“No problem,” I muttered under my breath. But I nodded my assent.
Johnny was smiling like a deranged lunatic as he stood up and made his way out from behind the keyboard into the middle of the room. He took a minute to pull down the neoprene sleeve wrapped around his leg, making sure it was loose. When he was done, he was leaning on it the way someone with two legs might lean their knee on a coffee table.
“Okay, you’re sure about this?”
“Just do it already!”
So I lifted the guitar strap over my head and held my Strat by its neck, like a baseball bat. I crouched low, readying myself to swing.
When I was younger, before I knew Johnny, before I played the guitar, I took a few Tae Kwon Do lessons. My dad thought it was a way I could build confidence. One of the first things they taught me was how to break a board. I’m not kidding; just to get your white belt you actually had to break a piece of wood with your hand. I can still remember standing in the class.
“My name is Harry, and my breaking board is hammer fist, sir!” I yelled. Then I cocked my arm high over my head and brought it down gently once, touching the board and saying, “Concentration.” I recocked the arm and brought it down gently again, this time saying, “Confidence.” The third time, I brought the arm down with all the force my ten-year-old body could muster, screaming, “Ki hap!” It was a kind of Korean power word. No one was more surprised than me when my hand sliced through that board like it was a piece of paper.
It was an incredibly happy moment—one of the happiest of my life—for about ten seconds. That’s when one of the other students in the class said, “It looks like someone did breaking board on his face,” and all the other kids laughed.
The teacher, who I really admired, admonished the other kids, talking to them about respect, but I could still see the look in their eyes. I was going to be the freak in Tae Kwon Do just like I was in school, and I didn’t want that.
I never went back.
I wish I had, though. I really wish I had.
That day in Johnny’s living room, I brought the guitar back, gently moved it forward to the prosthetic leg, and said, “Concentration.” I brought it back and moved it forward again, saying the second part of my incantation: “Confidence.” But when I swung through the third time, the moment of the lethal strike, I pulled up, holding back any real power. I hit Johnny’s leg with all the force of a down pillow. The leg wobbled like a bowling pin but didn’t fall over.
Johnny groaned. “Jesus Christ, Harry. You have to hit it. Are you scared or something?” It was a dickish kind of thing for him to say, but in a way it made me happy; it was a sign that the old Johnny was trying to fight his way back into the world.
“Okay, okay, let’s try again.” This time my third blow was what it needed to be, and his leg went flying across the room, landing on a sofa. Johnny had jumped in the air at just the right instant and managed to land on his good leg, though he had to hold on to a table to keep from losing his balance and falling over.
“Yes!” Johnny was totally pumped at how well the stunt had worked. “That’s it! Let’s do it again!”
I retrieved Johnny’s leg, and we set up to run through it once more. Just as my guitar was sailing through the air and connecting with Johnny’s prosthesis, Mrs. McKenna, Johnny’s mom, turned a corner on the top of the stairs. She shrieked as she watched the leg go flying through the air, this time knocking over a lamp.
“Are you boys insane!”
She spent the next ten minutes screaming at us about the cost of a prosthetic leg, not to mention the lamp, not to mention the damage we could do to Johnny. We were very apologetic and very contrite. She ended with an “I think you’d better go now, Harry.”
Johnny walked me out. When we got to my car, he smiled and said, “Okay, we’ll need to practice that one at your house.” And that’s just what we did.
When we finally got around to doing it at the gig, it came off—the stunt and the leg—without a hitch. Johnny, realizing his mother was right about needing to protect his prosthesis, somehow managed to get his hands on a peg leg. When that gnarled piece of wood went sailing through the air, it was like the Bat-Signal letting all of Gotham City know that the Scar Boys were back.
I was a little surprised at how pissed off Cheyenne was when we got to the greenroom, and it made me feel a little bad, but honestly, at that point, she was Johnny’s problem, not mine.
CHEYENNE BELLE
“What the fuck was that?!” I screamed at Harry and Johnny the second we got to the graffiti-covered excuse for a dressing room behind the stage. I know the other guys see the romance of CBGB’s, but to me that place is a dump.