The Scar Boys

by Len Vlahos

  Carol, the booking agent for CB’s, “loved” our demo tape. At least that’s what Johnny told us. We were going to be the second of six bands on the bill and we’d have half an hour, exactly enough time to play all seven of our original songs.

  From the moment the gig was booked, we rehearsed nonstop. Every day after school we ran through each of those songs in my parents’ basement. Then Johnny made us play them again. And again. And then again. We were determined and methodical, and it paid off. Richie, Dave, and I fused our instruments into a single, rhythmic buzz saw, while Johnny gave each song character and depth. We were becoming a well-oiled, punk-pop machine. The Scar Boys were going to blow the roof off CBGB’s, all the way from the Bowery to the East River. And we would have, I swear to God in heaven we would have. If only Dave had shown up.

  The afternoon of the showcase, Johnny, Richie, and I skipped school and wandered around the East Village. We went from one secondhand clothing shop to the next, trying on shirts with angry torn fabric, tight leather pants, and scaly maroon boots so pointy they could be classified as weapons. It was all a vain attempt to camouflage the fact that we were just a bunch of green kids from the suburbs.

  I settled on an outfit of brown pants, a mauve smoking jacket, and a big burgundy hat with a floppy brim that would just about completely hide my face. I was planning to cap it all off with my trademark sunglasses. For some reason, I’d convinced myself that looking like a pimp would make me blend in. Go figure.

  It didn’t matter. Johnny was having none of it. He was pushing me to wear a pair of skintight, red denim pants, and a black shirt covered with zippers that had no apparent meaning or function.

  “C’mon Harry, you can still wear the hat and sunglasses,” he told me.

  I really didn’t want to call any more attention to myself than I had to, but you didn’t say no to Johnny McKenna.

  Johnny was the kind of kid who’d been overindulged by his parents. You know these kids. They’re the little brats who hear daily how smart they are, how handsome, how strong, how fast, how funny, how kind, how considerate, how clever, how wise they are.

  One group of these kids gets addicted to the attention, growing up to need constant approval and reassurance. They throw tantrums in public and excel at school. They get good grades, partly to please their parents and partly because they’re such insufferable little jerkwads that they have no friends and nothing better to do with their time than study.

  The other group of overindulged kids uses the coddling to gain confidence. They walk with a strident gait, laugh easily, and test well. Johnny fit squarely into this latter camp. (I was overindulged, too, but for different reasons, so neither stereotype described me. One more way not to fit in, I suppose.)

  When Johnny showed me his own outfit for the gig—black shirt, black pants, black boots; Johnny Cash, simple, elegant, cool—I was annoyed.

  “Why should I be the one wearing fire-engine red? You’re the front man.”

  “It’s just the opposite for me,” he explained. “The singer is in the spotlight. He needs to be understated.”

  I looked to Richie for support, but he just shrugged his shoulders and wandered to the register to buy his own ensemble, a T-shirt with a bull’s-eye at its center and a giant brass belt buckle in the shape of a ten-gallon hat. I was on my own.

  Truth is, over those first few years of our friendship, I’d become something of a reluctant sycophant to Johnny, and it was getting harder and harder to break out of that role. While he was the main reason—maybe the only reason—I was becoming my own person, he also kept me in check. It was okay for me to come out of my shell, as long as I didn’t come out too far. If you didn’t let Johnny be the center of attention, he had no use for you. And even though I don’t think I understood it then, I needed Johnny, and needed Johnny to need me.

  I held the red pants and the black shirt in my hands and looked at him. “I can still wear my sunglasses?”

  “Yes.”

  “And my hat?”

  “Sure,” he said, smiling at me. Some part of Johnny, I suspect, liked that I was still cowed by my own shame. “I just think this combo will look cool onstage,” he added.

  I nodded and the deal was struck.

  Sporting our new duds, Johnny, Richie, and I arrived at CB’s at five-thirty for our six p.m. sound check, expecting to meet Dave, who, in his understated way, had mumbled something about taking the train and meeting us in the city. When it came our turn for the sound check, Dave was MIA, so we swapped slots with another band and soaked in our surroundings.

  A long, narrow space with a bar on the right-hand wall and a stage at the far end, CBGB’s oozed character. I’d been a few times before, but those visits were at night, when the lights were low and the room was shrouded in mystery. During the sound check, in the grim reality of overhead fluorescence, CB’s was laid bare, a magician’s trick revealed. I watched a pierced girl vacuum the battle-worn carpet, her face a mask of total apathy. I ran my fingers along the scoring on the rough-hewn tables, feeling the ruts left by knives, forks, safety pins, and fingernails. I smelled the decade of cigarette smoke and body odor caked on to the high ceiling. And I studied, with the intensity of a graduate student studying theoretical physics, the layer upon layer of bumper sticker, spray paint, and ink covering every exposed surface.

  The mere thought that in just a few hours I’d be standing on the same stage that so many punk and rock icons had stood on before—Johnny Ramone and Lenny Kaye, Jerry Harrison and Chris Stein—almost made me cry. It was as if all my dreams had come true. If there’s a nightclub in heaven, I thought, it’s going to be just like CBGB’s.

  Beyond the stage were the dressing rooms, cramped spaces so covered with graffiti that no hint of the original walls was visible. You had the feeling that if someone were to clean the band names, sex jokes, and insults away, the entire place would collapse into dust, leaving a gaping hole on the Bowery.

  A twenty-something guy tuning his guitar saw me admiring the wall and handed me a Magic Marker. I mumbled an inaudible and monosyllabic “thankyou” as I took it, and in small but confident letters added “The Scar Boys” to the litany of names that had come before.

  I could hear the band finishing its sound check and went back out front. Still no sign of Dave. We gave the next slot to the next band in line and Johnny went to find a pay phone to call Dave’s house. Richie and I, who never had much to say to each other, listened to the soundman get levels from the three-piece onstage.

  “Okay, just the bass drum.” Thud, thud, thud, thud.

  “Good, now the mounted toms.” Bong thwap, bong thwap, bong thwap.

  “Great. Play the whole kit.” The drummer, who couldn’t hold a candle to Richie, put together a simple beat as the engineer tweaked the volume and EQ.

  “He’s not coming.” Richie and I both jumped, more startled at the words Johnny shouted over the noise than at his sudden reappearance. He held a hand up to stop us from the barrage of questions he could see we were about to unleash.

  “His mother didn’t say why. He’s home, he wouldn’t come to the phone. He’s not coming.”

  The music stopped mid-sentence, and Johnny found himself shouting the word “coming!” He said it a second time, “He’s not coming,” quiet and restrained.

  I don’t know if we sat there staring at each other and grinding our teeth for three seconds, three minutes, or three weeks. I do remember that, in that moment, I was more conscious than ever of my ridiculous bright-red pants.

  Richie was the first to act. He shook his head, spat on the ground, and got up to leave. He knew what we all knew—we couldn’t go on without a bass player, it just wouldn’t work. We packed our equipment, made up a story for the girl at the door that a member of our band had been in a car accident, and left.

  So ended the first, almost glorious gig of the Scar Boys.

  When we tried to confront Dave the next day at school, he would only hang his head, whisper an apol
ogy, and tell us he was quitting the band. We pushed him pretty hard for an answer, but it was no use. Whatever Dave’s reasons were, he was keeping them to himself. To this day I still don’t know what happened. Maybe his parents stepped in, worried their son was about to piss his life away. Or maybe the thought of an actual gig, compared to a high school party, was too much for his wilting demeanor. Whatever the reason, after three years of almost constant companionship, Dave, just like that, was gone.

  PUNK ROCK GIRL

  (written by Genaro, Linderman, Sabatino, and Schulthise, and performed by the Dead Milkmen)

  Johnny wasted no time:

  “The Scar Boys are holding auditions for a new bass player today after school at 55 Elberon Ave. (That was my house.) Bring your instrument and bring your chops.”

  The handwritten ads were plastered all over school the day after the CBGB’s debacle, and we were floored when half a dozen kids showed up. Johnny had them wait in the backyard, calling each one in turn through the door that led to my family’s basement.

  The room itself was a catalog of bad trends in seventies decorating: Blond paneling surrounded a beige tile floor, three striped sofas formed a semicircle in front of a color television and a red shag rug, and my dad’s autographed photo of Bill Russell stood watch over a plastic ficus tree, hoping it, along with the rest of the room, might turn into something less ugly. This self-contained den occupied about a third of the basement. The rest was open space once devoted to a Ping-Pong table, but for the last few years playing host to Richie’s drum kit and my amp.

  The first bass player hopefuls were all kids we knew and any one of them would have been a fine replacement for Dave. We probably would have settled on Petey Havermayer—a short, sturdy kid with a deviated septum—if Cheyenne Belle hadn’t walked in.

  Cheyenne Belle.

  She couldn’t have stood more than five feet tall, and she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds soaking wet. The bass she held, a Rickenbacker, was large against her body, like a prop for a comedian parodying a race of tiny rock musicians. Her hair, the color of coal, was cut short in the back and left long in the front. Thick bangs hung down to her nose, obscuring one of her eyes, eyes so large that they looked like something out of a Disney movie. Cheyenne’s features, other than those eyes, were like her physique—small, delicate, and fragile, waiting for a stiff wind to blow them away. She wore a boy’s size, blue, button-down shirt, which hung loosely over tan shortshorts so close in color to the tone of her skin that at first glance she looked naked below the waist. Her outfit was completed by a pair of dusty red cowboy boots on the bottom, and a scaly red cowboy hat on top.

  Johnny, Richie, and I were struck dumb. We were unable to talk, unable to move, unable to blink. A tiny smile crept on Cheyenne’s tiny face and she said, “Where can I plug in?”

  Johnny regained enough of his wits to point to the patch cord, one end lying on the floor at her feet, the other tethered to the second input on my amp. She looked at me as she plugged in, pausing a beat as we made eye contact. I don’t know if she was examining my scars or just silently saying hello. Whatever it was, I wilted under her gaze and looked away.

  Richie broke the silence. “Um, like, how old are you?”

  “Old enough,” she said in a way that closed the subject then and for all time. It turned out Cheyenne was our age, she was just cursed—or to my way of thinking, blessed—by those pixyish features. She attended Our Lady of the Perpetual I-Still-Can’t-Remember-the-Name Catholic High School. How she heard about our audition, I never knew.

  But the thing about Cheyenne that surprised us the most? She could play that bass like Jaco Pastorius. She responded to each new musical challenge we threw at her, playing the line we asked, and then improvising and improving it. For fifteen minutes we tried to trip her up, until it became a sort of game, finally coming to an end when one of the kids out in the yard opened the door and yelled downstairs, wanting to know if the auditions were over. They were.

  We thanked Cheyenne and asked her to wait outside.

  Johnny, our de facto leader, spoke first.

  “Okay, she’s in. But listen to me—none of us, not me, not you, not you,” pointing at Richie and me in turn, “as long as we’re in this band, can ever date this girl, kiss this girl, or sleep with this girl. She is off-limits. Agreed?”

  Richie and I nodded.

  Johnny would be the first to break this rule. I would be the last.

  CHEYENNE

  (written by Gary St. Clair and Tim O’Brien, and performed by Barry Williams, sometimes credited as The Brady Bunch)

  From the moment Cheyenne joined the Scar Boys, things changed. Our rehearsals, our gigs, our music became infused with a new kind of energy. Maybe it was the sexual tension of having a girl in what had been an all-boys band, maybe it was hit-you-in-the-face rock and roll, or maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, it worked.

  We thought we had gotten good with Dave in the band, and at some level, we had. We really had. But when Chey came along, it was like a whole new world opened up to us musically. She was the missing piece of our chemical equation. Everything seemed to go right when she was around. I broke fewer guitar strings, Richie broke fewer sticks, and Johnny hit notes beyond his range. We all settled into a groove and a confidence that worked like an amplifier. Not only did we get better, we got ten times better.

  This new energy had a profound effect on me. For the first time since Johnny and I started the band, I took my hat, sunglasses, and denim jacket off, and I turned around to face the world. Yeah, sure, it was only rehearsal, with no one but the four of us there, but for me, it was a huge step. Or rather, it would’ve been a huge step if not for Johnny.

  “Harry, what are you doing?”

  The question was like a blow to my solar plexus. I practically doubled over in pain when Johnny asked it. Richie and Cheyenne stopped what they were doing to watch the exchange.

  “What?” I answered. It wasn’t really a question. It was more of an annoyed bark.

  “Your disguise. You’re taking it off?”

  It didn’t dawn on me at the time, but disguise was a carefully chosen word. It had the same effect on me that Darth Vader’s “I find your lack of faith disturbing” had on Star Wars Expendable Guy Number Two. (In case, FAP, you’re not well acquainted with the Star Wars canon—and shame on you if you’re not!—Darth Vader uses his mind to choke Expendable Guy Number Two while uttering that phrase. It’s awesome.)

  “I dunno,” I mumbled to my feet.

  “Huh.” That’s all he had to say. Huh. Embedded in that word was everything between us. It said that I didn’t get to make a decision like that on my own. That there were to be no big changes without the Johnny McKenna seal of approval. You have to understand that while Johnny didn’t actually tell me what to do or not to do, everyone in the room knew exactly what his Huh meant.

  I started to put the sunglasses and hat back on when Cheyenne cut in. She was looking straight at Johnny, but she spoke to me.

  “Harry, you should leave them off. You have a beautiful face.”

  Johnny just shrugged and turned away. When he did, Chey turned to me. I was a deer caught in the headlights. I was a mounted, stuffed, decapitated deer caught in the god damn headlights.

  “You should do what makes you comfortable, Harry. Don’t listen to him.”

  If Richie or I had tried to defy Johnny like that, the result would have been an hour-long lecture on whatever the topic of that day was, on why we were wrong, and why he was right. Things didn’t work that way with Cheyenne. No one, and I mean no one—not even Johnny McKenna—tangled with that girl.

  The oldest of seven sisters, Cheyenne grew up in a Catholic household that was part Carrie, and part Caddyshack. Her mother went to church several times a week, mostly to pray for the soul of her father. He wasn’t dead, he just smelled that way. The man’s system had absorbed enough alcohol over the years to synthesize formaldehyde. Chey’s dad di
dn’t seem to know or care. He would just sit in his favorite chair, watch television game shows, and drink cheap brandy.

  The influence of the Church at home was felt in the preponderance of crucifixes, Virgin Mary statues, and house rules—no boys, no makeup, no boys, no short skirts, no boys, no jewelry, and oh, yeah, no boys. But with her mom’s devotion to Christ being a full-time vocation, and her father’s devotion to the Christian Brothers being a full-time vacation, Chey and her sisters discovered early on that house rules were meant to be broken. For all the bluster religious people have about God and family, the Belle girls were raising themselves. They may as well have been orphans.

  About a year after I met Cheyenne, her sister—fifteen years old—delivered a stillborn baby in her bed at home because no one knew she was pregnant. Don’t ask me how a teenage girl can hide a nearly full-term pregnancy. Chey said that her sister was overweight to begin with, and that she wore a steady diet of peasant blouses, but I still had trouble believing it. Which was another thing about Cheyenne. You never quite knew when she was telling the truth.

  It’s not that she was a liar, just that she liked to stretch the facts to make a better story. When she told me that she stole her first bass guitar from the local music store, I took her at her word. I found out later that the bass was a rental that Cheyenne returned only after the store started legal proceedings for late payments.

  As she stood there staring at me—my sunglasses and hat still in my hands—the only thing I could think was Did she just say I have a beautiful face? (Maybe Chey took liberties with the truth sometimes, but I never questioned her sincerity.)

  I was about to put my costume on the floor, but then I caught Johnny’s eye.

  As smitten as I was with Cheyenne, Johnny still trumped everyone else. If he thought it was a bad idea, it was a bad idea. I put the “disguise” back on.