by Len Vlahos
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.”
HALLELUJAH
(written and performed by Leonard Cohen)
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:
Help the Scar Boys finish their tour. Rock and roll fund-raiser at 810 Hill Street this Friday (three nights hence). $10 to get in, larger donations accepted. Live music, cold brew, and riding the pipe. We start tapping the keg at 9 p.m. Spread the word.
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.
The sun was low over the horizon, throwing tangerine soup at a herd of passing clouds, when I heard the door close behind me. I was so lost in my own thoughts that I didn’t realize it was Cheyenne until she was sitting next to me.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I answered.
She seemed to collect her thoughts for a moment and then said, “This doesn’t feel right.”
“What?”
“Playing this party without Johnny. Finishing the tour without Johnny. Being here, without Johnny.”
Since the police had stopped our jam session three mornings earlier, Chey had kept mostly to herself. She stayed in her room, only coming out when we gave her updates on the plans for the fund-raiser, or to rehearse.
“So what do you want to do?” I asked, trying to be gentle. “Do you want to go home?”
“No,” she said, “but it still doesn’t feel right.”
“I think we sound pretty good as a trio,” I offered.
“We do.” She kind of smiled. “Somehow that makes it worse.”
“Look, Chey, if you want to go, we’ll all go. We’ll do whatever you want to do.”
She took my hand and I squeezed her fingers, maybe a little too hard. The next thing I knew, she was kissing my mangled cheek. Her lips were soft. Softer than her hands. Softer than anything in the world. They were the most wonderful things I’d ever felt in my life.
“Thank you, Harry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For still being here.”
Without thinking about what I was doing, I put my hand on her shoulder and gave her neck a little squeeze. I could feel her muscles release all of their tension, like they just needed human contact. She turned her face to mine.
“Cheyenne …” was all I could muster. Our faces were so close that it was mostly an accident when our lips touched. Both of us had our eyes open, and we both froze. Then she closed her eyes and kissed me.
I didn’t know what to do. Literally. Was I supposed to pucker up? Press my mouth forward? Open it? Jam my tongue in there? Luckily, kissing is one of t
hose animal instincts I guess we all have, because before I knew what was happening, I was kissing her back—innocent middle-school kisses, gentle, PG-rated kisses.
I would later learn—researching it, like Dr. Kenny taught me to do—that in those few seconds I was kissing Cheyenne, more than thirty muscles in my face and neck were working in concert as a dozen cranial nerves were busy zipping messages from those muscles to the pleasure centers of my brain—the right ventral tegmental and right caudate nucleus if you’re keeping score—which woke up with a vengeance, probably for the first time since I’d been weaned off of methadone. I learned that Chey’s kisses were causing the posterior lobe of my pituitary gland to release a hormone called oxytocin into my blood, filling me with feelings of generosity, social connectedness, and all over goodness. (Oxytocin is a drug that can turn any rational person into the village idiot, and is just crying out for someone to market it. Hey, FAP, maybe I should major in marketing!) And had I been paying attention, I would’ve noticed that my blood pressure and heart rate were spiking, my pupils were dilating, that I was getting seismic level cutis anserina (goose bumps), and that I was horripilating in the best possible way. (Some more SAT words for your reading pleasure.)
Interesting stuff, but pointless. The truth is, I was beyond reason, beyond thought. It was the closest thing to playing the guitar I’d ever experienced.
I can’t find my own words to describe kissing Cheyenne, so I’ll share a Chinese proverb we’d learned in tenth grade English:
Kissing is like drinking salted water
You drink, and your thirst increases
A total of five seconds later—though the concept of time had lost all meaning—something snapped Cheyenne back to the moment and she pulled away.
“Harry, I’m … I’m sorry.”
Cheyenne got up and walked down the driveway.
She was gone.
I’M FREE
(written by Peter Townshend, and performed by The Who)
By the time we were supposed to go on, just after dark, it seemed like every kid in town was there. There were skate punks with shaved heads, alt rockers with untucked flannel shirts and ripped jeans, new wave kids with over-teased hair, even some thick-necked jocks from UGA. Every kid, except for Cheyenne.
“Dude,” Richie asked me quietly, “do you think she followed Johnny home?”
I was just starting to wonder the same thing when Chey walked up with her bass slung across her back. She looked at both of us and said, “Let’s play.” She walked out onto the makeshift stage.
I was in my full Scar Boy getup—glasses, hat, denim jacket with the collar up (really uncomfortable in the Georgia heat)—ready to escape at the first sign of trouble, but there was no turning back.
Our opening song—“Girl in the Band”—began with the bass and drums pounding out an up-tempo four-four groove. As I waited for my cue, to thrash in the first chords from the guitar, I gave my body to the rhythm and started moving with the music. At first I tapped my foot, which is all I’d ever done onstage before that night, but within a few bars I was letting my whole body shake to the beat. And then the strangest thing happened. I heard a voice in my head.
Yeah, I know. Crazy. But it wasn’t that kind of voice. The voice was mine; it was the voice I’d been hearing all my life, the voice that had recited list after boring list of presidents and baseball stats, the voice that had told me to keep quiet when other kids gave me a hard time, the voice that had always done what it was told. But that night I heard something in that voice I’d never heard before: The voice was smiling.
Pump your fist in the air, the voice suggested, so I did. It was a good idea. With each pump the crowd smacked their hands together, filling the night with thundering clap after thundering clap.
Introduce the band, the voice told me. I did that, too.
“On the drums, give it up for the skateboarding prince of the groove, Richie McGill!” The guys riding boards on the pipe behind Richie whooped and hollered. He took the cue and did an extended drum fill. The crowd went wild.
Throw your hat, the voice said. I took the hat off my head, leaving the wig intact, and threw it off the stage. It was snatched one-handed out of the air by a UGA co-ed. She managed to catch it without spilling a drop of her beer.
“On the bass, the princess of pounding rhythm, Cheyenne Belle.” Some of the kids had flashlights and had been waving them in the air like light sabers. All at once they trained their light on Cheyenne. She was radiant. Again the audience screamed in delight.
I didn’t need the voice to tell me what to do next. My jacket came off and I threw my sunglasses deep into the crowd. Then I threw my wig.
“And I’m Harbinger Robert Francis Jones, the king of darkness and despair, and …” Without prior arrangement, without even exchanging a glance, Richie and Chey came to a thundering halt in perfect unison. The echo of the last beat filled the yard and died. The flashlight-spotlight hit me, revealing every crevice of my scars in excruciating detail. There was an audible and collective gasp. In the nanosecond that I paused, I thought about running out of the yard and never looking back, about getting out of that god damn light.
I looked over at Richie and Chey and they were smiling at me. They were both sporting ear-to-ear grins, like that stupid cat in the comics. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.
“And we,” I shouted, “are the Scar Boys!”
The beat started again, this time with my guitar, and the crowd went berserk. As I sang the first verse, the voice in my head gave a pat on the back. Nice, it said.
Thanks, I answered, and we were off and running.
I DON’T WANT TO KNOW
(written by Stevie Nicks, and performed by Fleetwood Mac)
Those few hours on the night of the Scar Boys fund-raiser were the best hours of my life. Nothing—and I mean nothing—will ever top them. Sure, adults blather on about their wedding days or holding their newborn children for the first time, or blah, blah, blah, blah. I don’t care. That gig and that kiss were it. It was a climax, a zenith, the realization of a perfect crescendo. I was on the summit of Everest and I was walking on the moon. I wanted to live those moments over and over and over again. And now that we had money to finish the tour, and now that Cheyenne and I had connected, maybe, just maybe I could. My life finally felt like it was turning a corner, like all that awful shit I’d dealt with for all those years would just fade away like bad graffiti. The sunlight would finally win out.
Which is why it had to all come crashing down.
I don’t remember what I did after the gig that night. I know that I drank, a lot, because I woke up the next morning with my head feeling like a pendulum’s weight and throw-up stains on my shirt. I didn’t even know if the stains were mine or someone else’s. I didn’t care.
I found Richie in our room, wearing a pair of socks and boxer shorts and smiling in his sleep. Penny Vick was lounging on the end of his bed smoking a cigarette.
“Great show, Harry,” she said, offering me a smoke.
Penny was a pharmacology student at UGA who’d taken a shine to Richie. He was a little too dense to notice at first, but she’d been all over him like poison ivy the two days leading up to the fund-raiser, and from the looks of what I’d found in his bedroom, he’d finally caught on.
Everything about Penny was interesting and exciting. She had an eight-inch, spiked Mohawk that was blue the day we met her and flaming orange the night of the party. She read interesting books—John Fowles and Jim Carroll. She listened to cool music—R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü. She was the only girl I’d ever met who knew more world capitals, more geographical stats, and more useless trivia than me. (She told me she was an insomniac, and that the lists helped her sleep. Go figure.) Penny was also a constant fixture at the skate house. Her talent on the pipe was well established, and her ability to spar with the otherwise all-boys club—verbally, physically, and otherwise—was legendary.
We got to know Penny in those first few days n
early as well as we got to know Tony and Chuck. In some ways better, because Penny was smart. Really smart. She was in her second year at UGA and, according to Tony, was the “Queen of the Dean’s List.” She was fascinated with the Scar Boys and would pepper us with questions about our band and life in New York. Some of it, I figured, was just a way to get closer to Richie, but most of it was genuine.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the cigarette and bending down for her light. “Is he going to wake up any time soon?” I asked.
“I doubt it.” She smiled.
I shrugged my shoulders and went in search of Cheyenne. I couldn’t find her anywhere, and none of the all-night party stragglers—about a dozen people had crashed at the skate house—had seen her. Chuck saw me milling about and handed me an envelope.
“Open it,” he said, sounding serious. I peeked inside and saw a big, fat wad of cash. It smelled like beer, but it was legal tender. I looked up and Chuck was smiling. He watched me count out $1,627, mostly in tens, fives, and singles.
“Is this all for us?”
“Yeah, we took about a hundred out to cover our costs, but the rest is yours.”
“Sixteen hundred dollars?”
“I know, right?” Chuck said.
We would be able to finish the tour. The Scar Boys were going out as a three-piece, and we were going to finish the tour. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just stood there for a long minute. And then, in the joy of the moment, I felt something I almost never felt: Spontaneous.
“Can you drive me out to where you think there are cars for sale?” I asked.
“Hell yeah,” he answered.
An hour later I pulled into the driveway in a two-door, gray, 1976 Oldsmobile Omega. It had 100,000 miles on it and it seemed to run great. I probably should’ve waited for Richie and Cheyenne, but it was a steal, only three hundred dollars. That meant we’d have the rest of the money to stay in hotels and eat actual food.
When I returned to the skate house and stepped out of the car, I found that the Earth had moved.
