The Scar Boys Read online

  First published by Egmont USA, 2014

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © Len Vlahos, 2014

  All rights reserved

  www.egmontusa.com

  www.lenvlahos.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vlahos, Len.

  The Scar Boys : a novel / Len Vlahos.

  1 online resource.

  Summary: Written as a college admission essay, eighteen-year-old Harry Jones recounts a childhood defined by the hideous scars he hid behind, and how forming a band brought self-confidence, friendship, and his first kiss.

  Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  ISBN 978-1-60684-440-3 (eBook)--ISBN 978-1-60684-439-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) [1. Disfigured persons--Fiction. 2. Friendship--Fiction. 3. Bands (Music)--Fiction. 4. Near-death experiences--Fiction. 5. Family life--Fiction. 6.

  New York (State)--Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.V854

  [Fic]--dc23

  2013021295

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  Lyrics to “Girl Next Door” and “Assholes Like Us” (c) 1986, used with permission from Joe Loskywitz, Scott Nafz, Chad Strohmayer, and Len Vlahos.

  All rights reserved.

  “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” written by Lee Hazlewood

  Copyright ©1965 – 1966 ® 1983 – 1984 Criterion Music Corporation

  All Rights Reserved Used By Permission International Copyright Secured.

  v3.1

  For Kristen, Charlie, and Luke—you are my music.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Thunder Road

  Somebody Get me a Doctor

  Bad Brain

  Waiting on a Friend

  Our House

  Hello, I Love You

  Daydream Believer

  Rock and Roll Band

  School’s Out

  Dave

  Punk Rock Girl

  Cheyenne

  These Boots are Made for Walkin’

  Travelin’ Band

  We Want the Airwaves

  Rip Off

  Cars

  Femme Fatale

  Father and Son

  Lying

  Gone Daddy Gone

  Streets of Baltimore

  Breakdown

  What a Fool Believes

  My Best Friend’s Girl

  I Can’t Drive 55

  More Cigarettes

  I Wanna be Sedated

  Sitting Still

  Hit me with Your Best Shot

  Pump it Up

  Hallelujah

  I’m Free

  I Don’t Want to Know

  Dead Man’s Curve

  Going Home

  Time’s Up

  We Can Work it Out

  No Surrender

  The Song is Over

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  January 21, 1987

  The University of Scranton

  Office of Undergraduate Admissions

  Scranton, PA 18510-4699

  Dear Admissions Professional,

  Thank you for giving me the opportunity to become a matriculating student at the University of Scranton. I have had many interesting experiences in my life. I will represent the school well. I work hard and am a quick study. I have a wide variety of interests and I am dedicated to—Wait.

  Wait, wait, wait.

  250 words? Are you kidding? It can’t be done. Whoops, just wasted four words, five if you count the contraction, telling you “it can’t be done.” Another 17 words talking about telling you that “it can’t be done.” Another 12 … never mind. This could go on forever.

  Here’s the short version of what you need to know:

  I’m ugly and shy and my face, head, and neck are covered with hideous scars. (15 words)

  Here’s the slightly longer version:

  I’m ugly and shy and my face, head, and neck are covered with hideous scars.

  I was almost struck by lightning.

  I wish I had been struck by lightning.

  I was a methadone addict before the age of 10.

  It’s my fault that my best friend almost got killed.

  I played guitar in the greatest punk rock band you’ve never heard of.

  And that was all before my 19th birthday, which isn’t for another five months. (76 words)

  But the most important thing to know about me, what you really need to grok in order to understand what kind of student you’ll be getting, is that I, Harbinger Robert Francis Jones, am a coward.

  I just counted and “coward” was word number 248, and that doesn’t even include the date or your address, so I should stop. But I can’t believe you know me any better yet, and that was your goal, right? So with your permission—strike that, with or without your permission—I’m going to exceed that word count, just a little.

  Okay, maybe a lot.

  I suppose I should start at the beginning, and it begins with a question …

  THUNDER ROAD

  (written by Bruce Springsteen, and performed by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band)

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  An older and much larger boy stood over me, blotting out the sun. “You weren’t god damn here when we chose up the god damn sides.” He was trying on curse words the way a little girl tries on her mother’s shoes.

  The boy wasn’t just big, he was cartoon big. He also wasn’t alone. He was one of seven snot-nosed tweens surrounding me like I was in the middle of a football huddle. They had decided to make me a central character in their game of Ringolevio. I had no idea what that word meant, and didn’t have a clue about the rules of the game, but near as I could tell, it was something between hide-and-seek and all-out neighborhood war.

  I don’t remember what I was doing just before the “Who the fuck are you?” It’s as if the entire universe came into being all at once in that exact moment. Earlier memories just don’t exist for me. Strike that. They exist, but they’re buried in a place where I can’t find them. They can only be reconstructed from the outside. (If you’re wondering how this can be, give yourself a pat on the back, because you’re asking a really good question. Read on.)

  “Who the fuck are you?” the boy demanded a second time.

  A thick haze hung between the sun and Earth like gauze, trying to choke the life out of everything—even the flies and mosquitoes didn’t have any energy. It was the kind of summer afternoon that bred impatience.

  “I don’t know,” I muttered back. With no brothers or sisters to properly weave me to the fabric of kid society, I was, at eight years old, mostly overlooked, and only occasionally tolerated by the other children in our neighborhood. I was so lost in the excitement of an older boy actually talking to me, that it took me a minute to realize it wasn’t going so well.

  “You don’t know who you are? Are you fucking retarded, shit-for-brains?” The other boys laughed.

  “I’m Harry Jones,” I mumbled at my shoes.

  “Well then,” the older boy said and puffed out his chest like Patton, “you, Harry Shit Jones, have been caught by the Sharks—that’s our team—and you’re our prisoner.” The other boys stomped their feet in approval. I’d wandered into the final act of Lord of the Flies but was too young to know it. “And what’s worse, you little ass head,” he leaned in close, “
you’ve been caught cheating.”

  “I wasn’t chea—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Honest, I wasn’t—”

  He punched me, hard, in the shoulder. I was already too scared to cry, and somehow I knew crying would only make it worse. Maybe if I take my lumps, I thought, it’ll all turn out okay.

  “Whaddya think we should do with him?” someone asked.

  One of the other kids, a freckled little creep named Timmy, who called me “Shrimp Toast” every time he saw me playing in front of my house, was holding a length of rope, maybe a clothesline, maybe something else. “I think we should put him in jail,” he said. This was met with laughs and hoots all around.

  The jail was a small but sturdy dogwood tree, its thick green leaves providing shade, but no protection from the heat. According to the rules, I was supposed to keep one hand on the tree at all times until a teammate tagged me free. But I didn’t know the rules, didn’t know rope wasn’t supposed to be part of the game.

  I let them tie me to the tree without a struggle, never complaining as they pulled the nylon cord too tight, wrapping it several times around the trunk, binding me from my shoulders to my knees.

  Thick gray clouds soon replaced the summer haze, and the painfully still air started to move. The first drops of rain prompted one mother after another to open her ranch house window and bellow for little Jimmy or Johnny or Danny to get inside. The game started to break as the kids sprinted for home. No one seemed to remember I was there, bound to that tree.

  “Guys!” I screamed. “GUYS!”

  Childhood, for all its good press, is a time when the human animal explores the dark side of the Force, pushing the limit of the pain it’s willing to inflict on bugs, squirrels, and little neighborhood boys. Most kids outgrow the darker impulses by high school. The ones that don’t spend their teenage years playing football, lacrosse, and, dating the prom queen. (It doesn’t seem fair to me, either, but hey, I don’t make the rules.)

  Only one boy, Timmy with the freckles and the rope, heard me. He turned around and we locked eyes. I believed, if only for an instant, that I was saved. By the time I understood why his face was twisting itself into something between a smile and sneer, he was already in a dead run, headed for his own house, probably planning to torture his hamster or sister or something. I heard his door slam shut.

  The first bolt of lightning wasn’t a bolt at all. It was a flash, like a camera’s flash, bringing every atom of the world into stark relief for a nanosecond. My mother taught me to count “Mississippis” when I saw lightning, so I did. There were nine before I heard the first rumble of thunder. I forgot what that meant, but I knew the heart of the storm was still far away, and as long as there were at least nine in the next group of Mississippis, I’d be safe.

  The rain started falling harder, the noise surrounding me like freeway traffic. There was another flash and I started to count again.

  One Mississippi. The wind was blowing little pieces of our neighborhood across the lawn: an unsecured lid from a plastic garbage can, a red kickball, a white dress shirt liberated from someone’s untended clothesline.

  Two Mississippi. A latticework fence supporting tomato plants was bending sideways as the rain, now waving in translucent sheets like see-through shower curtains, pooled into muddy lakes around the yard. My brain turned to jelly and my bladder let loose.

  Three Mississi—a sonic BOOM slammed my head against the tree. My skin and clothes were drenched in a cocktail of rainwater, sweat, and urine. The heart of the storm—now a living, breathing thing—had moved closer.

  Another flash and I started my count again, this time out loud.

  “One Mississippi!” My voice, choked by its own sobs, only carried a few feet forward where it was swallowed by the torrent of water and wind. I began writhing like a fish on a hook, trying to loosen the nylon cord and slip free.

  “Two Mississippi!” I noticed a cat, its tortoiseshell hair matted flat by the deluge, hiding beneath a stack of lawn chairs that was pushed up against the house in front of me. Its legs were pulled tight under its waterlogged body, and its eyes were open wide, darting back and forth and looking for some escape. It spotted me, held my gaze, and wailed like a banshee, loud enough for me to hear through the rain.

  “Three Mississippi!” Seeing the cat calmed me down. I wasn’t alone. As long as we were together, me and this cat, we were going to be okay. I regained control of my voice. The wind died down just a little. Even the fence with the tomato plants wasn’t bending so far forward.

  “Four Mississippi!” No lightning. No thunder. The storm was moving away.

  “Five Mississippi!” I thought I could hear my mom’s voice calling me. She sounded far away and she sounded scared. I tried to call back, but my voice still wasn’t carrying. I shouted again, as loud as I could: “MOM!”

  “Six Missi—” Before I could say “ssippi,” before any thunder from that flash reached my ears, and before I had any idea if my mother heard me calling out to her, a new spear of lightning found me. It struck the tree just above my head.

  In the instant before everything went black, just before I was sure I’d died, I looked up and saw that the cat was gone.

  SOMEBODY GET ME A DOCTOR

  (written by Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony, and David Lee Roth, and performed by Van Halen)

  The lightning bolt sawed the top of the tree cleanly off. A large shaft of the trunk, a piece like a battering ram, landed on my head. It fractured my skull, dislocated my shoulder, and knocked me unconscious. What was left of the tree—enough that I was still loosely bound to it—caught fire, leaving third-degree burns on my shoulders, neck, face, and scalp. My mother found me dangling there in just enough time to pull me free, call an ambulance, and save my life.

  I didn’t remember any of it.

  I woke up four days later in a dimly lit hospital room that smelled like Bactine. Whirring machines and blinking lights formed an eerie halo around my body, pieces of which, including my face, were wrapped in gauze. My view of the world was restricted to a small, cotton-framed slit. At first I was disoriented. I wondered if I was on a submarine or a spaceship. But as soon as I tried to move, the pain went coursing through the millions of exposed nerve endings, and I passed out. I regained and lost consciousness like that often the first couple of weeks.

  The treatments during my “recovery” were the kind of nightmare from which you just can’t wake up. The worst of it was the changing of the bandages. The nurses tried to make it a game by calling it the Changing of the Guard. “You know Harry, like at Buckingham Palace.” Only I didn’t know what Buckingham Palace was, and even if I had known, it wouldn’t have helped. The balm slathered on my wounds acted like glue, fusing the sterilized cotton pads to the fleshy meat of my neck and head, leaving the nurses with no choice but to rip the bandages off. And when I say “rip,” I mean they would grab an end of the gauze and pull it like they were trying to start a gas-powered lawn mower. I would put up such a fight that they had to strap me down. They had me on a morphine drip for most of my hospital stay, and I took an oral version of methadone hydrochloride for many months after. It was supposed to help manage the pain in a less addictive way. It didn’t entirely work.

  My memory of the doctors and nurses is colored by images of generals and admirals—a group of authoritative yahoos trying to inspire me back to full health, telling me to “buck up,” to “be brave,” to “never give up hope.” I lost count of how many times they told me it was a miracle I wasn’t killed and that I should be grateful to have spent only forty-five days in the hospital. They had no answer for the burns, which, while they did heal, left me badly and irrevocably scarred, or for my memory loss, which left gaping holes in my personal history that had to be rebuilt by others.

  By the time I got home, I was inconsolable. People talk about the resiliency of children, but those same people have never tied those same children to a tree during a thunderstorm to te
st the theory. I refused to eat, refused to speak, even refused to watch television. My parents tried all manner of carrots and sticks to coax me out of my funk, but nothing worked.

  Nothing until I met Lucky Strike the Lightning Man.

  Years earlier, Lucky had been working as a groundskeeper on an estate north of where we lived when a wayward thread of lightning struck him on the top of the head.

  It was something between a miracle and a fluke that Lucky’s injuries were as minor as they were. He spent eighteen hours unconscious, and woke up with a mild headache and strange gaps in his memory. For example, he couldn’t remember the name of his cat, so he eventually renamed it “Bolt.” The cat, Lucky would tell me, never answered to the new name. It seemed instead to be waiting for someone, anyone, to call it by its proper name. No one ever did.

  Lucky found himself spending every free minute reading about lightning, researching storm systems, and attending meteorology classes at the local community college. He needed to understand how and why he’d been singled out. Lightning became his great white whale.

  Through this obsession, Lucky met and was embraced by an underground network of natural disaster fanatics—tornado chasers, earthquake junkies, hurricane watchers, even one lonely devotee of tsunamis. When they founded the Society for the Study of Natural Phenomena, it was no surprise that Lucky—the only one of the group to have experienced his natural disaster firsthand—was asked to serve as the group’s president.

  The first official function of Nat-Phen, as they called themselves, was a presentation at a local library on the dangers of weather. Using blowups of photographs and acetate slides shone on a mammoth screen, the session—titled Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Lightning: What You Don’t Know Just Might Kill You—was a smashing success. The Putnam County Weekly called it “an eye-opening, hair-raising ride,” and singled out “Lucky Strike the Lightning Man” as a “fellow who knows his stuff.” Other libraries caught wind of the group, and Nat-Phen was invited to give a series of presentations all around southern New York State. My mother read about one of Lucky’s presentations, and that was how he and I met.