“This is the Scar Boys, Cheyenne. A tattoo is a scar.”
I liked that. I know this sounds completely crazy, but I was kind of envious of Johnny’s and Harry’s scars. If you’d’ve asked Johnny if he could’ve had his leg back, of course he would’ve said yes. Harry would have wanted to be rid of his scars, too. But what had happened to them made them closer, tied them to the music, tied them to each other. It gave them an identity. There was something cool about it.
But I still had my doubts.
“The only kids who have tattoos are super hardcore punks or Rocky Horror fans,” I told Jeff. “That’s not us at all.”
“I know. That’s what makes it so cool. You guys have this totally badass, dysfunctional image, and then the most amazing and accessible rock and roll comes out of your instruments. We need to play up the former to emphasize the latter.”
I thought about it for a minute. “Does it hurt?”
He rolled up his sleeve and showed me his own tattoo. It was a green-and-black line drawing of a pyramid with an eye on top. “Hell, yes, it hurts,” he said. “But it’s like a badge of honor. You become a member of a secret club.”
I liked the sound of that, too. “Does that mean anything?” I asked, pointing at his pyramid. He opened his wallet, took out a dollar bill, and showed me the back.
“It’s where mysticism and money come together,” he said. Jeff was always talking about money.
Anyway, a week later, when the band finally rehearsed again, I was sporting a new tattoo at the base of my spine. I wore a shirt that was a bit small on me, knowing that every time I turned around, the guys would get a glimpse of the new art. I hardly said two words through the whole rehearsal, but I must’ve turned around, like, fifteen times. Every time I did, I tried to sneak a peek at my bandmates.
Harry was in his own world with the guitar, and Johnny just sat staring into space, looking down every so often to write in this little black book he’d started carrying around. Richie saw the tattoo, though. He shook his head and smiled at me when the other guys weren’t looking.
I know Harry and Johnny saw it, too, but neither one ever said anything. I guess this was the new world Jeff wanted—business partners, not friends. But . . .
Well, Jeff’s whole “no-friends” rule. He was kind of full of shit.
That night at Red Lobster, he kept pouring me glasses of wine, and I kept drinking them.
And he and I made out in his car.
And then we went back to his apartment in New York City.
HARBINGER JONES
We were all business at that rehearsal. No one looked anyone else in the eye, except for Richie. We were all looking not just at him, we were looking to him. It was like the gravitational center of the band, which had once revolved around the planetary system of me and Johnny, with Johnny Jupiter and me one of his moons, had shifted to a spot that hovered just below and to the left of Richie’s crash cymbal.
I think Richie was kind of freaked out by it, but he didn’t say anything. We were taking Jeff’s words to heart and were there to play music, nothing more. It was awkward, it was stilted, it was even painful at points. But here’s the thing. I kind of loved it.
When you stripped all that other shit away—the broken, repaired, and rebroken friendship between me and Johnny; the broken, repaired, and rebroken relationship between Chey and Johnny; my unrequited love for Cheyenne—when all that nonsense was gone, locked in a drawer with no key, when only the music was left, it was a beautiful thing.
But that was only true while we were actually playing music. The moments in between the songs at that rehearsal were torture. I reverted all the way back to my thirteen-year-old self and hardly said two words. Johnny, his face a blank slate, devoid of any emotion, barely spoke. Cheyenne didn’t engage with any of us in any way between the songs, though she kept turning around, making sure we all saw her new tattoo. If she wasn’t going to say anything about it, neither was I, but, really, I thought it was pretty cool.
It was a severed leg with a lightning bolt on it. That girl has bravado. You have to love that. The rest of the time, she sat on her amp and plucked the bass, only looking up when the next song started.
The moments without music were like those first moments all these years ago between decreasing doses of methadone as Dr. Kenny weaned me off. But when the music started, man, oh, man, it worked. It just worked.
RICHIE MCGILL
That was the weirdest rehearsal ever.