The Scar Boys (17 page)

The sun was low over the horizon, throwing tangerine soup at a herd of passing clouds, when I heard the door close behind me. I was so lost in my own thoughts that I didn’t realize it was Cheyenne until she was sitting next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I answered.

She seemed to collect her thoughts for a moment and then said, “This doesn’t feel right.”

“What?”

“Playing this party without Johnny. Finishing the tour without Johnny. Being here, without Johnny.”

Since the police had stopped our jam session three mornings earlier, Chey had kept mostly to herself. She stayed in her room, only coming out when we gave her updates on the plans for the fund-raiser, or to rehearse.

“So what do you want to do?” I asked, trying to be gentle. “Do you want to go home?”

“No,” she said, “but it still doesn’t feel right.”

“I think we sound pretty good as a trio,” I offered.

“We do.” She kind of smiled. “Somehow that makes it worse.”

“Look, Chey, if you want to go, we’ll all go. We’ll do whatever you want to do.”

She took my hand and I squeezed her fingers, maybe a little too hard. The next thing I knew, she was kissing my mangled cheek. Her lips were soft. Softer than her hands. Softer than anything in the world. They were the most wonderful things I’d ever felt in my life.

“Thank you, Harry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For still being here.”

Without thinking about what I was doing, I put my hand on her shoulder and gave her neck a little squeeze. I could feel her muscles release all of their tension, like they just needed human contact. She turned her face to mine.

“Cheyenne …” was all I could muster. Our faces were so close that it was mostly an accident when our lips touched. Both of us had our eyes open, and we both froze. Then she closed her eyes and kissed me.

I didn’t know what to do. Literally. Was I supposed to pucker up? Press my mouth forward? Open it? Jam my tongue in there? Luckily, kissing is one of those animal instincts I guess we all have, because before I knew what was happening, I was kissing her back—innocent middle-school kisses, gentle, PG-rated kisses.

I would later learn—researching it, like Dr. Kenny taught me to do—that in those few seconds I was kissing Cheyenne, more than thirty muscles in my face and neck were working in concert as a dozen cranial nerves were busy zipping messages from those muscles to the pleasure centers of my brain—the right ventral tegmental and right caudate nucleus if you’re keeping score—which woke up with a vengeance, probably for the first time since I’d been weaned off of methadone. I learned that Chey’s kisses were causing the posterior lobe of my pituitary gland to release a hormone called oxytocin into my blood, filling me with feelings of generosity, social
connectedness, and all over goodness. (Oxytocin is a drug that can turn any rational person into the village idiot, and is just crying out for someone to market it. Hey, FAP, maybe I should major in marketing!) And had I been paying attention, I would’ve noticed that my blood pressure and heart rate were spiking, my pupils were dilating, that I was getting seismic level cutis anserina (goose bumps), and that I was horripilating in the best possible way. (Some more SAT words for your reading pleasure.)

Interesting stuff, but pointless. The truth is, I was beyond reason, beyond thought. It was the closest thing to playing the guitar I’d ever experienced.

I can’t find my own words to describe kissing Cheyenne, so I’ll share a Chinese proverb we’d learned in tenth grade English:

A total of five seconds later—though the concept of time had lost all meaning—something snapped Cheyenne back to the moment and she pulled away.

“Harry, I’m … I’m sorry.”

Cheyenne got up and walked down the driveway.

She was gone.

By the time we were supposed to go on, just after dark, it seemed like every kid in town was there. There were skate punks with shaved heads, alt rockers with untucked flannel shirts and ripped jeans, new wave kids with over-teased hair, even some thick-necked jocks from UGA. Every kid, except for Cheyenne.

“Dude,” Richie asked me quietly, “do you think she followed Johnny home?”

I was just starting to wonder the same thing when Chey walked up with her bass slung across her back. She looked at both of us and said, “Let’s play.” She walked out onto the makeshift stage.

I was in my full Scar Boy getup—glasses, hat, denim jacket with the collar up (really uncomfortable in the Georgia heat)—ready to escape at the first sign of trouble, but there was no turning back.

Our opening song—“Girl in the Band”—began with the bass and drums pounding out an up-tempo four-four groove. As I waited for my cue, to thrash in the first chords from the guitar, I gave my body to the rhythm and started moving with the music. At first I tapped my foot, which is all I’d ever done onstage before that night, but within a few bars I was letting my whole body shake to the beat. And then the strangest thing happened. I heard a voice in my head.

Yeah, I know. Crazy. But it wasn’t
that
kind of voice. The voice was mine; it was the voice I’d been hearing all my life, the voice that had recited list after boring list of presidents and baseball stats, the voice that had told me to keep quiet when other kids gave me a hard time, the voice that had always done what it was told. But that night I heard something in that voice I’d never heard before: The voice was smiling.

Pump your fist in the air
, the voice suggested, so I did. It was a good idea. With each pump the crowd smacked their hands together, filling the night with thundering clap after thundering clap.

Introduce the band
, the voice told me. I did that, too.

“On the drums, give it up for the skateboarding prince of the groove, Richie McGill!” The guys riding boards on the pipe behind Richie whooped and hollered. He took the cue and did an extended drum fill. The crowd went wild.

Throw your hat
, the voice said. I took the hat off my head, leaving the wig intact, and threw it off the stage. It was snatched one-handed out of the air by a UGA co-ed. She managed to catch it without spilling a drop of her beer.

“On the bass, the princess of pounding rhythm, Cheyenne Belle.” Some of the kids had flashlights and had been waving them in the air like light sabers. All at once they trained their light on Cheyenne. She was radiant. Again the audience screamed in delight.

I didn’t need the voice to tell me what to do next. My jacket came off and I threw my sunglasses deep into the crowd. Then I threw my wig.

“And I’m Harbinger Robert Francis Jones, the king of darkness and despair, and …” Without prior arrangement, without even exchanging a glance, Richie and Chey came to a thundering halt in perfect unison. The echo of the last beat filled the yard and died. The flashlight-spotlight hit me, revealing every crevice of my scars in excruciating detail. There was an audible and collective gasp. In the nanosecond that I paused, I thought about running out of the yard and never looking back, about getting out of that god damn light.

I looked over at Richie and Chey and they were smiling at me. They were both sporting ear-to-ear grins, like that stupid cat in the comics. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

“And we,” I shouted, “are the Scar Boys!”

The beat started again, this time with my guitar, and the crowd went berserk. As I sang the first verse, the voice in my head gave a pat on the back.
Nice
, it said.

Thanks
, I answered, and we were off and running.

Those few hours on the night of the Scar Boys fund-raiser were the best hours of my life. Nothing—and I mean nothing—will ever top them. Sure, adults blather on about their wedding days or holding their newborn children for the first time, or blah, blah, blah, blah. I don’t care. That gig and that kiss were it. It was a climax, a zenith, the realization of a perfect crescendo. I was on the summit of Everest and I was walking on the moon. I wanted to live those moments over and over and over again. And now that we had money to finish the tour, and now that Cheyenne and I had connected, maybe, just maybe I could. My life finally felt like it was turning a corner, like all that awful shit I’d dealt with for all those years would just fade away like bad graffiti. The sunlight would finally win out.

Which is why it had to all come crashing down.

I don’t remember what I did after the gig that night. I know that I drank, a lot, because I woke up the next morning with my head feeling like a pendulum’s weight and throw-up stains on my shirt. I didn’t even know if the stains were mine or someone else’s. I didn’t care.

I found Richie in our room, wearing a pair of socks and boxer shorts and smiling in his sleep. Penny Vick was lounging on the end of his bed smoking a cigarette.

“Great show, Harry,” she said, offering me a smoke.

Penny was a pharmacology student at UGA who’d taken a shine to Richie. He was a little too dense to notice at first, but she’d been all over him like poison ivy the two days leading up to the fund-raiser, and from the looks of what I’d found in his bedroom, he’d finally caught on.

Everything about Penny was interesting and exciting. She had an eight-inch, spiked Mohawk that was blue the day we met her and flaming orange the night of the party. She read interesting books—John Fowles and Jim Carroll. She listened to cool music—R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü. She was the only girl I’d ever met who knew more world capitals, more geographical stats, and more useless trivia than me. (She told me she was an insomniac, and that the lists helped her sleep. Go figure.) Penny was also a constant fixture at the skate house. Her talent on the pipe was well established, and her ability to spar with the otherwise all-boys club—verbally, physically, and otherwise—was legendary.

We got to know Penny in those first few days nearly as well as we got to know Tony and Chuck. In some ways better, because Penny was smart. Really smart. She was in her second year at UGA and, according to Tony, was the “Queen of the Dean’s List.” She was fascinated with the Scar Boys and would pepper us with questions about our band and life in New York. Some of it, I figured, was just a way to get closer to Richie, but most of it was genuine.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the cigarette and bending down for her light. “Is he going to wake up any time soon?” I asked.

“I doubt it.” She smiled.

I shrugged my shoulders and went in search of Cheyenne. I couldn’t find her anywhere, and none of the all-night party stragglers—about a dozen people had crashed at the skate house—had seen her. Chuck saw me milling about and handed me an envelope.

“Open it,” he said, sounding serious. I peeked inside and saw a big, fat wad of cash. It smelled like beer, but it was legal tender. I looked up and Chuck was smiling. He watched me count out $1,627, mostly in tens, fives, and singles.

“Is this all for us?”

“Yeah, we took about a hundred out to cover our costs, but the rest is yours.”

“Sixteen hundred dollars?”

“I know, right?” Chuck said.

We would be able to finish the tour. The Scar Boys were going out as a three-piece, and we were going to finish the tour. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just stood there for a long minute. And then, in the joy of the moment, I felt something I almost never felt: Spontaneous.

“Can you drive me out to where you think there are cars for sale?” I asked.

“Hell yeah,” he answered.

An hour later I pulled into the driveway in a two-door, gray, 1976 Oldsmobile Omega. It had 100,000 miles on it and it seemed to run great. I probably should’ve waited for Richie and Cheyenne, but it was a steal, only three hundred dollars. That meant we’d have the rest of the money to stay in hotels and eat actual food.

When I returned to the skate house and stepped out of the car, I found that the Earth had moved.

Richie, Penny, and Chuck were sitting on the back stoop consoling Cheyenne, who was crying uncontrollably. Richie looked visibly shaken.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“We had a call,” Chuck began, and paused. An alarm bell went off in my head. It seemed like he didn’t know how to continue. I waited. “It was from New York,” he said. The alarm bell became an air-raid siren. “It’s your friend, Johnny. There’s been an accident.”

My first thought on hearing Johnny was in an accident was:

Serves him right
.

I know, I know. I’m a complete and utter dick. But you have to look at it from my point of view. Everything about my life got better the moment Johnny McKenna exited stage left. And it wasn’t just Cheyenne. Yes, connecting with her was awesome. But there was so much more. Without Johnny around to control my every move, without him to remind me, overtly or otherwise, that I needed to be cared for, that I could never be more than one of the sheep, I went through a kind of metamorphosis. It was finally my turn to become a butterfly. Strike that. Maybe it’s better to say I became a moth. Either way, I was no longer the caterpillar, the sheep, the lackey, the number two. With Johnny gone, I was my own man.
It would be my wings flapping now and causing thunderstorms, or whatever else. It was freedom. Wonderful, wonderful freedom.

So yeah, there was a measure of satisfaction deep in my gut when I heard that Johnny’d been in an accident. I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but it’s the truth.

Of course, if I probe deeper I can see that my years of kowtowing to Johnny weren’t really his fault. They were my own fault. Every toady needs a boss and I was no different. We were symbionts. Fonzie and Richie. No wait. That’s not right. Richie had too much moxie. Maybe Fonzie and Potsie. Huh, I guess I was the real Potsie all along. Anyway, after I thought about it for a minute, after I let my brain take over for my heart, I did feel bad. Just not as bad as I should have.