The Scar Boys

MORE CIGARETTES


(written by Paul Westerberg, and performed by The Replacements)




Johnny and Cheyenne hoofed it to the next exit, a little more than a mile away, and called a wrecker to have the van towed. The dispatcher told them that the trip to Athens was going to cost two hundred dollars, most of the cash we had left.

None of us could find a single word to say while we waited. It was the first time since I’d known Johnny that he was without some clever remark, without an obvious solution no one else could see. That more than anything else scared the crap out of me.

When the wrecker arrived, I volunteered to ride in the tow truck while the rest of the band rode in the van. Given everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, I needed space.

The driver they sent to rescue us was your garden-variety, twenty-something, old-school redneck—denim overalls, blue-checked flannel shirt, scuffed work boots, even a John Deere hat—or so I thought. It turns out you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (you’d think I, of all people, would know that!) because he was actually a stoner from New Jersey.

“Yeah, man, I just came to Athens because I heard UGA was a party school. Want some?” I didn’t know how, but this guy had managed to roll a joint while he was driving. According to the speedometer we were doing ninety. He waved the fat boy under my nose.

I guess it’s weird, that, at eighteen, playing in a band, and spending most of my adolescence trying to fit in, I hadn’t been stoned before. Well, not unless you count being a methadone addict as a fourth grader, which I’m choosing not to count. Anyway, recreational drug use, for whatever reason, had just never come up.

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

The driver, whose name was Jeremiah, lit the joint, sucked the sweet smelling smoke deep into his chest, and held his breath. Then he passed it to me. I tried to mimic what I saw, but wound up in a fit of coughing and sputtering. As I tried to refill my lungs with fresh air, the coughing morphed into a kind of maniacal laughter that ended as teary gasps for breath. Jeremiah laughed, too, but I think it was just to be polite.

Only three years older than me, Jeremiah (not “Jerry” I was told) had recently dropped out of UGA and taken a job with Northern Georgia Wreck & Rescue, the company with the exclusive contract to handle calls to the state police along I-85. He’d been studying psychology, but that was just to please his parents. Jeremiah’s true love was driving, fixing, and being around cars. He spent his weekends at the Dixie Speedway in Woodstock, just north of Atlanta, working a stock car crew and hoping for a chance to race.

“So what’s wrong with your van, anyway?” he asked.

“We threw an engine rod.”

“Oh, you boys are f*cked.” He took another long toke and handed the joint back to me. By my third drag I was smoking without convulsing, though to be honest, I didn’t feel any different. I thought being stoned would make me light-headed and happy. I just felt nauseous and my throat burned.

I handed what was left of the joint back to Jeremiah who carefully stubbed it out on the steering wheel, adding another burn mark to the twenty or thirty that were already in orbit around the truck’s horn. He dropped the roach in his shirt pocket and then pulled out a pack of Marlboro’s, offering it in my direction.

“Sure,” I said, “why not.”

I flicked the lighter and held the thin orange flame to the end of the cigarette until I saw it was burning and then drew the smoke in. The taste of tobacco was foul compared to pot. It was like the difference between coffee and coffee ice cream. I held the soupy fog in my lungs for a long moment and exhaled.

“No, no, no, son.” Jeremiah laughed. “You exhale these right away. Don’t you smoke?”

“Not until today.”

“What the hell you wanna start for now?”

I didn’t have a good answer, so I shrugged my shoulders and took another drag, doing it right the second time. The truth is, I didn’t care why. I just wanted to smoke. Sue me.

The conversation petered out and we rode in silence for a while. Then Jeremiah asked, “So is Harry short for Harold?”

As you can probably guess, I hate that question. It comes up way more than you would think. But my name is my name, so I answered.

“No, it’s Harbinger.”

“Harbinger?”

“Yeah.”

“Like Harbinger of Doom?” Jeremiah was both amused and perplexed.

Maybe it was the pot, maybe it was the nicotine, but something loosened me up enough that I found myself telling Jeremiah the whole sorry story of how I got my name. It goes something like this:

My parents met in September 1967, which was supposed to be the “Summer of Love.”

Race riots were flaring in a dozen cities, the Chinese were exploding H-bombs in the Gobi Desert, and the US Congress was upping the ante in Vietnam, turning a police action into a full-fledged war. Summer of Love? It was more like the summer of indigestion, like 1966 had eaten a bad taco and just couldn’t keep it down.

My mom was working nights at a diner in Brooklyn to put herself through Kingsborough Community College, when my dad stopped in for a cup of coffee. He had been in Prospect Park for an event with his boss, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy; yeah, that Kennedy. Dad’s first political job was as a junior staffer, a constituent liaison or something like that, for the one and only Bobby Kennedy.

Dad sat at the counter of the diner and flirted with my mom for an hour. (She says it was more like two hours.) When he finally introduced himself and she shook his hand, there was an electric shock so intense that all the lights went out. Literally. All five boroughs of New York City went dark in a blackout that lasted five hours.

Halfway through that blackout I was conceived, and three weeks later my parents were married.

Yeah, I know, gross.

Things started off really good for my mom and dad. They bought a small house in Yonkers and began to build a life.

Then, in March of 1968, Kennedy jumped into the presidential race. My dad was offered a job on the campaign team, so he wound up traveling with the senator. It was hard on my mom, but the payoff if Kennedy won—and everyone was pretty sure he would win—was a job for my dad and an exciting new life in Washington for the Jones family.

Mom went into labor in the early hours of the morning on June 5. Her first contraction began at the exact same moment an unemployed exercise rider from Santa Anita racetrack was squeezing the trigger that would put a bullet into Bobby Kennedy’s head. My father was just a few yards away when it happened. (The gunshot, not the contraction.)

Dad talks about that night often, his eyes glazing over, his voice going hoarse, like he’s still there, stuck in that moment. He pulls out the same photograph of Kennedy and his entourage onstage at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, all of them smiling with their arms raised in celebration at having just won the California primary.

“See that ear?” my father asks, pointing to the obscured view of a man’s head, five people deep on the stage. “That’s my ear.


“Bobby,” Dad tells me, “was heading for a press conference after his victory speech. That’s when I heard the shots and I knew they got him. I knew they got Bobby.”

At this point my father usually stops and stares at his hands. I can never tell if he’s really getting emotional, or if he’s just pausing for effect. Then he takes a deep breath and starts again.

“The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hospital room with a big lump on my head. I don’t remember how I got there or how I got hurt. Something must have happened in the chaos after the shooting. When word reached me that your mother had gone into labor, I was confused—I had a concussion, and was probably still in shock—but I knew that I had to get home.”

Thirty hours later, the story goes, when he finally made it to my mother’s bedside, dazed and smelling like stale cigarettes and taxicab air freshener, my dad could barely hold me.

“Ben,” my mother said as my father gazed into my half-shut eyes for the first time, “he still needs a name.”

Not yet ready to move on from the grief and confusion he’d left behind in California to the joy of new life, my father could only mutter, “Harbinger.”

My mother, a puzzle of a woman if ever there was one, smiled and said, “Okay, Harbinger Robert Francis Jones.”

The events of those agonizing two days finally caught up with my dad, and he broke down. He climbed into the hospital bed next to my mom. With me cradled between them, and with my mother stroking his hair, my father cried himself to sleep.

Dad could never bring himself to call me Bobby like my mother wanted, so they started calling me Harry instead, and it stuck.

But it’s hard to escape a name like Harbinger. And, of course they had no idea what a good choice it would turn out to be.

When I finished the story Jeremiah just looked at me and gave a long low whistle.

“That is one f*cked-up story, Harbinger Jones.”

We didn’t say much else after that, and a few minutes later Jeremiah found the Athens address I’d given him—a low ranch house with light blue siding on a sleepy street. We’d been steered here by the drummer from the Woofing Cookies. This was the house of a friend of a friend, and arrangements had been made to let us crash for a few days. Jeremiah left Dino at the end of the driveway.

When I went to shake his hand, he was holding out his pack of Marlboros; inside was the roach from earlier. He winked at me and said, “Take care Harbinger Robert Francis Jones. Stay out of trouble.” And with that, he was gone.





I WANNA BE SEDATED


(written by Joey Ramone, and performed by the Ramones)




I woke up in a pitch-black room, sweating and out of breath. I was having a nightmare and must’ve been making some sort of horrible noise because Johnny came bursting through the door to see what was wrong.

“I’m all right,” I started to say, “it was just …” But Johnny didn’t stop at the door. He bounded into the room, leapt onto my chest, and wrapped his hands around my throat, choking all the air out of my lungs.

My heart seized and I fell out of bed, waking up for real.

Richie was on the floor next to me, sprawled like a chalk outline. His snoring didn’t even break its rhythm when I hit the ground.

There was light spilling under the door and I heard muffled voices on the other side. Johnny and Cheyenne. They were talking low and laughing.

I caught my breath and got my bearings—we were still in Athens, still crashing in the same house. The room had no air conditioner and my shirt was soaked through.

I got up, grabbed my cigarettes, and snuck out.

Johnny and Cheyenne were in their own room with the door closed. The light I saw was coming from a kitchen, where a stove clock read 3:24. I walked past the refrigerator, out the back door, and lit a smoke.

Off to the right, difficult to make out in the dark, was a twelve foot half-pipe made of pine boards and two-by-fours. It had been built by Tony and Chuck, the two skate punks who lived in the house. Shaved heads, piercings, and tattoos notwithstanding, they were actually pretty nice guys. Despite the fashion choice, they had more in common with Jeff Spicoli than with Aryan youth. All they wanted to do was ride that pipe and drink beer.

Dino was parked in the driveway to my left, wearing his name like a badge of honor. Our van had become a dinosaur, a reminder of another age. Useless and extinct, it had been sitting idle since we arrived two days earlier.

Our first morning in Athens we’d found the local Ford dealer and learned it was going to cost seventeen hundred dollars to fix the van. The entire engine block needed to be replaced. We didn’t have the money, and none of us were willing to ask our families for a loan, so we began canceling tour dates. It felt a little like quitting methadone, but with no reward at the end. Each gig lost was a punch in the gut. We canceled four dates the first day, and another two the second. We gave ourselves one week to get it sorted out and get back on the road. No one talked about what would happen at the end of that week.

I used the embers of my dying cigarette to light another and decided to go for a walk.

I started off at a rapid clip, the slap of my sneakers against the pavement sounding like the heartbeat of a small bird. I tried to get my mind around everything that was happening—the van, the tour, Johnny and Cheyenne—but it was all too much, so I started listing world capitals instead.

Abu Dhabi, Accra, Addis Ababa.

The air was a stew of humidity and heat, the only breeze generated by my own movement. The farther I walked, the faster I walked, but it did nothing to cool me off.

Algiers, Amman, Amsterdam.

I couldn’t slow down, body or mind.

Once, when I was nine or ten years old, I was in the car with my mother going to some doctor or other when the gas pedal got stuck. Bad things always seemed to happen when my mother was behind the wheel of a car. In this case, a little metal burr on the accelerator caught on an adjoining piece of metal in the engine and opened an uninterrupted and unquenchable flow of gasoline to the pistons. The brakes, when fully engaged, produced acrid-smelling smoke but did nothing to slow our speed. The car couldn’t be stopped. That’s how I felt walking through that stifling night, like that car careening out of control. (My mom eventually saved us by putting the car in neutral and coasting to safety. Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to have a neutral gear. Only drive and reverse.)

Andorra la Vella, Ankara, Antananarivo.

The mantra of the capitals was the only tangible thing in the world. The only thing I could hold on to. I was seeing everything as if reflected in a room of fun-house mirrors—distorted, ugly, unreal—and I couldn’t find my way out. Parked cars looked like something from an Escher print and the trees were melting. Either the world was breaking down or I was.

Asunción, Athens, Baghdad.

I had no idea where my feet were taking me, so I was surprised when I rounded a corner and found myself in the center of town. Without knowing how or why, I made a beeline for the pay phone outside of the Athens police station and dialed the first and only number that popped into my brain.

“Dr. Hirschorn’s line,” said a bored woman’s voice. For some stupid reason, I’d imagined that Dr. Kenny would answer the phone himself. It never occurred to me that doctors didn’t answer their own phones, especially in the middle of the night.

“I have a collect call from a Harry Jones,” the operator answered.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Apparently the answering service lady hadn’t encountered collect calls before. Not sure what to do, she accepted the charges.


“May I help you?” she asked, her boredom replaced by alarm.

“I need to speak to Dr. Kenny,” I managed to rasp into the receiver.

“Dr. Kenny?”

“Dr. Hirschorn.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“No. I’m calling in the middle of the night, collect, and can barely breathe. Of course it’s an emergency! Do you think I want to sell him a set of encyclopedias?” Even if I had said that, the poor woman on the other end of the line wouldn’t have understood a word of it. But I didn’t say that or anything intelligible. I don’t think I was capable of forming actual sentences.

“Sir?” she asked.

My only response was to continue blathering world capitals in between gasps of weeping.

“Hold, please,” she said somewhere around Beirut.

I had stopped seeing Dr. Kenny not long after Johnny and I started the band. It was my idea to end our sessions. Dr. Kenny resisted.

“What you’ve been through, Harry,” he’d told me, “it’s a lot more complicated than it seems. It’s wonderful that you’ve made friends and are playing music, but there’s healing that needs to happen at a deeper level, too. And that takes time.”

I’d already been through six years of sessions with Dr. Kenny, and I was having none of it. The only thing I’d ever wanted was a normal life, and there was no place for a pediatric psychiatrist in the world I was trying to build. My parents—my mom still indulging my every desire and my dad wanting to save money—took my side.

Dr. Kenny seemed genuinely worried at our last session.

“Well, the music will be good therapy, I guess,” he told me, and he turned out to be right. “You take care, Harbinger Jones,” he said as I left his office for the last time.

I did have some regret, not because I thought I needed therapy—though, of course I did—but because I really liked and trusted Dr. Kenny. It’s why I was calling him and not my parents from that phone booth in Athens.

Just after Lima and right before Lisbon Dr. Kenny came on the line.

“Harry, is that you?” he asked, as I continued to gasp for air.

“Yes.”

“It’s been a while, Harry.” Dr. Kenny dropped his voice a cool octave. It was one of his Jedi mind tricks, and it worked. A this-isn’t-the-anxiety-you’re-looking-for sort of thing. “Can you tell me what’s happening?”

I didn’t know where to begin. My brain fumbled through the facts of my life, groping for a starting point, but found none.

“Harry, it will help if you talk to me.”

I saw my reflection in the glass of the phone booth and I froze.

Throughout the course of my life, I’d had one of two reactions on seeing myself in a mirror:

Reflection Reaction #1: Complete revulsion. I was as horrified at my face as everyone around me. I was a scary-looking freak. I got it.

Reflection Reaction #2: The mental airbrush. On the very rare occasions when I wasn’t feeling desperate, despondent, detached, or any other SAT word that starts with the letter “d,” I would see myself as I imagined I would’ve looked without the scars, without the nerve damage, without the wig. I would see an unremarkable face—beautiful in its unremarkability, if that’s even a word. I would see in my reflection a normal kid.

But something different happened in the phone booth that night. For reasons I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now, rather than scare me, my face—with all of its horror intact—was, for the first time in my life, a comfort. Maybe I had become so emotionally isolated that I had no one left to turn to other than myself. Or maybe I just didn’t care anymore. Whatever the reason, my reflection gave me a glimmer of stability. The phone call to Dr. Kenny started to feel like a bad idea.

“Nothing,” I mumbled, “I’m okay. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Harry, wait,” Dr. Kenny said before I could hang up. I didn’t answer, but I knew he could hear me breathing. “I want you to listen to me carefully. You need to get yourself to an emergency room. Can you do that? For me?”

I didn’t answer again. My heart rate was starting to retreat from the redline. Barely, but noticeably, I was starting to feel the ground beneath my feet again.

“Harry?”

“No, really doc. I’m going to be okay. And I am sorry to have bothered you. Thank you.” I hung up and stood there for a few minutes with my forehead pressed against the glass, letting its smooth surface cool me. I remember that I laughed out loud, but I don’t remember why. Had someone been passing by, I’m sure I would’ve sounded batshit crazy. Lucky for me, the street was deserted.

I left the phone booth and began the long walk back.





SITTING STILL


(written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe, and performed by R.E.M.)




When I got back to the skate house, I found Cheyenne sitting on the back stoop. Her legs were pulled up tight against her chest and she was rocking back and forth with the precision of a metronome. She didn’t say anything or even look up when I approached.

“Hey,” I muttered, ready to scoot around her and retreat inside. I was still shaky from my walk and phone call, and felt like maybe I should be alone. But when I passed her, I could hear that Cheyenne was crying. The sound stopped me in my tracks.

I didn’t know what to do. A crying girl wasn’t anything I’d encountered before.

Wait, strike that.

Dana Dimarco.

I was eleven years old and had been walking home across the otherwise deserted elementary school playground. Dana was there, sitting on a swing, dragging her foot in a small, slow circle on the asphalt. She was sobbing openly.

I had stayed late after school that day to avoid a bully named Jamie Cosite. He was a year younger than me and was planning to beat me up. I knew this because during playtime on the kickball field he told me, “I’m going to beat you up.”

Going against my better judgment I asked him, “Why?”

“Whaddya mean why?”

“I mean why do you want to beat me up?” I had been so routinely abused by other kids that I guess on some level, I figured I had nothing to lose.

“Because look at you,” he said, his friends laughing at his oh-so-clever wit. Cosite had too many freckles and an unnaturally square jaw; he looked like a ventriloquist dummy.

“So?”

That was all he needed. He punched me in the face right then and there, and kicked me in the shoulder as I went down. A teacher saw the commotion and walked straight over to where we were standing. Jamie stopped the assault when he saw her coming toward us, but managed to get in a quick “I’ll finish you after school,” before the teacher’s presence sent all the other kids scattering.

Miss Chardette—“Bulldog Chardette”—the warden of my sixth-grade class, stood over me. I was alone, lying there on the ground, looking up at her, silently pleading for help. She just shook her head and walked away.

That was the last time I talked back to a bully.

When the last bell rang that day, going outside seemed like a bad idea, so I hid in a coat closet. This was right after Dr. Kenny had first taught me to use lists as calming devices. I began with the only one other than lightning that I’d memorized to that point: US presidents. I ran through the list forward and backward. I counted the even-numbered presidents, and then the odd-numbered presidents. I figured out that the most common letter of the alphabet to begin a president’s last name was “H”—Harrison, Hayes, Harrison, Harding, and Hoover—and that only one president’s last name began with the letter “L”—Lincoln. The exercise must’ve worked, because I fell asleep.


When I woke up and dragged myself out of the closet, the clock on the wall of the classroom said it was four p.m. The school was deserted. That’s when I went outside and found Dana Dimarco crying on the swings.

As I walked by, she looked out from underneath her copper bangs. She didn’t say anything, but I know she saw me. She cast her eyes back to the ground and started crying louder.

I figured I had two choices:

Choice #1: Sit down on the next swing over and ask her what was wrong. Experience taught me that would only lead to disaster. I would do something—or rather, I was something—that would make her cry harder.

Choice #2: Walk away.

I chose door number two, and I’ve regretted it every day of my life since.

If I had talked to Dana Dimarco, maybe I would’ve made a friend. Truth is, she wasn’t totally awful to me most of the time. I bet if I had bothered to ask her what was wrong—and I think she wanted me to ask—maybe my whole life would’ve been different.

I sat down next to Cheyenne, leaving a healthy buffer between us. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t have to; something in the air told me that being there was the right thing to do. She needed company.

I don’t know how long we sat there—the two of us on that stoop, saying nothing—but the sky turned from the color of a plum, to the color of faded blue jeans, to dawn, and Chey had stopped crying. I’d almost forgotten she was next to me. I was just starting to hatch this crazy idea that we should steal a van to finish the tour when Chey cleared her throat and brought me back to reality.

I turned to face her. She must have sensed that she had my attention because she didn’t look up before she spoke.

“We had a big fight.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact. I didn’t have to ask who we was. I knew who we was.

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say next, so I said nothing.

Chey plowed on, not realizing that I was the last person on the planet who wanted to hear about her problems with Johnny. “He wants us to leave, to go home. I told him we all agreed to wait until the end of the week, but he says he doesn’t care, he wants to leave now and I should go with him.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I said.

I know what you’re thinking. This was my chance to pile on Johnny, drive a wedge between him and Cheyenne, but honestly, I didn’t have it in me.

“He has money, you know.” This caught my attention.

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Yep.”

“How much?”

“Like five hundred dollars. His parents gave it to him for emergencies. Chey,” she said, mocking Johnny’s voice, “if this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.”

Johnny had money? He and Chey were fighting? I didn’t know what to do. I’d only just barely pulled myself back from the edge of a breakdown and I felt empty, hollowed out, like someone had removed all of my internal organs and replaced them with bags full of sand. Nothing in me was real.

Chey started to cry again, which was the only sound in the world less bearable than the silence.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going with him?”

“To do what?” she said, unable or unwilling to sniffle the edge out of her voice. “Spend a week following him around until he leaves for Syracuse? Then what? Follow him there? He begged me to go, but I don’t see the point.”

“Johnny begged you to go?” I couldn’t picture Johnny begging anyone for anything.

“I guess that’s not the right word. He kinda ordered me to go. That’s what started the fight.”

I nodded. Something about Johnny ordering Chey to go with him reminded me of my father, maybe because it had the unmistakable ring of moral superiority. It never occurred to either one of them—Johnny or my dad—that they could possibly be wrong, about anything, ever.

Case in point: Once, a few years earlier, Johnny told me that he’d heard “they” were breeding six-legged chickens.

“Huh?” I responded.

“Yeah, I saw it on a TV show. They want to sell more drumsticks.” Johnny was always bringing some crazy bit of information like that to our rehearsals:

“They’re using coffee enemas to cure cancer.”

“A nail punch will shatter your car’s windshield if you ever drive into a lake.”

“Carrie Fisher is really a dude.”

Crazy as these tidbits sounded, this was Johnny, so I just accepted whatever he said as true. The chicken thing though, sounded just a bit too crazy, so I put up a meager and casual resistance, which for me was a lot.

“C’mon,” I said, “that can’t be for real.”

Johnny was flabbergasted. You could almost hear him thinking, How dare you talk back.

He quoted every detail he could remember from the television show—except its name—and kept pushing, not letting us rehearse until I said I believed him. I never did. I finally shrugged my shoulders, thinking the whole thing was funny, and that the incident was over. But Johnny was so hell-bent on proving his point—just like my dad would’ve been in the same situation—that he actually wrote a letter to Frank Perdue for validation. Really. Frank Perdue. I kid you not. As far as I know, the letter went unanswered.

When I think about it now, I wonder if Johnny wasn’t some sort of surrogate for my dad. Freaky. And beside the point.

“I don’t know what to do, Harry,” Chey said. It was more or less an open plea for help, but I had nothing. I wanted to help Cheyenne—more than anything in the world I wanted to help Cheyenne—but I couldn’t even help myself.

The last time I’d felt this way was the afternoon I’d been rejected by Gabrielle. That day Johnny was there to pick me up. “We should start a band,” he’d said. It was like a magic phrase—abracadabra, hocus pocus, and open sesame all rolled into one. It made me forget the pain for just long enough to move on to the next thing.

Sitting there with Chey, I wished for that magic phrase again. Strike that. Not for the phrase, but for how it made me feel, full of wonder and promise. I wished I had bottled that feeling, let it age, and uncorked it there on that porch.

And that’s when it hit me. The only thing in the world that could ever make anyone feel truly better.

“I have an idea,” I said, “that will help us both.” I reached out my hand for Chey. This was so unlike me—taking action and initiative, being direct—that I’m not sure she knew what to do. After a moment she put her hand in mine and let me help her up.

“Let’s go.”





HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT


(written by Eddie Schwartz, and performed by Pat Benatar)




During our first sixty hours in Athens, we’d done the following:

Athens Thing #1: We found the mechanic and got the bad news about Dino.

Athens Thing #2: We listened to Johnny whine that we needed to give up the tour and go home.

Athens Thing #3: We waited outside the downtown phone booth while Johnny called his parents and told them that the van had broken down and that we were stranded. He made them promise to be in touch with everyone else’s family. They made him promise to call again the next day.

Athens Thing #2: We listened to Johnny whine that we needed to give up the tour and go home.

Athens Thing #4: We watched Richie try his hand at skateboarding. With his arms flailing and whirling, he managed to stay afloat all the way into the trough of the half-pipe, but as the momentum carried the board up the opposite slope, he fell backward and landed hard on his ass. It took him a minute to realize he was okay, and when he did, he raised both arms and yelled, “F*cking A!” in triumph. Tony, Chuck, and the other skate punks shrieked with delight.


Athens Thing #2: We listened to Johnny whine that we needed to give up the tour and go home.

Athens Thing #5: We explored downtown Athens. We found a secondhand record store (we had no money so we browsed), a local sub shop called Judy’s (where we learned that subs were called “po’boys”), and the University of Georgia campus (where a steady stream of unpleasant looks suggested we were less than welcome).

Athens Thing #2: We listened to Johnny whine that we needed to give up the tour and go home.

Athens Thing #6: And we—meaning me—read a book in the living room while Johnny and Cheyenne sat on the front porch swing and made out. (Not true. I pretended to read a book while I spied on Johnny and Cheyenne through the venetian blinds.)

Those were the things we’d done after crash-landing in Athens. Here’s what we hadn’t done:

Athens Thing #0: Play music.

Cheyenne followed me inside, and I led her straight to her bass. “Here,” I said, “I’ll get the other guys.”

Cheyenne smiled. “Good idea. Where?”

“Richie set his drums up in the basement.”

The basement of the skate house was a strange space. There were four rooms, each separated from the others by brick walls, all but one with a hard-packed dirt floor. There were odd pieces of furniture scattered about, including a giant cherry wood dresser, a rolltop desk, and a toilet, which for some reason cracked Richie up.

The other things of note in the basement were the jumping spiders.

I don’t know if they were technically spiders because I’d never seen anything like them before, and haven’t seen anything like them since. In fact, I’m not entirely sure they were of this world. They were dime-sized bugs that hopped vertically in the air, moving with precision and menace. A group of them together looked like the tiny pistons of a tiny car engine. (Notice that I didn’t say van engine because as you now know, FAP, van engines do not work.) There were hundreds of the little monstrosities. They were mostly restricted to a back corner of the basement, which left the rest of the space safe for human habitation. Every so often one of the spiders would venture into the green zone, which made it fair game. The only house rule Tony and Chuck had was to never go into the basement in bare feet.

I kicked Richie’s foot as I walked into our shared bedroom, waking him up. He made an unintelligible sound, a breathy amalgam of “what” and “f*ck,” and looked at me. “Jesus, Harry, what time is it?”

“I don’t know. Six or seven maybe?”

“Is the house on fire?”

“No.”

“Then piss off.”

“We’re jamming.”

Richie’s eyes opened all the way and he smiled. He got up and grabbed his drumsticks and pants, in that order, and headed downstairs.

Johnny was in the room he and Cheyenne had been sharing, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at his fully packed knapsack.

“I told you guys I was going to college,” he said to me as soon as I crossed the threshold, defending himself before I could say a word.

“C’mon,” I told him, waving him to follow me.

“Where?”

“We’re jamming.”

“Harry, I think I need to leave.” Johnny sounded exasperated, defeated.

“I know,” I said, looking at my shoes. “Cheyenne told me. But why don’t you come jam first?”

“What? Why?”

“I dunno.” It was a coward’s answer. The truth was that he should come jam because he was my best friend and music was the only thing left holding us together. That whatever he and I had once meant to each other was seeping away like water from a drought-stricken lake, too slowly to be noticed, until one day it would just be gone. That even if he was going to leave, he should go out, literally, on a high note. But I wasn’t programmed to say those things. I wanted to, but didn’t know how.

“If you don’t know, then I sure don’t know,” he answered. His voice had an edge and a meanness that hurt, and I reacted.

“Cheyenne says you have money,” I said. It felt good to catch him in a lie, to force him to the moral low ground.

Silence.

I looked up at Johnny and met his eyes. It’s important to understand that I’d never said anything so directly confrontational in the entire history of our friendship. This was new ground for both of us.

“It’s none of your business,” he finally answered.

“It’s not?”

“No.”

“You didn’t seem to mind spending the money my dad gave me.”

“That was your choice, Harry. Besides, my parents told me this was emergency money.”

“And the van breaking down? That wasn’t an emergency?”

“My emergency, not your emergency. And like I said, it’s none of your business.” He was defiant, smug and secure in the rightness of his actions to the last. I couldn’t take it.

“A*shole.” I muttered the word under my breath. It was dripping with malice, and it was out of my mouth before I could stop it.

Johnny’s eyebrows arched so sharply in surprise that they looked like two garden slugs trying to crawl off his forehead and into his hair. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”

My utterance of “a*shole” was so far off the script of our well-defined relationship that I knew I’d crossed a line and it scared me. I shook my head no.

He stared right through me and with all the cruelty he could muster, said, “You. Are. Such. A. p-ssy.” And then he smiled.

When I think about it now, I know that Johnny was feeling the same stress, or at least his own version of the stress, that the rest of us were feeling. And when I think about it now, I know that Johnny’s best defense has always been a good offense. But that’s only if I think about it now. In the heat of that moment, something in me snapped. It was like when the cotter pin on Dino snapped; the clutch was still there, and the gears were still there, but any connection between the two was gone. I had no control. Strike that. In some weird way, I think I had total control. I’d switched to autopilot. All feeling and all thought peeled away from me like a snake’s skin molting.

Maybe I snapped because I hadn’t slept. Or maybe it was a hangover from the flood of emotions I’d experienced the night before. Or maybe it was the years of abuse and neglect, the cruelty upon cruelty inflicted on me. Or maybe it was that Johnny had broken the promise we’d all made not to date Cheyenne, ever, and that he did it before I’d had the chance. Maybe it was all of those things, or maybe it was something else entirely. But when I look back, I think it was his smile that pushed me over the edge.

Time froze. I saw everything as a collection of brightly glowing pixels, each point of light so intense I couldn’t look straight at it, but all the pixels together rendering the world in perfect, stark clarity, as if illuminated by a prolonged flash of lightning. Every nerve ending in my body was humming. Strike that. Not humming, thrumming, like what you feel if you’re standing too close to high voltage power lines. I was either going to float away or explode.

I didn’t float away.

I dropped my arms to my sides and looked Johnny in the eye. He didn’t flinch. My right hand opened itself into a flat paddle, and with all my might, my arm swung out wide and slapped Johnny in the face. I hit him hard enough that his head swiveled to the side and his cheek turned red.

He looked back at me stunned. “Did you just slap me?”


I turned and walked out of the room.