Scar Girl

Text copyright © 2016 by LenVlahos

Lyrics to “Johnny's Dead” © 1986, used with permission from
Joe Loskywitz, Scott Nafz, Chad Strohmayer, and Len Vlahos.
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Cover and interior photographs: Michael Frost (rocker girl); © Robert Kohlhuber/Moment/Getty Images (crowd); © Guru 3D/Shutterstock.com (headphones).

Main body text set in Iowan Old Style 10.5/18.
Typeface provided by Bitstream.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cataloging-in-Publication Data for
Scar Girl
is on file at the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-1-60684-607-0 (LB)
ISBN: 978-1-60684-608-7 (EB)

Manufactured in the United States of America
1 – BP – 12/31/15
eISBN: 978-1-51240-164-6 (pdf)
eISBN: 978-1-51240-479-1 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-51240-477-7 (mobi)

For all the people with whom I played music when I was younger.

And for my parents, for putting up with me and with all the people with whom I played music when I was younger.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

What follows are transcripts of the interviews I conducted with the Scar Boys over a period of five weeks—stretching from early February to late March 1989—while the band was in the studio recording the follow-up to their debut album, Minus One. Though this material has been edited and rearranged to make the story flow, all of the words attributed to members of the band are true and accurate.

Here, then, are the Scar Boys, in their own words. I hope you find their story as fascinating as I did.

Joanne Cryder

New York City, September 14, 1989

PART ONE,
JULY TO AUGUST 1986

We're a rock group. We're noisy, rowdy, sensational, and weird.
—Angus Young

 

What defines you?

HARBINGER JONES

You mean aside from my face?

CHEYENNE BELLE

I guess I'd say that I'm not good at asking people for help.

RICHIE MCGILL

How the hell should I know? What defines you?

HARBINGER JONES

How much do you know about Johnny McKenna? He was the first singer in the Scar Boys. He, Richie, and I started the band together in the eighth grade. The whole thing was mostly Johnny's idea.

CHEYENNE BELLE

I didn't join the band until a year or two later. Some kid from their high school had been playing bass, but he quit.

At my first rehearsal, I remember that all three guys—Johnny, Harry, and Richie—were looking at me like I was from Mars, or maybe Venus. But the person who caught my eye most was Harry.

Harry had been struck by lightning as a kid, and he has all kinds of scars on his face, though they're not nearly as bad as he thinks. The lightning did a lot more damage inside than outside. Not like damage to his internal organs and stuff, but damage to his soul. Everything and everyone Harry sees in the world, he sees through the prism of a lightning bolt. All of us, all of this, lit up so bright that it gets distorted. He can't stand the light, so he hides in the darkness.

HARBINGER JONES

I wasn't struck by lightning. I was tied to a tree and the tree was struck by lightning. My injuries are the result of the severe burns I received when the tree caught fire. I was kind of like a marshmallow on a stick that gets too close to the flames.

Did Chey say I was struck by lightning?

You have to take Chey with a grain of salt. She likes to exaggerate the details of a story to make it better.

CHEYENNE BELLE

About a year after I joined the Scar Boys, Johnny and I started dating. He was after me from almost the first day. I kept saying no, that it would be bad for the band, but he kind of wore me down. Johnny was like that. He wouldn't stop until he got what he wanted. He had a kind of take-no-prisoners attitude, you know? I think that's what made me fall in love with him.

HARBINGER JONES

When we were on our first tour, the summer after we'd graduated high school, before there were tour buses and roadies, when it was just the four of us in the van, Johnny and I got into a big fight. It'd been bubbling under the surface for months. For me, the fight was about how I was Johnny's lackey, about how he was an emotional bully and I was an emotional cripple; it was even about our musical differences. But mostly it was about how I was in love with Cheyenne and how I hated that she was with him and not me. Johnny and I never said any of these things out loud; when you're close like we were at the time, all that unspoken stuff is just there in the room with you.

The fight got bad enough that I hit Johnny in the face. It was the first and only time in my life I ever hit another human being. The world had made me its personal punching bag for so long that I guess I finally lost it and punched back.

After I hit him, Johnny left the tour and went home, which, if you ask me, was a complete overreaction. We decided to continue on as a three-piece and even played one gig with me as the singer—it was this giant keg party in Georgia. It was probably the best night of my life. With Johnny gone and with that great show under our belts, I really thought it was the start of something special.

The next day was when we found out about Johnny's accident. There was nothing to do but give up the tour and go home.

You want to know what guilt is? Try punching—wait, strike that—try
slapping
your best friend in the face, and then watch as a chain of events unfolds that ends with him almost dying. I more or less shut down after that.

CHEYENNE BELLE

Johnny was hit by a car, about a mile from his house in Yonkers. They amputated his leg. Did you know they actually use a saw to do that? I mean a real saw. Do you think they buy them at the local hardware store or something? I can't even begin to imagine what that must've been like.

Anyway, Johnny wouldn't see me after the accident. I tried going to the hospital, tried calling his house, even tried just showing up. His mother kept running interference, but I knew Johnny was putting her up to it. He was pushing me away. It'd been almost a month since I'd seen him, and I was going out of my mind.

RICHIE MCGILL

The whole thing with Johnny's leg was fucked up. I was the only one in the band to visit him, and let me tell you, the dude was in bad shape. I mean, like, his hair was greasy and his clothes smelled and his room was a total mess.

He asked me why Harry didn't come, too, and I didn't know what to say. Harry had shut himself off from the rest of the world and was kind of being a whiny bitch. Johnny didn't need to hear about Harry's crap while he was sitting there with one of his legs gone.

I called Harry and tried to convince him to go see Johnny, but when that dude gets caught up in his own shit, there's no getting through.

I give him a pass, though, you know, because of his face and stuff.

HARBINGER JONES

Both Richie and my shrink got on my case about being a recluse after the tour imploded, but it wasn't until serendipity put Cheyenne and me in the same place at the same time that things changed.

I was on one of my favorite walking paths, feeling sorry for myself, blaming myself for what had happened to Johnny, when I stumbled across Chey standing on a footbridge. She looked so incredibly beautiful standing there that any thought of Johnny went right out of my head. I ignored every good instinct I had and decided to go for broke.

“Chey, I love you,” I told her.

She threw up on my shoes.

For real.

It turned out that Johnny had been keeping Chey away, and the girl was so tortured over it that she got literally lovesick all over my sneakers. I felt bad enough for her that I stupidly offered to help her and Johnny reconcile. (If I'm being honest, I would've done anything to make Cheyenne Belle happy, to make her like me back, even if it made no sense.) Of course, that meant I would have to visit Johnny first.

Johnny and I had a lot of stuff to work through, but we managed it. We took what was left of our tattered friendship to the only place where it would have a chance to heal: music. We found peace and we found our friend-ship buried in the music. It always comes back to the music.

And I was true to my word. My visit opened the door for Johnny and Chey to get back together.

CHEYENNE BELLE

Johnny lived in a much nicer part of town than me. His neighborhood was called Colonial Heights; mine was called McLean Avenue. That's the name of the street I grew up on. My neighborhood wasn't cutesy enough to have a name like Colonial Heights. His street was lined with oak trees, and the houses had shrubs and fences protecting mowed lawns with dogs barking hello in the front yard. Mine was a scraggly street with low-rent retail, auto shops, and apartment buildings. We had dogs, too, but they were mostly pit bulls and Doberman Pinschers. So Colonial Heights was a different world than mine, still Yonkers, but a different world.

Johnny's house was three stories tall, with dark wood trim and all kinds of funky angles. It sat on a bend in the road on a supersteep hill; and he told me that at least once a year someone would crash a car through the bushes that lined the curb and wind up on his front lawn. That's crazy, because the spot where Johnny was hit by the car, about a mile away, was almost exactly like that.

Inside, the house was massive, too big for Johnny and his parents. His older brother, Russell, moved to New York City after graduating college, like five or six years earlier, but even if Russell had been living there, the house still would've been too big.