The Scar Boys

PUMP IT UP


(written and performed by Elvis Costello)




“Where’s Johnny?” Chey asked without looking up. She was sitting on the edge of her amp tuning her bass.

“Upstairs,” I answered as I plugged my guitar in.

After my open-handed slap I made straight for the basement. I saw Chey and Richie exchange a glance as I pulled the guitar strap over my head. They could tell something was wrong.

You’re probably thinking that I was feeling one of the following emotions in that moment:

Anger.

Joy.

Relief.

Fear.

Guilt.

Sorrow.

The truth is, more than anything, I was embarrassed. Embarrassed that I’d slapped Johnny and not punched him in the face. When someone calls you a p-ssy, an open-handed slap only proves his point. That’s what I was thinking when I went downstairs. The whole episode showed how damaged my friendship with Johnny was. I didn’t know if he would come down the stairs or not, and by then, I really didn’t care. I just wanted to move on.

“Let’s play a song,” I said.

“Is he coming?” Cheyenne asked, looking worried.

As if on cue, the sound of stomping footsteps upstairs made the ceiling shake. We all stopped—me standing and holding my guitar, Richie sitting behind his drums, and Chey perched on the edge of her amp—and waited. Then we heard the front door of the house open and slam shut.

No one moved for a least a full minute, probably more like two.

Cheyenne broke the silence. I don’t know what was going through her head. She probably thought Johnny had left because of her. She set her jaw in the locked position and started playing the bass line to our nastiest, fastest song.

Playing loud, hard music was the tonic I needed. Strike that. Johnny leaving was the tonic I needed. Strike that, too. It wasn’t just one thing, it was everything. It was hitting bottom the night before, it was connecting with Cheyenne on the stoop, it was the music, it was confronting Johnny, it was all of it. I—we—played like the world was going to end in five minutes and this was the last thing any of us would ever get to do.

I was the only one who knew the words to all our songs (I had memorized them), so with Johnny gone, I set up his microphone and sang. And you know what? I was good. Really good. I could see it in Richie’s and Chey’s faces. I was surprising them as much as I was surprising myself. I wasn’t even wearing my costume.

We got through a whole forty-five minutes before the police showed up. We didn’t hear them until they were coming down the stairs. There were two officers—both young, both built like football players—and they looked kind of amused.

We stopped playing.

“Do you kids know what time it is?” the taller of the two asked.

“Isn’t it like ten a.m.?” Cheyenne asked. I was pretty sure she knew it wasn’t, but Chey was a pro at bending the truth.

“No, it’s like 7:45 a.m.,” he answered, mocking her.

“Huh,” Chey said. “I guess we should stop.”

I had been in a corner of the cramped, poorly lit room, and had kept my head down. Something about the way I was sitting must’ve bothered the cop.

“Hey, are you all right?” he asked.

I lifted my head and met his eyes. He tried to check his reaction, but I could see him recoil. It made me smile. I’ve always known that I have no ability to control that reaction, to stop the revulsion at the mere sight of me. But for the first time in my life, it didn’t bother me. It was what it was; it really didn’t matter. It seemed so obvious that I wondered how I’d been missing it all those years.

I thought back to what Lucky Strike the Lightning Man told me, that I had to control things or they would control me. I’d been putting the emphasis on controlling rather than on not being controlled. And maybe that was upside down. Maybe I just needed to figure out how to go with the flow.

“I’m okay,” I answered him.

“Okay,” he said. “Just cool it with the music until later in the day. We had three complaints.”

“Sure thing, officer,” Chey said. “Sorry to have brought you out here.”

He nodded, said, “Let’s go” to his partner, and they left.

“Should we play another song?” Richie asked after we heard their car pull away, the corners of his mouth stretched wide with mischief.

Chey—who looked like she was coming back to Earth, like the feeling of the music was leaving her, like she was remembering that Johnny was gone—shook her head no. “Probably not the best idea. But let’s come back later. I really needed this.”

“Amen,” I said.

When we went upstairs, we found Tony and Chuck in the kitchen drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

“Crap,” I said. We hadn’t even stopped to consider that our hosts were still sleeping. “I’m really sorry if we woke you guys up.”

“Are you kidding, man?” Chuck began. “We loved it! We had no idea you guys were that good.”

“Really?” Richie asked. He was beaming, and I think I was, too.

“Where’s the other dude?” Tony asked.

“Gone,” I said. “Home. College.”

“Well, f*ck him then. You dudes should finish your tour.”

The three of us exchanged a glance and I burst out laughing. “We’d love to,” I answered, “but we can’t afford to fix our van.”

“So buy a smaller car. There are always crap cars for sale just outside of town for like five hundred dollars. We can drive you out there.”

“Well, five hundred dollars is less than the seventeen hundred it’s gonna cost to fix the van, but it doesn’t matter, because we barely have fifty dollars between us.”

Tony and Chuck looked at each other and said in unison, “Fund-raiser.”





HALLELUJAH


(written and performed by Leonard Cohen)




The fund-raiser turned out to be a keg party. A big keg party. A really, really big keg party.

Tony and Chuck made crude signs and enlisted the help of their friends to post them all over town:

Help the Scar Boys finish their tour. Rock and roll fund-raiser at 810 Hill Street this Friday (three nights hence). $10 to get in, larger donations accepted. Live music, cold brew, and riding the pipe. We start tapping the keg at 9 p.m. Spread the word.

From what they told us, the fund-raiser was the only thing anyone was talking about. Athens was like that. It was a small town and word spread fast, especially when it involved beer. There were no formal invitations, there was no arm twisting, just the grapevine. This party was, according to Tony and Chuck, going to be huge.

Like always, I stayed away from other people, so I had no idea if they were blowing smoke or not, but I figured not, and I started to freak myself out.

This was going to be the first time we played in public without Johnny, and the first time I would be singing in front of other people. I had no idea what to do, or worse, what to expect of myself.

On the afternoon of the fund-raiser I wandered around the house waiting for the sun to go down. I was trying to kill time, but I think it was killing me instead.

I finished an unfinished crossword puzzle.

I watched Mayberry R.F.D. on the television in Tony’s room.

I took two walks around the block, counting the individual cement squares on the sidewalk (567).

I even washed the dishes.

I ran out of things to do and wound up on the back porch chain-smoking, staring at the empty pipe and the crude stage we’d built in front of it, and going over the set list in my head, again and again and again.


The sun was low over the horizon, throwing tangerine soup at a herd of passing clouds, when I heard the door close behind me. I was so lost in my own thoughts that I didn’t realize it was Cheyenne until she was sitting next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I answered.

She seemed to collect her thoughts for a moment and then said, “This doesn’t feel right.”

“What?”

“Playing this party without Johnny. Finishing the tour without Johnny. Being here, without Johnny.”

Since the police had stopped our jam session three mornings earlier, Chey had kept mostly to herself. She stayed in her room, only coming out when we gave her updates on the plans for the fund-raiser, or to rehearse.

“So what do you want to do?” I asked, trying to be gentle. “Do you want to go home?”

“No,” she said, “but it still doesn’t feel right.”

“I think we sound pretty good as a trio,” I offered.

“We do.” She kind of smiled. “Somehow that makes it worse.”

“Look, Chey, if you want to go, we’ll all go. We’ll do whatever you want to do.”

She took my hand and I squeezed her fingers, maybe a little too hard. The next thing I knew, she was kissing my mangled cheek. Her lips were soft. Softer than her hands. Softer than anything in the world. They were the most wonderful things I’d ever felt in my life.

“Thank you, Harry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For still being here.”

Without thinking about what I was doing, I put my hand on her shoulder and gave her neck a little squeeze. I could feel her muscles release all of their tension, like they just needed human contact. She turned her face to mine.

“Cheyenne …” was all I could muster. Our faces were so close that it was mostly an accident when our lips touched. Both of us had our eyes open, and we both froze. Then she closed her eyes and kissed me.

I didn’t know what to do. Literally. Was I supposed to pucker up? Press my mouth forward? Open it? Jam my tongue in there? Luckily, kissing is one of those animal instincts I guess we all have, because before I knew what was happening, I was kissing her back—innocent middle-school kisses, gentle, PG-rated kisses.

I would later learn—researching it, like Dr. Kenny taught me to do—that in those few seconds I was kissing Cheyenne, more than thirty muscles in my face and neck were working in concert as a dozen cranial nerves were busy zipping messages from those muscles to the pleasure centers of my brain—the right ventral tegmental and right caudate nucleus if you’re keeping score—which woke up with a vengeance, probably for the first time since I’d been weaned off of methadone. I learned that Chey’s kisses were causing the posterior lobe of my pituitary gland to release a hormone called oxytocin into my blood, filling me with feelings of generosity, social connectedness, and all over goodness. (Oxytocin is a drug that can turn any rational person into the village idiot, and is just crying out for someone to market it. Hey, FAP, maybe I should major in marketing!) And had I been paying attention, I would’ve noticed that my blood pressure and heart rate were spiking, my pupils were dilating, that I was getting seismic level cutis anserina (goose bumps), and that I was horripilating in the best possible way. (Some more SAT words for your reading pleasure.)

Interesting stuff, but pointless. The truth is, I was beyond reason, beyond thought. It was the closest thing to playing the guitar I’d ever experienced.

I can’t find my own words to describe kissing Cheyenne, so I’ll share a Chinese proverb we’d learned in tenth grade English:

Kissing is like drinking salted water

You drink, and your thirst increases

A total of five seconds later—though the concept of time had lost all meaning—something snapped Cheyenne back to the moment and she pulled away.

“Harry, I’m … I’m sorry.”

Cheyenne got up and walked down the driveway.

She was gone.





I’M FREE


(written by Peter Townshend, and performed by The Who)




By the time we were supposed to go on, just after dark, it seemed like every kid in town was there. There were skate punks with shaved heads, alt rockers with untucked flannel shirts and ripped jeans, new wave kids with over-teased hair, even some thick-necked jocks from UGA. Every kid, except for Cheyenne.

“Dude,” Richie asked me quietly, “do you think she followed Johnny home?”

I was just starting to wonder the same thing when Chey walked up with her bass slung across her back. She looked at both of us and said, “Let’s play.” She walked out onto the makeshift stage.

I was in my full Scar Boy getup—glasses, hat, denim jacket with the collar up (really uncomfortable in the Georgia heat)—ready to escape at the first sign of trouble, but there was no turning back.

Our opening song—“Girl in the Band”—began with the bass and drums pounding out an up-tempo four-four groove. As I waited for my cue, to thrash in the first chords from the guitar, I gave my body to the rhythm and started moving with the music. At first I tapped my foot, which is all I’d ever done onstage before that night, but within a few bars I was letting my whole body shake to the beat. And then the strangest thing happened. I heard a voice in my head.

Yeah, I know. Crazy. But it wasn’t that kind of voice. The voice was mine; it was the voice I’d been hearing all my life, the voice that had recited list after boring list of presidents and baseball stats, the voice that had told me to keep quiet when other kids gave me a hard time, the voice that had always done what it was told. But that night I heard something in that voice I’d never heard before: The voice was smiling.

Pump your fist in the air, the voice suggested, so I did. It was a good idea. With each pump the crowd smacked their hands together, filling the night with thundering clap after thundering clap.

Introduce the band, the voice told me. I did that, too.

“On the drums, give it up for the skateboarding prince of the groove, Richie McGill!” The guys riding boards on the pipe behind Richie whooped and hollered. He took the cue and did an extended drum fill. The crowd went wild.

Throw your hat, the voice said. I took the hat off my head, leaving the wig intact, and threw it off the stage. It was snatched one-handed out of the air by a UGA co-ed. She managed to catch it without spilling a drop of her beer.

“On the bass, the princess of pounding rhythm, Cheyenne Belle.” Some of the kids had flashlights and had been waving them in the air like light sabers. All at once they trained their light on Cheyenne. She was radiant. Again the audience screamed in delight.

I didn’t need the voice to tell me what to do next. My jacket came off and I threw my sunglasses deep into the crowd. Then I threw my wig.

“And I’m Harbinger Robert Francis Jones, the king of darkness and despair, and …” Without prior arrangement, without even exchanging a glance, Richie and Chey came to a thundering halt in perfect unison. The echo of the last beat filled the yard and died. The flashlight-spotlight hit me, revealing every crevice of my scars in excruciating detail. There was an audible and collective gasp. In the nanosecond that I paused, I thought about running out of the yard and never looking back, about getting out of that god damn light.

I looked over at Richie and Chey and they were smiling at me. They were both sporting ear-to-ear grins, like that stupid cat in the comics. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.


“And we,” I shouted, “are the Scar Boys!”

The beat started again, this time with my guitar, and the crowd went berserk. As I sang the first verse, the voice in my head gave a pat on the back. Nice, it said.

Thanks, I answered, and we were off and running.





I DON’T WANT TO KNOW


(written by Stevie Nicks, and performed by Fleetwood Mac)




Those few hours on the night of the Scar Boys fund-raiser were the best hours of my life. Nothing—and I mean nothing—will ever top them. Sure, adults blather on about their wedding days or holding their newborn children for the first time, or blah, blah, blah, blah. I don’t care. That gig and that kiss were it. It was a climax, a zenith, the realization of a perfect crescendo. I was on the summit of Everest and I was walking on the moon. I wanted to live those moments over and over and over again. And now that we had money to finish the tour, and now that Cheyenne and I had connected, maybe, just maybe I could. My life finally felt like it was turning a corner, like all that awful shit I’d dealt with for all those years would just fade away like bad graffiti. The sunlight would finally win out.

Which is why it had to all come crashing down.

I don’t remember what I did after the gig that night. I know that I drank, a lot, because I woke up the next morning with my head feeling like a pendulum’s weight and throw-up stains on my shirt. I didn’t even know if the stains were mine or someone else’s. I didn’t care.

I found Richie in our room, wearing a pair of socks and boxer shorts and smiling in his sleep. Penny Vick was lounging on the end of his bed smoking a cigarette.

“Great show, Harry,” she said, offering me a smoke.

Penny was a pharmacology student at UGA who’d taken a shine to Richie. He was a little too dense to notice at first, but she’d been all over him like poison ivy the two days leading up to the fund-raiser, and from the looks of what I’d found in his bedroom, he’d finally caught on.

Everything about Penny was interesting and exciting. She had an eight-inch, spiked Mohawk that was blue the day we met her and flaming orange the night of the party. She read interesting books—John Fowles and Jim Carroll. She listened to cool music—R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü. She was the only girl I’d ever met who knew more world capitals, more geographical stats, and more useless trivia than me. (She told me she was an insomniac, and that the lists helped her sleep. Go figure.) Penny was also a constant fixture at the skate house. Her talent on the pipe was well established, and her ability to spar with the otherwise all-boys club—verbally, physically, and otherwise—was legendary.

We got to know Penny in those first few days nearly as well as we got to know Tony and Chuck. In some ways better, because Penny was smart. Really smart. She was in her second year at UGA and, according to Tony, was the “Queen of the Dean’s List.” She was fascinated with the Scar Boys and would pepper us with questions about our band and life in New York. Some of it, I figured, was just a way to get closer to Richie, but most of it was genuine.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the cigarette and bending down for her light. “Is he going to wake up any time soon?” I asked.

“I doubt it.” She smiled.

I shrugged my shoulders and went in search of Cheyenne. I couldn’t find her anywhere, and none of the all-night party stragglers—about a dozen people had crashed at the skate house—had seen her. Chuck saw me milling about and handed me an envelope.

“Open it,” he said, sounding serious. I peeked inside and saw a big, fat wad of cash. It smelled like beer, but it was legal tender. I looked up and Chuck was smiling. He watched me count out $1,627, mostly in tens, fives, and singles.

“Is this all for us?”

“Yeah, we took about a hundred out to cover our costs, but the rest is yours.”

“Sixteen hundred dollars?”

“I know, right?” Chuck said.

We would be able to finish the tour. The Scar Boys were going out as a three-piece, and we were going to finish the tour. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just stood there for a long minute. And then, in the joy of the moment, I felt something I almost never felt: Spontaneous.

“Can you drive me out to where you think there are cars for sale?” I asked.

“Hell yeah,” he answered.

An hour later I pulled into the driveway in a two-door, gray, 1976 Oldsmobile Omega. It had 100,000 miles on it and it seemed to run great. I probably should’ve waited for Richie and Cheyenne, but it was a steal, only three hundred dollars. That meant we’d have the rest of the money to stay in hotels and eat actual food.

When I returned to the skate house and stepped out of the car, I found that the Earth had moved.

Richie, Penny, and Chuck were sitting on the back stoop consoling Cheyenne, who was crying uncontrollably. Richie looked visibly shaken.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“We had a call,” Chuck began, and paused. An alarm bell went off in my head. It seemed like he didn’t know how to continue. I waited. “It was from New York,” he said. The alarm bell became an air-raid siren. “It’s your friend, Johnny. There’s been an accident.”





DEAD MAN’S CURVE


(written by Jan Berry, Roger Christian, Arthur Kornfield, and Brian Wilson, and performed by Jan & Dean)




My first thought on hearing Johnny was in an accident was:

Serves him right.

I know, I know. I’m a complete and utter dick. But you have to look at it from my point of view. Everything about my life got better the moment Johnny McKenna exited stage left. And it wasn’t just Cheyenne. Yes, connecting with her was awesome. But there was so much more. Without Johnny around to control my every move, without him to remind me, overtly or otherwise, that I needed to be cared for, that I could never be more than one of the sheep, I went through a kind of metamorphosis. It was finally my turn to become a butterfly. Strike that. Maybe it’s better to say I became a moth. Either way, I was no longer the caterpillar, the sheep, the lackey, the number two. With Johnny gone, I was my own man. It would be my wings flapping now and causing thunderstorms, or whatever else. It was freedom. Wonderful, wonderful freedom.

So yeah, there was a measure of satisfaction deep in my gut when I heard that Johnny’d been in an accident. I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but it’s the truth.

Of course, if I probe deeper I can see that my years of kowtowing to Johnny weren’t really his fault. They were my own fault. Every toady needs a boss and I was no different. We were symbionts. Fonzie and Richie. No wait. That’s not right. Richie had too much moxie. Maybe Fonzie and Potsie. Huh, I guess I was the real Potsie all along. Anyway, after I thought about it for a minute, after I let my brain take over for my heart, I did feel bad. Just not as bad as I should have.

I listened as Richie told me the story:

Johnny had made it to New York by suppertime on that first day. He had taken a bus to Atlanta and used his cash to buy an airplane ticket. His parents met him at the airport and drove him home. It was later than usual for Johnny’s evening run, but he told his mother that a lot had happened and he needed to clear his head.

The sky was already dark purple when Johnny walked out the door and quickened his step. With the moon in its new phase, it didn’t take long for all the color to seep into the stars and for the night to turn black.

Johnny ran his usual route, up Colonial Parkway, up Underhill, across Grandview Boulevard, and down Alta Vista Drive. That’s where the car hit him.


Alta Vista is a narrow road with lots of curves that ends in a steep hill. Even in the glow of a midday sun, it would be easy for a person on foot to get in the way of a car. On a moonless night, it’s almost guaranteed.

Johnny ran that route often, and he knew how to listen for and look out for cars. I’m not sure how he found himself in a position where he couldn’t get out of the way, but that’s what happened.

The car slammed Johnny into a tree, pinning his right leg to the tree trunk. He managed to hold on to consciousness for the next twenty-five minutes, until an ambulance arrived. I have to believe that that was the worst part, the not passing out.

His leg from just below the right knee was hanging on by a stretch of skin and some ligaments. The bone had been completely fractured in two. I can’t even begin to imagine what that pain was like.

Wait, strike that. Yes. Yes I can.

Johnny was rushed to the hospital where a team of doctors spent twelve excruciating hours trying to save the leg, only to amputate it in the end.

It was all too incredible to believe.

Chey stood, tears bubbling out of her eyes, but somehow she kept her voice calm and steady. “I need to be alone,” she said, and retreated to her bedroom.

Penny hugged Richie, and the two of them went inside. Chuck started to say something to me then thought better of it and stopped. He shrugged his shoulders and went inside, too, leaving me there alone. So I walked.

I don’t really remember where I went or what I did. But I walked all day. By the time I got back to the house, the sun was going down and Chey was gone. She’d taken a third of the money we’d earned at the fund-raiser, taken her bass, and left us a note. It said, “Gone to see Johnny.”

For the second time in my eighteen years, a random event was turning my life completely upside down. I had just begun to learn how to live with the first random event, the lightning strike, and now this. Now f*cking this.

Yeah, this new thing hadn’t happened to me, it had happened to Johnny. But that didn’t seem to matter. Everything that was important to me was about to crumble away, again. If I ever felt cursed—and I’d spent a lot of my life feeling cursed—it was at that moment, standing in Athens, Georgia, holding Cheyenne’s note.





GOING HOME


(written and performed by Mark Knopfler)




Johnny was hit by a twenty-one-year-old kid who had graduated our high school three years earlier. His name was Ronny Petrillo and he was so drunk that after he hit Johnny, he stumbled out of the car and passed out on the side of the road. It wasn’t until someone else drove by and saw Johnny pinned between the car and the tree, and Ronny curled up on the asphalt like he was at home, snug in bed, that they called the police.

I remember Ronny. He was one of the cud-chewing cave trolls who attempted to rule the school with brute force. He and his gang wore leather jackets all day, every day, and kept unlit cigarettes behind their ears, like they’d watched Welcome Back, Kotter or The Warriors one too many times. There was an exchange student in their year, a quiet boy from Budapest, who they’d beat senseless just because he had a “funny” accent. Welcome to the USA, kid.

I’d had only one direct encounter with Ronny. In my freshman year I was standing outside the school, just sort of hanging out, like lots of kids do. I usually knew better. Guys like me have to keep moving. As soon as we stand still, we’re easy targets. Kind of like gazelles on the Serengeti.

Anyway, I was standing in front of the school wearing a pair of sunglasses, when Ronny, then a senior, walked by. In one motion he took the sunglasses off my face, dropped them in his own path, crushed them with his next step, and kept walking. He wasn’t with a group of friends, so there was no audience, and he never looked back at me. Of all the insult and injury I’ve suffered in my life, it is the clearest example of pure, undiluted malice I can recall. It was meanness without purpose.

When the police took Ronny away after he hit Johnny, he was so messed up that he stayed passed out on the car ride to the police station and all through the night. They couldn’t read him his rights and book him until the next morning.

With Chey gone, there was nothing for Richie and me to do but go home. The sixteen-hour trip was the quietest car ride of my life. The only meaningful conversation we had lasted less than one minute and it took place just south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

“That really sucks about Johnny,” Richie said.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Do you think he’ll be okay?”

“I have no idea.”

And that was it.

I could tell from the tone of Richie’s voice that he was pretty freaked out. I would’ve tried to comfort him if I hadn’t been so freaked out, too.

When we got back to Yonkers at one a.m., Richie dropped me at home and kept the car. We both figured that it made more sense for Richie and his dad to fix it up or sell it.

The moonless night had brewed a deep gloom in Colonial Heights, the neighborhood I called home. The shadows were so complete that while I could see the outline of my house when we pulled up, I couldn’t see any detail. Not that there was much to see. I grew up in a nondescript split-level home; the outside a combination of white shingle and fake brick that must’ve been popular sometime in the 1950s or ’60s because half the houses in the neighborhood looked pretty much the same.

The closest streetlamp, two houses down, cast just enough light for me to see the giant oak that rose from the edge of our driveway. The tree was old, probably older than the house itself, and its roots had been churning up the yard and front walk for as long as I could remember. I’d played with Matchbox cars and plastic army men in the nooks and crannies at the base of that tree when I was little, or so some old family photos have led me to believe. That was before the lightning strike, before my memory circuits were fried.

I’d telephoned my parents when Richie and I left Athens to let them know I was coming home. It was the first time I’d called them since we left New York, and I could hear the relief in my mother’s voice. It turns out they’d heard about Johnny and had been trying to reach me.

I crept into the house, figuring my folks would be asleep. They weren’t. They were both on the landing just inside the front door. My mother had me in a bear hug before I could put my guitar down. It didn’t take long until I was hugging her back and crying on her robe. I didn’t know until that moment how much I’d missed my mom and how much everything hurt. When we finally let each other go, my dad wrapped his arms around me and held on tighter and longer than I thought he would or could.

It was good to be home.

I told my parents how tired I was and that I would catch them up on everything the next day. They said they understood and went back upstairs, and I went downstairs to my bedroom.

I don’t know why I was surprised to see the room exactly as I’d left it. I’d been away less than a month, but it felt like I was walking into a museum exhibit. Step right up and see the real live habitat of a late twentieth-century boy. A Blondie poster, with Debbie Harry standing tall and lean in fishnet stockings stood watch over the twin bed, still made with New York Mets sheets. The shelves of the bookcases, loaded with comic books and science fiction novels, were sagging and looked ready to fall. And in one corner of the room, an old nylon-string acoustic guitar sat propped against the wall.

I flopped down on the creaking bed feeling like Gulliver. Everything in my life that had come before Athens seemed so small and distant. I fell into an uneasy sleep, tortured by a dream of having lost my guitar in the basement of the house in Georgia. Every time I thought I caught a glimpse of it, an army of jumping spiders blocked my way. When I woke late the next morning, I was disoriented. Part of me didn’t know where I was, and part of me didn’t know when I was.


My parents were camped out in the kitchen sharing the local newspaper when I entered. They both smiled at me and said hello. There was something wrong with their greeting. It was too nice, too forced. I stopped in my tracks.

“What’s going on?”

“What?” my father asked. “Can’t we just be happy to see you?”

I looked at them both for a long moment. “No,” I said.

“Harry,” my mother began, “Dr. Hirschorn called us.”

Of course. Dr. Kenny. After my late-night, deranged call from the phone booth in Athens, Dr. Kenny had called my parents. Ugh.

“We’d like you to start seeing him again,” my father added. “We’ll pay for it, of course.” I thought maybe there was a tinge of resentment in his offer to pay. But maybe I imagined it, too. Something about my dad looked broken, defeated. The lines on his face seemed deeper, his hairline looked higher on his forehead.

A lot flashed through my mind. I thought about the sessions with Dr. Kenny from when I was younger and how much they helped me. I wondered if his office was still the same. I wondered if eighteen-year-olds were even allowed to see pediatric psychiatrists, I wondered if he would put me on meds. But with all those thoughts crashing through my brain, I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no. So I said nothing.

“We’ve made an appointment for you for next Wednesday,” my father added. He looked like he didn’t have any fight left in him. I probably could’ve refused the appointment with Dr. Kenny, but the truth is, I didn’t have any fight left in me either.

I shrugged my shoulders and nodded agreement.

I had that conversation with my parents on a Friday. I spent the next few days lounging around the house, eating sugar-coated cereal, watching sitcom reruns on television, and trying not to think about anything. Other than my mom and dad, I talked to no one. Not even Richie, who’d called a couple of times. I think I needed to detox.

I didn’t even play the guitar. Every time I had the urge, I’d look at the guitar case and be reminded of too much bad crap. I didn’t know if I’d ever play again.