The Scar Boys

by Len Vlahos

  “Sure,” I said, “why not.”

  I flicked the lighter and held the thin orange flame to the end of the cigarette until I saw it was burning and then drew the smoke in. The taste of tobacco was foul compared to pot. It was like the difference between coffee and coffee ice cream. I held the soupy fog in my lungs for a long moment and exhaled.

  “No, no, no, son.” Jeremiah laughed. “You exhale these right away. Don’t you smoke?”

  “Not until today.”

  “What the hell you wanna start for now?”

  I didn’t have a good answer, so I shrugged my shoulders and took another drag, doing it right the second time. The truth is, I didn’t care why. I just wanted to smoke. Sue me.

  The conversation petered out and we rode in silence for a while. Then Jeremiah asked, “So is Harry short for Harold?”

  As you can probably guess, I hate that question. It comes up way more than you would think. But my name is my name, so I answered.

  “No, it’s Harbinger.”

  “Harbinger?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like Harbinger of Doom?” Jeremiah was both amused and perplexed.

  Maybe it was the pot, maybe it was the nicotine, but something loosened me up enough that I found myself telling Jeremiah the whole sorry story of how I got my name. It goes something like this:

  My parents met in September 1967, which was supposed to be the “Summer of Love.”

  Race riots were flaring in a dozen cities, the Chinese were exploding H-bombs in the Gobi Desert, and the US Congress was upping the ante in Vietnam, turning a police action into a full-fledged war. Summer of Love? It was more like the summer of indigestion, like 1966 had eaten a bad taco and just couldn’t keep it down.

  My mom was working nights at a diner in Brooklyn to put herself through Kingsborough Community College, when my dad stopped in for a cup of coffee. He had been in Prospect Park for an event with his boss, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy; yeah, that Kennedy. Dad’s first political job was as a junior staffer, a constituent liaison or something like that, for the one and only Bobby Kennedy.

  Dad sat at the counter of the diner and flirted with my mom for an hour. (She says it was more like two hours.) When he finally introduced himself and she shook his hand, there was an electric shock so intense that all the lights went out. Literally. All five boroughs of New York City went dark in a blackout that lasted five hours.

  Halfway through that blackout I was conceived, and three weeks later my parents were married.

  Yeah, I know, gross.

  Things started off really good for my mom and dad. They bought a small house in Yonkers and began to build a life.

  Then, in March of 1968, Kennedy jumped into the presidential race. My dad was offered a job on the campaign team, so he wound up traveling with the senator. It was hard on my mom, but the payoff if Kennedy won—and everyone was pretty sure he would win—was a job for my dad and an exciting new life in Washington for the Jones family.

  Mom went into labor in the early hours of the morning on June 5. Her first contraction began at the exact same moment an unemployed exercise rider from Santa Anita racetrack was squeezing the trigger that would put a bullet into Bobby Kennedy’s head. My father was just a few yards away when it happened. (The gunshot, not the contraction.)

  Dad talks about that night often, his eyes glazing over, his voice going hoarse, like he’s still there, stuck in that moment. He pulls out the same photograph of Kennedy and his entourage onstage at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, all of them smiling with their arms raised in celebration at having just won the California primary.

  “See that ear?” my father asks, pointing to the obscured view of a man’s head, five people deep on the stage. “That’s my ear.

  “Bobby,” Dad tells me, “was heading for a press conference after his victory speech. That’s when I heard the shots and I knew they got him. I knew they got Bobby.”

  At this point my father usually stops and stares at his hands. I can never tell if he’s really getting emotional, or if he’s just pausing for effect. Then he takes a deep breath and starts again.

  “The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hospital room with a big lump on my head. I don’t remember how I got there or how I got hurt. Something must have happened in the chaos after the shooting. When word reached me that your mother had gone into labor, I was confused—I had a concussion, and was probably still in shock—but I knew that I had to get home.”

  Thirty hours later, the story goes, when he finally made it to my mother’s bedside, dazed and smelling like stale cigarettes and taxicab air freshener, my dad could barely hold me.

  “Ben,” my mother said as my father gazed into my half-shut eyes for the first time, “he still needs a name.”

  Not yet ready to move on from the grief and confusion he’d left behind in California to the joy of new life, my father could only mutter, “Harbinger.”

  My mother, a puzzle of a woman if ever there was one, smiled and said, “Okay, Harbinger Robert Francis Jones.”

  The events of those agonizing two days finally caught up with my dad, and he broke down. He climbed into the hospital bed next to my mom. With me cradled between them, and with my mother stroking his hair, my father cried himself to sleep.

  Dad could never bring himself to call me Bobby like my mother wanted, so they started calling me Harry instead, and it stuck.

  But it’s hard to escape a name like Harbinger. And, of course they had no idea what a good choice it would turn out to be.

  When I finished the story Jeremiah just looked at me and gave a long low whistle.

  “That is one fucked-up story, Harbinger Jones.”

  We didn’t say much else after that, and a few minutes later Jeremiah found the Athens address I’d given him—a low ranch house with light blue siding on a sleepy street. We’d been steered here by the drummer from the Woofing Cookies. This was the house of a friend of a friend, and arrangements had been made to let us crash for a few days. Jeremiah left Dino at the end of the driveway.

  When I went to shake his hand, he was holding out his pack of Marlboros; inside was the roach from earlier. He winked at me and said, “Take care Harbinger Robert Francis Jones. Stay out of trouble.” And with that, he was gone.

  I WANNA BE SEDATED

  (written by Joey Ramone, and performed by the Ramones)

  I woke up in a pitch-black room, sweating and out of breath. I was having a nightmare and must’ve been making some sort of horrible noise because Johnny came bursting through the door to see what was wrong.

  “I’m all right,” I started to say, “it was just …” But Johnny didn’t stop at the door. He bounded into the room, leapt onto my chest, and wrapped his hands around my throat, choking all the air out of my lungs.

  My heart seized and I fell out of bed, waking up for real.

  Richie was on the floor next to me, sprawled like a chalk outline. His snoring didn’t even break its rhythm when I hit the ground.

  There was light spilling under the door and I heard muffled voices on the other side. Johnny and Cheyenne. They were talking low and laughing.

  I caught my breath and got my bearings—we were still in Athens, still crashing in the same house. The room had no air conditioner and my shirt was soaked through.

  I got up, grabbed my cigarettes, and snuck out.

  Johnny and Cheyenne were in their own room with the door closed. The light I saw was coming from a kitchen, where a stove clock read 3:24. I walked past the refrigerator, out the back door, and lit a smoke.

  Off to the right, difficult to make out in the dark, was a twelve foot half-pipe made of pine boards and two-by-fours. It had been built by Tony and Chuck, the two skate punks who lived in the house. Shaved heads, piercings, and tattoos notwithstanding, they were actually pretty nice guys. Despite the fashion choice, they had more in common with Jeff Spicoli than with Aryan youth. All they wanted to do was ride that pipe and drink beer.

/>   Dino was parked in the driveway to my left, wearing his name like a badge of honor. Our van had become a dinosaur, a reminder of another age. Useless and extinct, it had been sitting idle since we arrived two days earlier.

  Our first morning in Athens we’d found the local Ford dealer and learned it was going to cost seventeen hundred dollars to fix the van. The entire engine block needed to be replaced. We didn’t have the money, and none of us were willing to ask our families for a loan, so we began canceling tour dates. It felt a little like quitting methadone, but with no reward at the end. Each gig lost was a punch in the gut. We canceled four dates the first day, and another two the second. We gave ourselves one week to get it sorted out and get back on the road. No one talked about what would happen at the end of that week.

  I used the embers of my dying cigarette to light another and decided to go for a walk.

  I started off at a rapid clip, the slap of my sneakers against the pavement sounding like the heartbeat of a small bird. I tried to get my mind around everything that was happening—the van, the tour, Johnny and Cheyenne—but it was all too much, so I started listing world capitals instead.

  Abu Dhabi, Accra, Addis Ababa.

  The air was a stew of humidity and heat, the only breeze generated by my own movement. The farther I walked, the faster I walked, but it did nothing to cool me off.

  Algiers, Amman, Amsterdam.

  I couldn’t slow down, body or mind.

  Once, when I was nine or ten years old, I was in the car with my mother going to some doctor or other when the gas pedal got stuck. Bad things always seemed to happen when my mother was behind the wheel of a car. In this case, a little metal burr on the accelerator caught on an adjoining piece of metal in the engine and opened an uninterrupted and unquenchable flow of gasoline to the pistons. The brakes, when fully engaged, produced acrid-smelling smoke but did nothing to slow our speed. The car couldn’t be stopped. That’s how I felt walking through that stifling night, like that car careening out of control. (My mom eventually saved us by putting the car in neutral and coasting to safety. Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to have a neutral gear. Only drive and reverse.)

  Andorra la Vella, Ankara, Antananarivo.

  The mantra of the capitals was the only tangible thing in the world. The only thing I could hold on to. I was seeing everything as if reflected in a room of fun-house mirrors—distorted, ugly, unreal—and I couldn’t find my way out. Parked cars looked like something from an Escher print and the trees were melting. Either the world was breaking down or I was.

  Asunción, Athens, Baghdad.

  I had no idea where my feet were taking me, so I was surprised when I rounded a corner and found myself in the center of town. Without knowing how or why, I made a beeline for the pay phone outside of the Athens police station and dialed the first and only number that popped into my brain.

  “Dr. Hirschorn’s line,” said a bored woman’s voice. For some stupid reason, I’d imagined that Dr. Kenny would answer the phone himself. It never occurred to me that doctors didn’t answer their own phones, especially in the middle of the night.

  “I have a collect call from a Harry Jones,” the operator answered.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. Apparently the answering service lady hadn’t encountered collect calls before. Not sure what to do, she accepted the charges.

  “May I help you?” she asked, her boredom replaced by alarm.

  “I need to speak to Dr. Kenny,” I managed to rasp into the receiver.

  “Dr. Kenny?”

  “Dr. Hirschorn.”

  “Is this an emergency?”

  “No. I’m calling in the middle of the night, collect, and can barely breathe. Of course it’s an emergency! Do you think I want to sell him a set of encyclopedias?” Even if I had said that, the poor woman on the other end of the line wouldn’t have understood a word of it. But I didn’t say that or anything intelligible. I don’t think I was capable of forming actual sentences.

  “Sir?” she asked.

  My only response was to continue blathering world capitals in between gasps of weeping.

  “Hold, please,” she said somewhere around Beirut.

  I had stopped seeing Dr. Kenny not long after Johnny and I started the band. It was my idea to end our sessions. Dr. Kenny resisted.

  “What you’ve been through, Harry,” he’d told me, “it’s a lot more complicated than it seems. It’s wonderful that you’ve made friends and are playing music, but there’s healing that needs to happen at a deeper level, too. And that takes time.”

  I’d already been through six years of sessions with Dr. Kenny, and I was having none of it. The only thing I’d ever wanted was a normal life, and there was no place for a pediatric psychiatrist in the world I was trying to build. My parents—my mom still indulging my every desire and my dad wanting to save money—took my side.

  Dr. Kenny seemed genuinely worried at our last session.

  “Well, the music will be good therapy, I guess,” he told me, and he turned out to be right. “You take care, Harbinger Jones,” he said as I left his office for the last time.

  I did have some regret, not because I thought I needed therapy—though, of course I did—but because I really liked and trusted Dr. Kenny. It’s why I was calling him and not my parents from that phone booth in Athens.

  Just after Lima and right before Lisbon Dr. Kenny came on the line.

  “Harry, is that you?” he asked, as I continued to gasp for air.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s been a while, Harry.” Dr. Kenny dropped his voice a cool octave. It was one of his Jedi mind tricks, and it worked. A this-isn’t-the-anxiety-you’re-looking-for sort of thing. “Can you tell me what’s happening?”

  I didn’t know where to begin. My brain fumbled through the facts of my life, groping for a starting point, but found none.

  “Harry, it will help if you talk to me.”

  I saw my reflection in the glass of the phone booth and I froze.

  Throughout the course of my life, I’d had one of two reactions on seeing myself in a mirror:

  Reflection Reaction #1: Complete revulsion. I was as horrified at my face as everyone around me. I was a scary-looking freak. I got it.

  Reflection Reaction #2: The mental airbrush. On the very rare occasions when I wasn’t feeling desperate, despondent, detached, or any other SAT word that starts with the letter “d,” I would see myself as I imagined I would’ve looked without the scars, without the nerve damage, without the wig. I would see an unremarkable face—beautiful in its unremarkability, if that’s even a word. I would see in my reflection a normal kid.

  But something different happened in the phone booth that night. For reasons I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now, rather than scare me, my face—with all of its horror intact—was, for the first time in my life, a comfort. Maybe I had become so emotionally isolated that I had no one left to turn to other than myself. Or maybe I just didn’t care anymore. Whatever the reason, my reflection gave me a glimmer of stability. The phone call to Dr. Kenny started to feel like a bad idea.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled, “I’m okay. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Harry, wait,” Dr. Kenny said before I could hang up. I didn’t answer, but I knew he could hear me breathing. “I want you to listen to me carefully. You need to get yourself to an emergency room. Can you do that? For me?”

  I didn’t answer again. My heart rate was starting to retreat from the redline. Barely, but noticeably, I was starting to feel the ground beneath my feet again.

  “Harry?”

  “No, really doc. I’m going to be okay. And I am sorry to have bothered you. Thank you.” I hung up and stood there for a few minutes with my forehead pressed against the glass, letting its smooth surface cool me. I remember that I laughed out loud, but I don’t remember why. Had someone been passing by, I’m sure I would’ve sounded batshit crazy. Lucky for me, the street was deserted
.

  I left the phone booth and began the long walk back.

  SITTING STILL

  (written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe, and performed by R.E.M.)

  When I got back to the skate house, I found Cheyenne sitting on the back stoop. Her legs were pulled up tight against her chest and she was rocking back and forth with the precision of a metronome. She didn’t say anything or even look up when I approached.

  “Hey,” I muttered, ready to scoot around her and retreat inside. I was still shaky from my walk and phone call, and felt like maybe I should be alone. But when I passed her, I could hear that Cheyenne was crying. The sound stopped me in my tracks.

  I didn’t know what to do. A crying girl wasn’t anything I’d encountered before.

  Wait, strike that.

  Dana Dimarco.

  I was eleven years old and had been walking home across the otherwise deserted elementary school playground. Dana was there, sitting on a swing, dragging her foot in a small, slow circle on the asphalt. She was sobbing openly.

  I had stayed late after school that day to avoid a bully named Jamie Cosite. He was a year younger than me and was planning to beat me up. I knew this because during playtime on the kickball field he told me, “I’m going to beat you up.”

  Going against my better judgment I asked him, “Why?”

  “Whaddya mean why?”

  “I mean why do you want to beat me up?” I had been so routinely abused by other kids that I guess on some level, I figured I had nothing to lose.

  “Because look at you,” he said, his friends laughing at his oh-so-clever wit. Cosite had too many freckles and an unnaturally square jaw; he looked like a ventriloquist dummy.

  “So?”

  That was all he needed. He punched me in the face right then and there, and kicked me in the shoulder as I went down. A teacher saw the commotion and walked straight over to where we were standing. Jamie stopped the assault when he saw her coming toward us, but managed to get in a quick “I’ll finish you after school,” before the teacher’s presence sent all the other kids scattering.