The Scar Boys (14 page)

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

The driver, whose name was Jeremiah, lit the joint, sucked the sweet smelling smoke deep into his chest, and held his breath. Then he passed it to me. I tried to mimic what I saw, but wound up in a fit of coughing and sputtering. As I tried to refill my lungs with fresh air, the coughing morphed into a kind of maniacal laughter that ended as teary gasps for breath. Jeremiah laughed, too, but I think it was just to be polite.

Only three years older than me, Jeremiah (not “Jerry” I was told) had recently dropped out of UGA and taken a job with Northern Georgia Wreck & Rescue, the company with the exclusive contract to handle calls to the state police along I-85. He’d been studying psychology, but that was just to please his parents. Jeremiah’s true love was driving, fixing, and being around cars. He spent his weekends at the Dixie Speedway in Woodstock, just north of Atlanta, working a stock car crew and hoping for a chance to race.

“So what’s wrong with your van, anyway?” he asked.

“We threw an engine rod.”

“Oh, you boys are fucked.” He took another long toke and handed the joint back to me. By my third drag I was smoking without convulsing, though to be honest, I didn’t feel any different. I thought being stoned would make me light-headed and happy. I just felt nauseous and my throat burned.

I handed what was left of the joint back to Jeremiah who carefully stubbed it out on the steering wheel, adding another burn mark to the twenty or thirty that were already in orbit around the truck’s horn. He dropped the roach in his shirt pocket and then pulled out a pack of Marlboro’s, offering it in my direction.

“Sure,” I said, “why not.”

I flicked the lighter and held the thin orange flame to
the end of the cigarette until I saw it was burning and then drew the smoke in. The taste of tobacco was foul compared to pot. It was like the difference between coffee and coffee ice cream. I held the soupy fog in my lungs for a long moment and exhaled.

“No, no, no, son.” Jeremiah laughed. “You exhale these right away. Don’t you smoke?”

“Not until today.”

“What the hell you wanna start for now?”

I didn’t have a good answer, so I shrugged my shoulders and took another drag, doing it right the second time. The truth is, I didn’t care why. I just wanted to smoke. Sue me.

The conversation petered out and we rode in silence for a while. Then Jeremiah asked, “So is Harry short for Harold?”

As you can probably guess, I hate that question. It comes up way more than you would think. But my name is my name, so I answered.

“No, it’s Harbinger.”

“Harbinger?”

“Yeah.”

“Like Harbinger of Doom?” Jeremiah was both amused and perplexed.

Maybe it was the pot, maybe it was the nicotine, but something loosened me up enough that I found myself telling Jeremiah the whole sorry story of how I got my name. It goes something like this:

My parents met in September 1967, which was supposed to be the “Summer of Love.”

Race riots were flaring in a dozen cities, the Chinese were exploding H-bombs in the Gobi Desert, and the US Congress was upping the ante in Vietnam, turning a police action into a full-fledged war. Summer of Love? It was more like the summer of indigestion, like 1966 had eaten a bad taco and just couldn’t keep it down.

My mom was working nights at a diner in Brooklyn to put herself through Kingsborough Community College, when my dad stopped in for a cup of coffee. He had been in Prospect Park for an event with his boss, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy; yeah,
that
Kennedy. Dad’s first political job was as a junior staffer, a constituent liaison or something like that, for the one and only Bobby Kennedy.

Dad sat at the counter of the diner and flirted with my mom for an hour. (She says it was more like two hours.) When he finally introduced himself and she shook his hand, there was an electric shock so intense that all the lights went out. Literally. All five boroughs of New York City went dark in a blackout that lasted five hours.

Halfway through that blackout I was conceived, and three weeks later my parents were married.

Yeah, I know, gross.

Things started off really good for my mom and dad. They bought a small house in Yonkers and began to build a life.

Then, in March of 1968, Kennedy jumped into the presidential race. My dad was offered a job on the campaign team, so he wound up traveling with the senator. It was hard on my mom, but the payoff if Kennedy won—and everyone was pretty sure he would win—was a job for my dad and an exciting new life in Washington for the Jones family.

Mom went into labor in the early hours of the morning on June 5. Her first contraction began at the exact same moment an unemployed exercise rider from Santa Anita racetrack was squeezing the trigger that would put a bullet into Bobby Kennedy’s head. My father was just a few yards away when it happened. (The gunshot, not the contraction.)

Dad talks about that night often, his eyes glazing over, his voice going hoarse, like he’s still there, stuck in that moment. He pulls out the same photograph of Kennedy and his entourage onstage at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, all of them smiling with their arms raised in celebration at having just won the California primary.

“See that ear?” my father asks, pointing to the obscured view of a man’s head, five people deep on the stage. “That’s my ear.

“Bobby,” Dad tells me, “was heading for a press conference after his victory speech. That’s when I heard the shots and I knew they got him. I knew they got Bobby.”

At this point my father usually stops and stares at his hands. I can never tell if he’s really getting emotional,
or if he’s just pausing for effect. Then he takes a deep breath and starts again.

“The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hospital room with a big lump on my head. I don’t remember how I got there or how I got hurt. Something must have happened in the chaos after the shooting. When word reached me that your mother had gone into labor, I was confused—I had a concussion, and was probably still in shock—but I knew that I had to get home.”

Thirty hours later, the story goes, when he finally made it to my mother’s bedside, dazed and smelling like stale cigarettes and taxicab air freshener, my dad could barely hold me.

“Ben,” my mother said as my father gazed into my half-shut eyes for the first time, “he still needs a name.”

Not yet ready to move on from the grief and confusion he’d left behind in California to the joy of new life, my father could only mutter, “Harbinger.”

My mother, a puzzle of a woman if ever there was one, smiled and said, “Okay, Harbinger Robert Francis Jones.”

The events of those agonizing two days finally caught up with my dad, and he broke down. He climbed into the hospital bed next to my mom. With me cradled between them, and with my mother stroking his hair, my father cried himself to sleep.

Dad could never bring himself to call me Bobby like my mother wanted, so they started calling me Harry instead, and it stuck.

But it’s hard to escape a name like Harbinger. And, of course they had no idea what a good choice it would turn out to be.

When I finished the story Jeremiah just looked at me and gave a long low whistle.

“That is one fucked-up story, Harbinger Jones.”

We didn’t say much else after that, and a few minutes later Jeremiah found the Athens address I’d given him—a low ranch house with light blue siding on a sleepy street. We’d been steered here by the drummer from the Woofing Cookies. This was the house of a friend of a friend, and arrangements had been made to let us crash for a few days. Jeremiah left Dino at the end of the driveway.

When I went to shake his hand, he was holding out his pack of Marlboros; inside was the roach from earlier. He winked at me and said, “Take care Harbinger Robert Francis Jones. Stay out of trouble.” And with that, he was gone.

I woke up in a pitch-black room, sweating and out of breath. I was having a nightmare and must’ve been making some sort of horrible noise because Johnny came bursting through the door to see what was wrong.

“I’m all right,” I started to say, “it was just …” But Johnny didn’t stop at the door. He bounded into the room, leapt onto my chest, and wrapped his hands around my throat, choking all the air out of my lungs.

My heart seized and I fell out of bed, waking up for real.

Richie was on the floor next to me, sprawled like a chalk outline. His snoring didn’t even break its rhythm when I hit the ground.

There was light spilling under the door and I heard muffled voices on the other side. Johnny and Cheyenne. They were talking low and laughing.

I caught my breath and got my bearings—we were still in Athens, still crashing in the same house. The room had no air conditioner and my shirt was soaked through.

I got up, grabbed my cigarettes, and snuck out.

Johnny and Cheyenne were in their own room with the door closed. The light I saw was coming from a kitchen, where a stove clock read 3:24. I walked past the refrigerator, out the back door, and lit a smoke.

Off to the right, difficult to make out in the dark, was a twelve foot half-pipe made of pine boards and two-by-fours. It had been built by Tony and Chuck, the two skate punks who lived in the house. Shaved heads, piercings, and tattoos notwithstanding, they were actually pretty nice guys. Despite the fashion choice, they had more in common with Jeff Spicoli than with Aryan youth. All they wanted to do was ride that pipe and drink beer.

Dino was parked in the driveway to my left, wearing his name like a badge of honor. Our van had become a dinosaur, a reminder of another age. Useless and extinct, it had been sitting idle since we arrived two days earlier.

Our first morning in Athens we’d found the local Ford dealer and learned it was going to cost seventeen hundred dollars to fix the van. The entire engine block needed to be replaced. We didn’t have the money, and none of us were willing to ask our families for a loan, so we began canceling tour dates. It felt a little like quitting methadone, but with
no reward at the end. Each gig lost was a punch in the gut. We canceled four dates the first day, and another two the second. We gave ourselves one week to get it sorted out and get back on the road. No one talked about what would happen at the end of that week.

I used the embers of my dying cigarette to light another and decided to go for a walk.

I started off at a rapid clip, the slap of my sneakers against the pavement sounding like the heartbeat of a small bird. I tried to get my mind around everything that was happening—the van, the tour, Johnny and Cheyenne—but it was all too much, so I started listing world capitals instead.

Abu Dhabi, Accra, Addis Ababa
.

The air was a stew of humidity and heat, the only breeze generated by my own movement. The farther I walked, the faster I walked, but it did nothing to cool me off.

Algiers, Amman, Amsterdam
.

I couldn’t slow down, body or mind.

Once, when I was nine or ten years old, I was in the car with my mother going to some doctor or other when the gas pedal got stuck. Bad things always seemed to happen when my mother was behind the wheel of a car. In this case, a little metal burr on the accelerator caught on an adjoining piece of metal in the engine and opened an uninterrupted and unquenchable flow of gasoline to the pistons. The brakes, when fully engaged, produced acrid-smelling
smoke but did nothing to slow our speed. The car couldn’t be stopped. That’s how I felt walking through that stifling night, like that car careening out of control. (My mom eventually saved us by putting the car in neutral and coasting to safety. Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to have a neutral gear. Only drive and reverse.)

Andorra la Vella, Ankara, Antananarivo
.

The mantra of the capitals was the only tangible thing in the world. The only thing I could hold on to. I was seeing everything as if reflected in a room of fun-house mirrors—distorted, ugly, unreal—and I couldn’t find my way out. Parked cars looked like something from an Escher print and the trees were melting. Either the world was breaking down or I was.

Asunción, Athens, Baghdad
.

I had no idea where my feet were taking me, so I was surprised when I rounded a corner and found myself in the center of town. Without knowing how or why, I made a beeline for the pay phone outside of the Athens police station and dialed the first and only number that popped into my brain.

“Dr. Hirschorn’s line,” said a bored woman’s voice. For some stupid reason, I’d imagined that Dr. Kenny would answer the phone himself. It never occurred to me that doctors didn’t answer their own phones, especially in the middle of the night.

“I have a collect call from a Harry Jones,” the operator answered.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Apparently the answering service lady hadn’t encountered collect calls before. Not sure what to do, she accepted the charges.

“May I help you?” she asked, her boredom replaced by alarm.

“I need to speak to Dr. Kenny,” I managed to rasp into the receiver.

“Dr. Kenny?”

“Dr. Hirschorn.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“No. I’m calling in the middle of the night, collect, and can barely breathe. Of course it’s an emergency! Do you think I want to sell him a set of encyclopedias?” Even if I had said that, the poor woman on the other end of the line wouldn’t have understood a word of it. But I didn’t say that or anything intelligible. I don’t think I was capable of forming actual sentences.

“Sir?” she asked.

My only response was to continue blathering world capitals in between gasps of weeping.

“Hold, please,” she said somewhere around
Beirut
.

I had stopped seeing Dr. Kenny not long after Johnny and I started the band. It was my idea to end our sessions. Dr. Kenny resisted.

“What you’ve been through, Harry,” he’d told me, “it’s a lot more complicated than it seems. It’s wonderful that
you’ve made friends and are playing music, but there’s healing that needs to happen at a deeper level, too. And that takes time.”