The Scar Boys

Bad Brain

Life after the lightning strike was a blur of car rides and waiting rooms.

I was shuttled from neurologists to infectious disease specialists, to plastic surgeons.

Teams of doctors floated over me and tried to fix my broken body.

They stuck me with hypos and IVs to fight the bacteria nesting in my wounds, they used low-level electric stimulation to repair my damaged nerves, and they performed countless surgeries in a vain attempt to make me look like someone's idea of "normal."

I was Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. Only I wasn't because the whole thing turned out to be a big fat waste of time.

Well mostly.

Dr. Kenneth Hirschorn, or Dr. Kenny as I came to know him, was young and edgy; he had longish hair, wore his shirt untucked, and had Sharpie drawings of rock stars ringing the walls of his office.

He was a pediatric psychiatrist and his assignment was to wean me off the pain meds to which I'd become addicted.

He would talk to me about Lou Reed, Janis Joplin, Syd Barrett, and any other rock star he could think of who had abused drugs.

"By getting off the junk now, Harry," and yes, Dr. Kenny taught me to call it junk, "you're already way cooler than they ever were."

I was probably the only kid my age to know all the words to the Velvet underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man."

He guided me through the misery of controlled withdrawal like a shaman initiating a warrior in the ways of battle.

It was dumb luck, Faceless Admissions Professional, that Dr. Kenny and I fond each other. ("Faceless Admissions Professional" is a heck of a mouthful. Okay if I just call you FAP for short? Good, thanks)

If I'd been sent to any other psychiatrist, I would've been weaned off the methadone, pronounced mentally healthy, and sent back to the front lines of the fourth grade.

No matter that I was grotesquely disfigured, or that I was unable to sleep, or that I would fall to the floor crying like a little girl in the lightest summer drizzle.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder still wasn't listed in the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the mid-1970s.

The profession of psychiatry was barely past the days of electroshock therapy and lobotomies.

Besides, I was a kid, and kids are supposed to heal.

Dr. Kenny knew better.

Once I was pronounced drug free, he suggested we continue our sessions, "Just to talk." My parents agreed.

Dr. Kenny never mentioned the storm or my injuries in those first few years, and neither did I.

He never made me recount the day of the lightning strike, never made me tell him about the hospital stays, and never asked me about the kids who'd tied me up.

When my parents and the police tried to get me to identify the little cretins that had done this to me, I pretended not to remember.

But I did remember. Of course I remembered. I didn't tell anyone because I was scared shitless of those kids.

The funny thing is, I think those kids were more afraid of me than I was of them. They wouldn't look at me or talk to me.

They wouldn't even pass by my house without first crossing the street. I guess they knew what they had done, and it kind of haunted them.