The Scar Boys

TIME’S UP


(written by Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, and performed by the Buzzcocks)




Dr. Kenny and I picked up right where we’d left off five years earlier—me on the couch staring up at the Sharpie drawings of rock stars that lined his office walls, and Kenny in the big comfy chair at my side, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

The couch felt like a bit of a cliché. You see it in every hackneyed movie or television show about psychiatry. But when I first began my appointments as an eight-year-old, I was so physically weak from the trauma of my ordeal that lying down was easier than sitting up, and the couch became my spot. Old habits die hard, I guess.

While the whole experience felt very familiar to me, some things had changed, too. Most notably, Dr. Kenny.

The streaks of gray that had flecked the black hair at Dr. Kenny’s temples when I was younger were now peppered across his entire head. But it wasn’t just the hair that made him seem older. There was a sadness about Dr. Kenny that hadn’t been there before. Like the world had beaten him down. His insides had gone from the warm glow of halogen light to the cold glare of fluorescence. The best way to describe the Dr. Kenny from my youth was the Iggy Pop song “Lust for Life”; now he seemed to fit better with Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life” instead.

I’d noticed a similar thing with my dad, and it made me wonder if people, when they reach a certain age, forget how to be happy. Like maybe they grow up to become what they were once rebelling against, and it makes them sad without even knowing it.

I asked Dr. Kenny about the sadness at our second session. I was still getting him caught up on everything that’d happened to me since I’d “abandoned him”—his words, not mine—but his attention seemed to wander. I asked if he was okay.

“You really want to know?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I lost a patient two years ago,” he said. He must’ve seen me look perplexed, because he added, “Suicide.”

Dr. Kenny is a gentle and sensitive soul. I can’t begin to imagine how that would’ve made him feel. No wonder he was so freaked out by my phone call from Athens.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked. Dr. Kenny looked at me like he’d never seen me before. And that’s the other thing that had changed about our relationship: Me.

I was broken almost beyond repair when Dr. Kenny and I found one another in 1976, and our bond developed as one of teacher and student. Much like my relationship with Johnny or my father, I was beta to Dr. Kenny’s alpha, though in a far more loving and constructive way. He asked the questions, I evaded the answers.

But that kid was gone, replaced by an older, more complicated Harbinger Jones. That this new model had the wherewithal, the balls, to ask a direct and caring question like, “Do you want to talk about it?” must’ve thrown Dr. Kenny for a loop.

“Thanks, Harry,” he finally said. “I really appreciate that, but I can’t violate doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“Even if the patient is … gone?”

“Even if the patient is gone,” he answered, choking on the word.

“Huh,” I grunted in response. He grunted, too.

I told Dr. Kenny everything. From Dave’s odd disappearance from the band, to meeting Cheyenne, to cutting a record, to buying a van, to seeing Johnny and Cheyenne do it, to everything that happened in Georgia. I omitted nothing. It took me nearly three sessions to get it all out.

“And that brings us to the here and now, Dr. K,” I said near the end of my third visit.

Dr. Kenny had stayed on the edge of his chair through my whole narrative, only interrupting when he needed to ask a question or clarify a point. He looked at me for a long moment when I finished, then sat back, took off his glasses, cleaned them, put them back on, and then looked at me some more. I knew this trick. He was trying to get me to say the one thing I wasn’t saying. It almost always worked. But not this time. I really didn’t know what the one thing was.

Then Dr. Kenny surprised me. Strike that. He blew me right out of the god damn water.

“You know, Harry,” he said, “sometimes you can be such a schmuck.”

The only time Dr. Kenny had ever said anything remotely like this to me was when I was twelve years old. For something like our fifth straight session I was coming in with schoolyard bruises to show him, visible reminders that socially I was lower than a pariah and only barely higher than a corpse. In fact, that’s exactly what I told Dr. Kenny.

“Socially I’m lower than a pariah and only barely higher than a corpse.”

I was kind of pleased with that line. I’d thought of it earlier in the week and had been waiting for my session with Dr. Kenny to use it. Apparently, it didn’t play very well.

“Dammit, Harry,” he’d said. Dr. Kenny never swore with me. “Don’t you ever stand up for yourself?”

I was stunned into complete silence. Dr. Kenny ran his hands through the shaggy mop on his head and immediately apologized. I’m not sure what prompted him to go so far off his script. Was he stressed over stuff in his personal life? Problems with another patient? Had he just had enough of me? Whatever it was, it hurt. It took another two sessions to coax me back out of my shell.


But calling me a “schmuck” was different. I could tell Dr. Kenny was using the expression the same way he might use it with his own friends. I could also tell there would be no apology.

“Seriously,” he continued, “just listen to yourself.”

“What?” I wanted to sound indignant, but I don’t think I pulled it off.

“You’ve been playing guitar in a rock band, you have friends, you kissed a girl, you’ve been traveling, you put out your own record. Most kids would give their big toe to live the life you’re living.”

“They can have it,” I said almost reflexively.

Dr. Kenny rolled his eyes in exasperation. I’m not sure why I wasn’t hearing Dr. Kenny. Whether it was a choice or not, I really couldn’t say. He shook his head and decided to change tactics.

“How long have you been home now?” he asked.

“I dunno, about a month, I guess.”

“And you haven’t tried to talk to Johnny or Cheyenne?”

“No,” I said to my shoes. “They hate me.”

“How do you know that?”

“Haven’t you been listening? Because the last time I saw Johnny we got in a fight and I hit him in the face.” I’d told Kenny about my last encounter with Johnny, but hadn’t used the word “slapped.” I was still too embarrassed. “And now he only has one leg. And because I’m sure Cheyenne knows all about it, too. And because they both think it’s my fault.”

“How can you possibly know that?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Have you even talked to Richie?”

“No.”

“Why?”

I shrugged again.

“And you’re not playing your guitar?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t you see?” There was such anguish in his voice that I looked up. “You’re shutting yourself off from all the things—maybe the only things—that can help you move past this. You need to talk to Johnny and Cheyenne, Harry. And for f*ck’s sake, pick up your god damn guitar.”

I started to protest, but Dr. Kenny waved me away in disgust. “Time’s up.”

Stunned into disbelief, I shuffled out of his office.





WE CAN WORK IT OUT


(written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and performed by the Beatles)




When I got home that afternoon, I opened my guitar case and stared at my Strat. It was a sleek guitar with an all-black body, a black pick guard, and a maple neck and fret board. I’d covered the beast with stickers acquired at various gigs—a skull and crossbones, Scooby-Doo, The Clash—which were already starting to peel and flake. There was a deep gouge next to the volume pot, the injury a reminder of smashing the guitar into Richie’s ride cymbal on stage at the Bitter End. The mark was a badge of honor.

I wanted to pick the guitar up, but something was stopping me. It was like touching it would rip a hole in the fabric of space and time and catapult me backward to a place I didn’t want to be. I closed the case and used my foot to nudge the whole thing under my bed. Like it was diseased.

Even though I couldn’t bring myself to play the guitar, I knew Dr. Kenny was right. I was being a real dick. Everything I’d wanted had been laid at my feet, and all I’d ever done was complain and feel sorry for myself. Maybe that’s the way I was wired and I couldn’t do anything else. But maybe I could.

I decided to call Richie.

“Dude!” he answered when he heard my voice. “Where the f*ck you been?”

“Just kind of hanging around,” I said. “How’re you doing?”

Richie spent the next ten minutes describing every last detail of his new skateboard—its length, the kind of wheels it had, the paisley pattern on its underside—as well as the time he’d spent hanging out with the local skate punks and riding an improvised pipe in Valhalla. Turns out he’d been bit by the skateboarding bug when we were in Athens and couldn’t shake it.

“You playing drums?” I asked, when he finished.

‘Yeah, of course. That and killing time until school starts.”

“I’m kind of jealous you get to go back to high school.”

Richie laughed. “You hated that place.”

“Yeah, well, the devil you know.”

We made a plan to get together that coming weekend and were about to hang up when Richie asked, “So have you been to see Johnny yet?”

“No,” I said, “I’m pretty sure he won’t want to see me.”

“I don’t know, Harry,” he answered. “The dude’s in pretty bad shape. He wound up not going up to Syracuse. He’s talking like he’s never gonna go.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear that. Trauma is great at changing plans.

“A visit might do him good,” Richie added.

Not knowing what else to say, I muttered, “Okay,” and we said good-bye.

I knew that the growing chorus—Richie’s voice now added to Dr. Kenny’s and to my parents’—was right, that I really did need to go see Johnny. Problem is, I didn’t want to. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that I was scared, that I felt responsible for everything that’d happened. But I wasn’t a genius (and even though I know admitting this won’t help me get into your college, I can tell you that I’m still not a genius), and I can be thick as molasses when I want to. So if you had asked me back then, I would’ve told you that I didn’t want to see Johnny because I didn’t care about him. Not because I was afraid.

Cheyenne was a different story. I was definitely afraid of seeing her. I didn’t want to let the universe taint the memory of our kiss or of the gig at the fund-raiser. They were the only things holding me together since we’d left Athens, and I was wrapping them in a protective cocoon. But the universe, as I seem destined to learn again and again, has a funny way of changing the story.

The day after talking to Richie I decided to go for a walk. A long walk. A walk like the one I took that night in Athens.

I moved with the energy of an over-wound toy and did everything I could to think about nothing. I tried counting states and listing presidents. I went through the periodic table and Triple Crown winners (baseball and horse racing). I calculated that with sixty-two years left (if I made my life expectancy), I had a mere fifteen presidential elections, Olympics, or World Cups left to enjoy; only seven hundred and fifty full moons to admire; just over three thousand two hundred New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles to attempt; less than twenty-three thousand mornings to open my eyes; and fewer than two billion beats left in my heart, a large but horrifyingly finite number. I was starting to freak myself out, so I shifted gears and listed every Academy Award Best Picture nominee in reverse chronological order. (The fact that Chariots of Fire beat out Raiders of the Lost Ark is still one of the great crimes of the twentieth century.) By the time I got to Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) I’d reached a small lake on the Yonkers-Bronxville border and I had started to calm down.

The lake was a three-quarter-mile long oval ringed by a dirt path, and it was one of my favorite places to go and think. The north end was marked by a grass field that butted up against a residential street, the south end by a footbridge that crossed from one side to the other at the narrowest point. That’s where I stumbled on Cheyenne.

She was standing on the footbridge, staring into the small waterfall that tumbled out of the lake and into a narrow stream. The white foam of water was quickly calming itself for the journey into the heart of Bronxville.


I had my head down, mumbling the names of long-forgotten movies, when I rounded a corner and stepped onto the bridge. I looked up and saw Cheyenne, but she didn’t see me.

Something about her had changed. It was like all the muscles in her face had lost their tension, giving her a pronounced droop.

I froze. My first instinct was to turn and run, and I almost did. But something made me stay. I watched her for a minute and then cleared my throat.

Chey didn’t turn her head, but her face got that look people’s faces get when they’re really annoyed. Like when you’re in a bad mood because you just know that your English teacher is going to give you a surprise quiz on the book you didn’t read, and then he walks into the room and announces that there will indeed be a test. That’s the look Cheyenne had, that “god damn it, I knew it,” look.

“Hi Chey.” I took a tentative stop forward.

“Not now, Harry. Just leave me alone.”

“I just—”

Cheyenne turned and walked off the other side of the footbridge and onto the dirt path. I was stymied. I’d been pretty sure she was mad at me, but this was more than I’d expected. I was going to turn and leave the way I came, but I kept hearing Dr. Kenny’s voice in my head saying, “You are such a schmuck, Harry,” and Johnny’s voice saying, “You are such a p-ssy.” I had no choice but to press on.

I followed a few paces behind until Chey sat down on a park bench. I sat, too. I expected her to get up, but she didn’t. She tucked her knees up to her chest and made herself as small as she possibly could. I didn’t know if she was trying to hide from me or from the whole world.

I slid down the bench a bit and put my hand on her shoulder, like I had done on the stoop in Athens. I didn’t think she could tense up anymore, but she did. At least she didn’t flinch.

I didn’t know what to say, but I was feeling an indescribable pressure to say something, so I started in the obvious place.

“Chey, I love you.”

Yeah, I know, what the hell was I thinking? Somehow I thought saying it would make everything okay.

It didn’t.

She threw up on my shoes.

When she was done retching, Cheyenne wiped her arm on her sleeve and started to get up. I pulled her gently back down.

“Wait,” I said, “please, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“No, Harry, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? For what?”

“For kissing you.” She started to cry, and this time she didn’t tense up or pull away. She buried her head in my shoulder.

Cheyenne cried hard, covering my shirt with snot and tears. In between sobs and gasps she told me how dumb she was, how she should have listened to Johnny, how she should have left with him, how she could have stopped the whole thing, how he lost his leg and it was all her fault.

“He won’t even see me, Harry,” she said, starting to calm down.

“What?” I was not expecting that.

“He won’t talk to me on the phone, either. And you know his parents. They never liked me or you or the band, so they’re not telling me anything. Has he said anything to you?”

“I haven’t been to see him yet.”

She looked at me with a blank expression and then nodded. I had no idea what she was thinking. We were both quiet for a few minutes.

“What should I do?” Her question was so tortured that it made my heart hurt. It felt terrible and I blurted out something I probably shouldn’t have. “I’ll talk to him,” I promised.

Chey smiled. It wasn’t a broad smile, or a smile filled with light and joy. It wasn’t even really a happy smile. But it was a smile.

And written in that smile was the knowledge that she and I could never be more than friends. Cheyenne and Johnny were bound to each other, and even if the bond between them was to break, it was a fixed barrier between us, for then and for all time. I’m not going to lie and tell you that knowing this made everything feel any better. It didn’t. But one thing I’ve learned, you can’t hide from the truth, and there’s no point in trying. I didn’t say anything then, but I think I probably let out a whopping big sigh.

“Walk me home?” she said.

I nodded.

We didn’t talk much on the way back, but the silence didn’t bother me. Right then, all I wanted in the world was company.

When we got to Chey’s door I mumbled good-bye and started to walk away. She grabbed my arm and hugged me. “I’m sorry, Harry. About everything. Let’s try to start over, okay?”

And you know what? It was okay. I hugged her back and headed home.





NO SURRENDER


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




It was late the following afternoon when I mustered the courage to visit Johnny. The promise I’d made to Chey was the final push I needed.

I wasn’t scared about seeing Johnny’s amputated leg. When I was younger and going through all kinds of rehabilitation, I spent lots of time in waiting rooms with amputees.

There was this one kid, about my age, who decided to introduce himself to me.

“Hi, I’m Stumpy Joe.” I must’ve looked at him crosseyed, because he laughed and said, “Nah, that’s not really my name, but it breaks the ice. My real name is George. What’s your name?”

As usual, I was frozen and couldn’t think of a response. Not even my name. I guess he figured that I was both deformed and a bit challenged, because he turned to the kid sitting on the other side of him and said, “Hi, I’m Stumpy Joe.”

So missing arms, missing hands, missing legs weren’t anything new to me. Seeing Johnny’s stump wasn’t going to be a problem.

It was the rest of him that was making me nervous. The part of him that would remember that I was the guy who’d hit (slapped) him, and that I was the guy who’d started the chain of events that ended with his leg on an operating room floor.

When I rang the doorbell, Mrs. McKenna—a tumbler of brown, translucent, and potent-smelling liquid in her hand—greeted me cordially, which was all she’d ever done. Johnny’s parents wished he’d hung out with a better class of friends, and given how things turned out, you can’t really blame them.

The cubes of ice were clinking against the sides of her glass and echoing through the hall as she escorted me to Johnny’s bedroom door. She put a hand on my shoulder and said, “See if you can help him, Harry.” The tone in her voice suggested no else had been able to. She walked away down the hall and I went in.

I found Johnny sitting up in bed, the covers pulled to his waist, his missing leg hidden from view. He was reading a weathered, library copy of The Catcher in the Rye and looked up when I entered. He didn’t smile.

“Hey,” I said. Johnny nodded in response. “How’re you doing?” He shrugged his shoulders. I sat down on the edge of his bed.

I saw something in Johnny that I hadn’t seen in a long time. A decade, to be exact. Written in the creases of Johnny’s brow, in the glass sheen of his eyes, in the tension in his neck and back, on his foul breath, in the dirty pajamas he wore, in his unkempt and uncut hair, and across the expanse of clutter in his room—written in every fiber of Johnny’s being was the same agony I’d felt after the thunderstorm. He was trapped in the disaster of himself and couldn’t find a way out.

Seeing him sitting there, seeing myself sitting there, I realized that I’d never left that place. And suddenly, I felt like a fool. Like the biggest god damn fool on the god damn face of the god damn Earth. This is what Dr. Kenny had been trying to tell me. That I was a fool. I was such a fool that I had to laugh out loud.


“Jesus, Harry, did you come here to laugh at me?” Johnny’s face was turning red.

“What? Oh, no, no. I was thinking of something someone said to me a long time ago, after the lightning strike.” His posture relaxed. He waited for me to continue.

“Do you know anything about Chinese butterflies?”

I don’t know if I did Lucky’s story justice, or if it helped, but it was enough of a distraction to allow Johnny to loosen up. He asked me questions about the day Lucky came to see me, and for the first time in a long time, we just talked, like we used to, before, well, before everything.

After a while there was a break in the conversation, so I steeled my nerve and said, “Johnny, I saw Cheyenne.”

At the mention of Chey’s name the temperature in the room dropped fifteen degrees.

Johnny looked darts at me. “What about Chey,” he said. My first thought was that he somehow knew that she and I had kissed, but I couldn’t imagine how so I pressed on.

“She thinks you hate her.”

“Good.”

“What?”

He nodded to the blanket, his hidden wound meant to serve as an exclamation point.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I’m letting her off the hook. I don’t want her pity, and I don’t want her to have to settle for someone who isn’t all here.” He threw his book onto the blanket, landing it in the spot where his leg should have been. He did it to make me uncomfortable, but it didn’t work. Johnny had lots of weapons against me; disfigurement wasn’t one of them.

“I don’t understand.”

“You said that already.”

“If you didn’t want to see any of us, why did your mom call Athens to tell us you were in the accident in the first place?”

“Who said I didn’t want to see any of you?”

“I don’t under—”

“You don’t understand. Yeah, so I’ve gathered. Look, Harry, I’m not sure if I told my mom to call the skate house, or if it was her idea. That was like less than two days after my surgery”—he nearly gagged on the word—“and I was so full of morphine you could’ve, oh, I don’t know, slapped me in the face and I wouldn’t have felt it.”

Ouch, I thought.

“And it wasn’t the band I wanted to get in touch with, it was you, Harry. You!” His cheeks were the color of an apple and he was short of breath. “Where the f*ck have you been?” he shouted at me.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I thought you were mad at me, because I hit you.”

“Slapped me,” he corrected.

“Slapped you,” I admitted.

“I was mad at you, Harry. But then this happened,” he said, pointing to his leg, “and somehow the slap in the face didn’t seem so bad.”

“But I still don’t understand,” I said. “Then why didn’t you call me?”

“You were supposed to call me!” he said, his voice rising again.

“You’re right, you’re right,” I said, hands up and out in a sign of surrender, hoping to calm him down. “I’m really sorry, John. I really am. But I’m here now.”

No response. I let a long moment pass. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe I’d been judging Johnny through a lens of jealousy. And not just jealousy about Cheyenne, jealousy about everything he was and I was not. Maybe it was me who’d been the crappy friend.

But something was still bothering me. “I still don’t understand,” I said quietly.

He rolled his eyes. “What?”

“Why you don’t want to see Cheyenne.”

“I told you. I’m doing her a favor.”

“But she loves you.”

“Which is why I need to push her away. Do you think I like doing this?”

“Then don’t.”

No response.

“You know, John, sometimes you can be one stubborn, arrogant prick.” As I think I’ve established, this isn’t the kind of thing I was used to saying to Johnny, and it wasn’t the kind of thing he was used to hearing from me. But seeing him there helped me understand how the world saw me and that was like a tonic. For once, I could be the other guy. I could be Kung Fu.

“Be careful, Harry.” He didn’t even try to hide the anger in his voice. I ignored it.

“Dude, you’re my best friend.” This hung in the air for a second. I think it surprised us both. “And you’re the luckiest guy in the world to have a girl like Cheyenne. I’d give anything for that. I almost did. Don’t blow it.”

“Luckiest guy in the world? Are you out of your mind? Look at me!”

“I am looking, John.”

“You’re looking but you’re not seeing! This is not lucky!” He pulled the blanket back, exposing his stump. His pajama bottoms were tied up in a knot, hiding the wound, but that didn’t lessen the impact of the visual. “I’m a cripple, a gimp, a freak! How the f*ck would you know anything about what I feel!” He screamed so loud I thought a window might shatter. I let his words ricochet around the room, bounce off his stereo, zigzag through his books, rattle the lightbulbs in the matching bedside lamps, careen off the poster of 1972 Olympics marathoner Frank Shorter, bounce off the worn carpet, shoot back up, and explode off the ceiling, until they were falling down on his head like soft rain.

He looked up at me, and he saw me. He really saw me. His shoulders sagged, and he nodded, realizing that I was the only person in his entire world who knew exactly how he felt.

“Just talk to her, okay?” I said quietly.

Johnny nodded again.

The shoe of our conversations had been so long on the other foot—with Johnny schooling me, and me setting my jaw and taking it—that neither one of us knew what to say next. Or maybe we’d both said what we’d needed to say, and we were worn out.

Either way, I couldn’t really look at Johnny so I let my eye wander the room.

There was a new acoustic guitar—a sunburst Takamine with a built-in pickup—propped against the wall opposite the bed. Johnny saw me eyeing it.

“Go ahead,” he said, I think relieved as much as I was, to change the subject. “My parents bought it to cheer me up. I haven’t touched it.”

I took the guitar, more as a defense against further angst than anything else, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and started strumming and picking random notes. The guitar felt heavy in my hands, but not like a weight. It was like an anchor, rooting me safely to the spot. It was like morphine, replacing so much pain with so much euphoria. People would come and people would go, I realized then, but music would be there until the end of time. (Note to self: Never question Dr. Kenny again. The guy is almost always right.)

I let that thought, about music, wash over me as I started to absentmindedly strum the chords of a song Johnny and I had been working on before we left to go on tour.

A to A7, A to A7.

I was playing soft but with a quick tempo. I let the simple chord progression drone on, the sound of it filling Johnny’s room with the joy that only an acoustic guitar can bring. Just before I was about to shift to the chords in the bridge, Johnny surprised me and started to sing along.

You give a little and take a lot

As distant guns are echoing shots

You never find the time to stop

You just keep reaching for the top

And you think you’re walking a thin line but you’re not


Able to see what’s at stake

You had your chance

To do your time

To rectify

Your useless crimes

But don’t worry

No one noticed

Your eyes are flooded with gin

Your head is needles and pins

Knee deep in original sin

Everything just started to spin

Someone had better notify your next of kin that you might not make it

You had your chance

To do your time

To rectify

Your useless crimes

But don’t worry

No one noticed.

We looked at each other as the last chord faded out, both cautious. It was Johnny who let his guard down first.

“You know,” he said, “the name of this band will make a lot more sense now that there are two of us.” He paused a beat, and we both burst out laughing. We laughed like that until we both cried.

When we were both tired and dried out, I started to strum chords to another Scar Boys song. Johnny pitched forward, ready to sing the first verse.

Music to the rescue again.