The Scar Boys (7 page)

Johnny wasted no time:

“
The Scar Boys are holding auditions for a new bass player today after school at 55 Elberon Ave
. (That was my house.)
Bring your instrument and bring your chops
.”

The handwritten ads were plastered all over school the day after the CBGB’s debacle, and we were floored when half a dozen kids showed up. Johnny had them wait in the backyard, calling each one in turn through the door that led to my family’s basement.

The room itself was a catalog of bad trends in seventies decorating: Blond paneling surrounded a beige tile floor, three striped sofas formed a semicircle in front of a color television and a red shag rug, and my dad’s autographed
photo of Bill Russell stood watch over a plastic ficus tree, hoping it, along with the rest of the room, might turn into something less ugly. This self-contained den occupied about a third of the basement. The rest was open space once devoted to a Ping-Pong table, but for the last few years playing host to Richie’s drum kit and my amp.

The first bass player hopefuls were all kids we knew and any one of them would have been a fine replacement for Dave. We probably would have settled on Petey Havermayer—a short, sturdy kid with a deviated septum—if Cheyenne Belle hadn’t walked in.

Cheyenne Belle.

She couldn’t have stood more than five feet tall, and she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds soaking wet. The bass she held, a Rickenbacker, was large against her body, like a prop for a comedian parodying a race of tiny rock musicians. Her hair, the color of coal, was cut short in the back and left long in the front. Thick bangs hung down to her nose, obscuring one of her eyes, eyes so large that they looked like something out of a Disney movie. Cheyenne’s features, other than those eyes, were like her physique—small, delicate, and fragile, waiting for a stiff wind to blow them away. She wore a boy’s size, blue, button-down shirt, which hung loosely over tan shortshorts so close in color to the tone of her skin that at first glance she looked naked below the waist. Her outfit was
completed by a pair of dusty red cowboy boots on the bottom, and a scaly red cowboy hat on top.

Johnny, Richie, and I were struck dumb. We were unable to talk, unable to move, unable to blink. A tiny smile crept on Cheyenne’s tiny face and she said, “Where can I plug in?”

Johnny regained enough of his wits to point to the patch cord, one end lying on the floor at her feet, the other tethered to the second input on my amp. She looked at me as she plugged in, pausing a beat as we made eye contact. I don’t know if she was examining my scars or just silently saying hello. Whatever it was, I wilted under her gaze and looked away.

Richie broke the silence. “Um, like, how old are you?”

“Old enough,” she said in a way that closed the subject then and for all time. It turned out Cheyenne was our age, she was just cursed—or to my way of thinking, blessed—by those pixyish features. She attended Our Lady of the Perpetual I-Still-Can’t-Remember-the-Name Catholic High School. How she heard about our audition, I never knew.

But the thing about Cheyenne that surprised us the most? She could play that bass like Jaco Pastorius. She responded to each new musical challenge we threw at her, playing the line we asked, and then improvising and improving it. For fifteen minutes we tried to trip her up, until it became a sort of game, finally coming to an end
when one of the kids out in the yard opened the door and yelled downstairs, wanting to know if the auditions were over. They were.

We thanked Cheyenne and asked her to wait outside.

Johnny, our de facto leader, spoke first.

“Okay, she’s in. But listen to me—none of us, not me, not you, not you,” pointing at Richie and me in turn, “as long as we’re in this band, can ever date this girl, kiss this girl, or sleep with this girl. She is off-limits. Agreed?”

Richie and I nodded.

Johnny would be the first to break this rule. I would be the last.

From the moment Cheyenne joined the Scar Boys, things changed. Our rehearsals, our gigs, our music became infused with a new kind of energy. Maybe it was the sexual tension of having a girl in what had been an all-boys band, maybe it was hit-you-in-the-face rock and roll, or maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, it worked.

We thought we had gotten good with Dave in the band, and at some level, we had. We really had. But when Chey came along, it was like a whole new world opened up to us musically. She was the missing piece of our chemical equation. Everything seemed to go right when she was around. I broke fewer guitar strings, Richie broke fewer sticks, and Johnny hit notes beyond his range. We all settled into a groove and a confidence that worked like an amplifier. Not only did we get better, we got ten times better.

This new energy had a profound effect on me. For the first time since Johnny and I started the band, I took my hat, sunglasses, and denim jacket off, and I turned around to face the world. Yeah, sure, it was only rehearsal, with no one but the four of us there, but for me, it was a huge step. Or rather, it would’ve been a huge step if not for Johnny.

“Harry, what are you doing?”

The question was like a blow to my solar plexus. I practically doubled over in pain when Johnny asked it. Richie and Cheyenne stopped what they were doing to watch the exchange.

“What?” I answered. It wasn’t really a question. It was more of an annoyed bark.

“Your disguise. You’re taking it off?”

It didn’t dawn on me at the time, but
disguise
was a carefully chosen word. It had the same effect on me that Darth Vader’s “I find your lack of faith disturbing” had on
Star Wars
Expendable Guy Number Two. (In case, FAP, you’re not well acquainted with the
Star Wars
canon—and shame on you if you’re not!—Darth Vader uses his mind to choke Expendable Guy Number Two while uttering that phrase. It’s awesome.)

“I dunno,” I mumbled to my feet.

“Huh.” That’s all he had to say.
Huh
. Embedded in that word was everything between us. It said that I didn’t get to make a decision like that on my own. That there were
to be no big changes without the Johnny McKenna seal of approval. You have to understand that while Johnny didn’t actually tell me what to do or not to do, everyone in the room knew exactly what his
Huh
meant.

I started to put the sunglasses and hat back on when Cheyenne cut in. She was looking straight at Johnny, but she spoke to me.

“Harry, you should leave them off. You have a beautiful face.”

Johnny just shrugged and turned away. When he did, Chey turned to me. I was a deer caught in the headlights. I was a mounted, stuffed, decapitated deer caught in the god damn headlights.

“You should do what makes you comfortable, Harry. Don’t listen to him.”

If Richie or I had tried to defy Johnny like that, the result would have been an hour-long lecture on whatever the topic of that day was, on why we were wrong, and why he was right. Things didn’t work that way with Cheyenne. No one, and I mean no one—not even Johnny McKenna—tangled with that girl.

The oldest of seven sisters, Cheyenne grew up in a Catholic household that was part
Carrie
, and part
Caddyshack
. Her mother went to church several times a week, mostly to pray for the soul of her father. He wasn’t dead, he just
smelled that way. The man’s system had absorbed enough alcohol over the years to synthesize formaldehyde. Chey’s dad didn’t seem to know or care. He would just sit in his favorite chair, watch television game shows, and drink cheap brandy.

The influence of the Church at home was felt in the preponderance of crucifixes, Virgin Mary statues, and house rules—no boys, no makeup, no boys, no short skirts, no boys, no jewelry, and oh, yeah, no boys. But with her mom’s devotion to Christ being a full-time vocation, and her father’s devotion to the Christian Brothers being a full-time vacation, Chey and her sisters discovered early on that house rules were meant to be broken. For all the bluster religious people have about God and family, the Belle girls were raising themselves. They may as well have been orphans.

About a year after I met Cheyenne, her sister—fifteen years old—delivered a stillborn baby in her bed at home because no one knew she was pregnant. Don’t ask me how a teenage girl can hide a nearly full-term pregnancy. Chey said that her sister was overweight to begin with, and that she wore a steady diet of peasant blouses, but I still had trouble believing it. Which was another thing about Cheyenne. You never quite knew when she was telling the truth.

It’s not that she was a liar, just that she liked to stretch the facts to make a better story. When she told me that
she stole her first bass guitar from the local music store, I took her at her word. I found out later that the bass was a rental that Cheyenne returned only after the store started legal proceedings for late payments.

As she stood there staring at me—my sunglasses and hat still in my hands—the only thing I could think was
Did she just say I have a beautiful face?
(Maybe Chey took liberties with the truth sometimes, but I never questioned her sincerity.)

I was about to put my costume on the floor, but then I caught Johnny’s eye.

As smitten as I was with Cheyenne, Johnny still trumped everyone else. If he thought it was a bad idea, it was a bad idea. I put the “disguise” back on.

Cheyenne offered me a smile tinged with melancholy, and nothing else in my life has ever made me feel like more of a failure. I wanted to kill Johnny. Looking back, this was probably the beginning of the end for the Scar Boys, but I didn’t know that at the time.

I launched into our next song, with perhaps a bit more intensity on the downstroke of my pick hand. I let my wrist take out some aggression on the strings, punishing them for the long list of things that were wrong with the world.

With the band graduating to new levels of musical prowess and interpersonal chemical connection, it didn’t take long before we were ready to play out.

Johnny and Cheyenne took our new demo tape down to CBGB’s and tried to convince Carol, the booking agent, to give us another chance. She did.

Having been through the pre-gig routine at CB’s once already, we knew exactly what we were doing and what to expect. What we didn’t expect, what I didn’t expect, was the feeling I got from being onstage, on a real stage.

Playing in front of people was like a drug. The walls dropped away and I found myself surrounded by open air, floating above everything. The energy of the audience—even the tiny audience at that first gig—wrapped the entire band in a protective bubble. Only the music and the
knowledge of each other existed. We were four individuals merged into one seamless being, each inside the other’s head, each inside the other’s soul. Music, I discovered that night, was a sanctuary, a safe place to hide, a place where scars didn’t matter, where they didn’t exist.

We didn’t bring enough friends through the door to get a paying gig, but the soundman liked us, so they invited us back to play another showcase.

Besides the CBGB’s gigs, we were playing Monday and Tuesday nights at the unsung clubs of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the Bitter End, R.T. Firefly, A7, and an aptly named dive called the Dive. These were the least desirable gigs in all of New York—the rooms were cramped, the bartenders were surly, and sound systems were seemingly hijacked from a White Castle drive-thru window—but they were gigs.

We got a small write-up in the
Village Voice
, and a DJ at WNYU, the only college station playing alternative music in all of New York City, had taken a shine to us, comparing us on the air to the Jam.

The more we played, the better we got. We eventually graduated from showcases to paying gigs, from Mondays and Tuesdays to Thursdays and Fridays. By the time we played our first Saturday night at CBGB’s, in February 1986 and a little more than a year after Chey had joined the band, we’d started to gain a small but legitimate following.

We were the first of four bands on the bill that night, so we had to start our set at the ridiculous hour of eight o’clock. But even that early the room was wall-to-wall people, two hundred or more. It was by far the largest crowd we’d ever seen. When I strummed the opening notes of our first song, our friends and small but growing fan base gathered around the front of the stage like an eager congregation.

Richie and Cheyenne were in perfect sync. Their groove served as a polished steel backbone for the guitar and melody. The sounds screaming out of my big Peavey speakers were the exact blend of twang and balls I was always striving for but never quite seemed to nail. And Johnny moved and shook like he was possessed by the Holy Ghost.

In short, we kicked ass.

When we were called back for an encore, a palpable buzz made the walls of the nightclub shake. A coordinated throng of Lower Manhattan’s rowdy and raucous punks—our thirty fans having swelled to two hundred disciples—hopped in unison and sang along as we lurched into our one and only cover tune, Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

Johnny practically made love to the mic with his low, sultry voice while the three of us scratched out a punk arrangement of the music. Cheyenne marched in lockstep to the snare drum, her red cowboy boots keeping time with the beat, the sole of each foot sliding in small
rhythmic circles on the dusty planks of the CBGB’s stage. Watching her had a physical effect on me—my palms and neck started to sweat, my sunglasses fogged up, and my heart, which was thumping along with the music, thumping along with Cheyenne, felt like it was going to explode.