The kids who drove the shiny black tank-mobiles didn’t know what to make of George’s hot pink Pontiac Firebird; they just knew to laugh at it. The kids with the lesser vehicles – perhaps mom’s old minivan, or a practically scrap-metal Buick – coveted it. The kids without cars were the most conflicted of all. If they made fun of the garish 80s model car, they knew it was out of envy more than anything else.
George himself did not know what to think of Screamin’ Tina, as he called the Pontiac. It had been a spur-of-the-moment purchase brought about by the prospect of having no means of transportation his senior year, coupled with the fact that Tina provided the most glitter for the $2378 that George had to spend. The money came from two years of arts and crafts counseling, plus tips, minus money necessary to buy a new pair of track shoes, sunglasses, and a couple of French dip sandwiches.
George knew that Tina was garish, but it was her hot pink paint that caught his eye, not her V-8 engine. George didn’t care about cars – he just wanted transportation that he felt good about. He had considered an old Volkswagen but decided that was too cliché. The ’87 Monte Carlo was ruled out when George realized that it wouldn’t fit through the garage door without taking the left side off his mom’s Camry. Tina, he deduced, was perfect in every way.
She only cost $2250, leaving George with $128 to spend on a few more French dips, pink fuzzy dice, and hot pink floor mats. She was obviously custom-painted by her previous owner, since there was absolutely no way General Motors would claim responsibility for a color like hers – her glitter topcoat sparkled over her neon-Pepto-Bismol exterior. She ran fine, although she had about 175,000 miles and a half-dead clutch when George found her. It didn’t really matter to George how she ran, though. He had just been looking for something interesting, something a little different.
Everyone knew about Tina, and everyone knew that she was George’s car. Nobody really understood the pairing, given what a shadow George was, but they knew that he must have been awfully lucky to find her. After all, a guy like George should’ve been driving a Toyota, or some generic Saturn. He didn’t really seem like the kind of guy who’d have a “bitchin’” car.
The problem was that George wore his eccentricities on the inside. He had no close friends who could release George information to the masses, so nobody knew that George had a pierced nipple and listened to nothing but 80’s pop and metal.. Nobody knew about his beautiful voice, which only came out when he sang along to Billy Joel, nor did they know about his deep love and interest in Egyptian mythology. Nobody seemed to care about the differences between Amun-Ra and Khnoum, the origins of Horus, or Sekhmet’s attempt at killing and eating all the humans. So, due to everybody else’s lack of interests, George decided that he was too dull.
He thought, every now and then, that maybe the world wouldn’t notice if he drove Tina off a cliff, but he knew that everyone would wonder what happened to the pink Pontiac. He wasn’t depressed; his ego was too regularly fed by his mother for that to be true. She always seemed so amazed by the things George knew, and told him every morning over breakfast how glad she was that he was a good kid. He just knew that despite this goodness, there was nothing else his mother ever praised about him. His track running was never good enough to set records, his grades were B’s, not A’s, and he was too timid to ever sing in public. The only time he ever felt like anything besides boring George was when he was with Tina.
He was in the grocery store that Thursday afternoon, picking up some vegetables for dinner, when the note was stuck on his windshield. He carried his bag out of the store, loaded it in the passenger seat, and was about to back out of his spot when he noticed the paper flapping in the wind, stuck like a trapped animal to his wiper. He didn’t really feel like removing the note himself, and almost used the wiper fluid to help remove the offending paper, but then he realized that the note was handwritten.
“Goddammit. Someone hit me, didn’t they.” His eyebrows crushed down.
He swung the door open and wrenched the paper from the windshield. He was at least relieved that they had left a note.
Of course, everybody had enough respect for Tina to know better than to hit her, so it didn’t really surprise George to discover that the note was not, in fact, about an accident.
Your car is f---ing awesome! Come race @ 9 on Saturday at 650 Quarropas Ave. Sweet $ if you win!
- J
Racing was something George had never considered. He knew what Tina was capable of, since he occasionally revved her high when he drove on the highway. He didn’t often drive fast; certainly not on a street like Quarropas, which was just too narrow for that sort of thing. It wasn’t that he was scared; George wasn’t really afraid of anything, save spiders. He just didn’t feel like one of those “racing guys.” Tina didn’t have spinning hubcaps, hot-rod flames, or a muffler that sounded like flatulence: she possessed nothing that the sporty Civics and Eclipses had. It seemed like she was singled out solely due to her mystique, and possibly because she looked so much like a really fast bubble-gum jellybean.
George drove home without his music on. His eyes kept darting to Tina’s fuzzy pink dice as they waggled left and right. She was clearly beckoning him to do something, but George wasn’t really certain what she was saying.
When he finally pulled into his garage, George noticed that the dice continued swinging even after Tina stopped moving. This confirmed it- she definitely wanted attention, and she wanted it from George. Ordinarily, he’d just leave her in the garage and he wouldn’t think about her until he had to go to school the next day. This time, it felt like he was going to have to be accommodating to Tina’s needs. She was a flashy car, and George knew she deserved better than a guy who was happy to settle for being uninteresting.
George’s Friday went pretty well. Because the one he ordered at lunch was undercooked, George got a free French dip. At track practice, he ran his laps pretty quickly, and on the 4 mile, he was only 10 seconds behind Chaz, who was the fastest guy on the team. He got back a B+ on his physics test, and took this to be the ultimate good omen- physics had been killing him all year.
Saturday morning, George was hunched over his usual grapefruit half at the breakfast table when his mother came in from her jog.
“Mornin’, sweetie.”
“Hey mom.” He chewed a little. “This grapefruit’s kind of gross.”
She leaned in and carefully eyed the suspect fruit. “It doesn’t look weird. Maybe it’s a little overripe? It’s pinker than usual. Kinda matches your car.”
George stabbed at a segment with a pointy edged spoon.
“You’re a good kid.”
“You tell me every morning, mom.” But even so, he looked up and smiled at her. It still mattered to him.
Saturday crawled. George ate 2 grapefruits, took a shower, did some homework, ate a sandwich, opened and closed his physics text book a few times, and eventually, it was 8:30. He told his mother he was going out. George put on his racing flats, and went to the garage.
The light shining through the small windows at the top of the garage door outlined Tina’s sharp edges. God… she looked fast even when she wasn’t moving. George saw the dice through the windshield. She wasn’t beckoning, because she knew he was coming.
The drive to Quarropas only took about 15 minutes, so George didn’t feel any need to go too fast. It looked like he was going to arrive about 20 minutes early, since George had managed to hit almost every green light. He finally got stuck at a red near his school.
When the light turned green, George lifted his left foot off the clutch and put his right foot on the gas. As he started to drive through the intersection, he saw glowing white beams growing rapidly as they got much closer to him. Finally, he heard a disgusting sound- air leaving him as he screamed S--T.
With a crush of metal and glass, the Lincoln slammed into Tina. Several minutes passed before the Lincoln’s driver lifted his bleeding face from the dashboard to gaze up at an astonishing glittery pink car. As a section of Tina’s driver-side window collapsed onto the Lincoln’s hood, the driver was able to view the contents of the smashed Pontiac. There was red everywhere, and the crumpled shape of what had once been a pretty nice guy hung, shattered, over the pink car’s steering wheel.
George didn’t even have to go to the hospital. The EMTs and the cops said that he couldn’t be saved, and he was pronounced dead on the scene. Tina was towed away; she was salvageable, according to the auto-body guy.
In June, he was supposed to graduate. His school was kind enough to give him a special memorial page in the yearbook. “In Memoriam of George Klein: 1986-2004,” the banner read. Below the banner were three pictures in a row. The one on the left was a picture of Tina in the school lot. The one on the right was Tina (with George behind the wheel, holding a French dip) at the luncheonette. The one in the middle was the guy who died, and apparently, he was the guy who drove that cool car.
You've got the looks, I've got the brains, let's make lots of money. - Pet Shop Boys, Opportunities
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