F*** You, Tegan
How a stranger in a parking lot knew my name
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Years ago, my buddy John Button was walking through a grocery store parking lot when he spotted a familiar car: a brown ‘77 Chevy Caprice Classic with gold mag wheels and a racing steering wheel. He knew that car. He’d ridden in that car. Hell, he’d helped push that car when it wouldn’t start.
So, when a woman got out of it, he struck up a conversation.
“Hey, I know the guy who used to own that car.”
She turned around with a look of surprise… and amusement.
“Oh, you know Tegan?”
John blinked. “Well, yeah. Do you?”
“Nope. Never met him but always wondered what he was like.” She pointed at the driver’s side door.
Etched ever so deeply into the paint, about an inch tall, were three words: Fuck you, Tegan.
She’d been driving around with my name on her door for God knows how long, introducing me to strangers at gas stations and grocery stores across the city. It was a rolling monument to one psycho woman’s rage and my apparent inability to date anyone stable in my twenties.
OK. Let me back up a second.
That Caprice was my pride and joy. I was young, broke, and convinced I was building a high-performance machine. In reality, I was dumping every spare dollar into a car that fought me at every turn. A 4,000 lb. “hot-pursuit police car” with a “custom” stereo, 10” racing steering wheel, mag wheels… Big dreams. No budget.
You know the type. Every teenage dude with a dream has one. That truck held together with zip ties and optimism. That motorcycle you bought off a guy named “Snake” in a dark parking lot filled with nothing but shadows and hope. The project car that ate your whole paycheck and still wouldn’t pass inspection unless you showed up with a 12-pack.
We name these things. We talk to them. We defend them against anyone who dares call them what they are… which is usually “a mistake.”
But they’re our mistakes, and that matters.
