The Terror #wattys2017 #TNTHorrorContest

Nash....See the music

        He had a 1955 Nash Statesman Super four door sedan. If you said it was pink he would correct you and say it was "salmon beige" as the factory called it.  This was not a time when this was considered a cool car, in fact it was considered about the most uncool car you could probably own in the early seventies but, somehow in Gerald Pomerantz hands it somehow became cool, in a Buddy Holly kind of way, which really wasn't cool then either.

        It had an under dash eight track tape deck with a couple of six by nine speakers on the rear deck that made beautiful base tones but not much else, and injected in that decks mouth was some "Best of the oldies" which then was 50's rock and roll.  He had a dancing hula girl on his dash and a Saint Christopher's medallion hanging from his rear view mirror. It had a gigantic steering wheel and "Mighty Met" sticker on the rear window.

        He got it from an old lady who gave him the car after it had set in a garage for twenty odd years since her husband had passed away.  She just took one look at him when he showed up at her door with his pasty white skin, coke bottle bottom glasses and flaming red hair with the "regular boys haircut" that he would be the perfect new proprietor of the old Nash.  He was inquiring about the car because it had become a sort of local myth that it actually existed. That's the kind of kat he was though, he would be the first guy to check something like that out.  Curious, inquisitive, intelligent, weird, bookish and driven, extra heavy on the weird!

        He was born 22 years prior, premature, diabetic and blind which required a prolonged period in the incubator and the possibility that he wouldn't make it through to the next day, hour or minute.  He struggled through that and had been struggling ever sense. One of the handy things he found in the old Nash was that it had a little-hidden spot in the glove box where he could keep, what he called his "optional injectables" that he hid right next to his vials of insulin and his throwaway plastic wrapped syringes.

        Somehow, all this peculiarity and propensity for heavy drug use made him some kind of cool that just didn't exist before he showed up.  When he looked at you with those gigantic blue eyes that were double normal size through his Buddy Holly black rimmed extra super duper thick glasses, you knew there was something highly intelligent and abnormal looking at you. Somebody who might know something you have yet to even imagine as of yet. 

        In the back seat of the Nash, you would alway find a pile of books. Though he never graduated high school, he might have been a physics teacher and those were the kind of titles you would find in said back seat.  So, as his nose was always in a book he became known as a book worm which soon got shortened to the name he was known by in town, "Worm."

        In fact, as the call from me came in for help, he had just slammed a little crystal and was planning on a good day or two with Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy published in 1958.  According to one of his idles, David Lindley, "Philosophically, the implications of quantum mechanics are psychedelic, a mind-expanding discovery."  Which he would meditate about next time he dropped some of that Orange Barrel that was going around town.

        So when he pulled up next to the phone-booth in his too round four door, you can probably guess the topic of conversation and the scent that emanated from the vehicle even before I opened the door.  I slid into the passenger seat and we shook hands in the Bro way that we all used and those oldies were playing away.  He took a long look at me with his giant blue eyes and said with his slightly raspy froggy voice,

        "Dude, you don't look too good," He turned on the dome light so he could see better. I was a little more than a little anxious and sighing a little more than one usually might.