Not surprisingly, the faceless admissions professional at the University of Scranton didn’t appreciate my fifty-thousand-word application essay, and a form rejection letter was dispatched. Quickly, I might add.
I showed it to my parents. They didn’t know that I had sent the school a book-length treatise on my life and assumed that the rejection had to do with my grades, my SAT scores, and my having taken a year off. My dad kept harping on that last one.
“It was a waste of a year, Harry,” he blustered in my general direction one afternoon. “I’m sorry you didn’t get into Scranton, but I’m not surprised.” He held my gaze and sized me up. “You need a Plan B.”
Plan B was the same as Plan A: play music. It’s what I was meant to do. Can you imagine Jimmy Page if he hadn’t played guitar? Can you picture him with short hair, in a suit and tie, doing data entry at some accounting firm?
My dad’s idea of Plan B was for me to take classes at the local community college, the same place the rest of the high school misfits and miscreants wound up. It was like a holding pen for people who grew up to amount to something less than they were supposed to be.
Community college: dreams not welcome.
Sure, some kids made the most of it, putting their time in and transferring to a four-year college, and good for them. But I didn’t have any illusions. For me, it would be like a Roach Motel. If I checked in, I would never check out.
Even knowing that, I agreed to my father’s version of Plan B and registered for a writing course that summer. The whole exercise of the Scranton application essay showed me how much I liked to write, and I figured why not.
So other than trying to keep my parents (mostly my dad) off my back about school and about getting a job, I spent my mornings sleeping, my afternoons rehearsing, and my nights playing computer games. It developed into a kind of seamless routine that bordered on becoming a rut. If it wasn’t for Richie’s school schedule and my dad being gone four nights a week, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to tell you what day it was.
The rehearsals were great musically but otherwise lifeless. I know that sounds like a contradiction, because, really, music is life, but that’s the way it was.
Cheyenne added three more tattoos, but still not one word about them was mentioned. It’s like they had become logos for our newfound lack of friendship. Any acknowledgment of Chey’s body art would have been an overt act of intimacy, and that was simply not allowed.
Except for when we returned from Georgia, those two months were the longest period of time we’d gone, since early in the eleventh grade, without a gig and without working on a new song. Newness had no place in what we were doing. We had gone from being an organism to being a machine.
The rehearsals became so repetitive that my brain would sort of check out. I found myself going back to old habits and running through lists in my head while I mindlessly strummed the chords to our songs. It’s amazing how quickly the details of a list can leave a person’s brain. I used to know every world capital cold. Now I was struggling with some of the easy ones. Was Lusaka the capital of Zambia or Zimbabwe?
Chey and Richie were the only two members of the band to really engage one another, and that was only while we were playing and it was only with their eyes and smiles. They really are the greatest rhythm section I’ve ever seen.
Johnny worried me. He looked thinner and twitchier as each week went by. His personal hygiene was going to shit—his hair was uncombed, his shirts were stained, and I could smell his breath from all the way across the room—and he was starting to walk with a limp, like he hadn’t been doing his exercises. It reminded me of what he was like right after he lost his leg, when he was going through the trauma of figuring out how to live as an amputee. And it reminded me of me, for so many years after the thunderstorm.
The only way we saw Johnny engage with the world was through his keyboard, and by writing in that little book he’d started carrying around. He would open it between songs and scribble something down. None of us knew what. I tried to sneak a peak over his shoulder once, and he pulled it away, making sure I couldn’t see.
Other than that, I never asked Johnny how he was doing, and he never offered. The rules were the rules. The truth is that I used Jeff’s rules as an excuse, as a place to hide, a place where I didn’t have any responsibility for my relationships or my friends. I think we all did.
The Scar Boys played on like that with no end in sight, like zombies, until Jeff summoned us back to the diner in New York City with “news.”
I thought maybe it was a record deal. I violated the “not-friends” protocol and asked Richie and Johnny what they thought on the ride to the city.
“Don’t know, dude. Record deal would be pretty cool, though,” Richie answered.
“Johnny?”
“No clue. I just hope he isn’t going to yell at us again.”
And that was the whole conversation.