The Scar Boys

by Len Vlahos

  Later, packed, loaded, and ready to go, we decided we needed a night in a hotel. It’d been three nights sleeping in the van, and we were starting to get rank. Richie guided Dino back to the highway and then off the very first exit where we found a sea of budget motor inns. With the money my dad had given me burning a hole in my pocket, we booked two rooms. Johnny, Richie, and I retreated to one, Cheyenne to the other.

  I dozed off right away, but it didn’t take. I woke up an hour later with Richie sawing wood in the bed next to me and Johnny off sleeping in the bathtub. I got up and let myself out of the room with as much stealth as I could manage. A blast of warm, wet air slapped me fully awake. I closed the door and stood for a moment, leaning on the railing, looking down over the small parking lot. A dozen cars and our van filled half the spaces.

  I was depressed and I was confused. It didn’t make sense. Being on the road should’ve been the happiest time of my life. This was all I’d ever wanted and I was somehow blowing it. I tried to distract myself by memorizing all the license plates I could read from my perch, but I got bored.

  Cheyenne was in the room next to ours and without stopping to think about what I was doing or why, I crept low, sidled up to her door, and listened.

  Laughing. No, not laughing. Moaning.

  This is the place in the story, FAP, where I expect you will audibly groan, horrified that the protagonist (me) doesn’t see what’s coming, and that the reader (you) will wonder how such an idiot got to be a protagonist in the first place. But this isn’t a story, and I’m not a protagonist. I’m just me. The fact is, sometimes we just don’t see what we don’t want to see.

  Curtains were drawn across the window, but they were being blown out and billowed by the air conditioner, allowing a glimpse inside: A partially finished bottle of Coke sat on a nightstand; a TV screen glowed blue; and Johnny moved to and fro, on top of Cheyenne. I couldn’t see their faces, only their bodies from the torso down, but I still knew it was them.

  I wanted to throw up, I wanted to bang on the door. At the very least I wanted to walk away. But I could only sit and watch until he was done. Until they were done. I let myself back into my room and stretched out in the tub where Johnny was supposed to be.

  I shut my eyes and slept the sleep of the dead.

  MY BEST FRIEND’S GIRL

  (written by Ric Ocasek, and performed by The Cars)

  In our junior year of high school, I sat behind Johnny in trigonometry. It was the only time we were ever in the same class.

  Johnny McKenna’s name was a permanent fixture on the RHS honor roll. He took Advanced Placement courses, aced all his tests, and was on his way to graduating in the top ten of our class. As I’ve already established it was a different story for me, though there was one exception: math.

  There’s something about the logic of math that I find beautiful. No, really, I do. It probably has to do with how Dr. Kenny trained me to embrace the truth of things, and math, no matter how you look at it, is always true.

  When I got placed into honors trig, my dad was so happy I thought he was going to pee himself. He kept talking about how with math as a foundation I could be an engineer or a physicist. It went in one ear and out the other. I was just psyched that Johnny and I were going to be taking a class together.

  For the first few months, it was great. We would meet outside the room, catch each other up on news of the day, and then take our seats. During class, we’d pass notes when the teacher wasn’t looking. Johnny always initiated the note passing, usually offering some comment about the band or something he’d seen on TV.

  In December of that year, he passed me a note that said: So are you ever going to get a girlfriend?

  Johnny would say things like this to me all the time. Part of me thinks he was genuinely interested in my happiness. Another part thinks it gave him a feeling of superiority to know that I had no shot. My answer was always the same.

  No, I wrote on the note without going into any more detail and passed it back. Why not? You know why.

  Okay, okay, he wrote back, but if you WERE going to date a girl, who would you want it to be?

  I didn’t really like where this was going, so I put the note in my pocket and didn’t answer. A minute later Johnny passed me a new note.

  Well????

  Well, nothing.

  We went back and forth like this for a while, but eventually, Johnny wore me down.

  Kristen Greeley, I wrote, sorry I did as soon as the note left my hand. Johnny read it, nodded, and didn’t say anymore. I thought that was kind of weird, but then I forgot about it.

  Two weeks later, Johnny canceled our nightly run because he had a date with Kristen Greeley. You can draw your own conclusions, FAP, but I think we can both figure out what happened.

  The two of them only went out twice. That was enough, I guess, for Johnny to prove his point: namely that he could have everything I couldn’t.

  And that brings us back to Virginia.

  I CAN’T DRIVE 55

  (written and performed by Sammy Hagar)

  Just before sunrise someone nudged my foot.

  It was Johnny.

  “Harry?” he asked. I could see right away that he’d figured out why I was sleeping in the tub. He and Cheyenne were out of the closet. He looked at me, waiting for I don’t know what. Absolution? Celebration? There was nothing to say, so we just stared at each other for a minute before he nodded and walked off.

  I lay there for a while, not sure what to do. Here are some of the things I considered:

  Broken Heart Remedy #1: Fill the tub with water and try to drown or maybe electrocute myself. But I didn’t really see how that would help.

  Broken Heart Remedy #2: Quit the band and take a bus home, though that didn’t seem any better than Remedy #1.

  Broken Heart Remedy #3: Get drunk. This was my favorite idea, but it was only five in the morning, and truth be told, I’d only ever been drunk once before and didn’t have a fake ID with which to buy booze.

  Broken Heart Remedy #4: Punch Johnny in the face and be done with the whole thing. Okay, this was my favorite idea, but who was I kidding? I didn’t have it in me. Even after watching him break his own promise about Cheyenne, watching him steal the girl I knew should be mine, I still couldn’t play any role other than Spock to his Kirk. Strike that. More like Chekov to his Kirk. Strike that again. More like Unnamed Male Ensign Number Three to his Kirk.

  Broken Heart Remedy #5 should have been to talk to Johnny and Cheyenne, to clear the air and tell them how I was feeling, but honestly, it never occurred to me.

  In the end, I did the only thing I was programmed to do—I pretended it hadn’t happened. I buried my emotions in a secret place with no windows and no doors. Either they would suffocate and vanish, or they would catch fire and burn everything down.

  Once their relationship was public knowledge, Johnny and Cheyenne flaunted it. They held hands, they hugged and kissed in public, they gave each other little neck massages. Each new sign of affection was like the pinprick of a tiny knife.

  I tried to talk to Richie about it, but he just said, “Ah, dude,” and walked away. I didn’t really know what that meant, but it made me feel kind of stupid, so I didn’t ask again.

  We had a gig in Durham the next night opening for a popular local band. They were a two-piece—crunchy, rockabilly guitar and spare, taut drums—and they filled the room with students from Duke and UNC. Our music didn’t fit the vibe, so we weren’t sure how well we’d go over with the crowd, but go over we did. No one told us that our B-side, “Assholes Like Us,” had been getting played on the Duke radio station. When we closed our set, half the audience was singing along.

  Hey Mom, I’m gonna drop out of school

  ’Cause I think it’s so cool

  Gonna play in a rock ’n’ roll band.

  Don’t shed a tear

  Was only eighteen years to figure out

  You were so bland.

  Gonna spend all my
money

  ’Cause I think it’s funny

  Gonna blow it on a real shitty van

  Driving through the states

  It’ll be great

  Getting laid wherever I can.

  What’s it like to be my mother?

  What’s it like to be my father?

  What’s it like to be my brother?

  To have to deal with an asshole like me.

  Other than big hair and Yuppie bullshit, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to rebel against, so we focused our angst inward, rebelling against ourselves. At least we had a sense of humor about it.

  It was by every external measure a great gig, and playing music did let me forget about things for a while. But the sense of relief faded with the last chord of our last song. Watching Johnny and Chey hug one another and laugh after the set was enough to send me into a deep funk. I was in the funk to end all funks. I was Parliament Funkadelic.

  When we left the club it was already after three in the morning. There wasn’t much point in trying to find a place to sleep, so we decided to drive straight through to our next gig, in Athens, Georgia.

  I drove the first shift with Richie next to me in the passenger seat, his mouth open and drooling, his slow breathing keeping time with the whine of the tires on the road. A 7-Eleven Big Gulp full of Coke was balanced on his lap. We had a rule that whoever rode in the passenger seat was supposed to help the driver stay awake and entertained. It only seemed to work when I was the passenger. Johnny and Cheyenne were sacked out in the back, the two of them twisted together like a pretzel.

  Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, or in the transparent reflection cast by the dashboard lights on the interior of the windshield, I felt sick. I was grotesque, a thing to be shunned, an Untouchable. And that seemed right to me. A person who looked like me didn’t have the right to feel anything different, didn’t deserve to be happy.

  Had I stopped for even just one minute to think about things, had I found a way to step back and gain perspective, I might’ve felt different. I was the guitar player in a touring rock band and was living every kid’s dream. Even more than that, the stage was the one place where my scars didn’t matter. Sure, I did my best to cover my face and neck, but people still knew there was something wrong with me—I mean, duh, we were called the Scar Boys for a reason—they just didn’t care. To them I was just a guy in a band. A good band. A band that made them want to dance and shout and sing. I, Harbinger Robert Francis Jones, was making people happy. That should’ve been enough to make me happy, too. But perspective, I’m told, doesn’t come easily to teenagers, and it never came to me at all.

  I tried to distract the tornado swirling in my head by listing, in alphabetical order, every word I could remember from eleventh grade Spanish, starting with almuerzo. I got as far as desayuno when a loud metallic rattle, coming from somewhere deep inside the engine, announced itself with a fury.

  We were somewhere near Spartanburg, South Carolina.

  “What’s that noise?” Richie asked, sitting up straight and rubbing his eyes. His sudden movement caused the Big Gulp to spill all over his pants.

  “Shit,” he muttered. He was half annoyed and half amused. That was what I always loved about Richie. He could find the humor in anything.

  The noise in the engine sounded like a handful of ball bearings thrown into a washing machine.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I answered, “it just started. And we seem to be losing power.”

  “Since when?” he asked.

  “Since right now. I have it floored and we’re only doing fifty.”

  “Shit,” he said again, tapping his teeth with his fingernail and looking at his watch. “Get off at the next exit.”

  Five minutes later we found ourselves in the parking lot of a McDonald’s, the interior shrouded in darkness, the golden arches silent and gray.

  “Stay here and rev the engine when I say so.” Richie hopped out and went to a pay phone in front of the van.

  Johnny stirred in the back. “What’s going on?”

  I didn’t answer. My anger had become a festering sore that needed to burst, but I wouldn’t let it.

  “Harry?”

  “Something wrong with Dino,” I mumbled. “I think Richie wants to call his dad.”

  “Cotter pin?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Richie motioned to me, so I stepped on the gas, throttling up the volume of the rattle in the engine.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Johnny said.

  “What’s he doing?” Cheyenne asked, pointing at Richie.

  I couldn’t believe it, but Richie was holding the pay phone up to the van. He had me gun the accelerator a few more times, talked for another minute, hung up, and hopped back in. The look on my face must’ve asked the unstated question.

  “I wanted my dad to hear the engine,” he said.

  “Over a pay phone?”

  “You got a better idea?” I didn’t. “He says we probably threw an engine rod.”

  “Let me guess, that’s bad,” Johnny said.

  “Yeah, that’s real bad,” Richie answered, unable to hide the anxiety in his voice. “If we did throw a rod, it’s only a matter of time until the engine stops working all together and needs to be replaced.”

  “Replace the engine?”

  “Yeah.”

  We were all silent for a moment.

  “Is there any—” Johnny started.

  “No. I mean, we can put heavier oil in, but that’ll only buy us time. Think of this sucker as having a massive brain tumor. The survival rate is zero.” As we talked about it more, I learned from Richie that technically, we hadn’t “thrown the rod” yet. One of the shafts in the engine that moves the pistons had come loose and was knocking around. That was the rattling. And because we had one piston malfunctioning badly, we didn’t have full power. That was the poor acceleration. In time the rod would come completely loose and break through the engine casing. When that happened, we were dead in the water.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  “We keep going for as long as we can.” This from Johnny. I looked at Richie who could only shrug.

  “Okay then.” I put Dino in gear, and pulled back onto the highway.

  Twenty-nine miles later, there was a loud THWACK! Thick smoke filled the cabin of the van and oil spewed everywhere on the road. I was able to make it to the shoulder where Dino let out his last gasp and died on the spot. We were still one hundred miles from Athens—all our equipment, all our luggage, all our hopes and dreams entombed in rusted metal.

  MORE CIGARETTES

  (written by Paul Westerberg, and performed by The Replacements)

  Johnny and Cheyenne hoofed it to the next exit, a little more than a mile away, and called a wrecker to have the van towed. The dispatcher told them that the trip to Athens was going to cost two hundred dollars, most of the cash we had left.

  None of us could find a single word to say while we waited. It was the first time since I’d known Johnny that he was without some clever remark, without an obvious solution no one else could see. That more than anything else scared the crap out of me.

  When the wrecker arrived, I volunteered to ride in the tow truck while the rest of the band rode in the van. Given everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, I needed space.

  The driver they sent to rescue us was your garden-variety, twenty-something, old-school redneck—denim overalls, blue-checked flannel shirt, scuffed work boots, even a John Deere hat—or so I thought. It turns out you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (you’d think I, of all people, would know that!) because he was actually a stoner from New Jersey.

  “Yeah, man, I just came to Athens because I heard UGA was a party school. Want some?” I didn’t know how, but this guy had managed to roll a joint while he was driving. According to the speedometer we were doing ninety. He waved the fat boy under my nose.

  I guess it’s we
ird, that, at eighteen, playing in a band, and spending most of my adolescence trying to fit in, I hadn’t been stoned before. Well, not unless you count being a methadone addict as a fourth grader, which I’m choosing not to count. Anyway, recreational drug use, for whatever reason, had just never come up.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  The driver, whose name was Jeremiah, lit the joint, sucked the sweet smelling smoke deep into his chest, and held his breath. Then he passed it to me. I tried to mimic what I saw, but wound up in a fit of coughing and sputtering. As I tried to refill my lungs with fresh air, the coughing morphed into a kind of maniacal laughter that ended as teary gasps for breath. Jeremiah laughed, too, but I think it was just to be polite.

  Only three years older than me, Jeremiah (not “Jerry” I was told) had recently dropped out of UGA and taken a job with Northern Georgia Wreck & Rescue, the company with the exclusive contract to handle calls to the state police along I-85. He’d been studying psychology, but that was just to please his parents. Jeremiah’s true love was driving, fixing, and being around cars. He spent his weekends at the Dixie Speedway in Woodstock, just north of Atlanta, working a stock car crew and hoping for a chance to race.

  “So what’s wrong with your van, anyway?” he asked.

  “We threw an engine rod.”

  “Oh, you boys are fucked.” He took another long toke and handed the joint back to me. By my third drag I was smoking without convulsing, though to be honest, I didn’t feel any different. I thought being stoned would make me light-headed and happy. I just felt nauseous and my throat burned.

  I handed what was left of the joint back to Jeremiah who carefully stubbed it out on the steering wheel, adding another burn mark to the twenty or thirty that were already in orbit around the truck’s horn. He dropped the roach in his shirt pocket and then pulled out a pack of Marlboro’s, offering it in my direction.