Scar Girl (18 page)

It took me a minute to process that.

“I'm sorry, Jeff, did you say you don't want us to be friends?” I asked.

“That's right.”

No one else jumped in, so I continued, “But aren't our friendships what make the chemistry of the band work?”

He smiled. Like a shark. “No. They're not. What makes the band work is the chemistry of the music.”

“I don't know—” I started, but he cut me off.

“Cheyenne,” Jeff said, turning to her, “how close are you and Mr. Drummer Boy, over here?”

“Dude,” Richie said, “stop calling me that.”

Cheyenne thought about it for a minute. “I don't know. Not that close, I guess.”

Jeff turned to Richie.

“What?” Richie asked, his hackles now up.

“Well, is she right?”

“I don't know. We see each other all the time. She's, like, one of my best friends.”

“Do the two of you ever hang out outside the band? Do you go to movies together or anything?”

“No,” Richie answered.

“Do you call each other on the phone to talk?”

“No.”

“Do you even have Cheyenne's phone number?”

“No.” Richie hung his head.

“Buck up, Drummer Boy. This is a good thing. Let me ask one last question. How close are you and Cheyenne musically?”

Richie scrunched his face as he thought about this. “I'd say we're married.” He flashed a grin at Cheyenne, and she grinned back. Johnny was sitting next to me, and I could feel the air around us shrivel.

“That's right. You and she are musical soul mates. It's a beautiful thing. But once the amps are off, you hardly know each other. That, kiddies, is what you will now strive for. It's what you need to become. You are fellow musicians, and you are business partners. Once you learn how to do that, maybe, just maybe, you can go back to being friends. Everyone understand?”

And we did.

CHEYENNE BELLE

A couple of days before Jeff had dragged the whole band to New York City for lunch, he'd taken me out to a kind of fancy restaurant where Central Avenue crosses the border into Scarsdale. Well, fancier then I was used to anyway. It was a Red Lobster. Have you heard of these places? I actually got to eat lobster! That was a first for me. I thought it was gross but didn't want to say anything. I wanted to be sophisticated.

“Look,” Jeff said after we'd ordered. “I don't care if you drink. In fact, here.” He slid a glass of white wine from in front of his place setting to in front of mine. I looked at the glass and at Jeff like they weren't real. “I only care that whatever you do offstage doesn't hurt what's happening onstage. Do you understand?”

I nodded. Jeff was twenty-eight-years old, and I took him very seriously.

“Good,” he said. “Moderation and control are important lessons to learn, Cheyenne.”

“Can I ask you something?” I was afraid to sip the wine—afraid that it might not be real, that it might be a trap—and wanted to distract myself.

“Sure, kid, shoot.”

“Why does any of this matter? Isn't the band kind of, I don't know, over?”

“What? No, no. Great bands go through this shit all the time.” I liked the way Jeff cursed, like swear words were just words. “Roger Waters and David Gilmour can't be in the same room with each other.”

“But didn't Pink Floyd break up?”

“Yeah, but they were together for years hating each other, and they made zillions.”

“Okay, but what about Johnny and Harry? I'm pretty sure they think this is over. I haven't even talked to them since New Year's Eve.”

“Leave them to me, okay?”

I trusted Jeff. I don't know why, but I did. “Okay,” I answered.

It was a little weird he was sitting on the same side of the booth as me, but I just figured that was how older people went to dinner in fancier restaurants. Anyway, that's when he suggested I get a tattoo.

“You want me to get a what?” I said.

“A tattoo.”

“Why?”

“This is the Scar Boys, Cheyenne. A tattoo
is
a scar.”

I liked that. I know this sounds completely crazy, but I was kind of envious of Johnny's and Harry's scars. If you'd've asked Johnny if he could've had his leg back, of course he would've said yes. Harry would have wanted to be rid of his scars, too. But what had happened to them made them closer, tied them to the music, tied them to each other. It gave them an identity. There was something cool about it.

But I still had my doubts.

“The only kids who have tattoos are super hardcore punks or
Rocky Horror
fans,” I told Jeff. “That's not us at all.”

“I know. That's what makes it so cool. You guys have this totally badass, dysfunctional image, and then the most amazing and accessible rock and roll comes out of your instruments. We need to play up the former to emphasize the latter.”

I thought about it for a minute. “Does it hurt?”

He rolled up his sleeve and showed me his own tattoo. It was a green-and-black line drawing of a pyramid with an eye on top. “Hell, yes, it hurts,” he said. “But it's like a badge of honor. You become a member of a secret club.”

I liked the sound of that, too. “Does that mean anything?” I asked, pointing at his pyramid. He opened his wallet, took out a dollar bill, and showed me the back.

“It's where mysticism and money come together,” he said. Jeff was always talking about money.

Anyway, a week later, when the band finally rehearsed again, I was sporting a new tattoo at the base of my spine. I wore a shirt that was a bit small on me, knowing that every time I turned around, the guys would get a glimpse of the new art. I hardly said two words through the whole rehearsal, but I must've turned around, like, fifteen times. Every time I did, I tried to sneak a peek at my bandmates.

Harry was in his own world with the guitar, and Johnny just sat staring into space, looking down every so often to write in this little black book he'd started carrying around. Richie saw the tattoo, though. He shook his head and smiled at me when the other guys weren't looking.

I know Harry and Johnny saw it, too, but neither one ever said anything. I guess this was the new world Jeff wanted—business partners, not friends. But . . .

Well, Jeff's whole “no-friends” rule. He was kind of full of shit.

That night at Red Lobster, he kept pouring me glasses of wine, and I kept drinking them.

And he and I made out in his car.

And then we went back to his apartment in New York City.

HARBINGER JONES

We were all business at that rehearsal. No one looked anyone else in the eye, except for Richie. We were all looking not just at him, we were looking to him. It was like the gravitational center of the band, which had once revolved around the planetary system of me and Johnny, with Johnny Jupiter and me one of his moons, had shifted to a spot that hovered just below and to the left of Richie's crash cymbal.

I think Richie was kind of freaked out by it, but he didn't say anything. We were taking Jeff's words to heart and were there to play music, nothing more. It was awkward, it was stilted, it was even painful at points. But here's the thing. I kind of loved it.

When you stripped all that other shit away—the broken, repaired, and rebroken friendship between me and Johnny; the broken, repaired, and rebroken relationship between Chey and Johnny; my unrequited love for Cheyenne—when all that nonsense was gone, locked in a drawer with no key, when only the music was left, it was a beautiful thing.

But that was only true while we were actually playing music. The moments in between the songs at that rehearsal were torture. I reverted all the way back to my thirteen-year-old self and hardly said two words. Johnny, his face a blank slate, devoid of any emotion, barely spoke. Cheyenne didn't engage with any of us in any way between the songs, though she kept turning around, making sure we all saw her new tattoo. If she wasn't going to say anything about it, neither was I, but, really, I thought it was pretty cool.

It was a severed leg with a lightning bolt on it. That girl has bravado. You have to love that. The rest of the time, she sat on her amp and plucked the bass, only looking up when the next song started.

The moments without music were like those first moments all these years ago between decreasing doses of methadone as Dr. Kenny weaned me off. But when the music started, man, oh, man, it worked. It just worked.

RICHIE MCGILL

That was the weirdest rehearsal ever.

I mean, Scar Boys rehearsals always went the same way: we would sit and wait for Johnny to tell us what to do. Maybe every so often, one of us would get a bug up our ass to play a certain song and just launch into it, but most of the time Johnny led the way. And if Johnny wasn't all there, like right after the thing with his leg, Harry would step in.

At that rehearsal, the first one after Jeff bawled us out, the other guys just sat there, looking at me. I'm thinking, like,
What the fuck did I do?
And they're still just looking at me. Then I figured it out. They were all so caught up in their own stupid shit that they were waiting for me to take over. I'm the drummer, for chrissakes. I mean, yeah, Don Henley and Phil Collins do that shit, but I'm more of a Keith Moon–Tommy Ramone kind of dude. Leading wasn't my thing.

Harry was twitchy, looking like he wanted to say something but couldn't or wouldn't; Chey kept her head down, turning around every so often so we could see her new tattoo; and Johnny kept writing in this little black book. It was the kind of book that Fonzie used to keep girls' phone numbers in. It was the first time I ever noticed it, but I don't think I ever saw him without it after that. Every time there was a break in the music, Johnny opened the book and started scribbling stuff down. It was like he was getting lost in the words or something. When I looked more closely, I could see that the book wasn't new. He had it opened to the middle, and it was kind of bent and worn. He caught me looking and covered it up like it was some big secret.

I didn't think anything of it at the time.

Cheyenne's tattoo, by the way, was maybe the coolest thing I'd ever seen. It was so badass. I went out two days later and got my own. It's in a place that only a special few have gotten to see.

HARBINGER JONES

No matter what Jeff said, no matter what kind of nonsense was going on between the four of us—well, really, the three of us, because Richie was immune to all of it—these people were my friends. They were practically my family.

You know how I could tell? The music. Total strangers or business partners, or whatever it was we were supposed to be, can't make music like that. They just can't.

What we had was special.

I'd been struggling to find an ending to my fifty-thousand-word college essay, and it was then, while playing music at the first rehearsal after the New Year's debacle, that I figured it out.

I couldn't go to college. Of course I couldn't go to college. I wasn't craving some sort of conventional experience that prepared for me an even more conventional existence. The world told me a long time ago that it would not let me conform to its established norms, so why should I start now?

Maybe I was a coward. And maybe my face was a mangled piece of meat that scared children and small animals. And maybe I had a rougher go of it than seemed fair, but I had something else, too. Even with all the shit that was swirling around the Scar Boys, I had friends and I had purpose.

Johnny, Chey, and I had worked through stuff before, and we would work through stuff again. It might take time, but we would get back to a better place. I could feel it in my bones. I would just bide my time while it all sorted itself out.

Until then I would find joy and peace in the music, just like Johnny and I did that first day we played together after Georgia. That moment—the two of us in his bedroom, me playing guitar and him singing, with no structure, no rules, no bullshit, all the baggage left at the door—is one of the happiest moments of my life. If the University of Scranton, or anyone else, wanted to really understand me, they needed to understand that. I had my ending.

I finished the essay that night and mailed the package the following day. Even though I'd decided not to go to college, I submitted the application to Scranton anyway. I figured I owed my parents that much. And, hey, it never hurts to keep your options open.

PART EIGHT,
JANUARY TO MARCH 1987

It was a job, and I was just doing my job.
—Johnny Ramone

 

What's the dumbest thing you've ever done?

CHEYENNE BELLE

Duh, getting knocked up.

HARBINGER JONES

Letting a bunch of older kids tie me to a tree during a thunderstorm. I mean, I didn't even put up a fight. I'm not sure it would have turned out different if I had fought back. Who knows, maybe I would've been beaten up and then tied to a tree and almost struck by lightning anyway, but at least I would've tried to do something about it.

RICHIE MCGILL

This interview.

Nah, I'm just kidding. The dumbest thing I ever did was not tell my mom I loved her when I had the chance. She died of cancer when I was a little kid. By the time the end came, she looked so skinny and so sick that I was afraid of her. Think about how fucked up that is, a little kid being scared of his own mom.

When she was about to go into surgery, my dad tried to get me to go wish her luck and tell her how much I loved her, but I wouldn't do it. I just stayed in the hospital waiting room, reading comic books. My dad didn't push it. He let me hang out there with my aunt.

My mom died during the operation.

For a long time, I thought it was my fault, that if I'd told her I loved her, maybe she would've lived.

I told my dad all that a few years later, and it was the only time, other than my mom's funeral, that I saw him cry.