The Scar Boys

by Len Vlahos

  Everything was falling into place. The only thing left to do was bag ourselves a set of wheels.

  RIP OFF

  (written by Marc Bolan, and performed by T. Rex)

  Richie’s dad—Alec, Mr. McGill, Mr. Mac—was a retired mechanic. He was a gruff man with thick hair shining an unnatural black from Grecian Formula, and skin turned to leather from years spent absorbing car exhaust. Mr. Mac barely came up to Richie’s shoulder, but his hands were rough, scorched, and enormous. They were a source of wonder to me, large like a basketball player’s, but nimble like a pianist’s. He was the only one of my friends’ parents who didn’t seem uncomfortable with my deformities. He treated me like he treated any other kid, and I loved him for it.

  “You’re not gonna get much with thirteen hundred,” he told us. Mr. Mac was on his hands and knees, his head under the sink, the sound of a wrench twisting, scraping, banging metal. I can’t remember a single time at Richie’s house when Mr. Mac wasn’t busy working on something.

  “Yes, sir, we know,” Richie said. “Except, we already bought the van. It’s out front. We’re hoping you’ll take a look.”

  The banging stopped and I could see Richie tense up. His relationship with his dad—a blend of respect, fear, and adoration—was so unlike the relationship I had with my own father, that it was kind of inspiring.

  Richie’s mom died when Richie was still in grade school. Stage four ovarian cancer. They say it doesn’t strike women who’ve given birth, but someone forgot to tell Richie’s mom’s ovaries. Mrs. Mac—none of us had ever met her, but we all thought of her as Mrs. Mac anyway—woke up one morning with a pain in her back and a bloated feeling in her belly. Thinking she’d eaten something bad, or maybe tweaked a muscle, she did her best to muddle through the discomfort—going to work at the post office, picking Richie up after school, keeping the house clean, and resting when she could find the time. The hectic schedule of a suburban mom managed to hide, in very plain sight, her growing sense of fatigue. Richie’s dad used his magical hands to massage her back, but that only seemed to make it worse, whatever it was.

  Then one morning, Mrs. Mac woke up to find that the pain in her back had subsided, that it had faded to an echo of pain, there but not there. She figured she was on the mend. Three days later Mr. Mac came home to find his wife in bed with chills, aches, and fever, barely able to acknowledge his presence. Four weeks later, she was dead.

  The pain in her back, Richie and his dad would later learn, was from a cantaloupe-sized, cancerous tumor pressing against her kidney. If Mrs. Mac had tended to it before it burst, the doctor explained, she might have had a chance. Once that softball of poisoned pus ruptured, and the cancer infected her kidneys, liver, and pancreas, it was game over. They tried surgery, but it was too late. Richie’s mom died on the operating room table. There can never be a silver lining when something like that happens, but Mrs. Mac’s absence did forge a bond between Richie and his dad that was unique among my friends, and I guess that counts for something.

  “You did what?” Mr. Mac’s head was still under the sink, and it was getting weird having a conversation with his butt.

  “We bought a van. A Ford, sir. It’s in the driveway.”

  “You bought it? A Ford?” Mr. Mac finally backed away from his work. “What the hell’dya do that for?”

  “It was a great deal, Mr. Mac,” Johnny chimed in. “Only 40,000 miles and the engine sounds real good.” Mr. Mac looked at Johnny, then at the rest of us.

  “Where’s the girl?” We knew he meant Cheyenne.

  “Not here, sir.”

  “Cars and shit are for boys,” Cheyenne had said when we invited her along. “I’m going to treat myself to something ‘girly’ today.” None of us knew what that meant, so when we caught up with her later we were surprised to find her crying and hiding her hands behind her back. Johnny coaxed her arms free and we found ourselves staring at two-and-a-half-inch long, pink-polished, buffed nails protruding from each finger—faux extensions of the real thing. “I can’t even make a fist,” Cheyenne sobbed. It took Richie and an acetylene torch forty-five minutes to remove them. How he didn’t burn her hands to a crisp, I’ll never know.

  Mr. Mac sized us up and shook his head. “All right, let’s go have a look.”

  In the McGills’ driveway was a 1976 Ford Econoline van. It was powder blue, with two or three rust spots along the running boards. Inside were bucket seats finished in black vinyl, with a hard bench in the back that was flanked on each side by smallish windows. The spacious cargo area in the rear was more than enough room for the drums, guitars, amplifiers, and luggage we were going to bring on tour.

  We’d found the van through an ad in the Pennysaver. “Cargo van. Runs good. $1300.” Simple, direct, and the right price. Johnny called the number, and before we knew it we were forking over what was left of the band fund to an older black woman in a fine blue dress. She told us her husband had “used the van for his flooring business, God rest his soul,” and that “he never drove it, as the good Lord is my witness, more than thirty-five miles per hour.” For some reason, we believed her.

  I bit my cuticles—a nasty habit I’d picked up from a need to keep my fingernails short for the guitar—while Mr. Mac rooted around under the hood of the Econoline.

  “Start it up,” he called to Richie, who did as he was told. Listening to the van’s engine at Richie’s house, under the scrutiny of his father’s expertise, it didn’t sound quite as good as when we’d driven it home. It sounded … congested. “All right, kill it.” Mr. Mac emerged a minute later, wiping those enormous mitts on a filthy rag.

  “Well, it’s got 140,000, not 40,000 miles. And the catalytic’s gone.”

  “Shit,” Richie said, and then looked quickly at his father. “Sorry, sir.”

  “What does that mean, ‘catalytic’s gone’?” Johnny asked.

  “It means we won’t pass inspection,” Richie answered.

  “How much to get it fixed?”

  “More than we have.” The color drained from Richie’s face and the room grew graveyard still.

  Mr. Mac’s frown softened and he rubbed his chin. He seemed to be staring at a blank spot in the sky. “I shouldn’t do this,” he said, “but there is another way.”

  CARS

  (written and performed by Gary Numan)

  Half an hour later we were leaving the quiet residential streets of northeast Yonkers behind, crossing the border into the Bronx. Mr. Mac had called an acquaintance who owned a garage on Jerome Avenue. “Gary the Grease Monkey” promised to give us an inspection sticker without actually inspecting the van. Fifty dollars was the price. Mr. Mac pressed three twenties into Richie’s hand and sent us on our way.

  The heart of the Bronx was a twenty-minute car ride from Yonkers, but it may as well have been on another continent. Like most people from the suburbs, my experience with the Bronx was limited to class trips to the zoo or botanical gardens. We saw the Bronx the way a Madison Avenue advertising executive saw the Midwest; you flew over without ever touching down.

  The drive to Jerome Avenue was otherworldly. We were floating down Marlow’s river, making our way deeper and deeper into an alien landscape, searching for an ever-elusive Mr. Kurtz. (That may be overdramatic, but we’d just read Heart of Darkness in English class, and hey, I want this thing to sound smart, don’t I? It is a college essay after all.)

  So yeah, I was afraid of the Bronx. Maybe it’s why I’m a Mets fan. Where I lived—in safe, secure suburbia—retail stores didn’t have steel shutters after dark, graffiti was the exception not the rule, and let’s call it like it is, my corner of Westchester County was pretty white. I don’t mean “pretty” white as in “nice-looking” white. I mean “pretty” white as in “where are all the people of color?” white. The Bronx was new to me, and like I had learned from Dr. Kenny, we fear what we don’t know.

  Of course, as harsh as life in the Bronx was supposed to be, the suburbs, I had learned firsthand, were no
less cruel. I doubted that kids in the city were tied to trees during lightning storms. Chain-link fences maybe, but not trees.

  Gary’s garage was a dirty place, and I could see why he went by the name “Grease Monkey.” An Irishman with a very light brogue (his last name was Gilligan), Gary was bathed in filth. From the point on his scalp where his hairline met his wrinkled forehead, to the tips of his stubby fingers, Gary was covered in a gelatinous layer of motor oil, brake fluid, steering fluid, grease, and exhaust, all of which had congealed into a kind of paste. When I asked Richie about it, he told me his dad came home from work looking like that every day, and only after a long shower with scalding water and Lava soap did he approach something you might consider clean.

  We pulled the van into the garage and waited, watching as Gary dressed down one of his crew. The mechanic, a twenty-something black man who projected hostility, stood in silence as Gary called him every name in the book. We had no idea what the guy had done, but unless he’d run over Gary’s dog, it couldn’t have been bad enough to warrant the verbal beating he was taking.

  When Gary was finished, he came over to us and said, “Gotta keep these boys in line, if you know what I mean,” and winked. We didn’t know what he meant, but we could guess. He’d said it loud enough for everyone in the garage to hear. No one reacted or looked at Gary or looked at us, but you could see the muscles on their necks and arms pull tight. I remembered something about Simon Legree from eleventh grade English class, and something else about Malcolm X from social studies. We paid our fifty dollars, got our sticker, and got out of there as quick as we could, making our way back to the safety of the suburbs.

  By the time we got home, we were buzzing. From our sheltered point of view, our little adventure certified us as cool. The big, bad Scar Boys had braved and beaten the Bronx, and we had flouted the law in getting an illegal inspection sticker. We were invincible.

  Uh huh.

  Truth is, if we’d had a shred of sense, we’d have known we were getting in way over our heads. But you can’t buy shreds of sense, and even if you could, we were pretty much out of money.

  FEMME FATALE

  (written by Lou Reed, and performed by the Velvet Underground)

  The tour was all I could think about those last few months of my senior year in high school. While other kids were busy buying furniture for their dorm rooms and planning midnight keg parties at Jones Beach, I was dreaming of screeching guitars and sold-out shows.

  Johnny was squarely in the former camp. On our nightly run, a ritual we had carried forward from the eighth grade, he talked more and more about Syracuse and less and less about the Scar Boys. It was depressing, but I kept my mouth shut.

  Of course, that didn’t stop Johnny from making sure that everyone in the twelfth grade—and most of the kids in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades—knew about our tour. He was using the tour to make himself cool, to satisfy his own massive ego, and it pissed me off.

  On the other hand …

  “Hi Harry. I heard your band is going on the road. That is so cool!”

  Before that moment, and in the ten years since the lightning strike, Mary Beth Tice had said exactly six words to me. On three separate occasions she said, “Hi,” and one other time she said, “Excuse me, please.” That she had now chosen to more than double the word count of our entire life’s conversation, in one fell swoop, was more than unexpected. It was mind-numbingly, disarmingly scary.

  Mary Beth Tice was the “It Girl” at Theodore Roosevelt High School. She stood five feet six inches tall, had a trim body, and very symmetric features. She also had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. They were like a satellite photo of the Amazon rain forest that we’d seen in Earth sciences class, full of mystery and life.

  Most days she dressed down, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and even then she was devastatingly beautiful. On the rare days that Mary Beth wore a skirt or a sundress, with her hair spilling over her shoulders, she would enter rooms in slow motion with a kick-ass soundtrack to accompany her every move. At least that’s how I remember it.

  To most of the male troglodytes in my year, “It Girl” simply meant they wanted to do “it” to Mary Beth. And while I don’t think she was that kind of It Girl—in addition to her spectacular outer shell, she was smart (straight-A student), outgoing (class vice president), and funny (her imitation of our biology teacher had everyone in stitches, including the teacher)—she did know how to use her considerable gifts to her advantage. There was always a parade of boys trailing after her, carrying her books, doing her homework, lighting her “I-can-be-a-bad-girl-too” cigarettes.

  It goes without saying that I wasn’t one of those boys. I’d never done “it” to anyone other than myself. Heck, I hadn’t even kissed a girl. Mary Beth was so far out of my league that she wasn’t even in my dreams. Of course, I was still an incomprehensible idiot any time she came near me.

  The three times Mary Beth said “Hi” to me (twice in the fifth grade and once in the sixth), I’d been the first kid to arrive in class for the day, and Mary Beth had been the second. She walked into the otherwise empty room and greeted me. It was, I suppose, a part of her DNA to acknowledge other forms of life. I remember taking particular solace that she hadn’t also said hello to the two ferns that adorned the window ledge of the fifth grade classroom. On all three occasions I was too freaked out to respond.

  The day she said, “Excuse me, please” (seventh grade), I’d been unwittingly blocking Mary Beth’s exit from English class. When she approached, I froze, staying glued to the spot like I’d been stunned with a Star Trek phaser. She shrugged her shoulders and squeezed through the space between me and the door. I regained my wits and finally moved out of the way, but only after she was already a good fifteen feet past me. I added a sheepish, “Sorry.” The other girls that had clustered around Mary Beth, hoping that some of her “Itness” would rub off on them, laughed at me. To her credit, Mary Beth ignored my gaffe and just kept on walking.

  So why after a decade of invisibility had I suddenly materialized in front of Mary Beth Tice, as if out of thin air? Simple. If you’re in a touring rock band, especially if you’re still in high school, you are per se cool.

  Unless, of course, you’re the king of uncool.

  Mary Beth was leaning against the locker adjacent to mine when she broke our ten-year vow of silence. At first, I presumed she was talking to someone else. It was the natural thing to think. Just like a fish had no reason to believe that the man on the boat was talking to it, I had no reason to believe Mary Beth was talking to me. Men didn’t talk to fishes, and Mary Beth Tices didn’t talk to Harbinger Joneses. It’s not that I hadn’t heard her, it’s that I hadn’t heard her talking to me.

  I closed my locker, spun the dial, and turned to walk to class. The “Hi Harry. I heard your band is going on the road. That is so cool!” was still hanging in the air. It was static to me, white noise in the background. But there was Mary Beth Tice blocking my way. Remembering the last time this’d happened—the day she’d said, “Excuse me, please” and I’d frozen—I acted quickly. I smiled and stepped to the side.

  Then three things happened:

  Thing #1: Mary Beth didn’t move forward. In fact, she looked at me like I had two heads. (It’s important to note that she did not look at me like I had one really ugly head. I know that look, and as a connoisseur of human facial expressions, I can tell you that this look was different.)

  Thing #2: I noticed that her normal gaggle of devotees was absent, and that this month’s boyfriend—Louie, the starting center for the football team—was nowhere to be seen. (You may be wondering why it is that I knew who Mary Beth’s boyfriend was. If you are, then you might not be grasping the concept of an It Girl.)

  Thing #3: I finally heard what she’d said and realized she’d been talking to me.

  “Oh!” I said, with a little too much volume. “You were talking to me.”


  “Unless you know someone else who plays in a band that’s going on tour?” she said in a teasing, and if I think about it now, flirtatious voice.

  “Just Johnny and Richie,” I answered, regretting my stupidity before the words were fully out of my mouth.

  To her credit, Mary Beth smiled. I was dumbfounded. Mary Beth Tice didn’t talk to me, and she definitely didn’t smile at me. Something was amiss in the universe, and I stood there sullen and silent, trying to figure it out. Eventually, Mary Beth gave up. She got bored of waiting for me to make conversation, shrugged her shoulders, and walked away.

  “Thanks,” I managed to mutter when she was out of earshot. That’s when I felt an elbow in my back and my face was slammed into the locker. It was Billy the Behemoth.

  “Don’t talk to yourself, freak. People will think you’re crazy.” He kept walking, his friends laughing out loud and high-fiving one another.

  I may have been in a band, even a touring band, but I still occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder. It would take a lot more than a handful of gigs at a few out-of-town nightclubs to change that.

  So let’s move on. No wait. Before we do, let’s take a step back. It’s important to the story. Trust me, you’ll see.

  FATHER AND SON

  (written and performed by Cat Stevens)

  When I was a kid—before there was ever a Johnny McKenna or a Cheyenne Belle or a Ford Econoline van—my mother, father, and I would spend one week each summer on a spit of sand just off the New Jersey coast called Long Beach Island. I would sit on that beach for hours, a hooded sweatshirt hiding my face from the other kids, and watch wave after wave build and break. The thundering sound of the surf, rather than upsetting me the way real thunder did and does, soothed me, made me believe I wasn’t afraid of anything.