Scar Girl (5 page)

“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.

“C'mon, what?” Johnny answered, laughing. “Did you see how much they liked it?” He was sitting on the bench, pulling on the custom-made sock that sat in the socket of his real prosthetic leg.

“Yeah, well, maybe you two idiots could've warned me first.” Harry was trying hard to stifle a laugh. Johnny wasn't even trying; he was doubled over, the jerk.

“I didn't know, either,” Richie offered, all serious. Then he burst out laughing too, adding, “But it was fucking awesome! How many times did you guys practice that?”

I was pissed off and I was hurt, so I left the dressing room and went out front while Mud played their set.

Like I said, they weren't much to watch. The five members of the band—two guitars, bass, drums, vocal—all had Beatlesque haircuts, flannel shirts, jeans, and ratty sneakers. It was a uniform for alt rockers that had already become a cliché. They pranced around the stage like it was some weird kind of ballet. I was embarrassed for them.

They were playing a song called “I'm Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired.” The lead singer, so pleased with how clever the lyric was, could barely contain his smirk as he sang that line over and over again. And the guitar player, who moved like he was double-jointed—by that, I mean like a real spaz—kept winking at me. Actually winking. I mean, who does that?

Anyway, right at that exact moment, the entire world stopped spinning.

Or maybe my brain sped up, I don't know.

Each beat of the snare echoed and boomed for an eternity.

Every wink of that creepy guitar player's eyelid was like a curtain slowly coming down.

Every word that singer sang was a drawn-out slur.

Time did everything it could to stop.

Sitting at that crusty, crappy table in the cesspit that is CBGB's, on the heels of a great Scar Boys set, after Johnny and Harry had played their trick that had so pissed me off, in the middle of the ridiculousness of “I'm Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired” by Chemicals Made of Mud, the dumbest band in the history of dumb bands, I felt the baby move for the first time.

Holy shit, the baby—my baby—was moving.

I knew without any trace of doubt I was going to keep it.

PART THREE,
NOVEMBER 1986

A ballad once in a while doesn't go amiss.
—Chrissie Hynde

 

Who are your musical influences?

HARBINGER JONES

The Bay City Rollers.

CHEYENNE BELLE

The Bay City Rollers.

RICHIE MCGILL

Let me guess, the other guys said the Bay City Rollers?

Yeah, we all hate that question. It's, like, the most unoriginal question in the universe, and we swore that if anyone ever asked it, we would all always say the Bay City Rollers.

But I kind of like you, so I'm gonna give you a break and give you my real answer.

You ready?

The Bay City Rollers.

HARBINGER JONES

We decided to take the next day off from rehearsal.

But I never take a day off from the guitar. I was hanging out in the basement in my parents' house, watching
The Price is Right
, the guitar on my lap.

After a while I found myself picking the same riff over and over again. It was kind of beautiful. Maybe that sounds immodest, but it's the only word I can use to describe what I was hearing. Everything around me dropped away. The TV became a blur of muted color, the cheering of the game-show audience faded to static. The only thing I could hear was that riff.

That's kind of amazing because my guitar wasn't even plugged in. When you play the electric guitar, you can barely hear it if it's not plugged in. But when you play often enough, your brain interprets what little sound there is and compensates for it. It's like my brain engaged some sort of organic alpha-wave amplifier that allowed me to hear that riff with perfect clarity.

I played it over and over again until it had the rhythm and cadence of a slow-moving train. Next thing I knew, my hands shifted to a chord progression built off the line I'd been playing, and I knew I had a song.

I started singing, the words more or less coming to me without interruption.

I bet when authors write books, they probably get into a zone where whole chapters pour out of them with-out ever once needing Wite-Out. That's what happened to me.

A song. This song. It was just floating in the air or in my brain, or maybe in the background hum of Bob Barker hawking everyday household items, and somehow it came out of my hands and out of my mouth. It was a kind of magic.

When I was done, I turned the TV off and called Johnny. Someone needed to hear this.

“Yeah,” Johnny said when I called him. “C'mon over, I'm just listening to music.”

I could hear in his voice that Johnny was kind of out of it. He had good days and bad days, and after the excitement of the CB's gig, I think he was having a bad day. I didn't really like to be around Johnny when he was like that—I guess I saw too much of myself in him; it hit too close to home—but I also knew that's when he needed me the most.

He was sitting on the floor of his bedroom when I got to his house, his back leaning up against his desk. Above his head, on the desk blotter, were three brown vials of prescription medicines. I couldn't read the labels, but figured they must be painkillers or antibiotics to stave off any infection that might have lingered in his stump. I used to have those little bottles lined up in my room, too.

A coiled wire snaked down from a hi-fi unit to a pair of headphones wrapped around Johnny's ears. His eyes were closed, and he was otherwise motionless. The album cover for U2's
Wide Awake in America
was on the floor.

The record is an EP, just four songs. “Bad,” an eight-minute live opus that pulls you through every emotion you can imagine, was a favorite song of ours. Both Johnny and I felt like Bono was talking to us personally.

I nudged Johnny's foot with the toe of my sneaker.

“Careful, Harry,” he said without opening his eyes. “I've only got one of those left.”

“I know it's the left, and that ain't right,” I answered. This had quickly become a favorite joke of ours. I don't know why. “‘Bad'?” I asked about the music.

“Actually, pretty damn good.” Johnny and I were a regular Smothers Brothers. No, strike that. More like Martin and Lewis. We were still a bit too dysfunctional to be the Smothers Brothers.

“So let's hear this new song,” he said, tugging the headphones down around his neck.

I was about to take my Strat out of its case, but I realized this would sound much better on an acoustic guitar. Music is like that. You need the right tools to make it perfect. So I grabbed Johnny's Takamine. It had a sunburst body with a built-in pickup and this trebly sound with a lot of twang. It was bright and clear, like sunshine.

I sat on Johnny's bed and started picking, and right away I saw him smiling. He recognized the guitar part for what it was: a really good riff. I was just about to launch into the lyrics and melody when my brain hit the pause button.
Oh, shit,
I thought.
I can't sing this song for Johnny.

CHEYENNE BELLE

After feeling the baby move, I knew I couldn't put it off anymore, so I got up super early the day after the gig, like eight thirty, took the number twenty bus up Central Avenue, got off at Underhill, and walked the rest of the way to Johnny's house. The walk is way more than a mile, first up and then down a steep hill. I was tired and not feeling quite right, and by the time I got there, almost two hours after I left home, I was a bit of a wreck.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Theresa had asked from her bed as I was leaving the house. She was still bleary from whatever she'd been doing the night before. Part of me really wanted to have someone with me when I told Johnny, but I knew I needed to do this alone. I told her, “No, thanks.” She nodded, flopped her head back down on the pillow, and was snoring before I left the room.

I didn't even know if Johnny was home, which, given how I was feeling, I suppose was pretty stupid. I don't know why I didn't call first. Maybe I wanted to catch him off guard, or maybe I wanted to see how happy he would be when I showed up at his door. Or maybe I just wasn't thinking straight.

When I got there my heart sank to my knees; Harry's car was in the driveway. I felt like I couldn't catch a break.

Yeah, I should've been happy that Johnny and Harry were back to the way they were when I first joined the band. They'd been rebuilding their broken friendship brick by brick since we got back from Athens, and by this time it was stronger than ever. I guess it had to do with Johnny's accident. Misery really does love company, you know? If I'm being honest, I wonder if my decision to keep the baby was me wanting to find a way to be closer to Johnny than Harry was.

God, it sounds so messed up to say that out loud.

Anyway, Johnny answered the door, and he
was
happy to see me. Even though he was on crutches without his prosthetic leg, he wrapped me in a big hug and didn't let go for a long minute. That goofy “I Melt with You” song popped into my head.