The Scar Boys

BAD BRAIN


(written by Dee Dee Ramone, Joey Ramone, Johnny Ramone, and Marky Ramone, and performed by the Ramones)




Life after the lightning strike was a blur of car rides and waiting rooms. I was shuttled from neurologists, to infectious disease specialists, to plastic surgeons. Teams of doctors floated over me and tried to fix my broken body. They stuck me with hypos and IVs to fight the bacteria nesting in my wounds, they used low-level electric stimulation to repair my damaged nerves, and they performed countless surgeries in a vain attempt to make me look like someone’s idea of “normal.” I was Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. Only I wasn’t, because the whole thing turned out to be a big fat waste of time.

Well, mostly.

Dr. Kenneth Hirschorn, or Dr. Kenny as I came to know him, was young and edgy; he had longish hair, wore his shirt untucked, and had Sharpie drawings of rock stars ringing the walls of his office. He was a pediatric psychiatrist and his assignment was to wean me off the pain meds to which I’d become addicted. He would talk to me about Lou Reed, Janis Joplin, Syd Barrett, and any other rock star he could think of who had abused drugs.

“By getting off the junk now, Harry,” and yes, Dr. Kenny taught me to call it junk, “you’re already way cooler than they ever were.” I was probably the only kid my age to know all the words to the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man.” He guided me through the misery of controlled withdrawal like a shaman initiating a warrior in the ways of battle.

It was dumb luck, Faceless Admissions Professional, that Dr. Kenny and I found each other. (“Faceless Admissions Professional” is a heck of a mouthful. Okay if I just call you FAP for short? Good, thanks.) If I’d been sent to any other psychiatrist, I would’ve been weaned off the methadone, pronounced mentally healthy, and sent back to the front lines of the fourth grade. No matter that I was grotesquely disfigured, or that I was unable to sleep, or that I would fall to the floor crying like a little girl in the lightest summer drizzle.


Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder still wasn’t listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the mid-1970s. The profession of psychiatry was barely past the days of electroshock therapy and lobotomies. Besides, I was a kid, and kids are supposed to heal.

Dr. Kenny knew better.

Once I was pronounced drug free, he suggested we continue our sessions, “Just to talk.” My parents agreed.

Dr. Kenny never mentioned the storm or my injuries in those first few years, and neither did I. He never made me recount the day of the lightning strike, never made me tell him about the hospital stays, and never asked me about the kids who’d tied me up.

When my parents and the police tried to get me to identify the little cretins that had done this to me, I pretended not to remember. But I did remember. Of course I remembered. I didn’t tell anyone because I was scared shitless of those kids.

The funny thing is, I think those kids were more afraid of me than I was of them. They wouldn’t look at me or talk to me. They wouldn’t even pass by my house without first crossing the street. I guess they knew what they had done, and it kind of haunted them. You’d think that would’ve made me feel better, but really, it didn’t.

Anyway, like I said, Dr. Kenny never asked me about any of that stuff. He didn’t need to. Somehow he always managed to steer our sessions back to my relationships with other children, my feelings about fire, or worse, lightning.

“I don’t like it,” I told him, withdrawing into myself.

“Why not?”

“Because, it’s stupid?”

“Why is lightning stupid?”

“Because it’s dumb!”

“Why is it dumb?” Ask a nine-year-old a series of uninterrupted questions, and eventually you can steer the conversation anywhere you want. Try it some time.

“I dunno, because it hurts people.”

“Okay then, Harry,” he said, “the best way to avoid getting hurt by something is to understand it.”

Dr. Kenny and I spent the next five sessions learning everything we could about lightning—from how a lightning bolt can be hotter than the surface of the sun, to how clouds turn into huge capacitors during electrical storms, to what a capacitor actually is. Whether he meant to or not—and I’m pretty sure he meant to—Dr. Kenny set in motion a lifelong pattern of learning for me. Analysis, logic, and calculation became my defense mechanisms against the world. I trained myself—strike that, Dr. Kenny trained me—to find comfort in tearing a thing down to its basic elements and building it back up in a way that I could understand. When things got really bad, I could wrap myself in a security blanket of cold, hard facts.

In the last of those five sessions, Dr. Kenny showed me a chart he’d found in a library book. It was a list of every kind of lightning known to man. I can still picture it clearly to this day.

“Harry,” he said, “do you think you can remember this list?” He saw me look confused, so he continued. “A lot of grown-ups use little tricks to help calm themselves down when they’re upset, or when they’re sad or frightened. Sometimes they’ll count to ten, sometimes they’ll try to remember the lyrics to a song. They use lists so they’ll be distracted from whatever is bothering them.”

“That works?” Dr. Kenny could see I wasn’t really buying it.

“Just try it.”

I did:

Intracloud Lightning

Cloud-to-Cloud Lightning

Cloud-to-Ground Lightning

Cloud-to-Air Lightning

Bolts from the Blue

Anvil Lightning

Ball Lightning

Bead Lightning

Forked Lightning

Heat Lightning

Ribbon Lightning

Streak Lightning

Triggered Lightning

It worked. I couldn’t believe it, but it worked. The list became a kind of incantation for me. Anytime I was upset or scared, I would repeat it in my head over and over again until I calmed down.

Intracloud Lightning

Cloud-to-Cloud Lightning

Cloud-to-Ground Lightning

Cloud-to-Air Lightning

Bolts from the Blue

Anvil Lightning

Ball Lightning

Bead Lightning

Forked Lightning

Heat Lightning

Ribbon Lightning

Streak Lightning

Triggered Lightning

The Lightning List was the first of hundreds of lists that I’ve memorized over the years. They’re like a slap in the face when anxiety hits. No strike that, not a slap in the face. They’re like a reset button, like the ones they have at bowling alleys. The lists somehow manage to jolt my brain from being a jumbled mess and back into a functioning state.

Dr. Kenny was my Obi-Wan Kenobi, and my sessions with him were the best fifty minutes of my life each week. Sad but true.

As for those other doctors, the ones trying to fix my flesh and bones, well, let’s just say those visits didn’t go quite as well. After five years of intense treatment, I was, and there’s no other way to put it, a monster: splotches of discolored skin were mottled across my thirteen-year-old face and neck. Thick, pink ridgelines ran from my right temple to the base of the flattened snout that was my nose. Crinkly flesh replaced my eyebrows and eyelashes, giving me the look of a startled albino. It was all capped off by an obvious and unrealistic wig hiding spotty patches of hair, some of it black, some of it gray like dust. The sum total of my appearance formed the contour map of a strange world where even I wasn’t welcome.

Between the war crime that was my face and the absences for doctors’ visits, I was a ghost to the other kids at school, the boogeyman. No one knew what to make of me. The kids who were more or less nice—the ones who did their homework, played the clarinet or flute, and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch—left me alone.

The other kids did not.





WAITING ON A FRIEND


(written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and performed by The Rolling Stones)




I was sitting outside of Henry David Thoreau Middle School, eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, when a behemoth of a seventh grader—who could’ve passed for an eighteen-year-old, with facial hair, a husky voice, and a vague scent of aftershave—sat down next to me. He started rummaging through my lunch bag.

“Juice, banana … here we go, cupcake.” He took the cupcake and smiled at me. I could hear his friends, a group of devoted henchman standing outside my field of vision, laughing and snorting. Bruised noses, bruised ribs, and a bruised ego taught me the only safe response: pretend it’s not happening. I started to think my way through the New York Mets active roster: John Stearns, Dave Kingman, Doug Flynn.

The behemoth stood to go. “Thanks, freak.”

Hubie Brooks, Frank Taveras, Mookie Wilson.

“I said thanks, freak,” a bit more emphasis the second time. “I said …”

“That’s enough, Billy. Give it back.” It was a new voice, coming from somewhere behind me. I stopped my list and turned around.

A kid half Billy’s size, even smaller than me, was standing there with his hands on his hips. His posture, while not exactly threatening, left no room to question his intentions.

Billy looked at me, looked at the new kid, and then back at me. “Whatever. I was just foolin’ ’round anyways.” He tossed the cupcake in the air—landing it in the outstretched hand of my benefactor—and walked away.

“Don’t mind him,” the new kid said. “He’s harmless. I’m Johnny.” I was so caught off guard that it took me a beat to register his other hand, the one not holding a cupcake, stretched in my direction. I shook it.


“I’m Harry Jones.”

One of the more interesting exercises Dr. Kenny had me go through was the creation of something he called a People Catalog. “How do you see the rest of the world, Harry?” he’d asked. “How would you describe other people?”

“Describe them?”

“Find things they have in common, and put them into groups. You know, kids who are into sports, or adults who yell too much. That sort of thing.”

Naturally, I built that catalog around my scars and how other people saw them. I’m guessing that’s what Dr. Kenny wanted:

Potsies. Named for the hangdog character from Happy Days, a Potsie can’t figure out if he’s supposed to look at me or look away. For a long time I thought this was pity. It’s not. It’s shame and guilt at being normal, in not having to bear my burden. It’s why people look at the ground when they see someone with Down’s syndrome, or a homeless person, or a kid with palsy. At some subconscious level most of you think that you—because of some horrible thing you’ve done, will do, or want to do—deserve a more sinister fate than me.

Nazis. A few people, like Billy the Behemoth, stare at my face, focusing on my scars. They see opportunity in my deformity, something to exploit and control. What they’re really doing is responding to a Darwinian urge awakened at the genetic level, its goal to weed out evolution’s mistakes. They’re trying to purify the race.

Faints. The name is shorthand for “Faux Saints.” This is the “holier than thou” crowd who want desperately to live on the moral high ground. They try to prove they have no prejudice by locking their gaze to mine, when in fact their discomfort is written in the stillness of their eyes: See Harry, I’m treating you normally … I’m not staring at your scars at all.

Freaks. There’s a small group that likes to sneak furtive glances at my face, imagining, I suspect, a long tale involving muggers, terrorists, or pirates. It’s like they get a boner at the thought of what I’ve been through. (Seriously, this happens.)

Friends. Then there’s the truly rare breed, like Johnny McKenna, who don’t seem to see the scars at all.

Thoreau was a two-year middle school, and with nearly three hundred and fifty kids in eighth grade alone, it was impossible to know everyone, so Johnny was a stranger to me. He had curly blond locks spilling over his forehead and framing a pair of ocean-colored eyes. And it was those eyes you noticed first. They commanded attention. No wait, they demanded attention. They were why I remained glued to the spot even though every fiber of my being was telling me to run.

Johnny sat down and we started talking. Strike that, he started talking. I didn’t say two words. I was so unresponsive that I must’ve seemed weird or at least ungrateful, and I wondered why he didn’t just walk away. Maybe he figured I was still reeling from the whole thing with the cupcake. Whatever the reason, Johnny stayed.

He talked about his brother Russell—“he’s eighteen and he’s super cool. He has an old Mustang that he lets me drive in the Caldor’s parking lot, and a huge record collection he lets me listen to.” He talked about his parents—“my dad’s a chemical engineer and my mom teaches classics at Concordia. They’re mostly okay, ya know, for parents.” He talked about how he ran three miles every night before dinner—“I’m going to go out for track next year in high school. I want to run in the New York City Marathon some day.” And he described in detail, often quoting from, the music and comic books and television shows that formed the axis on which his world seemed to revolve—“Nanu Nanu, Harry!”

The more he talked, the more I let my guard down. I wasn’t even aware at first that I’d started talking back.

“I collect baseball cards. I have every complete Topps set from 1973 forward. The best part is—” I heard the sound of my own voice and stopped. Talking to other kids was anathema to me. (Please note, FAP, the great use of an SAT word—anathema—in context, in spite of what I’m sure you think are my lackluster SAT scores.) Anyway, hearing my own voice was like walking onto a frozen lake in early spring, knowing the ice was going to collapse beneath my feet any second.

But Johnny just sat there, smiling. It was a patient smile, like watching a cat blink. It made me want to blink back. Before long I was telling him how I was almost struck by lightning. When the bell rang we went our separate ways and I didn’t see Johnny again that afternoon.

The next day during recess, Johnny was at the center of a group of boys, the lot of them orbiting around his Reaganesque charm and hanging on his every word. I sat down alone nearby. I’d just started on that day’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich when Johnny called me over.

“Hey Harry, c’mere.”

Everything froze.

I felt a rush of vertigo as I stood up. A narrow aisle parted through the throng of kids around Johnny. They were like menacing trees come to life, making an eerie path through a dense and uninviting wood. The tension pulled what was left of my skin tauter than usual as I felt them stare at me—the weird kid with the scars, what’s he doing here? When I reached the center of the swarm, Johnny said, “Hey, do you guys know Harry Jones? He was struck by lightning!” I held my breath, thinking I’d been duped into some new and twisted form of torture. I noticed the other kids looking at Johnny, waiting for a cue. Johnny noticed, too.

He shifted down the bench on which he was perched, motioning with a nod of his head for me to join him. Time, which had stopped, started ticking forward again.

“That’s neat,” one of the other kids said to me. “I mean, not neat, but wow! Did it hurt?”

And just like that, I was accepted. I was cool by association. For the first time in my life, I was starting to fit in.





OUR HOUSE


(written by Michael Barson, Mark William Bedford, Christopher John Foreman, Graham McPherson, Charles Smyth, Lee Jay Thompson, and Daniel Woodgate, and performed by Madness)




After Billy the Behemoth “introduced” us, Johnny and I started spending a lot of time together. I don’t think there’s any explanation for how people become friends. Maybe it’s pheromones (we learned about pheromones in tenth grade biology), maybe it’s kismet (we learned about kismet in eleventh grade English), or maybe there’s no reason or explanation at all (I learned about unexplained things from Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of TV series). With kids, there’s an even greater intensity to the speed at which new friendships form. To me, it seems like magic.

I’d show up at Johnny’s house most nights to join him on his training runs. His mother hated that I was there. She’d put on her best smile and speak to me in a loud and slow voice, like I was retarded, deaf, or both.

“Well, hello Harry. And how are you today?”

She and Johnny’s dad, Mr. McKenna—to this day I still don’t know either of their first names—must’ve figured that I was their son’s charity case, that I was there because he took pity on me. The more often I turned up, the less friendly they became. Johnny didn’t seem to notice, and if he didn’t notice, I didn’t care. It was a small price to pay for the pleasure of his company.

I could never quite keep up with Johnny when we ran. He would slow his pace just enough to let me almost catch up, and when I got too close, he’d put on the jets and pull away. That’s just who he was.


When he had run his allotted distance he would flop down on some neighbor’s lawn panting and laughing and I’d follow suit.

“What are you doing for Halloween?” he asked me out of the blue one night.

Since the lightning strike, I’d made a point of avoiding Halloween. It was my least favorite night of the year. Other kids would transform themselves into the monster I already was, going from door to door scaring people into giving them treats. That I didn’t need a costume was a miserable reminder of everything I hated about life.

“I’m not really into Halloween,” I told him.

“Come to my house,” he said, ignoring my answer. “We’re going to have fun.”

I shook my head no and changed the subject.

“My parents,” I told him, “want to meet you.”

You have to understand, for five solid years, since 1976 to be exact, I only left the house to go to school, doctors’ appointments, or wherever else I was dragged. That I was suddenly leaving of my own accord was a shock to my parents’ system. They didn’t know whether to open a bottle of champagne or call an exorcist. They took the middle ground and invited Johnny to dinner.

It was a few days before Halloween when Johnny showed up at my house. When I answered the door he was wearing a sport jacket and carrying flowers. Johnny was strictly a jeans and T-shirt kid, so at first I wasn’t even sure who I was looking at.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in, Harry?” he asked.

“Yes, yes,” my mom said from behind me, “invite him in.”

I was too stunned to say anything, so I just stepped aside and let Johnny pass.

“Mrs. Jones,” Johnny said, “these are for you.” He held the flowers out, and I swear my mother almost cried when she took them.

“Mr. Jones,” Johnny continued, approaching my dad, who was standing just behind my mom, slack-jawed and dumbfounded, “it’s nice to meet you, sir.” Sir? Johnny held out his hand and my dad took it. “I’m Johnny McKenna. Thank you for inviting me over.”

It turns out I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how to relate to kids my age. My parents were just as clueless.

My mom hadn’t worked since the lightning strike.

Her life, post-storm, as I think I’ve already told you, was defined entirely by me. It was my dad who was the breadwinner. He was a political campaign consultant, working mostly on statewide elections. For a man who loved to argue as much as my dad did, it was the right kind of work. Most nights over dinner, he would introduce a topic that would get the three of us debating. Sometimes it was serious stuff like “What happens when the world runs out of oil?” Sometimes it was light stuff like “Who’s funnier, Lenny or Squiggy?”

But on the night Johnny came over, my dad, for the first time I could remember, seemed flummoxed. When you stop to think about it, it kind of makes sense.

If I’d had a normal childhood, my parents would have been broken-in by a steady diet of increasingly older and more sophisticated friends. Instead, they skipped over all that and got right to Johnny. It was like having your first driving lesson. On the interstate. During rush hour.

Johnny took the seat my dad offered and proceeded to give my parents his entire life story. I didn’t join the conversation. Not because I was freaked out or nervous, but because there was no natural opening. Johnny and my parents, mostly my dad, basked in the warm glow of each other’s company. I was something of an ornament.

That made me feel good and bad at the same time, but it didn’t really matter. More than anything I was proud and happy to show my parents that I wasn’t a total freak, at least not anymore. Not only did I have a friend, I had this friend.

My mom shot me the occasional look throughout the night, making sure I was doing okay, like she always did.

I’d actually started to zone out when something Johnny was saying caught my attention.

“… excited that Harry’s going to be joining us for trick-or-treating on Halloween.”

What? Did he just say I’m going trick-or-treating?

My parents, who were well versed in my views on Halloween—mostly from my annual October 31 sob fest—looked at each other and then at me, and then back at each other. After a beat, they both started talking at once, falling over each other at how happy they were to hear the news.

“Wonderful,” said my mom.

“Best thing for him,” my dad said to Johnny like I wasn’t even there.

When the celebration subsided, all three of them looked at me.

“Great,” I said weakly. Johnny’s face was all smirk.

After dinner was over, after Johnny helped clear and wash the dishes, after the four of us watched Laverne and Shirley together, it was time for Johnny to go home.

As I watched both my parents hug him goodnight, I have to admit that I felt a pang of jealousy. This is what it must feel like to be normal, I thought.

I walked out of the house with Johnny. As soon as the front door closed behind us, he gave me a high five.

“Awesome, Harry,” he said. “Trust me, they’re going to let you stay out as long as you want on Halloween.” He walked down the street toward his house, adding, “See you at school tomorrow” as he went.

Halloween. I had told Johnny “no” about Halloween because I really wanted to stay home. The thought of being out with other kids made me physically nauseous. But thanks to his stunt with my parents, I was trapped.

When I look back now, I see that this was the beginning of what would become a well-established pattern of Johnny deciding and me doing.

As I went back up the steps to my house I overheard my parents’ muffled voices on the other side of the door.

“What a fine young man,” my father was saying.

“I’ll say,” my mother offered. “The two of them are lucky to have found one another.”

“The two of them?” my dad answered. “Let’s call a spade a spade, Ruth, Harry’s the lucky one here.”

“Ben, hush, he’ll hear you.”

I waited another minute until I heard them take their conversation into the kitchen, and snuck back inside. I pretended not to have heard anything, said goodnight, and went straight to bed.