The Haters (5 page)

We caught up with Ash outside the music hall on her way to the practice spaces across the quad. She still looked blank and unruffled.

“Why did you guys leave?” she asked. “I thought you were both pretty good.”

“What that guy did was bullshit,” said Corey.

“That whole scene was just kind of tough,” I said.

She nodded a little uncertainly.

“Basically, this entire camp makes us want to harm our own dicks,” announced Corey.

It's always a risk to introduce people to our go-to trope of dick harm. People tend to find it confusing and frightening. But it turned out Ash was receptive to it.

“Yeah?” she said. “This camp makes me want to harm
other people's
dicks.”

“
Fuck
yeah,” said Corey.

“Bear in mind,” I said, “to have any kind of impact, you'd have to harm at least twenty or so dicks. Because this camp has serious issues with dick surplus.”

She laughed this kind of rusty, squeaky chuckle and my heart got hot.

“So are you guys super into jazz,” she wanted to know.

“I mean,” I said.

“Some jazz,” said Corey.

“Jazz among other kinds of music, I would say,” I said.

It was clear to us both that we were not going to win her over by making a point of how much we loved jazz. “Here's the thing,” she said. “I do like jazz some of the time. But I don't think any of the jazz I like was played by someone who went to jazz camp.”

“One billion percent yes,” said Corey.

“Who do you like,” I said.

“Miles Davis,” she said.

“Miles Davis is a beast,” Corey said.

“Huge huge beast, obviously,” I said.

“If you sent Miles Davis to jazz camp,” said Corey, “he would have responded by becoming a professional terrorist.”

She laughed a little at this, too.

“I mean, he probably would have just left,” I said.

“To
suicide bomb an airport
,” said Corey.

“Or play a show somewhere,” I said.

“Somewhere like the smoldering ruins of an airport that he just bombed the shit out of.”

“Sure. Or, the Village Vanguard, where he played many noteworthy shows.”

“Or, the Village
Deadguard, where he played many noteworthy dead
.”

“Hey,” said Ash, to get us to stop. “Do you guys want to play some stuff?”

“Sure,” we both said.

“Not jazz, though,” she said, but that kind of went without saying.

Like I said, our previous attempts to play music other than jazz had all failed. So I was a little nervous going into this one.

And I was right to be nervous. Because we started playing and immediately sounded horrible.

For whatever reason—probably a combination of anxiety and just panicky self-sabotage—as soon as he got behind the kit, Corey immediately launched into a very busy fusiony beat, like from a lesser Headhunters or Weather Report song. It was the kind of beat that was unfollowable, because it kept changing every single measure. The bass pattern changed, the snare pattern changed, and there was basically nothing to latch on to.

And I knew it wasn't going to be a ton of fun to play to or listen to. But out of pure reflex, I launched into my own complementary Jaco-Pastorius-but-dumber-and-worse bass line that had a million notes and made it sort of unclear what the key was or what the melody could possibly be.

So Corey and I hammered away at this complicated, difficult, rootless groove for a while. Now and then Ash did a little aimless noodling on her guitar. Mostly, though, she didn't play anything. She just looked at her fretboard like she was waiting for a video to load.

After about a minute, which felt a lot longer, she held up a fist. We stopped playing.

“No,” she told us. “That's not gonna work.”

We both nodded.

“Can you guys just dumb it down,” she said.

So we tried again. It was what we were playing before, but dumbed down. But when you take the braininess out of what we were doing, there's nothing really left. So, unsurprisingly, it sounded even worse.

This time Ash didn't even noodle. She just watched us, with her skeptical eyebrows and scrunched mouth.

After nine bars she stopped us again.

Corey's jaw was jutting out the way it does when his parents are preventing him from leaving his house.

“I don't mean dumb that beat down,” she told us. “I mean dumb yourselves down. Just shut off your jazz brain. Give me something really, really simple.”

We nodded.

“In E,” she said to me. “Not whatever key that was. E, okay?”

I nodded.

“Just make some room,” she said to us. “Try to give me a lot of room.”

And she started snapping off a very slow tempo.

Corey and I looked at each other.

I played the dumbest, simplest thing I could think of, which was just ringing out a low E.

Corey held his sticks up in the air. He let his hands go theatrically limp, above his head. His sticks dangled uselessly from his fingers. He lifted his right knee. And he started thumping his bass drum on Ash's slow beat.

On one, I let E ring out again, and then muted it on three.

That was the beat. It was just me playing long half-note E's,
and Corey thumping quarter notes on the bass drum. That was it. It was incredibly simple and dumb.

And yet, somehow it didn't sound bad.

We kept doing it. And I can't tell you why. But pretty soon it started to sound good.

Actually, it was sounding kind of great.

It was so dumb that it was hypnotic. It was eerie and intense. And Ash was really comfortable letting it grow on all of us. She just stood there, not smiling but nodding a little, while we kept cranking out this beat like we were both possessed or snake-charmed or something.

Then without warning she pushed her volume up and rang out an E, too. It was huge and jagged-sounding and she let it sit in the air for two bars.

Someone screamed, “OH.”

Then we started playing.

I'm not going to give you the details. I'm not going to do them justice. But we played for three and a half hours, and we sounded incredible.

I don't know if you'd call it rock, or blues, or punk, or what. It felt a lot simpler and earthier than those. There was some mid-career Miles Davis in there, some Ramones, John Lee Hooker, AC/DC. Some James Brown and some Talking Heads. Parts were a little bit like Sleater-Kinney, and there were a few moments that sounded like Cat Power. But none of these are really going to give you the right impression at all.

What it was, honestly, was just about locking in. We were just
all completely fused together. We got quiet together, and loud, and quiet again, and rhythmically it was like we weren't capable of playing outside one another's beat. And somehow the whole time I knew exactly what to do, like I could hear every note the moment before I played it, and honestly the whole time a part of me was terrified that there was a limit to whatever was happening, and it was going to suddenly run out, but it didn't.

After about an hour of just playing, without any song or plan, Ash started giving us little bare-bones sketches of songs she had written. The lyrics were pretty hard to make out but seemed to be a little bit gonzo '90s fringe lyrics like Ween or King Missile and a little bit not-super-rhymey conversational lyrics like Courtney Barnett. The titles were, too, but more intense.

God Has No Thoughts

Suburb of the Abyss

Everyone at Wendy's Was Dead or a Robot

Trees Are Eating My Dad Right Now Pt. 1

Love Plague

This Sex Sucks

Shark Contest

I Am Such a Mess from Werewolf PMS

They Told Me You Are What You Eat So I Ate Roger Federer

and my favorite,

If You Love Your Dog So Much, Why Don't You Fuck Him

Ash plugged a microphone into her guitar amp and did all
the singing, and her singing voice was sort of like she took her speaking voice and gave it fresh batteries. It was a voice that cut. It was the voice of someone who gave zero fucks and rode around on a bear. It was the kind of voice where you didn't care if you could tell what she was saying, because you knew what she meant.

The bass and guitar were all thick and distorted and buzzy because we turned our amps up higher than they were supposed to go. Corey ended up mostly thumping things out on his bass drum and toms and used his cymbals only when he absolutely had to. So the effect was this chunky thumpy sound that kind of made you think of the most badass possible rabbit. I know that sounds idiotic. I don't care. That's how it sounded. It was like the war music for an elite army unit of giant, bear-riding, eyepatch-wearing rabbits who were riding off to a battle that was actually just a huge party.

Ash took audio of the whole thing by hanging her phone from the ceiling with a shoelace. We played for three and a half hours, and between every song Corey and I were afraid to do any talking. The entire time it was incredible. Then we went out into the hall and tried not to freak out too much.

At that point, I would say Ash felt like one of us.

WES,
punching a wall
: yeah

COREY,
punching himself
: yeah

ASH: fuck yeah guys

COREY: heeeeerrrrrrrRRRRNNNNNNNNNN

WES: i know this is gross but it feels like we all just had sex with each other for three hours

COREY: i can never play jazz again

ASH: fuck jazz

WES: to continue to play high school–type jazz would be a catastrophic mistake for us

COREY: the very thought of having to play another two weeks of jazz with the many herbs of this camp is making my dick retreat into my body like the head of a turtle

[
a hyped-up silence during which corey punches himself again
]

ASH: so actually that was the first time i've ever gotten to play those songs like with a band and everything

COREY: no

WES: what?!

ASH: i've just never had anyone to play with

COREY: fuck you! that's not even possible!!

WES: you're telling us Trees Are Eating My Dad Right Now, for example, you've never gotten to hear that song played by a band before

ASH: no. i mean i tried to play it with one of my sisters on piano once, but that doesn't count

COREY: that probably sounded like ass

ASH: it did sound like total ass

WES: that song could work with guitar and piano if your sister had a certain kind of approach but it sounds like she did not

ASH: she plays like you gave billy joel mittens and a concussion

WES: daaaaaaaamn

COREY: real talk

[
a silence in which everyone is thinking something different
]

[
the silence intensifies
]

[
he has been suppressing them pretty hard but wes's hyper-developed hater reflexes finally kick in
]

WES: so just,

COREY:

ASH:

WES: i mean, uh

COREY,
with growing irritation
:

ASH:

WES: i mean that was as good as we thought it was, right?

COREY: oh goddamn it wes

WES: what

COREY: wes. why would you
even say that

WES,
babbling like a maniac
: it's just that i just want to be prepared in case we listen back to it and it turns out we were being dumb or naive or whatever because i mean it was definitely good but what if it wasn't
as good

COREY: you have to stop talking immediately

WES: okay

COREY: if you keep talking i am going to commit an atrocity against you

WES: okay but let's just listen to it and make sure

COREY: no

WES: what

COREY: no. we can't listen to it in fear

WES: oh

COREY: we can only listen to it when you're no longer at risk of hating on it

This was a tough thing to hear. Because I was, deep down, preparing to hate on it. But I figured Corey was, too. He's even more of a hater than me.

We were at kind of an impasse, and fortunately Ash was there to break it.

ASH: let's listen to it after dinner

WES: okay great

COREY: what's for dinner though

8.
COREY LITERALLY EATS HIS TONGUE AND ASH LEARNS THE TRUE MEANING OF GARFUNKEL

Dinner at Bill Garabedian's Jazz Giants of Tomorrow Intensive Summer Workshops was an array of steamed meats and vegetables that looked and tasted like we were getting them secondhand. There was also a pasta bar way off in an abandoned corner somewhere. Corey filled an entire bowl with sauce and drank it as if it were soup.

At first we were mostly silent, ignoring our gross food and gazing around the room in secret triumph at these other jazz kids in their various jazz-camp-hierarchy postures: the alpha kids sitting in too wide of a stance; the beta kids hunched over, intensely making Important Points; the gamma kids slumping around all demoralized.

We were feeling completely superior to these kids who were too chickenshit to throw a tantrum and walk out on jazz camp band practice for basically no reason.

ASH: oh my god this food sucks dick

WES: i feel like someone pre-licked all of these zucchinis

[
ash chuckles again and wes feels a happiness so extreme that he momentarily cannot function
]

COREY: the soup's okay but there's too many tomatoes

WES: corey, that's spaghetti sauce

COREY: no it's a soup

WES: you got it from the pasta bar

COREY: i think it's the soup and pasta bar

WES: well

WES: hmm

ASH: you guys want to get second dinner?

[
a silence in which it is clear that corey and wes had not even considered the possibility of second dinner
]