The Scar Boys

The Scar Boys By Len Vlahos


January 21, 1987

The University of Scranton

Office of Undergraduate Admissions

Scranton, PA 18510-4699

Dear Admissions Professional,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to become a matriculating student at the University of Scranton. I have had many interesting experiences in my life. I will represent the school well. I work hard and am a quick study. I have a wide variety of interests and I am dedicated to—Wait.

Wait, wait, wait.

250 words? Are you kidding? It can’t be done. Whoops, just wasted four words, five if you count the contraction, telling you “it can’t be done.” Another 17 words talking about telling you that “it can’t be done.” Another 12 … never mind. This could go on forever.

Here’s the short version of what you need to know:

I’m ugly and shy and my face, head, and neck are covered with hideous scars. (15 words)

Here’s the slightly longer version:

I’m ugly and shy and my face, head, and neck are covered with hideous scars.

I was almost struck by lightning.

I wish I had been struck by lightning.

I was a methadone addict before the age of 10.

It’s my fault that my best friend almost got killed.

I played guitar in the greatest punk rock band you’ve never heard of.

And that was all before my 19th birthday, which isn’t for another five months. (76 words)

But the most important thing to know about me, what you really need to grok in order to understand what kind of student you’ll be getting, is that I, Harbinger Robert Francis Jones, am a coward.

I just counted and “coward” was word number 248, and that doesn’t even include the date or your address, so I should stop. But I can’t believe you know me any better yet, and that was your goal, right? So with your permission—strike that, with or without your permission—I’m going to exceed that word count, just a little.

Okay, maybe a lot.

I suppose I should start at the beginning, and it begins with a question …





THUNDER ROAD


(written by Bruce Springsteen, and performed by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band)




“Who the f*ck are you?”

An older and much larger boy stood over me, blotting out the sun. “You weren’t god damn here when we chose up the god damn sides.” He was trying on curse words the way a little girl tries on her mother’s shoes.

The boy wasn’t just big, he was cartoon big. He also wasn’t alone. He was one of seven snot-nosed tweens surrounding me like I was in the middle of a football huddle. They had decided to make me a central character in their game of Ringolevio. I had no idea what that word meant, and didn’t have a clue about the rules of the game, but near as I could tell, it was something between hide-and-seek and all-out neighborhood war.

I don’t remember what I was doing just before the “Who the f*ck are you?” It’s as if the entire universe came into being all at once in that exact moment. Earlier memories just don’t exist for me. Strike that. They exist, but they’re buried in a place where I can’t find them. They can only be reconstructed from the outside. (If you’re wondering how this can be, give yourself a pat on the back, because you’re asking a really good question. Read on.)

“Who the f*ck are you?” the boy demanded a second time.

A thick haze hung between the sun and Earth like gauze, trying to choke the life out of everything—even the flies and mosquitoes didn’t have any energy. It was the kind of summer afternoon that bred impatience.

“I don’t know,” I muttered back. With no brothers or sisters to properly weave me to the fabric of kid society, I was, at eight years old, mostly overlooked, and only occasionally tolerated by the other children in our neighborhood. I was so lost in the excitement of an older boy actually talking to me, that it took me a minute to realize it wasn’t going so well.

“You don’t know who you are? Are you f*cking retarded, shit-for-brains?” The other boys laughed.

“I’m Harry Jones,” I mumbled at my shoes.

“Well then,” the older boy said and puffed out his chest like Patton, “you, Harry Shit Jones, have been caught by the Sharks—that’s our team—and you’re our prisoner.” The other boys stomped their feet in approval. I’d wandered into the final act of Lord of the Flies but was too young to know it. “And what’s worse, you little ass head,” he leaned in close, “you’ve been caught cheating.”

“I wasn’t chea—”

“Shut up.”

“Honest, I wasn’t—”

He punched me, hard, in the shoulder. I was already too scared to cry, and somehow I knew crying would only make it worse. Maybe if I take my lumps, I thought, it’ll all turn out okay.

“Whaddya think we should do with him?” someone asked.

One of the other kids, a freckled little creep named Timmy, who called me “Shrimp Toast” every time he saw me playing in front of my house, was holding a length of rope, maybe a clothesline, maybe something else. “I think we should put him in jail,” he said. This was met with laughs and hoots all around.

The jail was a small but sturdy dogwood tree, its thick green leaves providing shade, but no protection from the heat. According to the rules, I was supposed to keep one hand on the tree at all times until a teammate tagged me free. But I didn’t know the rules, didn’t know rope wasn’t supposed to be part of the game.

I let them tie me to the tree without a struggle, never complaining as they pulled the nylon cord too tight, wrapping it several times around the trunk, binding me from my shoulders to my knees.

Thick gray clouds soon replaced the summer haze, and the painfully still air started to move. The first drops of rain prompted one mother after another to open her ranch house window and bellow for little Jimmy or Johnny or Danny to get inside. The game started to break as the kids sprinted for home. No one seemed to remember I was there, bound to that tree.

“Guys!” I screamed. “GUYS!”

Childhood, for all its good press, is a time when the human animal explores the dark side of the Force, pushing the limit of the pain it’s willing to inflict on bugs, squirrels, and little neighborhood boys. Most kids outgrow the darker impulses by high school. The ones that don’t spend their teenage years playing football, lacrosse, and, dating the prom queen. (It doesn’t seem fair to me, either, but hey, I don’t make the rules.)

Only one boy, Timmy with the freckles and the rope, heard me. He turned around and we locked eyes. I believed, if only for an instant, that I was saved. By the time I understood why his face was twisting itself into something between a smile and sneer, he was already in a dead run, headed for his own house, probably planning to torture his hamster or sister or something. I heard his door slam shut.

The first bolt of lightning wasn’t a bolt at all. It was a flash, like a camera’s flash, bringing every atom of the world into stark relief for a nanosecond. My mother taught me to count “Mississippis” when I saw lightning, so I did. There were nine before I heard the first rumble of thunder. I forgot what that meant, but I knew the heart of the storm was still far away, and as long as there were at least nine in the next group of Mississippis, I’d be safe.

The rain started falling harder, the noise surrounding me like freeway traffic. There was another flash and I started to count again.

One Mississippi. The wind was blowing little pieces of our neighborhood across the lawn: an unsecured lid from a plastic garbage can, a red kickball, a white dress shirt liberated from someone’s untended clothesline.

Two Mississippi. A latticework fence supporting tomato plants was bending sideways as the rain, now waving in translucent sheets like see-through shower curtains, pooled into muddy lakes around the yard. My brain turned to jelly and my bladder let loose.

Three Mississi—a sonic BOOM slammed my head against the tree. My skin and clothes were drenched in a cocktail of rainwater, sweat, and urine. The heart of the storm—now a living, breathing thing—had moved closer.

Another flash and I started my count again, this time out loud.

“One Mississippi!” My voice, choked by its own sobs, only carried a few feet forward where it was swallowed by the torrent of water and wind. I began writhing like a fish on a hook, trying to loosen the nylon cord and slip free.

“Two Mississippi!” I noticed a cat, its tortoiseshell hair matted flat by the deluge, hiding beneath a stack of lawn chairs that was pushed up against the house in front of me. Its legs were pulled tight under its waterlogged body, and its eyes were open wide, darting back and forth and looking for some escape. It spotted me, held my gaze, and wailed like a banshee, loud enough for me to hear through the rain.

“Three Mississippi!” Seeing the cat calmed me down. I wasn’t alone. As long as we were together, me and this cat, we were going to be okay. I regained control of my voice. The wind died down just a little. Even the fence with the tomato plants wasn’t bending so far forward.

“Four Mississippi!” No lightning. No thunder. The storm was moving away.

“Five Mississippi!” I thought I could hear my mom’s voice calling me. She sounded far away and she sounded scared. I tried to call back, but my voice still wasn’t carrying. I shouted again, as loud as I could: “MOM!”

“Six Missi—” Before I could say “ssippi,” before any thunder from that flash reached my ears, and before I had any idea if my mother heard me calling out to her, a new spear of lightning found me. It struck the tree just above my head.

In the instant before everything went black, just before I was sure I’d died, I looked up and saw that the cat was gone.





SOMEBODY GET ME A DOCTOR


(written by Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony, and David Lee Roth, and performed by Van Halen)




The lightning bolt sawed the top of the tree cleanly off. A large shaft of the trunk, a piece like a battering ram, landed on my head. It fractured my skull, dislocated my shoulder, and knocked me unconscious. What was left of the tree—enough that I was still loosely bound to it—caught fire, leaving third-degree burns on my shoulders, neck, face, and scalp. My mother found me dangling there in just enough time to pull me free, call an ambulance, and save my life.

I didn’t remember any of it.

I woke up four days later in a dimly lit hospital room that smelled like Bactine. Whirring machines and blinking lights formed an eerie halo around my body, pieces of which, including my face, were wrapped in gauze. My view of the world was restricted to a small, cotton-framed slit. At first I was disoriented. I wondered if I was on a submarine or a spaceship. But as soon as I tried to move, the pain went coursing through the millions of exposed nerve endings, and I passed out. I regained and lost consciousness like that often the first couple of weeks.

The treatments during my “recovery” were the kind of nightmare from which you just can’t wake up. The worst of it was the changing of the bandages. The nurses tried to make it a game by calling it the Changing of the Guard. “You know Harry, like at Buckingham Palace.” Only I didn’t know what Buckingham Palace was, and even if I had known, it wouldn’t have helped. The balm slathered on my wounds acted like glue, fusing the sterilized cotton pads to the fleshy meat of my neck and head, leaving the nurses with no choice but to rip the bandages off. And when I say “rip,” I mean they would grab an end of the gauze and pull it like they were trying to start a gas-powered lawn mower. I would put up such a fight that they had to strap me down. They had me on a morphine drip for most of my hospital stay, and I took an oral version of methadone hydrochloride for many months after. It was supposed to help manage the pain in a less addictive way. It didn’t entirely work.

My memory of the doctors and nurses is colored by images of generals and admirals—a group of authoritative yahoos trying to inspire me back to full health, telling me to “buck up,” to “be brave,” to “never give up hope.” I lost count of how many times they told me it was a miracle I wasn’t killed and that I should be grateful to have spent only forty-five days in the hospital. They had no answer for the burns, which, while they did heal, left me badly and irrevocably scarred, or for my memory loss, which left gaping holes in my personal history that had to be rebuilt by others.

By the time I got home, I was inconsolable. People talk about the resiliency of children, but those same people have never tied those same children to a tree during a thunderstorm to test the theory. I refused to eat, refused to speak, even refused to watch television. My parents tried all manner of carrots and sticks to coax me out of my funk, but nothing worked.

Nothing until I met Lucky Strike the Lightning Man.

Years earlier, Lucky had been working as a groundskeeper on an estate north of where we lived when a wayward thread of lightning struck him on the top of the head.

It was something between a miracle and a fluke that Lucky’s injuries were as minor as they were. He spent eighteen hours unconscious, and woke up with a mild headache and strange gaps in his memory. For example, he couldn’t remember the name of his cat, so he eventually renamed it “Bolt.” The cat, Lucky would tell me, never answered to the new name. It seemed instead to be waiting for someone, anyone, to call it by its proper name. No one ever did.

Lucky found himself spending every free minute reading about lightning, researching storm systems, and attending meteorology classes at the local community college. He needed to understand how and why he’d been singled out. Lightning became his great white whale.

Through this obsession, Lucky met and was embraced by an underground network of natural disaster fanatics—tornado chasers, earthquake junkies, hurricane watchers, even one lonely devotee of tsunamis. When they founded the Society for the Study of Natural Phenomena, it was no surprise that Lucky—the only one of the group to have experienced his natural disaster firsthand—was asked to serve as the group’s president.

The first official function of Nat-Phen, as they called themselves, was a presentation at a local library on the dangers of weather. Using blowups of photographs and acetate slides shone on a mammoth screen, the session—titled Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Lightning: What You Don’t Know Just Might Kill You—was a smashing success. The Putnam County Weekly called it “an eye-opening, hair-raising ride,” and singled out “Lucky Strike the Lightning Man” as a “fellow who knows his stuff.” Other libraries caught wind of the group, and Nat-Phen was invited to give a series of presentations all around southern New York State. My mother read about one of Lucky’s presentations, and that was how he and I met.

Lucky was tall and lean and had a thick mane of blond hair with one shock of gray arching up from his forehead. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, and he had a slight quiver to his thin lower lip. The rosy hue of his cheeks stood out against the ghostly pallor of his skin. I thought maybe he was a teacher or a professor because his tweed blazer had patches sewn on the sleeves.


I wondered if Lucky was disappointed that I wasn’t actually struck by lightning, that I was hit by a falling, burning tree struck by lightning. In a lot of ways my life would’ve been easier if I’d received a direct hit. To be the boy almost struck by lightning was like finishing second in the big race. You ran, but no one cared. But if Lucky was disappointed, he didn’t let it show.

“Had the lightning hit you directly,” he told me, “your burns probably would have been much less severe.” He had a very civilized way of speaking, like a career diplomat, like Winchester from M*A*S*H. “That’s not to say you would have come through unscathed. Electricity flows through a human body, which, unlike a tree, is quite a good conductor of current. It is like being inside a microwave oven, for just an instant.” Microwaves weren’t all that common in 1976, but I knew what they were and I formed a mental image of bubbling soup.

“The concentrated surge of energy,” he continued, “eviscerates the nervous and autonomic systems.” I didn’t know what eviscerate meant or what autonomic systems were, but he had my attention. “Our brethren, those souls fortunate enough to survive a lightning strike, often suffer terrible maladies.”

“Maladies?” I asked, sounding out the word

“Illnesses,” he answered.

“Like what?”

“Oh, from simple things like headaches, dizziness, and vomiting, to more serious ailments like amnesia, depression, and suicide. In very brutal strikes,” he said, “the heart can stop, depriving the brain of blood and oxygen. When it restarts, the victim is something of a vegetable. No, wait,” he smiled, “not a vegetable, a piece of toast.”

My mother, who’d been sitting quietly in a corner of the room, got quickly to her feet. I guess talking about depression and suicide to an already distraught eight-year-old wasn’t what she had in mind when she invited Lucky to our house. But then Mom looked at me and saw something in my eyes—a spark of life, a flicker of hope, or maybe just plain old interest—that she hadn’t seen since before the storm.

The truth is my mom’s a saint. She sacrificed everything for me after the storm. She used to play tennis, she used to be in bowling leagues, hell, my mom used to write. All of that went up in smoke with me and that dogwood tree.

It took me a couple of years to figure out how much the lightning strike had been affecting the people around me, and when I did I felt awful. Mom saw me moping more than usual one day and asked what was wrong.

“Nothing,” I said.

“No, really honey, what is it?”

“I’m just sorry is all.”

“Sorry for what?”

“For ruining your life.” I have a flair for the dramatic when I want to, but I meant what I said. I really did.

Mom looked at me and burst into tears. “Don’t ever, ever, ever apologize again,” she said to me. “Never.” She hugged me and held on to me for as long as I would let her, which that day was a long time.

So when my mom saw me connecting with Lucky, or rather, saw Lucky connecting with me, she knew enough to let it play out. She sat back down.

“A piece of toast?” I asked Lucky. He nodded, and then shifted gears.

“Do you know, young man,” he asked, “what can happen when one little butterfly flaps its wings in China, all the way on the other side of the world?”

I didn’t, so I shook my head.

“When those little wings flap,” and here he extended his gangly arms and made slow, graceful flapping motions, “they move little molecules in the air. Do you know what molecules are?”

I was pretty sure I did, so I nodded.

“Good, good. Now picture those molecules moving and bumping into other molecules, which bump into other molecules, which bump into other molecules. All these molecules affecting the course of those that surround them, changing them, moving them in different directions, just because a butterfly flapped its wings.” He could see I was confused. “So a butterfly flapping its wings in China in April can cause a thunderstorm in New York in July,” he finished.

I thought about this. Was Lucky trying to tell me that my thunderstorm was caused by a butterfly in China? Or was he telling me that things like thunderstorms are so random that there’s no point trying to make sense of them?

“You see, Harry, even the tiniest little event, something that can happen so quickly that you would miss it were you to blink your eyes, can have long-lasting, far-reaching consequences. One little thing can cause so many other things to happen. And here is the secret.” He leaned in so close I could smell the aftershave on his neck and the peppermint chewing gum on his breath. “All these things that happen, if you don’t control them, they will control you. It is up to you, Harry.” He held my gaze for a moment, waiting to see if I understood. I wasn’t sure I did, though I knew what he was telling me was important.

Lucky took my hand in his and told me to keep my chin up. I took him literally, and despite the pain of healing burns and structural damage to my neck, I managed to sit up a little straighter. With that he got up to go.

He left me a card with his phone number and told me I could call him at any time for any reason. “We are brothers,” he said, “brothers of the storm.”

I never saw Lucky again, and I never called the number, but I’ve carried that card with me my entire life. It’s like a Valium prescription, always at the ready, just in case.