The Scar Boys

RIP OFF


(written by Marc Bolan, and performed by T. Rex)




Richie’s dad—Alec, Mr. McGill, Mr. Mac—was a retired mechanic. He was a gruff man with thick hair shining an unnatural black from Grecian Formula, and skin turned to leather from years spent absorbing car exhaust. Mr. Mac barely came up to Richie’s shoulder, but his hands were rough, scorched, and enormous. They were a source of wonder to me, large like a basketball player’s, but nimble like a pianist’s. He was the only one of my friends’ parents who didn’t seem uncomfortable with my deformities. He treated me like he treated any other kid, and I loved him for it.

“You’re not gonna get much with thirteen hundred,” he told us. Mr. Mac was on his hands and knees, his head under the sink, the sound of a wrench twisting, scraping, banging metal. I can’t remember a single time at Richie’s house when Mr. Mac wasn’t busy working on something.

“Yes, sir, we know,” Richie said. “Except, we already bought the van. It’s out front. We’re hoping you’ll take a look.”

The banging stopped and I could see Richie tense up. His relationship with his dad—a blend of respect, fear, and adoration—was so unlike the relationship I had with my own father, that it was kind of inspiring.

Richie’s mom died when Richie was still in grade school. Stage four ovarian cancer. They say it doesn’t strike women who’ve given birth, but someone forgot to tell Richie’s mom’s ovaries. Mrs. Mac—none of us had ever met her, but we all thought of her as Mrs. Mac anyway—woke up one morning with a pain in her back and a bloated feeling in her belly. Thinking she’d eaten something bad, or maybe tweaked a muscle, she did her best to muddle through the discomfort—going to work at the post office, picking Richie up after school, keeping the house clean, and resting when she could find the time. The hectic schedule of a suburban mom managed to hide, in very plain sight, her growing sense of fatigue. Richie’s dad used his magical hands to massage her back, but that only seemed to make it worse, whatever it was.

Then one morning, Mrs. Mac woke up to find that the pain in her back had subsided, that it had faded to an echo of pain, there but not there. She figured she was on the mend. Three days later Mr. Mac came home to find his wife in bed with chills, aches, and fever, barely able to acknowledge his presence. Four weeks later, she was dead.

The pain in her back, Richie and his dad would later learn, was from a cantaloupe-sized, cancerous tumor pressing against her kidney. If Mrs. Mac had tended to it before it burst, the doctor explained, she might have had a chance. Once that softball of poisoned pus ruptured, and the cancer infected her kidneys, liver, and pancreas, it was game over. They tried surgery, but it was too late. Richie’s mom died on the operating room table. There can never be a silver lining when something like that happens, but Mrs. Mac’s absence did forge a bond between Richie and his dad that was unique among my friends, and I guess that counts for something.

“You did what?” Mr. Mac’s head was still under the sink, and it was getting weird having a conversation with his butt.

“We bought a van. A Ford, sir. It’s in the driveway.”

“You bought it? A Ford?” Mr. Mac finally backed away from his work. “What the hell’dya do that for?”

“It was a great deal, Mr. Mac,” Johnny chimed in. “Only 40,000 miles and the engine sounds real good.” Mr. Mac looked at Johnny, then at the rest of us.

“Where’s the girl?” We knew he meant Cheyenne.

“Not here, sir.”

“Cars and shit are for boys,” Cheyenne had said when we invited her along. “I’m going to treat myself to something ‘girly’ today.” None of us knew what that meant, so when we caught up with her later we were surprised to find her crying and hiding her hands behind her back. Johnny coaxed her arms free and we found ourselves staring at two-and-a-half-inch long, pink-polished, buffed nails protruding from each finger—faux extensions of the real thing. “I can’t even make a fist,” Cheyenne sobbed. It took Richie and an acetylene torch forty-five minutes to remove them. How he didn’t burn her hands to a crisp, I’ll never know.

Mr. Mac sized us up and shook his head. “All right, let’s go have a look.”

In the McGills’ driveway was a 1976 Ford Econoline van. It was powder blue, with two or three rust spots along the running boards. Inside were bucket seats finished in black vinyl, with a hard bench in the back that was flanked on each side by smallish windows. The spacious cargo area in the rear was more than enough room for the drums, guitars, amplifiers, and luggage we were going to bring on tour.

We’d found the van through an ad in the Pennysaver. “Cargo van. Runs good. $1300.” Simple, direct, and the right price. Johnny called the number, and before we knew it we were forking over what was left of the band fund to an older black woman in a fine blue dress. She told us her husband had “used the van for his flooring business, God rest his soul,” and that “he never drove it, as the good Lord is my witness, more than thirty-five miles per hour.” For some reason, we believed her.

I bit my cuticles—a nasty habit I’d picked up from a need to keep my fingernails short for the guitar—while Mr. Mac rooted around under the hood of the Econoline.

“Start it up,” he called to Richie, who did as he was told. Listening to the van’s engine at Richie’s house, under the scrutiny of his father’s expertise, it didn’t sound quite as good as when we’d driven it home. It sounded … congested. “All right, kill it.” Mr. Mac emerged a minute later, wiping those enormous mitts on a filthy rag.

“Well, it’s got 140,000, not 40,000 miles. And the catalytic’s gone.”

“Shit,” Richie said, and then looked quickly at his father. “Sorry, sir.”

“What does that mean, ‘catalytic’s gone’?” Johnny asked.

“It means we won’t pass inspection,” Richie answered.

“How much to get it fixed?”

“More than we have.” The color drained from Richie’s face and the room grew graveyard still.

Mr. Mac’s frown softened and he rubbed his chin. He seemed to be staring at a blank spot in the sky. “I shouldn’t do this,” he said, “but there is another way.”





CARS


(written and performed by Gary Numan)




Half an hour later we were leaving the quiet residential streets of northeast Yonkers behind, crossing the border into the Bronx. Mr. Mac had called an acquaintance who owned a garage on Jerome Avenue. “Gary the Grease Monkey” promised to give us an inspection sticker without actually inspecting the van. Fifty dollars was the price. Mr. Mac pressed three twenties into Richie’s hand and sent us on our way.

The heart of the Bronx was a twenty-minute car ride from Yonkers, but it may as well have been on another continent. Like most people from the suburbs, my experience with the Bronx was limited to class trips to the zoo or botanical gardens. We saw the Bronx the way a Madison Avenue advertising executive saw the Midwest; you flew over without ever touching down.

The drive to Jerome Avenue was otherworldly. We were floating down Marlow’s river, making our way deeper and deeper into an alien landscape, searching for an ever-elusive Mr. Kurtz. (That may be overdramatic, but we’d just read Heart of Darkness in English class, and hey, I want this thing to sound smart, don’t I? It is a college essay after all.)


So yeah, I was afraid of the Bronx. Maybe it’s why I’m a Mets fan. Where I lived—in safe, secure suburbia—retail stores didn’t have steel shutters after dark, graffiti was the exception not the rule, and let’s call it like it is, my corner of Westchester County was pretty white. I don’t mean “pretty” white as in “nice-looking” white. I mean “pretty” white as in “where are all the people of color?” white. The Bronx was new to me, and like I had learned from Dr. Kenny, we fear what we don’t know.

Of course, as harsh as life in the Bronx was supposed to be, the suburbs, I had learned firsthand, were no less cruel. I doubted that kids in the city were tied to trees during lightning storms. Chain-link fences maybe, but not trees.

Gary’s garage was a dirty place, and I could see why he went by the name “Grease Monkey.” An Irishman with a very light brogue (his last name was Gilligan), Gary was bathed in filth. From the point on his scalp where his hairline met his wrinkled forehead, to the tips of his stubby fingers, Gary was covered in a gelatinous layer of motor oil, brake fluid, steering fluid, grease, and exhaust, all of which had congealed into a kind of paste. When I asked Richie about it, he told me his dad came home from work looking like that every day, and only after a long shower with scalding water and Lava soap did he approach something you might consider clean.

We pulled the van into the garage and waited, watching as Gary dressed down one of his crew. The mechanic, a twenty-something black man who projected hostility, stood in silence as Gary called him every name in the book. We had no idea what the guy had done, but unless he’d run over Gary’s dog, it couldn’t have been bad enough to warrant the verbal beating he was taking.

When Gary was finished, he came over to us and said, “Gotta keep these boys in line, if you know what I mean,” and winked. We didn’t know what he meant, but we could guess. He’d said it loud enough for everyone in the garage to hear. No one reacted or looked at Gary or looked at us, but you could see the muscles on their necks and arms pull tight. I remembered something about Simon Legree from eleventh grade English class, and something else about Malcolm X from social studies. We paid our fifty dollars, got our sticker, and got out of there as quick as we could, making our way back to the safety of the suburbs.

By the time we got home, we were buzzing. From our sheltered point of view, our little adventure certified us as cool. The big, bad Scar Boys had braved and beaten the Bronx, and we had flouted the law in getting an illegal inspection sticker. We were invincible.

Uh huh.

Truth is, if we’d had a shred of sense, we’d have known we were getting in way over our heads. But you can’t buy shreds of sense, and even if you could, we were pretty much out of money.





FEMME FATALE


(written by Lou Reed, and performed by the Velvet Underground)




The tour was all I could think about those last few months of my senior year in high school. While other kids were busy buying furniture for their dorm rooms and planning midnight keg parties at Jones Beach, I was dreaming of screeching guitars and sold-out shows.

Johnny was squarely in the former camp. On our nightly run, a ritual we had carried forward from the eighth grade, he talked more and more about Syracuse and less and less about the Scar Boys. It was depressing, but I kept my mouth shut.

Of course, that didn’t stop Johnny from making sure that everyone in the twelfth grade—and most of the kids in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades—knew about our tour. He was using the tour to make himself cool, to satisfy his own massive ego, and it pissed me off.

On the other hand …

“Hi Harry. I heard your band is going on the road. That is so cool!”

Before that moment, and in the ten years since the lightning strike, Mary Beth Tice had said exactly six words to me. On three separate occasions she said, “Hi,” and one other time she said, “Excuse me, please.” That she had now chosen to more than double the word count of our entire life’s conversation, in one fell swoop, was more than unexpected. It was mind-numbingly, disarmingly scary.

Mary Beth Tice was the “It Girl” at Theodore Roosevelt High School. She stood five feet six inches tall, had a trim body, and very symmetric features. She also had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. They were like a satellite photo of the Amazon rain forest that we’d seen in Earth sciences class, full of mystery and life.

Most days she dressed down, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and even then she was devastatingly beautiful. On the rare days that Mary Beth wore a skirt or a sundress, with her hair spilling over her shoulders, she would enter rooms in slow motion with a kick-ass soundtrack to accompany her every move. At least that’s how I remember it.

To most of the male troglodytes in my year, “It Girl” simply meant they wanted to do “it” to Mary Beth. And while I don’t think she was that kind of It Girl—in addition to her spectacular outer shell, she was smart (straight-A student), outgoing (class vice president), and funny (her imitation of our biology teacher had everyone in stitches, including the teacher)—she did know how to use her considerable gifts to her advantage. There was always a parade of boys trailing after her, carrying her books, doing her homework, lighting her “I-can-be-a-bad-girl-too” cigarettes.

It goes without saying that I wasn’t one of those boys. I’d never done “it” to anyone other than myself. Heck, I hadn’t even kissed a girl. Mary Beth was so far out of my league that she wasn’t even in my dreams. Of course, I was still an incomprehensible idiot any time she came near me.

The three times Mary Beth said “Hi” to me (twice in the fifth grade and once in the sixth), I’d been the first kid to arrive in class for the day, and Mary Beth had been the second. She walked into the otherwise empty room and greeted me. It was, I suppose, a part of her DNA to acknowledge other forms of life. I remember taking particular solace that she hadn’t also said hello to the two ferns that adorned the window ledge of the fifth grade classroom. On all three occasions I was too freaked out to respond.

The day she said, “Excuse me, please” (seventh grade), I’d been unwittingly blocking Mary Beth’s exit from English class. When she approached, I froze, staying glued to the spot like I’d been stunned with a Star Trek phaser. She shrugged her shoulders and squeezed through the space between me and the door. I regained my wits and finally moved out of the way, but only after she was already a good fifteen feet past me. I added a sheepish, “Sorry.” The other girls that had clustered around Mary Beth, hoping that some of her “Itness” would rub off on them, laughed at me. To her credit, Mary Beth ignored my gaffe and just kept on walking.

So why after a decade of invisibility had I suddenly materialized in front of Mary Beth Tice, as if out of thin air? Simple. If you’re in a touring rock band, especially if you’re still in high school, you are per se cool.

Unless, of course, you’re the king of uncool.

Mary Beth was leaning against the locker adjacent to mine when she broke our ten-year vow of silence. At first, I presumed she was talking to someone else. It was the natural thing to think. Just like a fish had no reason to believe that the man on the boat was talking to it, I had no reason to believe Mary Beth was talking to me. Men didn’t talk to fishes, and Mary Beth Tices didn’t talk to Harbinger Joneses. It’s not that I hadn’t heard her, it’s that I hadn’t heard her talking to me.


I closed my locker, spun the dial, and turned to walk to class. The “Hi Harry. I heard your band is going on the road. That is so cool!” was still hanging in the air. It was static to me, white noise in the background. But there was Mary Beth Tice blocking my way. Remembering the last time this’d happened—the day she’d said, “Excuse me, please” and I’d frozen—I acted quickly. I smiled and stepped to the side.

Then three things happened:

Thing #1: Mary Beth didn’t move forward. In fact, she looked at me like I had two heads. (It’s important to note that she did not look at me like I had one really ugly head. I know that look, and as a connoisseur of human facial expressions, I can tell you that this look was different.)

Thing #2: I noticed that her normal gaggle of devotees was absent, and that this month’s boyfriend—Louie, the starting center for the football team—was nowhere to be seen. (You may be wondering why it is that I knew who Mary Beth’s boyfriend was. If you are, then you might not be grasping the concept of an It Girl.)

Thing #3: I finally heard what she’d said and realized she’d been talking to me.

“Oh!” I said, with a little too much volume. “You were talking to me.”

“Unless you know someone else who plays in a band that’s going on tour?” she said in a teasing, and if I think about it now, flirtatious voice.

“Just Johnny and Richie,” I answered, regretting my stupidity before the words were fully out of my mouth.

To her credit, Mary Beth smiled. I was dumbfounded. Mary Beth Tice didn’t talk to me, and she definitely didn’t smile at me. Something was amiss in the universe, and I stood there sullen and silent, trying to figure it out. Eventually, Mary Beth gave up. She got bored of waiting for me to make conversation, shrugged her shoulders, and walked away.

“Thanks,” I managed to mutter when she was out of earshot. That’s when I felt an elbow in my back and my face was slammed into the locker. It was Billy the Behemoth.

“Don’t talk to yourself, freak. People will think you’re crazy.” He kept walking, his friends laughing out loud and high-fiving one another.

I may have been in a band, even a touring band, but I still occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder. It would take a lot more than a handful of gigs at a few out-of-town nightclubs to change that.

So let’s move on. No wait. Before we do, let’s take a step back. It’s important to the story. Trust me, you’ll see.





FATHER AND SON


(written and performed by Cat Stevens)




When I was a kid—before there was ever a Johnny McKenna or a Cheyenne Belle or a Ford Econoline van—my mother, father, and I would spend one week each summer on a spit of sand just off the New Jersey coast called Long Beach Island. I would sit on that beach for hours, a hooded sweatshirt hiding my face from the other kids, and watch wave after wave build and break. The thundering sound of the surf, rather than upsetting me the way real thunder did and does, soothed me, made me believe I wasn’t afraid of anything.

During these vacations—and always at my insistence—we’d pay a visit to the century-old Barnegat Lighthouse at the northern tip of the island. I was obsessed with that lighthouse. I knew everything about “Old Barney,” from the date he was built to the date he was decommissioned. I’d look up at his red and white tower and admire his strength and solitude. I’d wish that I could be a lighthouse, too.

Leaden clouds blanketed the sky from horizon to horizon as we stepped out of the car on one particular afternoon in 1979. I was craning my neck to stare at the top when something wet and cold nudged the back of my leg, startling me to the point of almost falling over. I turned around to find a beagle-lab-something-or-other mutt looking up at me, tail wagging, eyes full of expectation. I bent down to pet him and he licked my hand. The little guy didn’t have a collar. I scanned the parking lot but didn’t see anyone who looked like they were missing a dog.

“Mom?” My mother turned and saw the two of us standing there, probably both looking lost. If I’d had a tail I suppose it would have been wagging, too.

“Oh, isn’t he precious. Ben, come over here.”

To understand what happens next, you have to know two things about my father:

First, he’d grown to resent me. From the moment my mom found my flaming body dangling from that dogwood tree, my dad had become the odd man out in our house. Everything in my mother’s world revolved around me. She had no attention and no patience left for her husband. My dad dealt with it for a while, but eventually he got fed up. I would overhear my parents late at night, my father complaining that their life had come to a complete standstill, that they were starting to lose their friends, that it wasn’t healthy for them or for me. My mother, sounding shocked, would only say “But Ben … Harry!” A few months later the bickering turned to arguing, their voices reaching a decibel level that even a pillow held smushed over my head couldn’t keep out. After that they gave up all pretense and fought out in the open. If you’re from a happy home, you just can’t know how much this sort of thing sucks.

It didn’t help that my father was out of work at the time. A local news station had videotaped my dad’s latest political patron, a New York City councilman, coming out of a drag bar. He—the councilman, not my dad—was wearing a frilly green dress, matching shoes, and pearls. The photo beneath the Daily News headline, which read “Council Woe-Man,” showed my dad’s boss in the full getup, but without his wig. The story mushroomed into a citywide scandal, which, like all scandals, blew over as soon as the newspaper-reading mob moved onto the next big thing. But the damage was done. The councilman was forced to resign, and my dad was left to putter around the house and get in my mom’s way.

There’s an apocryphal story about my dad wanting to wash his boxer shorts in their new top-loading Maytag dishwasher, the first either of them had ever owned. “Ruth, if it cleans the glasses, it will clean the clothes.” My mom gave him a choice: find a job, or else. He didn’t know what “or else” was, and he didn’t wait around to find out.

My dad took a job working as a legislative liaison in the governor’s office in Albany, three hours away. We’d see him on weekends, at Christmas, during summer vacation, and most other times the legislature was out of session. He’d barrel into the house like a freight train, showing up with souvenirs from around the state: A refrigerator magnet from Skaneateles Lake, a “Relax at the Spa” button from Saratoga, a T-shirt with a picture of the Maid of the Mist in the foreground and a rainbow and Niagara Falls in the background.

The long-distance living arrangement seemed to solve the problem for my mother, but it never suited my dad, or maybe it never suited his idea of what his life should be like. My father imagined himself the king of his castle, a benevolent, enlightened man, presiding over life at his own Kennedy compound. Instead, he was an exile, granted visitation only when the government allowed, and he blamed it all on me. It was a feeling that had been gnawing at him and it needed an outlet.

The second thing to understand about my dad is that he really hates dogs.

My father was just about to go into the lighthouse when he heard my mother call. He walked over to where we were standing.


“I think he’s lost,” I said, motioning to the dog.

“Nonsense. He’s with one of these families. Someone is up in the lighthouse and they just left him to wait.”

“I don’t know, Ben,” my mother said, studying the dog.

My father muttered “For crying out loud” to himself, and, always desperate to prove his point, stomped off, systematically approaching the few other families in and around the lighthouse while my mother and I waited. Five minutes later he came back with his brow furrowed.

“One of the men inside saw a green station wagon pull up, let the dog out, and drive away. They think maybe he was abandoned here.”

“Oh, how awful.” My mother looked at my father with pursed lips, motioning at me with her eyes. “We can’t just leave him here.”

“What exactly are we supposed to do?” my father asked, his words clipped.

“Can we keep him?” I knew the answer before it was spoken.

“Absolutely not.”

“We can at least bring him to a shelter, dear.”

My father weighed his options, knowing that if he did nothing he’d spend the rest of his vacation with a sullen, angry wife and a disappointed son. He grudgingly agreed. “Okay, a shelter.”

Dad got down on his hands and knees a few feet from the dog and whistled, trying, I supposed, to mimic something he’d seen in a movie or on TV. “C’mere boy, over here.” The dog, who in my head I’d given the clever name of “Blacky,” wasn’t buying it. He inched back.

My father inched forward.

Blacky inched back.

My dad stood up and looked around, pretending to ignore the dog, thinking he could outsmart him. The dog never took his eyes off my father, so when Dad lunged forward to grab him, Blacky bolted.

In the instant the dog turned and ran, I heard a sickening scrape of bone on bone and I saw my father grab his back and fall to the ground. The pain must have been intense, because tears were streaming down his lobster-colored cheeks, and his breath was short and raspy. I held out my hand to help him up, but he batted it away.

“This is your fault, everything is your fault! Just get away from me you god damn freak!”

There was no wind, no sound of the ocean, no sunlight. Just the reverberating echo of the word “freak” as it ricocheted off the lighthouse and the rocks in the flat, gray stillness.

“Ben!” my mother barked and time started moving forward again.

My father mumbled something, I didn’t know what, and took my hand, which was still extended in his direction. I didn’t even think about my reaction. I pulled his arm as hard as I could, jerking his torso and head toward my foot, which was moving in the direction of his face at the speed of sound. When my Converse sneaker connected with his mouth, I felt something crack. Three bloodstained teeth flew through the air and landed on his chest. I dropped knee-first onto his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. His arm was still in my grasp when I landed, and I could feel his shoulder separate.

Strike that. I couldn’t feel his shoulder separate or anything else, because, no matter how much I might’ve wanted to, that’s not what I did.

Here’s what really happened:

My father mumbled something, I didn’t know what, and took my hand, which was still extended in his direction. I helped him up. He didn’t look me in the eye, and he didn’t say anything else. I was so used to dealing with crap like this at school that I knew how to control and bottle up my emotions. I just pretended like it’d never happened. I didn’t even let myself cry.

I opened the car door for the old man, preparing to ease him into the backseat, when, without warning, the dog came bounding across the pavement and leapt in ahead of us, his tail wagging so fast it was just a black blur. My father hurled some insult at Blacky, and I did my best not to laugh.

After we dropped the dog at the local shelter, my dad spent the rest of the vacation lying prone on the floor of our bungalow. It was the beginning of a lifelong battle with back spasms, his vertebrae shifting without warning into configurations so painful as to require a cane for support.

He did apologize that night, looking up at me from the floor. A well-worn carpet surrounded him, making it look like he was floating in a beige-colored sea. He told me that sometimes, in the heat of a crisis, people say and do things they don’t mean to say or do.

“Pain and stress can hijack a man’s soul and twist it out of shape, like my back,” he said, trying to smile.

I nodded, but it didn’t matter, the damage was done. I didn’t believe his excuse anyway. My sorry little life had already taught me that things said under duress are always more true than not. But there was at least one unintended consequence from that vacation. I had the moral high ground and a “Get Out of Jail Free” card with my father.