The Scar Boys (16 page)

Those were the things we’d done after crash-landing in Athens. Here’s what we hadn’t done:

Cheyenne followed me inside, and I led her straight to her bass. “Here,” I said, “I’ll get the other guys.”

Cheyenne smiled. “Good idea. Where?”

“Richie set his drums up in the basement.”

The basement of the skate house was a strange space. There were four rooms, each separated from the others by brick walls, all but one with a hard-packed dirt floor. There were odd pieces of furniture scattered about, including a giant cherry wood dresser, a rolltop desk, and a toilet, which for some reason cracked Richie up.

The other things of note in the basement were the jumping spiders.

I don’t know if they were technically spiders because I’d never seen anything like them before, and haven’t seen anything like them since. In fact, I’m not entirely sure they
were of this world. They were dime-sized bugs that hopped vertically in the air, moving with precision and menace. A group of them together looked like the tiny pistons of a tiny car engine. (Notice that I didn’t say
van
engine because as you now know, FAP,
van engines
do not work.) There were hundreds of the little monstrosities. They were mostly restricted to a back corner of the basement, which left the rest of the space safe for human habitation. Every so often one of the spiders would venture into the green zone, which made it fair game. The only house rule Tony and Chuck had was to never go into the basement in bare feet.

I kicked Richie’s foot as I walked into our shared bedroom, waking him up. He made an unintelligible sound, a breathy amalgam of “what” and “fuck,” and looked at me. “Jesus, Harry, what time is it?”

“I don’t know. Six or seven maybe?”

“Is the house on fire?”

“No.”

“Then piss off.”

“We’re jamming.”

Richie’s eyes opened all the way and he smiled. He got up and grabbed his drumsticks and pants, in that order, and headed downstairs.

Johnny was in the room he and Cheyenne had been sharing, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at his fully packed knapsack.

“I told you guys I was going to college,” he said to me as soon as I crossed the threshold, defending himself before I could say a word.

“C’mon,” I told him, waving him to follow me.

“Where?”

“We’re jamming.”

“Harry, I think I need to leave.” Johnny sounded exasperated, defeated.

“I know,” I said, looking at my shoes. “Cheyenne told me. But why don’t you come jam first?”

“What? Why?”

“I dunno.” It was a coward’s answer. The truth was that he should come jam because he was my best friend and music was the only thing left holding us together. That whatever he and I had once meant to each other was seeping away like water from a drought-stricken lake, too slowly to be noticed, until one day it would just be gone. That even if he was going to leave, he should go out, literally, on a high note. But I wasn’t programmed to say those things. I wanted to, but didn’t know how.

“If you don’t know, then I sure don’t know,” he answered. His voice had an edge and a meanness that hurt, and I reacted.

“Cheyenne says you have money,” I said. It felt good to catch him in a lie, to force him to the moral low ground.

Silence.

I looked up at Johnny and met his eyes. It’s important
to understand that I’d never said anything so directly confrontational in the entire history of our friendship. This was new ground for both of us.

“It’s none of your business,” he finally answered.

“It’s not?”

“No.”

“You didn’t seem to mind spending the money my dad gave me.”

“That was your choice, Harry. Besides, my parents told me this was emergency money.”

“And the van breaking down? That wasn’t an emergency?”

“My emergency, not your emergency. And like I said, it’s none of your business.” He was defiant, smug and secure in the rightness of his actions to the last. I couldn’t take it.

“Asshole.” I muttered the word under my breath. It was dripping with malice, and it was out of my mouth before I could stop it.

Johnny’s eyebrows arched so sharply in surprise that they looked like two garden slugs trying to crawl off his forehead and into his hair. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”

My utterance of “asshole” was so far off the script of our well-defined relationship that I knew I’d crossed a line and it scared me. I shook my head no.

He stared right through me and with all the cruelty he could muster, said, “You. Are. Such. A. Pussy.” And then he smiled.

When I think about it now, I know that Johnny was
feeling the same stress, or at least his own version of the stress, that the rest of us were feeling. And when I think about it now, I know that Johnny’s best defense has always been a good offense. But that’s only if I think about it now. In the heat of that moment, something in me snapped. It was like when the cotter pin on Dino snapped; the clutch was still there, and the gears were still there, but any connection between the two was gone. I had no control. Strike that. In some weird way, I think I had total control. I’d switched to autopilot. All feeling and all thought peeled away from me like a snake’s skin molting.

Maybe I snapped because I hadn’t slept. Or maybe it was a hangover from the flood of emotions I’d experienced the night before. Or maybe it was the years of abuse and neglect, the cruelty upon cruelty inflicted on me. Or maybe it was that Johnny had broken the promise we’d all made not to date Cheyenne, ever, and that he did it before I’d had the chance. Maybe it was all of those things, or maybe it was something else entirely. But when I look back, I think it was his smile that pushed me over the edge.

Time froze. I saw everything as a collection of brightly glowing pixels, each point of light so intense I couldn’t look straight at it, but all the pixels together rendering the world in perfect, stark clarity, as if illuminated by a prolonged flash of lightning. Every nerve ending in my body was humming. Strike that. Not humming, thrumming, like
what you feel if you’re standing too close to high voltage power lines. I was either going to float away or explode.

I didn’t float away.

I dropped my arms to my sides and looked Johnny in the eye. He didn’t flinch. My right hand opened itself into a flat paddle, and with all my might, my arm swung out wide and slapped Johnny in the face. I hit him hard enough that his head swiveled to the side and his cheek turned red.

He looked back at me stunned. “Did you just slap me?”

I turned and walked out of the room.

“Where’s Johnny?” Chey asked without looking up. She was sitting on the edge of her amp tuning her bass.

“Upstairs,” I answered as I plugged my guitar in.

After my open-handed slap I made straight for the basement. I saw Chey and Richie exchange a glance as I pulled the guitar strap over my head. They could tell something was wrong.

You’re probably thinking that I was feeling one of the following emotions in that moment:

The truth is, more than anything, I was embarrassed. Embarrassed that I’d slapped Johnny and not punched him in the face. When someone calls you a pussy, an open-handed slap only proves his point. That’s what I was thinking when I went downstairs. The whole episode showed how damaged my friendship with Johnny was. I didn’t know if he would come down the stairs or not, and by then, I really didn’t care. I just wanted to move on.

“Let’s play a song,” I said.

“Is he coming?” Cheyenne asked, looking worried.

As if on cue, the sound of stomping footsteps upstairs made the ceiling shake. We all stopped—me standing and holding my guitar, Richie sitting behind his drums, and Chey perched on the edge of her amp—and waited. Then we heard the front door of the house open and slam shut.

No one moved for a least a full minute, probably more like two.

Cheyenne broke the silence. I don’t know what was going through her head. She probably thought Johnny had left because of her. She set her jaw in the locked position and started playing the bass line to our nastiest, fastest song.

Playing loud, hard music was the tonic I needed. Strike that. Johnny leaving was the tonic I needed. Strike that, too. It wasn’t just one thing, it was everything. It was hitting bottom the night before, it was connecting with Cheyenne on the stoop, it was the music, it was confronting Johnny, it was all of it. I—we—played like the world was
going to end in five minutes and this was the last thing any of us would ever get to do.

I was the only one who knew the words to all our songs (I had memorized them), so with Johnny gone, I set up his microphone and sang. And you know what? I was good. Really good. I could see it in Richie’s and Chey’s faces. I was surprising them as much as I was surprising myself. I wasn’t even wearing my costume.

We got through a whole forty-five minutes before the police showed up. We didn’t hear them until they were coming down the stairs. There were two officers—both young, both built like football players—and they looked kind of amused.

We stopped playing.

“Do you kids know what time it is?” the taller of the two asked.

“Isn’t it like ten a.m.?” Cheyenne asked. I was pretty sure she knew it wasn’t, but Chey was a pro at bending the truth.

“No, it’s like 7:45 a.m.,” he answered, mocking her.

“Huh,” Chey said. “I guess we should stop.”

I had been in a corner of the cramped, poorly lit room, and had kept my head down. Something about the way I was sitting must’ve bothered the cop.

“Hey, are you all right?” he asked.

I lifted my head and met his eyes. He tried to check his
reaction, but I could see him recoil. It made me smile. I’ve always known that I have no ability to control that reaction, to stop the revulsion at the mere sight of me. But for the first time in my life, it didn’t bother me. It was what it was; it really didn’t matter. It seemed so obvious that I wondered how I’d been missing it all those years.

I thought back to what Lucky Strike the Lightning Man told me, that I had to control things or they would control me. I’d been putting the emphasis on controlling rather than on not being controlled. And maybe that was upside down. Maybe I just needed to figure out how to go with the flow.

“I’m okay,” I answered him.

“Okay,” he said. “Just cool it with the music until later in the day. We had three complaints.”

“Sure thing, officer,” Chey said. “Sorry to have brought you out here.”

He nodded, said, “Let’s go” to his partner, and they left.

“Should we play another song?” Richie asked after we heard their car pull away, the corners of his mouth stretched wide with mischief.

Chey—who looked like she was coming back to Earth, like the feeling of the music was leaving her, like she was remembering that Johnny was gone—shook her head no. “Probably not the best idea. But let’s come back later. I really needed this.”

“Amen,” I said.

When we went upstairs, we found Tony and Chuck in the kitchen drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

“Crap,” I said. We hadn’t even stopped to consider that our hosts were still sleeping. “I’m really sorry if we woke you guys up.”

“Are you kidding, man?” Chuck began. “We loved it! We had no idea you guys were that good.”

“Really?” Richie asked. He was beaming, and I think I was, too.

“Where’s the other dude?” Tony asked.

“Gone,” I said. “Home. College.”

“Well, fuck him then. You dudes should finish your tour.”

The three of us exchanged a glance and I burst out laughing. “We’d love to,” I answered, “but we can’t afford to fix our van.”

“So buy a smaller car. There are always crap cars for sale just outside of town for like five hundred dollars. We can drive you out there.”

“Well, five hundred dollars is less than the seventeen hundred it’s gonna cost to fix the van, but it doesn’t matter, because we barely have fifty dollars between us.”

Tony and Chuck looked at each other and said in unison, “Fund-raiser.”

The fund-raiser turned out to be a keg party. A big keg party. A really, really big keg party.

Tony and Chuck made crude signs and enlisted the help of their friends to post them all over town:

From what they told us, the fund-raiser was the only thing anyone was talking about. Athens was like that. It was a small town and word spread fast, especially when it involved beer. There were no formal invitations, there
was no arm twisting, just the grapevine. This party was, according to Tony and Chuck, going to be huge.

Like always, I stayed away from other people, so I had no idea if they were blowing smoke or not, but I figured not, and I started to freak myself out.

This was going to be the first time we played in public without Johnny, and the first time I would be singing in front of other people. I had no idea what to do, or worse, what to expect of myself.

On the afternoon of the fund-raiser I wandered around the house waiting for the sun to go down. I was trying to kill time, but I think it was killing me instead.

I finished an unfinished crossword puzzle.

I watched
Mayberry R.F.D
. on the television in Tony’s room.

I took two walks around the block, counting the individual cement squares on the sidewalk (567).

I even washed the dishes.

I ran out of things to do and wound up on the back porch chain-smoking, staring at the empty pipe and the crude stage we’d built in front of it, and going over the set list in my head, again and again and again.