The Scar Boys (6 page)

Mr. Sewicky went through the motions of scolding Alvaro, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. There was an unspoken understanding between the two of them: Alvaro had only done what nature had commanded him to do. He could no more help beating on me than a hawk could stop itself from scooping up a mouse. By the end of the session, the principal was telling me that I should do less to provoke other children.

As soon as he sent us on our way and we were in the hall, Alvaro shoved me hard into a row of lockers, laughed, and moved on. I never told anyone about that incident, not Johnny, not Dr. Kenny, not my parents. That’s just how things were.

“I think we all know why we’re here,” Mr. Sewicky said to my parents. “Harry, his difficulties notwithstanding”—the word
difficulties
stuck in his teeth like a piece of uncooked popcorn—“is failing two of his classes, and is getting a C in two of the others. The only bright spot seems to be arithmetic.”

I snuck a peek at my father. If he clenched his jaw any harder, he was going to need to see a dentist.

“His teachers seem to think he has more potential than that.” From the tone of his voice, it was pretty clear that Mr. Sewicky didn’t agree with them.

“We’re very sorry, Mr. Sewicky,” my father offered. His tone of voice suggested that he and the principal were both Men and that their Manliness gave them an intuitive understanding of the situation. “Isn’t that right, Harry?” my father asked.

I nodded.

“Harry,” my father said to me, “how much of this has to do with your little musical group?” (And yes, he actually said “little musical group.”)

“Oh, Ben, no,” my mother interjected. “That band is so good for Harry.”

Both Mr. Sewicky and my father looked at my mother like she had just parachuted in from a Russian Mig. Her cheeks flushed, she turned her head, and she looked out the window.

“I know about this band,” Mr. Sewicky said. “Johnny McKenna’s in it.”

I nodded again.

“Tell me, Harry,” he said, “how come Johnny’s grades aren’t slipping?”

The answer, of course, had nothing to do with music. It was because Johnny cared and I didn’t. But that didn’t seem like a smart thing to say, so I just shrugged my shoulders.

“Harry’s grades have slipped low enough,” Mr. Sewicky said to my dad, “that if he can’t turn things around, I’m going to be forced to consider academic probation.”

I didn’t really know what “academic probation” was, but I’d seen
Animal House
and all I could think of was Dean Wormer putting the Deltas on “double secret probation” and a small, barely noticeable chuckle escaped from my lips.

I say
barely
noticeable because Mr. Sewicky asked, “Are you finding this funny, Harry?”

“No, sir,” I said, and put my head down. That was kind of a lie. I thought it was funny for three reasons:

Reason #1:
If you take a step back, the whole situation was kind of ridiculous. It’s like adults think that tackling problems at the surface equals tackling
problems
. It doesn’t. If they wanted me to do better at school, they probably should’ve been talking about why I hated the place so much, why I was terrified to set foot in that school each and every day. They should have been talking about Billy the Behemoth and Alvaro Dimatteo.

Reason #2:
I couldn’t help staring at that mounted fish. I was sure it was watching me and I was sure it was smiling. No, I wasn’t taking any drugs, prescribed or otherwise. I guess I was bored enough by the whole situation that my imagination was getting the better of me.

Reason #3:
I’d already given up on school. Playing guitar was all I wanted to do. None of what anyone was saying
really mattered at all. And when nothing matters, it’s kind of funny.

Don’t get me wrong, I was smart enough to know that I had to pull my grades up at least a little bit, and I did. My parents weren’t going to tolerate a high school dropout living under their roof, so appearances mattered. I would play along, but only as much as I needed to.

My father and the principal talked some more, I nodded and said yes some more, and everyone left thinking it was mission accomplished. I knew better.

Later that night, when I was in my room listening to Elvis Costello’s
Trust
with the headphones on, someone opened the door.

It was my mom. She didn’t say anything; she just walked in, put down a mint chocolate chip ice-cream sundae with an Oreo on top, kissed me on the head, and left. That was the thing about my mom, she was always on my side. Yeah, she wanted me to do better in school, and yeah, she worried about my future every bit as much as my dad. But at the end of the day what she really wanted was for me to be happy.

No matter how much was wrong with the world, that, at least, would always be right.

The Scar Boys’ first real gig was in the fall of 1984 at the world-famous CBGB’s on the Bowery in New York City.

Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale were trading barbs in a series of what seemed like staged presidential debates that October, and the whole country seemed to be getting meaner. There were few places for social misfits like me to retreat from the exclamations of “Where’s the Beef” and “Go ahead, make my day.” CBGB’s was one of them.

Every Monday the club held what it called a “showcase night.” If they liked your demo tape enough, they let you play for free. If you brought enough of your friends through the door, they gave you a paying gig on a better night. CB’s got free live entertainment, and every band in New York got a shot.

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 apology, 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.