From On the Strand:

Looking in the mirror that morning, just over a month after Ronnie had rolled his old man’s Studebaker with me riding shotgun, I noticed my head had only begun to sprout a fuzzy blondness.  Half my head had been shaved to the scalp; the other half was cut shorter to complete my lop-sided Kojak look.  An eight-inch red scar ran from my hairline to the lower left side of my skull.  From behind, you could see the jagged scar, where the surgeon had sewn my ear back together after telling me my head looked like I had been rolling around in a pasture of horse shit.

            My red badge of courage was a chicken’s-foot scar above my left eyebrow. This I didn’t mind.  After two hundred stitches inside the hairline, I wanted a sign to announce, “Hey, I survived a bad wreck.” 

            The Studebaker had rolled three times on a warm July 27, 1968, evening, freezing the speedometer on 95.  The cops and our parents never wised up to our mission that night. Seven guys in one Studebaker out to pick up girls. What a joke, but somehow my emptied rum pint disappeared into the woods or had been destroyed in the accident.  I haven’t a clue. 

            Ronnie lost his driving privilege from his father, Mercer, and had been required to work construction and whatever jobs he could find to pay his father for the lost car. On the first day of school, right after Labor Day, Ronnie and I hitchhiked to school, rather than take the bus. To me, this was prolonging the embarrassment of being seen in the Dixie-cup sailor’s hat—my father’s Navy hat – that I was wearing, sides down, to hide that huge red scar etched into the left side of my head.

            My eyes were focused on the front door of what looked like a giant red-brick, two-level rectangle of a school built in 1954 and named after a well-known Robert E. Lee biographer.  I knew kids were going to be looking at me, the dumbshit looking kid with the weird hat on his head.  I was right, but I just breezed on by with thoughts of Fuck you going through my head, as well as a few very real “Fuck you” comments thrown at Ronnie, my taller, brown-haired best friend, who kept teasing me from behind what I felt was a smirky-smile, but which was quite innocent and caring.

From On the Strand:
Frankie responded with uncanny insight to my request.  She described me as, “Kind, shy, quiet, and very loyal.  You had a dry sense of humor and were ‘on the wild side’ and always ready for something different – always questioning things and authority:  REBELLIOUS!!!”  She ended her memory with a telling statement: “You were hard on yourself and did not believe in Kevin.”