The Scar Boys (5 page)

Johnny’s older brother Russell had a collection of albums spanning thirty years and we devoured every disc, every track, every groove. We started with the Beatles (
Help!
and
Rubber Soul
all the way through
The White Album
and
Abbey Road)
, graduated to
Exile on Main Street, Physical Graffiti
, and
Quadrophenia
(the greatest album ever recorded), and did our postdoctoral work with Elvis Costello, Richard Hell,
and the Clash. We sampled Miles Davis and John Coltrane. We even dabbled in Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. Nothing eluded our grasp.

Every day we spent hours and hours watching those black discs spin, listening to the pop and hiss of the needle riding the imperfections in the vinyl until the first chords took over. We’d lie on our stomachs poring over every inch of the album cover, the back album cover, the liner notes, and, if we were lucky enough to have them, the lyrics.

As we lay there that day, a new record from a band called Black Flag was on the turntable. If the Sex Pistols made the Who and Led Zeppelin sound like they were singing anthems from another age, Black Flag made the Sex Pistols seem overproduced and corporate, if that’s even possible. This was a bunch of guys with a guitar, a bass, and a drum set that were—or at least it sounded like they were—recording in someone’s living room. And they sounded drunk. (While I didn’t have any frame of reference for knowing what a drunk band would sound like, I was pretty sure this was it.) Songs like “Six Pack,” “TV Party,” and “Gimme Gimme Gimme” stitched themselves into a kind of manifesto for Johnny and me.

These guys really didn’t care what anyone else thought. It’s like they were giving the world the finger, and they thought it was really, really funny. We did, too. The entire album, from the first note to the last, infused our
conversation with energy and excitement.

Johnny, as usual, did most of the talking. He would be the lead singer. I would play guitar. We’d find a drummer and a bass player, and maybe a second guitar player. We’d write our own songs because nobody cool ever did cover tunes. We’d have “gigs” (a new word for me that day) at clubs in the Village, and we’d drink beers, and we’d go on tour, and we’d meet girls, and we’d get laid. (Not a new word.)

I just listened, letting the daydream wash over me, cleansing Gabrielle from the surface, letting her sink to a deeper place where she could live in my memory to teach and occasionally haunt me.

“What should we call ourselves?” Johnny asked the question more to himself than to me. I’d hardly said two words as he laid out his vision for the band, so I surprised us both when I spoke.

“How about the Scar Boys?”

For a moment, Johnny was startled. Then he smiled wider than the Grand Canyon. “Brilliant, Harry. Fucking brilliant!”

When I woke the next morning, a rain-soaked Monday, the memory of that afternoon seemed real but insubstantial, like steam. I knew all that stuff about starting a band would be forgotten as quickly as it had been said, that its purpose was to make me forget about Halloween, to ease the blow of getting dumped before ever having had
a girlfriend. But when I caught up with Johnny at school, he was standing at his locker with a seventh grader I recognized but didn’t know. “Harry, meet Richie, the Scar Boys’ drummer.”

Richie, whose unruly chestnut hair made him seem every bit of his five foot ten inch frame and then some, let out a whoop and high-fived me. My jaw must have gone slack (something physical therapy had helped me learn how to do), because the two of them just stood there laughing.

Later that day, Johnny, who worked the school like he was running for office, found our bass player. A quiet kid from period seven social studies, Dave spent most of the class creating intricate drawings of birds, planes, or trees blowing in the wind on the margins of his spiral notebook.

In rounding up bandmates, Johnny had also committed us to play three different holiday parties in late December. There was no turning back.

My parents, even five years later, wore the incident of the thunderstorm like a Scarlet A. Their guilt at finding me tied to that tree half alive—as if they could’ve controlled or prevented it—hung over our house like summer smog. As time wore on I grew to resent it. It made me feel like I’d done something wrong, but it had its advantages, too.

When I told my mom I wanted to play guitar, the same day Johnny had introduced me to my new bandmates, she lit up like a Christmas tree. Before I knew what was happening, I was whisked to the local music store and outfitted with a new Fender Stratocaster, a Peavey amp, and a schedule of lessons once a week from Rick, the long-haired, tattooed “dude” who ran the guitar department.

Rick played lead guitar in a sixties tribute band called
the Skittish Invasion. Their set list covered everything from Gerry and the Pacemakers to Jimi Hendrix, and they appeared regularly at a handful of local bars.

“The money’s decent, but the best part’s the chicks.” Rick talked to me like I was an equal. Strike that. He didn’t talk to me like I was an equal at all. He was Kung Fu and I was Grasshopper. But he didn’t talk to me like I was a freak. He made me believe it was my right to expect every success he’d found with the guitar. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that the success he’d found was, well, kind of lame. Back then I thought Rick was a rock star, and I wanted to be just like him. I really did.

In the year and a half I spent taking lessons, Rick taught me basic music theory, gave me drills to make my pickhand nimble, and showed me how to use a slide. Together we went to school on blues, rock, and country guitar styles, covering everything from pentatonic scales, to how to dampen the strings when using a distortion pedal without causing too much feedback. And, most important, he imbued me with the ancient and sacred knowledge that the most beautiful part of music is the space between the notes.

I don’t think I can ever repay Rick for giving me the gift of music. It is the single greatest gift I’ve ever received. Praise the lord and amen.

But all that took time.

When I arrived at the Scar Boys’ first rehearsal, a mere
four weeks and four guitar lessons later, I’d only managed to learn three chords—A, D, and G. Through relentless hours of practice, groping the Braille of the fret board, I’d trained my hand to creep from one chord to the other and back again. As Johnny, Richie, Dave, and I stood there, staring at each other like a bunch of Neanderthals trying to figure out how to make a fire, I started to play.

A to D, A to D, A to D to G. A to D, A to D, A to D to G.

Dave, who had even less musical experience than me, asked what I was playing, so I shouted out each chord as I strummed it, and he managed to find the matching note on his bass.

A to D, A to D, A to D to G. A to D, A to D, A to D to G.

Richie, who had even less musical experience than Dave, found what little rhythm we were cobbling together and added a flailing but rudimentary four-four beat.

Tick tick tap tap. Tick tick tap tap. Tick tick tap tap.

Johnny grabbed his old Invicta cassette recorder, pressed the “play” and “record” buttons together, and started to sing. I can’t remember the words now, but I think it was called “Middle Class Blues.” It was a song about the drudgery of doing chores and the ills of authority, an anthem for teenage angst. When I listen to that tape now, I’m surprised at how earsplittingly, dog-howlingly awful we were. But when you’re thirteen and you can string three chords together in any organized way, to your own ears you’re the Beatles.

A few weeks later we played four original songs at each of those three holiday parties. Maybe no one had the heart to tell us we stank, or maybe they saw the chemistry and the potential of the Scar Boys and wanted to egg us on. Whatever the reason, they loved us. Or so the other guys told me.

Being onstage, having a spotlight shining on me, even metaphorically, was terrifying. I was still the misfit, still the monster. I played each of those gigs with my dad’s fedora (the one from Halloween) pulled low over my face, a pair of dark sunglasses, and a denim jacket with the collar turned up, and I spent most of the time facing Richie, with my back to the audience. Johnny tried to convince me that the name of the band would make a lot more sense if I could let my guard down, show my face. But I wasn’t ready. After a while he backed off and stopped asking.

We played on like this through ninth and tenth grades, making occasional appearances at friends’ parties, but mostly just jamming in my parents’ basement.

When we weren’t playing music, Johnny and I spent every free minute together. We’d lie on the grass hill by the elementary school, spotting animals, cars, and musical instruments in the clouds during the day, and counting stars at night. We’d leave empty soda cans, and pennies, and once even a history textbook, on the commuter rail tracks, watching the ten-car train demolish whatever was in its path. We’d cut school and sneak in through the movie theater’s back door to see
Return of the Jedi
, or
War Games
, or
The Right Stuff
. We’d try to work up the nerve to talk to girls at the mall, Johnny so effortlessly succeeding, me staying back, lurking in the shadows like the Phantom of the Opera.

And, of course, I’d join Johnny on his nightly run.

It was this last thing, the evening run, that was my favorite ritual. While I didn’t have the same soul-infusing love of running that Johnny did, I saw the appeal. It was easy to lose yourself in the sound of shoes slapping on the pavement, in the whoosh of wind in your ears. It felt good to be moving. Whether we were running away from something or toward something I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.

My friendship with Johnny was making everything better. Even school was becoming bearable. I was still one rung lower on the social ladder than Tina, the girl who’d crapped her pants in the second grade (there are some things you can never live down; her family probably should have moved after that happened), and two rungs lower than Lance, our school’s one and only deaf kid, but classmates who used to laugh at me would now at least nod in my direction, and a small but growing group of kids—mostly the ones that circled Johnny—were becoming my friends.

And then, when we hit the eleventh grade, something strange happened. Something no one anticipated or could have predicted. The Scar Boys got good.

It was around this time that my grades hit rock bottom and my parents were called to the school for a meeting with the principal.

Mom and Dad got there a few minutes early, and the three of us sat in the seats outside the principal’s office in uncomfortable silence. That this meeting had been called wasn’t a surprise to anyone.

The first few years after the lightning strike, when I was spending more time in hospital beds than classrooms, I was never able to catch up in school. The best I could manage was to squeak by. It’s not that I wasn’t smart enough, it’s that I was too physically and emotionally tired to do the work. My parents tried hiring tutors, but there just wasn’t enough gas in my tank for academics.

Even after I stopped the doctors’ visits and even after
I started to live a more normal life—thanks in large part to Johnny—I never became the kind of student my parents hoped I would be.

“You know, Harry,” my father would tell me each time he saw my report card, “a boy like you will have few prospects in life if he doesn’t go to a good college.” I didn’t know if a “boy like me” was a boy who
looked
like me or a boy who
tested
like me. I’m not sure which one was worse.

My dad, who didn’t look pleased to be sitting outside the principal’s office, was just raising his finger to say something when the door opened and we were called inside.

“Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Harry, please come in,” the secretary said. She closed the door behind us as we entered.

The principal, Mr. Sewicky, was a thick, lurching man who wore suits that were too small; it always seemed like he was going to bust out of his clothes like the Hulk. His hair was cut short in a military style, and on his desk was a gold-colored golf ball affixed to a piece of wood with a plaque that read “Hole in One, Stillwater Greens, October 1978.” Behind him on the wall was a mounted and stuffed fish that didn’t look happy. Why Mr. Sewicky was a principal in suburban New York instead of, say, Oklahoma, is a mystery to me.

He didn’t come out from behind his desk to shake anyone’s hand. Instead, he motioned to three empty seats and we all sat down.

This was the first time my parents had ever been called to Mr. Sewicky’s office. Not so for me. The principal and I had become well acquainted over the years. While I had been called down once or twice to talk about grades, more often it was because one or more of the school’s thugs had been picking on me.

Even though I had started to make friends, and even though hanging around a popular kid like Johnny McKenna offered a certain level of protection, that protection had its limits. I was still a favorite target of the school’s Nazi youth. There was no shortage of kids like Billy the Behemoth in high school, and I was one of their go- to guys.

There were the obvious things like wedgies and punches and kicks, but sometimes the more twisted of the school’s goons would get creative. There was a kind of art to it.

The worst was in ninth grade shop class when a boy named Alvaro Dimatteo discovered the mystery and wonders of a blowtorch. (You need a license to drive a car or own a gun, but the board of education will hand any fourteen- or fifteen-year-old a blowtorch. I need someone to explain that to me.)

I don’t know if Alvaro knew about my deeply ingrained fear of fire, but it didn’t matter. Five minutes into class he had me pinned into a corner, the lit blowtorch a few inches from my arms, which were held cowering over my head. When the teacher pulled him off and sent us both to the
principal’s office, the other students cheered. They weren’t cheering for me.