to restrain himself. “Back in my younger days, I’d have slapped the fuck out of that little prick,” he tells his crew between bites, “and I mean at the fucking meeting.”

For all that, he’s tried to abide by the county’s wishes, knowing that to do otherwise will invite pain. The crew has pulled a long string of bruising days at the lot, crushing and hauling away cars that Arney forced himself to admit he’d never sell. He’s reduced the inventory by three hundred vehicles and arranged the survivors in neat rows. Anyone familiar with the Moyock Muscle of five weeks ago would scarcely recognize the place.

He hasn’t got around to everything the county asked him to do, though, and he’s out of time to try. He had until today at three o’clock—right about now—and look: In walk two officials from the county planning department, folders of paperwork in hand. Arney, chewing, watches them cross the showroom. One is the man he came close to pounding, the other a slender, bearded young fellow who politely announces they’ve arrived for a look around. Arney nods and suggests they have that look, then come see him with questions.

He watches them leave. “My original plan was to come down here and walk around the whole place with them,” he tells us. “I thought about it and thought about it. Woke up this morning at six twenty thinking about it, and I decided I wouldn’t walk around with them, because that’s where I’d get aggravated.”

“You did right,” Skinhead says.

“You don’t need to get worked up,” Slick agrees. “It’s unbelievable, the attitude they have.”

“Well, they’re young.” Arney sighs. “And they’ve got an education. And they have the authority to be fucking assholes.”

The crew is cleaning away the crumbs when the county men return. The bearded fellow notes the improved state of the property but adds, as expected, that much remains to be done: Arney will have to pull the inventory away from the lot’s edges and do something about the landscaping. Then he gets to the county’s underlying concern: Most of these cars, he says, look way beyond repair. Too far gone to save. Too far gone to sell. I mean, he says, what are the odds that someone will actually buy some of these wrecks? They’re scrap.

“They’re project cars,” Slick offers.

“Project cars,” the planner says. Evidently, the term is new to him.

“Project cars,” Slick says again. “People buy cars to fix them up. They don’t want them perfect. We get a lot of guys who buy cars to work on with their sons, as a bonding experience.”

The county men stare at her. “Here,” Arney says, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin and rising to his feet. “Let me educate you young men.”

On other days, in other venues, such a sentence leaving his lips might carry a certain menace, for an education at Arney’s hands has been known to usher lengthy convalescence. He has stabbed at least two men. He has bitten, chewed, and swallowed a mouthful of neck from a third, and ripped the scrotum from another. And when an associate lied to him once too often, Arney knocked him unconscious and bored twice through his kneecap with a Black & Decker cordless drill. Unsatisfied, he drilled into the top of the man’s head. He failed to hole through before the bit snapped.

Today, he simply leads the way outside, into the bright heat of late summer, where, in the company of his sun-chapped bulk, the county men look fresh-scrubbed and pencil-limbed and unnaturally pale. So, for that matter, do I, bringing up the rear. We weave a path through a platoon of aged sedans and hardtops, chrome flashing in the sun, until Arney stops beside a 1970 Chevy Chevelle. “See this car?” he asks. “Just look at it for a minute.”

We scan the car. It’s rough. Black paint has turned cloudy. Rust has consumed the rocker panels. Chrome peels from the bumpers. A tire is flat.

Arney pops the hood. It opens with a groan. “Not looking good,” he announces, and points to an empty space behind the grille. “The battery box is gone. All rusted away.” He steps around the car’s right side. “See this?” He runs his hand over what was once the cowl, a narrow steel panel between the hood and windshield. It has decayed to nothing. “There should be a piece of metal here, but it’s gone. All turned to shit.” The visitors exchange a glance. He seems to be making their case.

Arney leans under the hood, points to the car’s wheels. “You shouldn’t be able to see those from in here,” he says. “The inner wheel wells, both of them—gone. And look at this engine.” A piece of plastic sheeting has been laid over the Chevy’s big V8 and weighted in place with a foot-long piece of two-by-four. Arney lifts away the makeshift cover to expose a portal into the engine’s guts. “Doesn’t even fucking have a carburetor,” he says. “This is where the carburetor would go, but instead, it’s got this.” He re-covers the hole and drops the hood.

“So,” Arney says, folding his arms over his chest. “How much would you pay for this car? How much do you think this car is worth?” He eyes the county men. They stare back, saying nothing. He gives them a gentle nudge. “Not fucking much, probably.”

“Right,” the bearded planner says.

“Right,” Arney says with a nod. He stands silent for a moment, and I detect the slightest hint of amusement in his eyes. “Well, it might interest you to know,” he says, “that just yesterday, I had a man from Connecticut pay me forty-five hundred dollars for this car. Not only did he pay me forty-five hundred dollars, he’s paying me another eight-fifty to take it up to him in Connecticut.”

Arney pats the car’s hood. “See, this is a 1970 Chevelle. It’s one of the most collectible cars there is. People search the country for this particular car in this condition. That fellow from Connecticut had been looking all over, and when he found this one, he was as happy as he could be. So what you might think is junk, another man’s going to see as treasure.”

He turns away from the Chevy and with a sweep of his arm takes in the hundreds of beaters that surround us. Within view are a couple of wasted Plymouths, a dozen old Fords, ancient General Motors models of every stripe. A thrashed American Motors Javelin. A two-tone but faded Studebaker Commander. “The same goes for all of these cars,” he says. “Somebody wants every one of them, and they’ll be willing to spend some money to get what they want. Because this”—here he stabs at the Chevelle with a thick index finger—“is American history. And the people who buy a car like this understand that.”

The tenor of the visit shifts.

LET THE RECORD show that on the day Tommy Arney utters this business about American history, he has not cracked a text devoted to the subject, not once; in fact, Arney says, he has not read any book intended for adult consumers in his fifty-four years of life, and doesn’t often pick up a newspaper or magazine, either. He is not illiterate, though he often describes himself that way. But having achieved only a fifth-grade education, and not a particularly high-flying one at that, he’s not much of a reader.

He’s right, just the same: The cars he sells are fossils of the twentieth-century American experience, of a place and a people utterly devoted to the automobile and changed by it in uncountable ways. He doesn’t need a book to tell him so. The evidence is plain on any summer’s day, as travelers from Virginia and points farther north stream past on Route 168, bound for the beaches of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. One after another peel from the herd and into Moyock Muscle, park among the forebears of their sleek SUVs, sedans, and minivans, spy familiar shapes sugared in rust, and find themselves transported back to moments of great personal import that they shared with cars exactly like the junkers before them—moments softened and dimmed by the years but restored to high relief, if only for seconds, by the smell of a Buick’s ancient vinyl, or the style of the numbers on an old Chrysler gauge, or the bulbous, vaguely cheery prow of a ’48 Ford pickup.

Many feel compelled to seek him out, to share with him the power contained by the metal, rubber, and glass on his lot. Some can bandy around engine sizes and performance specs, but most don’t; they’re excited by encountering a long-ago and (so they all say) simpler time in their lives, moved by a remembrance of childhood joys, or clumsy teenage reconnaissance, or critical junctures as lovers, spouses, parents—memories interwoven with, and inseparable from, those of riding in cars, in a car exactly like this, behind this skinny melamine wheel.

He’s witnessed hundreds of these intimate reunions, and has come to understand that as unique as they might feel to the person involved, they vary only so much: What makes Americans who and how we are is in no small measure tied to our status as the most automotive people on the planet. We may have individual experiences while on the road, but one individual experience doesn’t stray far from the next; driving is driving. As driving is also close to ubiquitous, Arney’s cars are time capsules of not only automotive engineering and design, but Americanism itself. Like he said, they’re our history.

Across Moyock Muscle’s rust and ruin, over on the property’s northern fringe, sits a relic of particular note, a Chevy station wagon languishing under a thick carpet of grime and flaking metal. Even by the standards of its setting, it’s in deplorable shape: Its turquoise paint is sun-bleached, salt-pocked, and cracked like a dry lake bed. Its body is dented and creased. Flat tires give it a strong list to port. Its interior is stripped to bare and rotting steel, floorboards chewed away, backseat gone, the headliner’s vinyl trim ripped from its moorings and draped like bunting.

The driver’s window is shattered, and long exposure to the elements has left two craters in the front seat, each a foot across, one lined with feathers. Gauges are missing from the dash, along with much of the steering wheel. The clock is shattered. A thick, rusty chain snakes into the cabin through rough holes in the floor, an inelegant swap for brackets that once held the transmission in place. Under the hood, the radiator, battery, and a host of minor components are absent. Even if they weren’t, the car wouldn’t start. Its engine hasn’t turned in years.

That it’s a 1957 Chevy, among the most universally beloved models to ever roll off an assembly line, makes its decrepitude all the more obvious, because just about everyone knows how the car should look. Chrome-laden front end, bumper and grille united in a gleaming, thick-lipped pout. Bumper guards jutting like tusks from the corners of its wide mouth. Bright, two-tone paint. And a departing flourish: fins, chrome-edged and massive, jutting a foot aft of the tailgate. Sixteen feet, eight inches of Eisenhower-era flash.

As it is, “classic” isn’t a label the wagon brings to mind. It seems beyond salvation. A goner. So consumed by rot and rust that it isn’t even worth recycling: To look at it, there’s little to scrap, let alone save. Except that an invisible asset sets this hulk apart from the other cars in the yard. Unimpressive though it might be in the present, the wagon has a well-documented past.

Unless a car has had just a few owners, or always been held by collectors, such a past is elusive. Most states pitch their motor vehicle records after a handful of years. The typical used-car buyer doesn’t long remember the seller’s name, and vice versa. Details blur; often, the only reliable givens about a vehicle’s past are those of its birth, encrypted in the numbers and letters stamped on its body and engine—figures that say nothing of its journey after leaving the assembly line.

This car, though: Arney acquired this one knowing that it had passed through twelve pairs of hands before his. There was the middle-class boilermaker who bought it fresh from the factory, and that man’s veterinarian grandson, and a shipyard worker who took his poodle to the grandson’s clinic. Then came a guy who ran a body shop, a fun-loving couple in the outer suburbs, and a struggling single mother. A gay physician and his partner. A pawnshop owner, briefly, followed by a navy sailor; after that, a high school dropout whose father was obsessed with old Chevys, and who’d grown up among scores of them. Next, a born-again Christian garbageman enamored of anything old. And finally, an electrician and weekend hot-rodder who happened to know both the garbageman and Tommy Arney. Which is to say, a dozen men and women from a dozen walks of life, of varied background and varying means—a cross section of America in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, all of them players in a single narrative for having sat behind the wheel of this Chevy.

This provenance, as Arney sees it, is central to the car’s value, right up there with its beauty, its mechanical merits, its storied place in American culture. He has watched the travelers pull off Route 168 to meet their pasts long enough to understand that the wagon transcends mere transportation, or performance, or design. It tells a story. It is a story, that of individual Americans, traces of whom it carries in its blemished skin and worn upholstery—their joy and anguish, hard days and easy, childhood and old age. Each dent and tear recalls a scene, a plot twist.

So it is that the Chevy heads the list of Moyock Muscle heaps that Arney has deemed worthy of rescue. Of all the choices on the lot, it’s this one he says he’ll next spend tens of thousands of dollars returning to its former glory.

TOMMY ARNEY AND I go back to 1993. We met two nights after Christmas that year at his go-go bar, the Body Shop, to which I ventured as a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot, the daily newspaper in Norfolk. Arney had made news of late, having taken Virginia’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board to court over an arcane state regulation that prevented him from serving hard liquor; he could pour beer and wine into his customers all day and night, but for reasons understood only by the ABC, he could not dispense the hard stuff in the presence of a woman’s exposed midriff or buttocks, both of which were essential to his business model. So he’d fought the law, the law lost, and I went to the Body Shop that night to talk to him about it.

I stepped into the bar with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation, because all I knew about Arney was that he’d supposedly manhandled a police dog. I’d heard two versions of the tale, both of which painted him as an almost comically fearsome character. One had Arney biting the dog before it could bite him, thereby removing a goodly portion of the creature’s ear and compelling it to quit the fight. The other, less specific account had him so demoralizing the animal that it fled for cover under a police SUV. Both versions ended with the German shepherd emotionally crippled and retired from service.

The Arney who waited for me in the bar’s perpetual dusk looked as if he could vanquish an entire pack of timber wolves. He could have passed for a pro wrestler. Dark ringlets spilled to his shoulders. We shook hands—his, hard and thorny and enveloping mine—and took up seats at a table near the stage, where a slim blonde in sequined bra and panties was lying on her back and thrusting her hips to the wildly amplified bass beat of an old Culture Club song.

“I love the Body Shop!” Arney yelled over the music. He smiled, cranked back a Michelob Light, and I noted that his wrists were as big around as wine bottles. “I tell that to my girls all the time: ‘I looove the Body Shop!’ ”

Over several hours and beers he explained why he so loved it. Despite what I might think, he told me, the go-go business wasn’t about sleaze or sex. It wasn’t predatory or immoral. What it was, really, was a safe, nurturing platform for male bonding. “The guys in a go-go bar, they’re in there either talking about work or cars. They’re not talking, really, about girl stuff,” he said. “They’ll look up at the runway and enjoy the girl. They’ll tip her. But they go back to playing their game of pool, or talking about cars.

“Don’t misunderstand me: The guys come in to see the girls. But they come in to see the girls and relax. And as they relax, they talk about things they enjoy talking about.

“Which is cars.”

I met the station wagon ten years later. Suffice to say for now that in the course of another newspaper assignment I encountered the Chevy when it was still on the road but in rapid decline, its prospects bleak, and came to know it well. Even so, within a few months the car and I lost touch, much as I’d fallen out of contact with Arney after our first meeting; though I had fond memories of him—of his humor, and the canny intelligence that lurked in his eyes, and his lecture linking Detroit and pole-dancing—and though I kept an ear open for word on what he was up to and how he was faring, we’d exchanged hellos only once in the intervening decade, when I ran into him at a local supermarket.

Then, in 2009—five years after meeting the car and fifteen after meeting Arney—I was reacquainted with both machine and man at once. It happened that Arney knew the wagon, too; what’s more, he knew that I knew the car. And he told me that he planned to fix it up. He’d start before the new year—meaning January 1, 2010.

Not long after, I learned that there was another label people hang on Arney with some regularity: distracted. The new year came and went. In March, he vowed that he’d jump on it in April. In April, he told me that he’d probably be starting around Memorial Day. To be fair, in the interim there were urgent demands on his time. For one thing, he was preparing to open a restaurant and bar, a country-western joint called Bootleggers, which involved ripping out the guts of an old storefront and draping its walls with NASCAR memorabilia and murals of Reba McEntire, Brad Paisley, and other country music stars, and hanging the new establishment’s name in massive blue neon capital letters over the door. That took time—more than expected, because Arney exchanged heated words with a building inspector over some purported code violations at Bootleggers, causing the inspector to fear for his physical well-being, which riled said inspector’s bosses at City Hall and sparked the intervention of lawyers. Come Memorial Day, the car was still slumped in the yard, shedding electrons.

Other distractions have preyed on him in the months since. Arney owns a lot of property besides Moyock Muscle, mostly small commercial buildings in dodgy neighborhoods, which had renters until the recent economic collapse; his mortgage payments now dwarf his income, have erased his savings and shredded his net worth. Plus, there’s the gnawing reality of an ongoing FBI probe into his affairs, involving the bank loans he obtained to pay for some of those properties. The bank has tipped into insolvency, a federal grand jury is poring over its records, and Arney is aware that any moment now, the marshals might be at the door.

Not least, he has himself to battle, for Arney doesn’t require bona fide distractions to become distracted. He has been hamstrung by a short attention span since his boyhood, has a tendency to dive into a project with great gusto, only to lose interest before—often just before—it’s finished. Moyock Muscle and a warehouse he owns across the road are repositories for a couple dozen half-restored cars, and another few that are missing just an odd piece here or there, but which, for whatever reason, he hasn’t managed to bring home.

So it defied long odds that in July 2010 Arney used a forklift to pluck the wagon from the weeds of Moyock Muscle’s front lot and carry it around back, toward the outbuildings in which Painter Paul plies his craft. Arney slid the forks under the car off-center, so that once eight feet in the air the Chevy teetered, tail-heavy, and looked sure to backflip onto an old Dodge before a couple of bystanders leaped for the front bumper and held on. That aside, it was an auspicious day. Arney gave the car a close once-over, and while he didn’t like all that he saw—so much of the sheet metal was shot that Painter Paul faces months of just cutting and welding—he ducked under the car while it was lifted and declared most of its undercarriage “good as shit.” He was eager to start. He said it would happen August 16. Alas, the county started making noise about Moyock Muscle being an eyesore. And here we are. August 16 was a month ago. The car sits.

Arney watches the county men leave, then walks back into the showroom. “I’ll tell you what,” he tells the crew, “that went pretty fucking well. I feel really fucking good about it. I think those motherfuckers learned something.”

“That little dude give you any trouble?” Skinhead asks.

Arney shakes his head. “He didn’t say one fucking word.”

The crew chuckles.

Okay, Arney says, enough sitting around. A recycling truck is coming by to pick up the catalytic converters they pulled out of the cars they crushed. The devices contain platinum, and there are scores of them—big money. Skinhead and Painter Paul head outside.

Arney follows them out after a while, watches as they load the truck. The wagon squats nearby, dandelions thick around its wheels. Its thirteenth owner glances over its way. The coming months will decide whether the car’s story ends here or acquires another chapter. It is up to Arney, the product of a reclamation no less ambitious than that required by the Chevy, a wreck of a boy and disaster of a man transformed by will and restless ambition into what he is today—whatever that might be—to fix it, to scatter it, to let it crumble to dust, or to sell it for scrap.

For the moment, the choice seems clear. “I’ve got a few things I have to get done,” he murmurs. “Won’t take long, but it’s shit I have to do.

“And after that,” he says, “we’re going to get to work on that ’57.”