IT’S ONE THING to sell a fine old car and replace it with something reliable and long-lasting. It’s another thing to sell a fine old car, one that draws admiring glances and comment wherever it goes, and replace it with a charmless pile of automotive scat. Sid Pollard’s decision to swap the Chevy for a Renault Alliance was one of those another things.
The best that can be said about his choice is that it was a new car, and presumably safer. But it’s also true that human nature drives us to seek complication when our lives become ordered and comfortable, and the Renault may have appealed on this count, for the Franco-American contrivance was nothing if not complicated—poorly designed, badly built, underpowered, and outclassed by its Japanese competitors.
It looked like a winner on its introduction in 1983, with a price tag of $5,595, dirt cheap even then, and styling that was uncluttered, if not exciting. It fused European pedigree and American jobs: The Alliance was assembled by Renault-controlled American Motors in Wisconsin. “Nearly 1½ million hours of development and testing and over $200 million invested in American Motors’ Kenosha assembly plant have produced a sophisticated small sedan of European breeding and American manufacture,” Renault/AMC boasted.
It covered thirty-seven miles on a gallon of gas, which remains impressive thirty years later, in the age of gas-electric hybrids. And there was the Motor Trend honor: The Alliance was “the best blend of innovation, economy, and fun-to-drive we have seen in almost a decade,” gushed one of the magazine’s editors in the “Car of the Year” issue. Car and Driver, only a little less enthusiastic, named the Alliance to its own “10Best” list for 1983.
Yet for all its attributes, Sid Pollard’s new purchase was a bad one—sufficiently so that Car and Driver formally apologized to its readers twenty-six years later, admitting: “The car was trash.” A glacier could outrun it. The engine would have been outgunned by a weed whacker. Within a couple of years, by which time its various reliability and quality issues were obvious, its sales were nosediving, and the car had earned a secure place in history’s long roster of automotive mediocrity—comprising, unfortunately, all too many of the vehicles offered to the public over the 120 years of the horseless carriage.
It was almost, but not quite, flawed enough to earn a spot among the diabolically bad, those rare offerings that get absolutely everything wrong and so win a certain perverse admiration among collectors. The Trabant, East Germany’s smoking, squealing, eighteen-horsepower admission that, okay, maybe the West was onto something. Older Fiats of any model before the automaker’s retreat from the American market in 1984, just ahead of torch-bearing mobs. The Lada, which combined Fiat engineering and that famed Soviet attention to fit and finish. The Triumphs, MGs, Austins, and Rovers of the late sixties and seventies—Dickensian in their glorification of hardship, pot metal, and decay, with wiring so notoriously vexed that its supplier, Lucas Electrics, was known industry-wide as “the Prince of Darkness.” (Several websites are devoted even today to Lucas humor. Examples: What’s the Lucas motto? “Get home before dark.” And “Lucas: inventor of the intermittent wiper.”)
Any such list is incomplete without the explosively bad Ford Pinto, or Chevy’s much-ballyhooed and universally reviled Vega, a subcompact that drew its looks from its sexy big sister, the Camaro, but otherwise seemed a GM experiment in just how flimsy, rust-prone, ineptly designed, and casually built a car could be. Or American Motors’ uncompromisingly ugly and shoddily engineered mid-seventies showpieces, the Matador, Hornet, Pacer, and Gremlin: “Where’s the rest of your brain, toots?” And let’s not overlook the Yugo, a cheapie subcompact so dreadful that it sullied the reputation of an Eastern European dictatorship.
One thing the Alliance had going for it: It didn’t torment its buyers for long. Within a very few years, almost all had rusted through, failed mechanically, and vanished from the American road. Even in junkyards, they’re rare sights today. Poor Sid Pollard regretted selling the Chevy almost immediately. A couple of years later he saw his old wagon in traffic, a pretty blonde behind the wheel. Sitting in his Alliance, he was almost moved to tears.
As for Frank DeSimone: In the years since he first painted the car, he’d moved his business out of his mother’s garage and into a shop in an industrial corner of Portsmouth, where he did high-dollar restorations, patched up exotic wrecks, and handled insurance repairs for big law firms. He parked the ’57 in the shop’s fenced yard, tinkering with it between other jobs.
Like everyone associated with the car to this point, DeSimone was a Portsmouth boy. At about the time he’d met Sid Pollard, a friend had asked him to help ready his car for painting, and the work had come so naturally to DeSimone, and had been so much fun, that he’d decided to take it up full-time. He and a buddy had gone into business together, DeSimone handling bodywork, the friend playing mechanic. When the partnership split, DeSimone had a reputation for quality repairs. He started doing fancy paint schemes and custom modifications—he built a car for the country-rock band .38 Special—and hired some top-notch body men to work with him.
One of his guys had a friend who now and then would drop by the shop, a fellow named Picot Savage. Sometimes Savage would bring his wife, Debbie, with him, and from the moment the two laid eyes on the wagon, they wanted it. DeSimone wasn’t sentimental about the car; to him, it was a machine—a nice machine, and a stylish one, but ultimately replaceable. So, just a few months after acquiring the Chevy, he obliged them. He sold it for $1,500.
FOR ALL OF its modernist flair, the wagon was in many respects decidedly old-school. It relied on cast iron and thick steel, anemic paints and primers. Its moving parts were quick to wear, and it had a lot of them. A host of mechanical devices—prone to inexactitude in the best of circumstances, and poised for catastrophic failure in the worst—performed tasks now handled by computers and solid-state gear. Rust feasted on its doors, fenders, its frame and floor. And though Chevrolet did not advertise the fact, parts of the wagon—the rear of the backseat and part of the cargo bay’s floor immediately come to mind—were made of wood.
So by 1984, when Picot and Debbie Savage bought the wagon, it was aging rapidly beneath its deceptively fresh-looking skin. Its odometer had ticked into six figures. Chunks of its roof and body had been replaced with putty—automotive silicon, spackled on then, as now, to smooth imperfections in its metal. Road salt and coastal rains had chewed its floor pans thin, and in places, almost translucently so. Most troubling of all, its mechanical heart was about to fail.
The Savages lived in Suffolk, a southeastern Virginia town made famous by the peanut—Planters, of Mr. Peanut fame, was headquartered there, and the legume dominated local agriculture and factory jobs. When the Chevy was new, the burg still retained some of the character of a rural southern outpost, with a compact and self-sufficient downtown of mom-and-pop stores, and sharply segregated neighborhoods (black and white parts of town were literally separated by railroad tracks), and a population that earned its keep with its hands. The wicked city centers of Norfolk and Portsmouth, twenty-odd miles to the northeast, had seemed much farther away; indeed, either was considered a punishingly long morning commute.
In 1984, however, America was a land transformed by the previous quarter century’s explosion in car ownership. Two-thirds of U.S. households had owned one car in 1957; now, more than two-thirds had two. Suburbia had advanced in ever-greater rings from the central city, had nosed up against Suffolk’s edges a decade back, and was now swallowing the town like an amoeba; the once-distinctive community was fast becoming part of a greater metropolitan whole, indistinguishable from its neighbors and bound to them by a web of high-speed roads.
Picot Savage had seen a similar transformation firsthand. Born in 1953, he was the fourth generation of his family to live in Churchland, a farming village not far from where Sid Pollard’s subdivision sprang up outside Portsmouth in the fifties. His great-grandfather, the son of a North Carolina preacher, had been pastor himself of the Churchland Baptist Church. His grandfather, a World War I veteran and the county surveyor for decades, had named many of the area’s roads. He evidently favored birds and bird dogs, though one subdivision, carved out of an aunt’s property, was crisscrossed by family names, including a Picot Court. Picot—rhymes with “hike it”—was the recycled surname of a distant cousin in North Carolina. It always confounded people. When a teacher called the roll for the first time each year, Savage knew that a long pause was his signal to say, “Here.”
When he was a youngster, Churchland’s center consisted of a few buildings clustered around two-lane U.S. 17 at its meeting with tracks of the Norfolk & Western Railway: grocery, drugstore, gas station; a restaurant and a little beer joint; and (here’s how rural it remained) a grain storage silo and a blacksmith shop. Savage’s grandmother lived right in the middle of this knot. A room added to her house served as post office.
The village didn’t last long past the time Savage was old enough to remember it. After his mother died, just shy of his seventh birthday, he and his father and his father’s new wife moved into a brick rambler in one of the new housing developments fast colonizing the area’s truck farms. The blacksmith shop disappeared. A strip shopping center replaced many of the buildings at the old village’s heart. The state widened U.S. 17, the remaining truck farms became schools and parks and neighborhoods of curving streets and cul-de-sacs, and pretty soon it all looked like everywhere else.
Picot spent most of his childhood in the brick rambler. Physically, the new Churchland probably wasn’t much different from the suburban picture offered up in Leave It to Beaver, but his boyhood ended with a sharp turn from the TV script: His parents separated, and he moved first into the homes of some school friends, then into his own apartment. He was a junior in high school.
Every day he walked to his classes, and from school to an afternoon job at a gas station, and he kept doing it until he graduated in 1973. His grades were not good enough for college—his attendance had been steady, but his efforts had been directed toward having as much fun as possible—so he went to work as a pipefitter. And did well: Three years out of high school, he built a house a few miles to the west in Suffolk, in a little knot of suburbia still ringed by cropland and nurseries.
The same year, he married Deborah Jo Brantley, the pretty daughter of a prominent Portsmouth community leader. He’d met her through a friend of his who lived across the street from her, and had been smitten on the spot: She was two years older than he was, fun-loving and adventurous. It was a solid pairing. He had a good sense of humor, was quick to laugh, wasn’t one for sitting around. They took up residence in the house, Savage’s father in an apartment that Picot built into the place.
Debbie was a civil servant at the Norfolk Naval Air Station when they met, then moved to a civilian job at a big naval medical complex on the Portsmouth waterfront. In time she left government service for work as a florist at a nursery near Sid Pollard’s boyhood home in Green Acres. The Chevy became her daily driver on the commute into town. It was Debbie whom Pollard saw in the car after selling it. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he knew her: The two had attended the same grade school and junior high, when she was still a brunette.
The Savages were unaware that the Chevy’s power plant was soon to give up the ghost. Though nearly thirty years had passed since it was bolted onto the wagon’s frame in Baltimore, that model of engine had proved itself a Chevrolet mainstay—one could still buy it new and, in fact, can still do so today. It was rumbling under the hoods of millions of cars. It was simple, tough, and seemingly indestructible.
Like the rest of the car, the engine traced its lineage to the decision to make over Chevrolet’s dowdy image with the all-new 1955 model. The company’s old-man reputation had snuck up on it: While Ford and Studebaker dropped V8s into their cars, Chevy had been content to limp along on its ancient six, its sales goosed along by Harley Earl’s ever-changing styles.
GM officials woke up to the cost of this conservatism as Ford’s share of the low-end car market crept upward in the early fifties. To inject new fire into Chevy’s running gear, GM recruited an engineer who’d overseen creation of a new V8 for Cadillac a few years before—an engine revolutionary for its power, light weight, and zesty performance. Ed Cole was his name. In early 1952, he was running GM’s tank plant in Cleveland, cranking out armament for the fight in Korea. The bosses offered him a ride back to autos as Chevy’s chief engineer. He arrived that May.
So began a two-year race to reengineer the Chevy in time for the 1955 model. Cole junked all the work that had been done on the car and marshaled his people to conceive of a small V8 that didn’t know it was small, an engine that would fit into a tighter space—and thus, a sportier car—but still snap heads with a stomp on the gas.
He and his team succeeded beyond all expectations, because just as groundbreaking as the ’55 model’s styling was the engine he built for it: a 265-cubic-inch V8 squeezed into a snug package, and lighter, stronger, and more efficient than other eight-cylinders. This was the famed “small-block” V8 that would prove the wellspring for Chevy engines of various displacements until the nineties, which was produced ninety million times over, and which inspired those that still power GM cars today.*
Cast with a thinner husk than its contemporaries, the 265 weighed forty-one pounds less than Chevy’s old six-cylinder engine, was structurally stiffer and stronger, and turned out 162 horsepower in its most basic form to the old motor’s 136. Chevrolet called its ’55 car “the Hot One” in its advertising, and that was a pretty fair assessment. Its engine delivered. And the small-block propelled Cole, along with the car: He became general manager of Chevrolet in 1956, and eventually rose to the presidency of GM.
By the time Nicholas Thornhill bought the wagon, he had more of Cole’s handiwork to choose from. The company still offered the six-cylinder, as well as the 265. For the 1957 model year, however, it added a variant to the V8, the same small block rebored to 283 cubic inches of displacement. Like the 265, the Turbo-Fire 283 came with a choice of carburetors; with a standard two-barrel, it cranked out 185 horses, and with the high-performance and gas-guzzling four-barrel (dubbed the Super Turbo-Fire), 220. With two four-barrels, it posted an impressive 270.
And you could do better still. Underlining the company’s drive to snare younger buyers, Chevy supplied that one especially forward-thinking option: fuel injection. The mechanical contraption was glitchy and expensive—it added five hundred dollars to the car’s price—but it boosted horsepower to 283, achieving an automotive Holy Grail: a unit of horsepower for each cubic inch of displacement.
Nicholas Thornhill hadn’t needed fuel injection. He probably hadn’t needed a V8 for the puttering around town that accounted for most of his driving. But it was 1957’s hearty and hallowed 283 two-barrel that resided under the hood of the Savages’ wagon in 1987.
Homebound from a weekend NASCAR Winston Cup race in Richmond, with Picot Savage at the wheel, the Chevy overheated. Savage, who’d had a few beers at the track, wasn’t in the mood to stop. The couple made it home, and over the next few days Savage narrowed the problem to a leak in the cooling system, though he didn’t pinpoint its exact location; he kept the car on the road by frequently watering the radiator. But within a few days, Debbie and a friend took the wagon across town to the beach, and on the way back the engine exploded. It was clear to Savage that he’d be unable to fix it: When he popped the hood he found a broken connecting rod jutting from a hole in the oil pan.
The car sat outside the house for several months before he pulled the ruined power plant and dropped a bigger motor, a used Chevy 327, in its place. The replacement was a small block, as well, a descendant of the same engine that Ed Cole had introduced in the ’55.
For a while, everything worked. But little things started to go wrong with the car, annoying things. The gas tank sprang a leak. Savage, now using the Chevy to commute to a new job across town, found that it drained dry while he worked. He’d have to carry a few spare gallons in a can every day, and replenish the tank before setting off for home. The Savages’ relationship with the wagon thus ventured from the third stage of automotive ownership, companionable reliance, to the initial substage of automotive heartache—doubt, in which a car exhibits its first, seemingly minor betrayals of strength and endurance, and its owner is left to wonder whether his machine will perform as expected.
Savage epoxied the leaky gas tank, but then a wire in the starter pulled loose, so that nothing happened when he turned the key. He discovered that when he delivered several hard stomps to the floorboards, he jostled the wiring just enough to make a difference, and the car would fire up. You have to kick-start it, he joked to his coworkers, but it runs good. Just the same, the Chevy was now approaching 140,000 miles, and it chugged gas like a frat boy. The couple took to driving other cars.
The wagon sat unused in the yard for months. Its plates expired. The Savages’ place wasn’t junky, by any means—the couple took care of the yard and kept the house in good repair. Still, some of the neighbors were irritated by the sight of a derelict vehicle on the premises, and complained to the city. Suffolk officials gave the Savages a choice: License it, garage it, or move it. Savage was working at a private shipyard near the navy yard, so he drove the wagon there and left it in a parking lot.
Weeks passed. Somebody mistook the car for abandoned and came close to driving it away. After three years of ownership, the Savages concluded that their once-prized classic Chevy might be more trouble than it was worth.
STILL HAULING JUNK, Tommy Arney decided running a filling station wasn’t for him. He opened a second business next door that seemed a better fit—a used-car lot, which dovetailed nicely with his junk trade. It went so well that with brothers Billy and Mike he opened a second lot, Arney Brothers Wholesale, in a declining part of town, and a garage, Arney Brothers Auto Repair, a few miles away. He leased and sublet a necklace of buildings to either side of the shop.
By the early eighties, Arney Brothers Wholesale had an arrangement with several new-car dealers to sell off their trade-ins. The brothers didn’t make much per sale, but they sold a lot of cars—fifty, sixty, even seventy on some days, most often to the many independent used-car dealers that catered to Norfolk’s huge population of enlisted sailors. A few cars came onto the lot that Arney decided to keep for himself. So began his study of the classics. The restlessness that had spelled such trouble in his schooling manifested itself now in more positive ways, at least some of the time. The brothers worked deep into most nights, augmenting their auto trade with anything that would bring a dollar. They did some roofing, sold tires and rims, and started a business training guard dogs; they needed the animals themselves to patrol their car lot at night.
In his few hours of leisure, Arney found time for romance. His relationship with Krista deepened, even as he pursued trysts with a number of other women—a number that, by his account, was very large indeed. Krista sussed out his infidelity in 1980, broke off contact, and moved to Tampa, Florida, where her father lived. Arney turned up there and convinced her not only to take him back, but to marry him, which she did on November 21, 1980, afterward returning with him to Virginia.
He found time for more violence, too. One day in the office at Moyock Muscle, I notice that he’s staring into space, a vague sadness in his expression. I ask him what’s the matter. “I was just sitting here, thinking about my mama,” he says, his tone dreamy. “I was thinking about this one time I was supposed to go to lunch with her—me and Billy and my brother Mike. We were going to Greater Grinders to have subs, and I had to whip somebody’s ass.”
This was a few months after he sold his service station to a man named Mike. Arney had agreed to leave the business’s electrical account in his name to spare Mike the hefty deposit required of new commercial customers. He stressed that Mike couldn’t be late with payments, as his own $3,500 deposit was on the line. Months later, Arney received notice from the utility that the bill had gone unpaid, and that his deposit would be used to cover the shortfall. Livid, he decided to pay Mike a visit. He told his mother that it couldn’t wait.
I thought we were going to eat, Fern complained. We will, Arney promised, just as soon as I’m done. Okay, his mother said. Take Billy with you, in case there are more than a couple of them. And hurry. I want lunch.
A few minutes later, he and Billy pulled up outside the station, which Mike was operating as a used-car lot. Arney walked in. Mike walked toward him, waving some paper. Arney punched him in the face, knocking him into his office, then followed him into the back room and beat him so fiercely that Billy, worried he’d kill him, pulled his brother off the man twice. Arney shook Billy off, climbed onto the arm of a sofa, and jumped with all of his boot-clad 190 pounds onto the unconscious Mike’s back. Then the brothers revived Mike, propped him into a sitting position in his desk chair, got the money to cover the overdue bill, and walked out. Mike declined to press charges.
“We got back, I guess, in about thirty minutes,” Arney tells me. “Mama said, ‘Are you ready to eat? I’m hungry.’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I washed my hands and we ate a sub that day.
“Yeah.” He pauses, looks into the distance. “Sometimes a guy will think about his mama.”
Was it nature or nurture that made Tommy Arney the violent thug he’d become by his late twenties? Some of both, no doubt: When he was five or six, he says, he got his first inkling that whatever Fern’s shortcomings, his family tree was a tangle of twisted branches and strange fruit. While spending the day with an uncle in Lenoir, Tommy failed to eat every potato chip in a bag he’d opened. Offended, the uncle pulled out his signature weapon, a bullwhip, with which he could pluck a cigarette from a pretty girl’s lips without leaving a mark, if he so chose. In this instance, he intended to leave a mark. He made contact with Tommy’s fleeing torso three or four times. The leather cracked like pistol shots.
Tommy spent the rest of the day a safe distance off, waiting for his mother to fetch him back to Lenoir. He was so angry and bewildered that while picking at the rubber sole of his sneaker, he accidentally ripped it off. When Fern saw that, she overlooked the fact that her brother had bullwhipped her son. She beat Tommy, instead.
That was, it turns out, a rather low-key episode in family history, compared to many, many others. Some fifty years later I drive down to Lenoir, where I meet Arney’s cousin Billie Ruth Bryant, daughter of Fern’s older sister, Pauline. Billie Ruth and her husband, Steve, a twice-wounded Vietnam vet who’s witnessed plenty of violence up close—but even so, is awed by his in-laws—offer an executive summary of the clan’s congenital yen for bedlam. Such as the time aunt Ruby, according to family legend, disarmed a Lenoir cop and menaced the officer with his own sidearm. And the time two of Ruby’s children soaked her in kerosene, resolved to setting her on fire, then lost their nerve and instead threw her from a second-floor balcony, breaking her leg. Or the fusillades Ruby exchanged with her children, visitors, and Arney’s uncle Clyde—who’s well into his eighties, Billie Ruth says, but still “carries a pistol in every orifice he has.”
Such were the family values into which Arney was born, and this accounting deals the subject only the most glancing of blows. I’ve skipped the stabbings. A stand-alone book could be written about Ruby’s husband, Colden Crump, who installed half a dozen locks on his bedroom door so that he could barricade himself inside when Ruby took to drinking white liquor straight from a mason jar, a reliable predictor of coming gunplay. A thousand lesser family disputes earn a chuckle from the survivors, such as the time Clyde slapped Ruby so hard she wet herself, and Ruby ran him down with her car in reply.
Roughhousing wasn’t restricted to the maternal line of Arney’s ancestry. When he was twenty-seven, a few years after Fern told him that Fred Arney wasn’t his father, that the responsible party was really one Earl Thomas Green, Arney went down to Carolina to visit his dad. Green asked him for a loan so that he could pay a lawyer who was defending him against charges that he’d shot a man.
Given his kin’s fondness for the scent of cordite, it shouldn’t surprise that Arney relied on firearms from time to time. There was the night he fired a revolver into the air to break up a roadside rumble that he and a buddy were losing against four marines (though not before he swung a heavy steel tow hook through one of the servicemen’s cheeks); the time he signaled his displeasure at a malfunctioning jukebox by putting five bullets through the machine, then borrowing a customer’s pistol and shooting it six more times in front of a horrified repair man—an act for which he received a two-month suspended jail sentence. A November 1984 parking lot hassle morphed into a chase through Norfolk’s streets, during which the pursuing Arney put a few bullets into the other car. He received a misdemeanor conviction for that.
He came close to shooting a man who owed him money, too, a used-car dealer who’d shown no signs of paying up. Not long after Krista gave birth to their first child, Ryan, in 1982, Arney “woke up and I decided: ‘I’m going to kill that motherfucker.’ So I took a gun”—a .357 Magnum—“and I stuck it in the back of my pants.” Krista saw the weapon and intercepted him as he crossed the front yard. Please come back inside, she begged him. Don’t take that gun. She was crying. She held Ryan. Arney looked at her, looked at the baby, and “something just clicked in me,” he says, “and said: ‘Go back inside.’ ” He called the man, told him what he’d almost done. The fellow hurried to settle his debt.
Arney stopped carrying a gun for good in 1989, he says, after Bill Taliaferro warned him that as a felon, he was pushing his luck. He didn’t much miss it. Violence was a means to an end for him, a salve to the anger that still roiled in his head and chest, and the relief and satisfaction he gleaned with his fists and feet dwarfed that which he might have experienced with the assistance of tools.
IN 1985, ARNEY again expanded his business empire: He bought a go-go bar called Elmo’s, which occupied a low-slung cinder-block pile on Norfolk’s west side, not far from the naval base. He joked to friends that he bought it because he’d been banned from every other tavern in town, and “was tired of drinking at the damn car lot,” and true enough, his fighting has made him unwelcome in many such establishments. But more to the point, he had contemplated owning his own joint since his days cooking at the Shamrock Inn, and he had frequented go-go bars even longer: In November 1971, while still holed up in the Sunoco, not yet seventeen, he’d strolled into a club with a fake draft card and a yarn about having pulled a tour flying helicopters in Vietnam. A girl was up onstage, wearing tasseled pasties. A glance her way made him a lifelong aficionado.
Part of the attraction was obvious. “I really liked go-go dancers,” he explains to me. “These fucking girls wanted attention. They had to have people tell them they had pretty hair, and a nice ass. Needed people to tell ’em. But, I mean, I did love their asses.”
So there was that. And, in addition, this: Most go-go bars rarely saw violence. They were among the safest drinking spots around, in fact, because their patrons were united in a common purpose. “If I went to a disco bar, I’d get into a fight, every single time,” Arney tells me. “You’re looking at a girl. She’s got a nice, sweet ass on her. She smiles at you. You smile at her. Next thing you know, her boyfriend’s coming over and saying, ‘What are you doing, looking at my girlfriend?’ And I’d say, ‘I’m looking at her because she’s got a sweet ass on her and a pretty face—what the fuck do you think?’ And then he’s throwing a punch.
“Won’t happen at a go-go bar. I was comfortable in a go-go bar. I could relax there.”
Arney renamed the place the Body Shop. He shut it down for a few days, scoured the interior, put in a new bar, hung signs, dressed it up. He built a menu around the titanic, one-pound Body Burger, and wired in a sound system loud enough to splinter kidney stones. He hadn’t yet reopened the bar when one early afternoon a wiry laborer in his early thirties wandered in off the street and asked for a beer. Arney gave him one, and John Nelson McQuillen, a maintenance man at a downtown Norfolk bank, pretty much never left. He loved the Body Shop to the detriment of his job, which he lost, and his marriage, which was already in trouble but soon fractured completely. Arney gave him a job as a doorman, then taught him how to cook.
McQuillen would prove an intriguing paradox—a high school dropout and a well-read autodidact with a headful of history, literature, and the scriptures; a biker whose forearms were engulfed in tattoo flames, but who could hold his own in polite conversation with just about anyone, on a surprising range of topics; a shrewd fellow, in most respects, with a weakness for dangerous women; and a man of uncompromising loyalty who rarely saw the numerous children of his past marriages and liaisons.
He was neither a neo-Nazi nor bald nor cut his hair especially close—in fact, he wore it in a mullet at the time—but one night at the Body Shop he asked Arney to buy him a beer, to which the boss replied: “Fuck you. Buy me one, you skinhead motherfucker.” The impromptu label stuck, in part because Arney threatened to fire anyone in his employ who addressed McQuillen by his real name.
When Skinhead was reduced to living with his mother for a while, Arney phoned the house and asked for him by his new moniker, to which Mrs. McQuillen said: “His name is Johnny. I ought to know. I named him.”
“Well, ma’am,” Arney replied, “I named him Skinhead.”
The two became inseparable. Along with a couple of sidekicks, they cruised around town in a blue limousine Arney bought, wore matching, floor-length fur coats, went dining and shopping with carloads of dancers, and spent long nights at the club and venturing out to after-hours joints when the Body Shop closed. It wasn’t unusual for the pair to down a case of beer in an evening, as well as a couple of bottles of hundred-proof Rumple Minze. Sometimes they slept on the go-go bar’s pool tables; Arney eventually built an efficiency apartment on the club’s second floor, where he crashed by himself or with members of the staff.
Often as not, the latter was the case: He was a big guy with huge biceps, an aura of friendly menace, and an electric smile, and his dancers were drawn to him as surely as he was to them. “I would just take my pick,” he says. “There were some days I was a little slack—I was with two. But most days I was with four, five, six different women.
“When I walked into a room anywhere, the women seemed to be attracted to me. I was fun. I was funny. I was wild as a motherfucker. I was crazy as a bitch. I was a fun motherfucker. I’d slap a guy and knock his teeth out, then go out in the parking lot and get a blow job.”
He and Krista had been a couple for almost ten years when he bought the Body Shop, and he owed much of what was good about his life to her. Their son was nearing the age when he’d be ready for kindergarten, and they’d had a daughter, Ashlee, in 1984. His wife had proved a faithful business partner: Because he’d stolen that safe, Arney had a felony conviction on his record, and the commonwealth of Virginia was therefore disinclined to grant him a liquor license; the Body Shop’s paperwork was in Krista’s name. Just the same, Arney stayed away for days at a time, leaving her to care alone for the kids. On those days he did make it home, he spent most of his time sleeping. Twenty years later, Ryan’s sharpest childhood memories of his father have him crashed out on the sofa.
Finally, things between Arney and Krista came to a head, and he told her that he couldn’t help his behavior—he hoped she understood, he recalls telling her, but he had to be with other women. He didn’t understand it himself. Krista replied that if he couldn’t control these urges of his, he’d have to leave. She came by the Arney Brothers car lot with his clothes.
NOWADAYS, ARNEY TALKS about that period as “the olden days,” and his behavior at the time as “the old Tommy Arney.” The old Tommy Arney didn’t brook any challenge, any sass, the slightest whiff of discord—or, for that matter, a wayward glance, a dancer touched, or a laugh too loud. He never fought in his own bar; the Body Shop’s parking lot thus saw a lot of scores, real or imagined, settled in the quick and brutal style for which he was renowned. After closing, when he and Skinhead ventured to other bars, he’d fight indoors, with resulting damage to property.
Each member of the crew has his or her own “greatest hits” list of Arney’s mayhem. Virginia Klemstine, who was twenty-one when she started dancing at the Body Shop in 1986, recalls the night Arney faced off with a man outside, punched him into a daze, then announced he was going to give the “motherfucker” something to “remember me by”—and grabbing him by the head, bit deep into the man’s neck, ripping away a divot of flesh and muscle. After he’d chewed and swallowed it, he asked Klemstine for a toothpick.
That was the only time he actually metabolized an opponent, though he bit several—he incised the tip from one unfortunate man’s nose, gouged a second neck, latched on to ears. But he preferred sharp blows. He was generous with concussions.
Skinhead was present for one storied rumble at an after-hours club, sparked when a patron assaulted a Body Shop manager with a folding metal chair and Arney launched a counterattack on the dance floor. His adversary had backup; in seconds, it was Arney versus an army, which he dispatched, one by one, with kicks and punches. The club’s staffers tried to intervene, but he’d entered that lizard state that tracked any movement as hostile, and he laid them out, too. Skinhead says that at one point, twenty-three of his opponents were down. Arney testifies that at least a dozen were knocked out cold.
Skinhead was on hand the night a Body Shop manager got into a fistfight with a lightning-fast navy boxer, and was on his way to defeat when Arney took over with the drawled announcement: “Let me show you how this is done.” He beat the boxer with his fists, knocked him senseless against a standpipe, then ground out a cigarette on the man’s head. On another night, Skinhead watched Arney beat a man over the head with a motorcycle helmet until it broke.
And both Klemstine and Skinhead were witness to the infamous power drill incident. Klemstine was working behind the bar when Arney asked a Body Shop regular named Jimmy to gas up her Trans Am at an Exxon station across the street—Klemstine had volunteered to run an errand for Arney, but had no gas. He gave Jimmy the keys and twenty bucks, and watched as the man left with a buddy.
Time passed—forty-five minutes or better—before Arney realized that Jimmy hadn’t reported back. He found him skulking in the back of the bar. Jimmy, he said, why didn’t you tell me you’d returned? Well, Tommy, look, Jimmy said, there’s been an accident—I was at the Exxon station when a driver lost control of his car as he passed the place, and his car jumped the curb and ran right into the Trans Am while I was standing there, filling the tank.
Let’s go look at the car, Arney said. He followed Jimmy into the parking lot. The Trans Am’s left quarter panel was crumpled in such a manner that Arney knew instantly it hadn’t been hit by another car: The damage ran vertically, as if caused by a pole. Jimmy, he said, do you want to tell me what really happened to the car?
I’m telling the truth, Jimmy insisted.
Arney sat Jimmy in the bar’s back room and dispatched Skinhead to the Exxon station; he returned a few minutes later to report that no one had seen an accident on the premises. Jimmy stuck to his story. Arney, growing impatient, sought out Jimmy’s friend and suggested that telling the truth was the healthiest option available to him. The man agreed. Jimmy, he said, had been attempting to spin doughnuts in a nearby parking lot when he’d lost control and smacked the rear end into a light standard. Arney bought the man a beer and returned to the office. I’ll give you one more chance, he told Jimmy. What happened to the Trans Am?
Tommy, he replied, I swear on my mother’s life that it happened the way I said.
At those words, Arney lost his temper. He slapped Jimmy unconscious, woke him up, again asked him for the truth—and when he didn’t get it, knocked him out and scanned the room for a tool to better hurt him with. His eyes fell on a Black & Decker cordless drill, bought earlier that day and charging in its cradle. The bit kept grabbing Jimmy’s blue jeans as he drilled into the man’s kneecap, so Arney abandoned the knee for Jimmy’s skull. Fortunately for all involved, the bit wasn’t up to the task.
Arney relates such stories with a mixture of wonder and regret. He does not miss the old Tommy Arney: “My dumb ass thought that if a motherfucker disrespected me in any way, I had to fuck him up,” he tells me. “If you talked about Tommy Arney and I found out about it, I was coming. I’d break your nose or knock you out.
“Whatever bar I walked into, I don’t care where it was, people moved out of the way,” he says. “I thought people respected me and liked me.” He shakes his head. “They didn’t like me. They were scared to death of me.”
Perhaps the most troubling facet of the old Tommy Arney was what he didn’t do, rather than anything he did. He was a generous father, lavish in his celebration of Christmas and birthdays, and he spoke on the phone with his wife, Ryan, and Ashlee almost every day. He was not nearly so consistent in his physical presence, however. Ryan would wait for him out in front of the family’s town house, which sat on a suburban cul-de-sac; a street sign stood at the mouth of the street, and he’d turn circles on the pole while maintaining a lookout for approaching cars. Sometimes Arney would arrive and bundle the kids off to see Disney on Ice, or a tractor pull, or pro wrestling. Sometimes they’d go stuff themselves at Piccadilly Cafeteria, see a movie.
Sometimes Ryan would stand out at that street sign for hours, wondering where his big, loud, two-fisted dad was, until Arney showed up hours late, contrite and eager to please.
Sometimes, Ryan says, his father wouldn’t show at all.