“What? No.”
I had told Johnny about Harry’s incredible night as our front man at the keg party in Athens.
“Seriously, dude, we’re called the Scar Boys, not the Amputee Boys. You and I should share the mic. You sing some of the songs, I’ll sing some of the songs.”
Harry fought it at first, but in the end he agreed. I could tell it made him really happy, too.
I honestly think Johnny figured getting Harry, our original “scar boy,” up front would help the band. But there was something else, too. Johnny was tired. Really tired. He was going to rehab four times a week, and it was taking a toll.
He let me come with him once and I was surprised at how simple it was. I expected to see medieval torture devices clipped to his leg while he learned how to walk. Instead, it was just a plastic leg with a foam foot that he would practice walking on for about an hour. The leg, Johnny said, was temporary.
“They don’t give you your permanent leg until you’re fully healed,” he told me. “They have to wait until the stump is done morphing and changing shape before they can create a mold to fit the prosthesis.”
It’s weird how comfortable I got with words like stump and prosthesis. It’s like they’d always been part of my vocabulary, part of my life.
Johnny had been lucky . . . well, as lucky as you can be when you have your leg chopped off. The break was clean, and his skin was intact. Apparently, what happens to your skin when you lose a limb is really important. Johnny didn’t need any skin grafts, which was good. Plus, because of the way the break happened, the surgery was pretty straightforward. It was really easy for them to fit him for a new leg.
Even in the worst of times, the best things still happened to Johnny McKenna.
The day I went with him to rehab, I saw all sorts of other amputees in much worse shape than Johnny. There was one girl with a leg that was so badly scarred that I wondered what kind of accident she’d been in. It made me think of Harry.
Johnny’s recovery seemed easier than I would’ve guessed. He was a fast learner, and after six weeks his rehab went from four to two times a week, and after three months he was pretty much done. You could barely tell he had a limp.
He’d been all set to go to Syracuse on a track-and-field scholarship before the accident, and it was really important to him to learn how to run with his new leg. Johnny probably had some secret dream that he’d be the first amputee to win a track-and-field medal at the Olympics, and I don’t mean the Special Olympics.
Anyway, even though the rehab was going really well, it was still a strain for him to spend a lot of time on his fake leg. His stump would get blisters if he put pressure on it for too long, so standing in front of a microphone for two hours during rehearsals wasn’t really in the cards. He never actually told me that, but I could tell.
Since he couldn’t stand, do you know what Johnny did instead?
Johnny McKenna decided to play the piano.
HARBINGER JONES
Johnny confided in me that standing up for two hours—that’s how long our rehearsals usually lasted—was too much for his leg.
“Imagine leaning your elbow on a table for two hours,” he told me. “Even if that elbow is on a nice soft cushion, the weight of your body will eventually wear it down. It’s like that.” The keyboard gave him a chance to sit. It, along with piano lessons, had been a present from his parents. Really, it was a kind of bribe to get him to reengage with the world.
I’d seen that kind of thing before. My parents showered me with gifts after the lightning strike. I was only eight when I spent all that time in the hospital, and I got an endless assortment of books and games and toys. I didn’t get anything as cool as an electric keyboard, though. I mean, the greatest thing about 1976 was the Pet Rock. Enough said.
When we started jamming again with the whole band, Johnny refused to plug the keyboard in, so he would just play along silently. He was something of a perfectionist. Strike that. He didn’t need things to be perfect; he needed them to be as good as they could be. There’s a difference.
But he did plug the piano in when it was just the two of us. That gave him a chance to fool around and learn how to make the keys work with another instrument. Hearing the keyboard and guitar together was like discovering an entire new universe. Like our own, it was filled with planets and stars and people. But in this universe, the laws of physics were expanded to allow for new dimensions. It was unreal.
CHEYENNE BELLE
For most of those first two months of the band jamming again, in August and September, Johnny sat behind his keyboard, trying to find the right notes. We didn’t know if he was any good or not because he wouldn’t plug the damn thing in.