Scar Girl

by Len Vlahos

  One of the biggest changes is that Harry has a girlfriend, Thea. She’s got something wrong with her face, too. I don’t mean that to sound bad; she’s actually totally hot, but her chin and the side of her face are all discolored. She says it’s a giant birthmark, something called a port-wine stain. I don’t know anything about that stuff, but I actually think it makes her look kind of cool. It’s like one of Mother Nature’s tattoos.

  When we started to get popular, we got a lot of people whose faces were fucked up in some way or other turning up at gigs. I mean, they saw Harry as a kind of hero.

  Harry, the jerk, was pissed off all the time when he started dating Thea. Some bullshit about how disfigured people should date normal people to prove some point or something. Harry always saw his scars worse than the rest of the world did. Well, worse than I did anyway. Luckily, he got over it, because she’s awesome. She’s kind of become our unofficial road manager.

  As for me, I try not to worry about things. Hell, I’m just happy I get to play the drums every day. I mean, people are paying me to beat on shit. How cool is that?

  HARBINGER JONES

  I found myself back on Dr. Kenny’s couch a week after the wake. I was feeling so messed up that I thought I might explode. Kenny had lost a patient to suicide a couple of years earlier, and I figured he might be able to offer me some perspective.

  “That was quite a memorial service,” he said. I didn’t even realize he’d been there. That was pretty much it for the small talk.

  “Harry,” Dr. Kenny began, lowering his voice until it was in tune with the Force, making sure I had no choice but to listen. “This is not your fault.” He paused. “Do you understand?”

  I nodded, but it was a reflex. Of course this was my fault. It was everyone’s fault. Johnny needed us, and we’d abandoned him. I could’ve blamed Jeff and his bullshit “no friendships” rule, and part of me did, but if I was being honest, I knew I was the culprit, I was the bad guy. Johnny told me that first day I’d visited him after we came back from Georgia that he needed me, and I didn’t deliver. I was the worst friend in the entire history of friendships.

  I’m not sure what Dr. Kenny thought as he watched me go through those mental calisthenics, but he knew I needed help. He was good like that.

  “Harry,” he said again, “it’s not your fault.” He looked me in the eye and did some kind of Svengali thing that stopped me from looking away. I started to cry.

  “How can you know that?” I asked. “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Because,” he answered, his voice weaker than I would have hoped, “at the end of the day, suicide is a choice that is made by someone who is sick, mentally ill, and doesn’t have the capacity to choose between life and death. It’s an incredible tragedy in part because the victim isn’t of sound mind.”

  “Johnny seemed like a lot of things, Doc, but he didn’t seem crazy.”

  “Depression doesn’t mean crazy, Harry. You know that.”

  “I just don’t understand.”

  “I know, son,” he said. He’d never, ever called me son before. It gave me comfort, but in a weird way crossed a line, too. “That’s the hardest part. Knowing that you will never understand. Knowing that what you really want, more than anything, is a chance to ask Johnny why, and knowing that you will never get that chance. But sometimes, there isn’t a why.”

  “I can’t believe that,” I said, wiping the snot on the back of my sleeve. “There has to be a reason.”

  “Look, there are a thousand reasons Johnny could have been driven to this, but most of the literature, in a case like Johnny’s—”

  “A case like Johnny’s?”

  “A suicide that follows a debilitating injury, particularly an amputation.”

  “Oh.” It never occurred to me that there might be precedent for this.

  “The literature suggests that Johnny was at greater risk than the average person because of who he was.”

  Dr. Kenny paused, looking for the right words. I just waited.

  “Harry, Johnny was a narcissist. Do you know what that is?”

  I nodded. I didn’t know the clinical definition at the time, but I looked it up later, and my working understanding—a person with a big ego whose world is defined by himself—was close enough.

  “He had such a strong sense of self, of power, of control, that losing it was very hard for him to reconcile. If Johnny had been shy and retiring—”

  “Like me.”

  “Yes, Harry, like you.” I always admired Dr. Kenny’s honesty. “If Johnny had been a different person, he might have adapted better. But everything about the amputation assaulted Johnny’s sense of self. From his surface image to his sexuality to every relationship he’d ever had.”

  I wasn’t really sure I wanted to hear about Johnny’s sexuality. It made me think about Cheyenne; it made me wonder how she was feeling.

  “Johnny was no longer who he believed himself to be, and he was unable to find any sort of anchor that tethered him to the world. He was literally adrift, unable to hold on to his own identity. In all likelihood, Johnny ended his life because he no longer saw himself as the Johnny McKenna he wanted to be, that he believed himself to be, and that was too much to reconcile.”

  “But couldn’t we have all helped him through that?”

  Here, Dr. Kenny paused. A pause with more than enough time for me to fill in the answer to my own question. “A professional could have helped him through it, Harry.” He left it at that. He chose not to say what I was thinking, that the people around him, me, Chey, his parents, might have seen the warning signs and pushed him to get help.

  The truth is, I have no idea what the truth is, and like Dr. Kenny said, I never really will. But what he said did make a kind of sense. Johnny was the center of his own universe. He had this gravitational pull that seemed to bring everyone else into orbit around him. Not just me and Chey, but everyone. His parents, his teachers, the other kids at school. When he lost his leg, he didn’t just lose a physical ability; he lost his gravity. Johnny lost Johnny.

  The thought didn’t give me peace—it didn’t change the fact that I should have been there to help Johnny—but it did give me perspective. I guess that was the most I could ask for.

  CHEYENNE BELLE

  “Johnny’s Dead” was what caught our attention in Johnny’s little black book. The guy, such a control freak in life—mostly because his instincts were so crazy good—wrote his own epitaph. That’s the word Harry used to describe it. Pretty amazing, you know?

  After seeing the lyrics to “Johnny’s Dead,” I didn’t look at the book again for a long time. I couldn’t. Harry tried to return it to Russell but was told that it was on extended loan to the band. Russell still owned it, but we would be its keepers. It stayed with us at every rehearsal, at every gig. Harry got a few good songs out of it besides “Johnny’s Dead”—“Long Winter,” “I Give Up,” “Oh So Gray.” You know, a hit parade of happy, peppy songs.

  Kidding.

  Anyway, three months after the wake I was sitting at a gig, waiting for our sound check, quietly nursing a beer, my second since we’d arrived at the bar. I knew I wouldn’t have another one before we played, but also knew I’d get plowed the second the set ended. Harry and Richie had gotten used to it, and instead of trying to change me, they just sort of took care of me, looking out for me to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid. Johnny’s book was there, and I started flipping through it without really looking at it, like a magazine in a doctor’s office. As I was flipping, a phrase caught my eye: To make you think, to make you drink, to make you hurt.

  The song wasn’t dated, but it was the last entry before “Johnny’s Dead.” It said, “Expletive” on the top of the page, which I loved as a title. So I read it.

  My heart, which has been broken over and over again, mostly by me, broke for the last time. I finally hit bottom. It was the end.

  You are a ladybug

  On the couch, all curled up,


  And I’m like a scientist,

  The way in which I insist

  You unravel and give all of yourself to me.

  You are a little girl,

  A flag not yet unfurled,

  And I’m like a little boy

  With a shiny, sharp new toy,

  And I will poke you, and I will prod you.

  But you know and I know, I can’t make you undone.

  Is it an empty phrase?

  Is it a disguise?

  Too long to get through this maze,

  Just to say good-bye.

  You are a metaphor,

  Never meaning the same thing as before.

  I am an expletive,

  Trying to convince you that I live

  Right here, right now, I’m alive.

  The more you try to run away,

  The harder I will push you to stay,

  ’Cause the closer that we get

  Is one more regret

  To make you think, to make you drink,

  to make you hurt.

  Is it an empty phrase?

  Is it a disguise?

  Too long to get through this maze,

  Just to say good-bye.

  Though it’s not very long,

  It’s the end of our song,

  ’Cause as I look into your heart,

  I can see we don’t know where to start

  With each other, with another.

  There’s nothing left to say.

  I started crying and couldn’t stop. Richie saw me and came over, and then Harry. Without me realizing it, they canceled the gig and somehow managed to get me home. Harry’s new girlfriend, Thea, held my hand the whole way. It was all a blur.

  When I woke up the next day, I was on the couch in Harry’s parents’ basement, the place where we used to jam before getting time in a real rehearsal studio. I was alone.

  “Harry?”

  He walked in a minute later and smiled at me.

  “Hey,” he said, “you feeling better?”

  I nodded. “Thanks for getting me here.”

  “Yeah, no worries.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Around ten, I think. You want to go out and get some breakfast? My treat.”

  I nodded again. I stood up and started to walk to the bathroom, then stopped, remembering what had set me off the night before. I froze, my back still to Harry.

  “Chey?”

  “Harry, did you know about that song?” I asked. He didn’t answer at first. “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Yeah, Richie and I both saw it. I wanted to rip it out of the book, but Richie stopped me. Something about a dying man’s last words.”

  I nodded again.

  I thought about what those words meant—how we all let ourselves believe there really was nothing left to say. I thought about all the secrets we’d kept from one another, the walls we’d put up between each other, the way we’d all let Johnny just fade away and die. I didn’t want that to happen to me.

  I turned around.

  “Harry,” I said. He looked at me, waiting patiently. Always there, always a friend. A friend to the end, you know?

  “Harry,” I said again, “I think I need help.”

  EPILOGUE,

  SEPTEMBER 1991

  Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on.

  —Henry Rollins

  The Scar Boys’ first album, Minus One, spread like wildfire on college radio, making them the “it band” of 1988. While the record made only one brief appearance on the Billboard charts, debuting and dying at number thirty-seven, the critical acclaim and the growing and rabid fan base positioned the band for the next big step.

  Three for the Show, when it was released seven months later, was a breakout success. The band spent a year circumnavigating the globe, drawing crowds in the tens of thousands nearly everywhere they went. That tour spawned their third album, The Scar Boys: Live in the Shadow of the Heads.

  “It was really just a stupid stunt,” Harry tells me when I sit down with the Scar Boys nearly two years after the initial interviews. I catch up with them on a tour stop in Los Angeles, and they are in a playful, energetic mood.

  “The few thousand people who live on Easter Island,” Harry continues, “had never heard of the Scar Boys and weren’t really inclined to like our music. But we wanted to do something grandiose.”

  The band held a contest, flying one thousand loyal fans to one of the remotest destinations in the world for an exclusive concert in the shadows of the Easter Island heads.

  “Man,” Richie adds, “that show cost us a shitload of money.”

  “Yeah,” Cheyenne agrees, “but I’d still do it again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what life is about, you know? You have to push the envelope, find the walls of your experience and tolerance, and see what’s on the other side.”

  At the word tolerance, I engage Cheyenne about her drinking.

  “Sober for eighteen months. Harry’s shrink, Dr. Kenny, hooked me up with Sheila.”

  Cheyenne still likes to make you tease the facts out of her. “And Sheila is?”

  “Sheila Carson. She’s my shrink. She helped me get into a program, taught me all about how my drinking problem was hereditary, and that I shouldn’t beat myself up. It took a while, but it seems to be working. She helped me work through a lot of things.”

  “Like losing Johnny?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the baby?”

  I look at Harry when I ask the question, not sure if he knew about Cheyenne’s pregnancy before this whole process began. He catches on right away.

  “I’ve known about the miscarriage, and everything else, since the day Chey asked for help in my parents’ basement. We sat and talked for hours.”

  “What did you think when you heard about the pregnancy? What would Johnny have thought?”

  The table goes very silent, and I suspect I’ve crossed some sort of line. After a long moment, Harry answers.

  “I don’t know what Johnny would’ve thought. But if you’re suggesting that he wouldn’t have taken his own life if he’d known, I don’t buy it.”

  “Me, neither,” Richie chimes in. I sense that he’s protecting Chey, like a brother protects his little sister.

  “As for me,” Harry adds, “If I had known at the time, I probably would’ve asked Chey to marry me.”

  “Good thing you didn’t,” Cheyenne answers. We all look at her, waiting for more. “I mean, I would’ve probably just thrown up on you again.” And just like that, the mood at the table is light once more.

  I can’t help but marvel at how different the bandmates are, how much they’ve grown. Gone are the innocence and naïveté. Well, maybe not from all of them.

  “Check this out,” Richie says, somehow managing to stand a spoon straight up in his cup of coffee. The other two roll their eyes.

  “How did you do that?” For all the money in the world, it looks like magic to me.

  Richie just smiles, snatches the spoon, and takes a sip from his cup.

  “What do you think Johnny would make of all this success?” I ask, and everyone is once again quiet, thoughtful. Richie, as is his wont, fills the void.

  “Is that a trick question?”

  We all look at him.

  “I mean, what kind of idiot wouldn’t love this life?”

  “Richie’s right,” Harry says. “Johnny would’ve loved all of this. And he would’ve made it better. He made everything better.” His voice trails off.

  “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.” Cheyenne stares at a point in space as she talks, and I wonder if she still sees that sleeping baby, or maybe Johnny. “I’m not sure he was ever wired to be happy. People with drive like he had need to feel anxious and frustrated; it’s what pushes them forward. It’s easy for us to blame Johnny’s death on him having lost his leg, or whatever, but maybe there was a tic
king bomb inside Johnny all along, just waiting for a fuse.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Harry says. “There were a million signs for what was coming. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know I ignored them.”

  “No.” Cheyenne counters with enough force to refocus everyone’s attention. “We only see those signs now, in hindsight. Everything in the world is clearer when you already know the ending. Sometimes there just isn’t any rhyme or reason to the world. It’s what makes it so beautiful and so terrifying at the same time.”

  “Do you miss him?” I ask.

  Cheyenne, Harry, and Richie answer without missing a beat.

  “Yes.” “Of course.” “Every day.”

  After a moment, Harry adds, “Johnny was a victim of circumstance. Really, we’re all victims of whatever our own individual circumstances are. For Johnny, it was the idiocy of a drunk driver; for me, it was a group of bullies too young to understand the cruelty of their actions; for Chey, it was having to grapple with the reality of an unexpected pregnancy and miscarriage; for Richie, it was losing his mom when he was a little kid; for you, I’m sure it’s something different.” Cheyenne and Richie are silent, watching Harry, waiting for him to continue. If there was ever any doubt that he was the leader of this band, it evaporates in this moment.

  “Every person on this planet is dealing with their own crap every day. Sometimes we manage it, and sometimes we don’t. The way I cope with having lost Johnny is to remember him before he lost his leg, or before losing his leg made him lose himself. It’s why I ended that crazy essay I wrote for the University of Scranton where I did, with me and Johnny playing music. I treasure my time with Johnny McKenna and always will. The dude taught me how to be happy.”

  “Me, too,” Cheyenne whispers. “Me, too.”

  “Is that why you’ve never replaced him?”

  All three bandmates squirm at the question.

  “Well, we’ve had keyboard players touring with us, but it never felt quite right to count them as actual Scar Boys, you know?” Cheyenne, her scary punk rock girl image intact, stares me down, telling me with her eyes that maybe it’s time to drop this line of questioning.