The Haters (9 page)

So you can't really blame Corey if sometimes he gets kind of surly and dickish with authority figures and people trying to make him do stuff. He has basically spent his entire life under constant assault.

My home life is a little different. If you're Corey, Corey's parents constantly want to hang out with you in this state of half love, half panic. So they're a lot like dogs. Mine are more like cats. If you're me, my parents are happy to have you around,
but they also seem perfectly happy to have you not around. Plus, like cats, they themselves are mysteriously not around a lot of the time. I mean, I guess it's not that mysterious. They're at work.

My mom and dad are first- and second-grade teachers at Mellon Elementary, a public school in South Oakland. And together they do this very effective two-year bilingual thing that wins awards every year and gets the school a ton of federal grant money and clearly has major impacts on kids' lives.

But it means they have to be at the school kind of a lot, like from 7
A.M.
until 8 or 9
P.M.
during the week, and then on the weekends they're sort of exhausted and checked out. So we're not all that tight-knit of a family unit. Family Dinner is not a thing that happens in our household, for example. I mean, even on an individual level none of us eats in an organized enough way that you would call it Dinner. Or Lunch. Instead you would probably have to call it Constant State of Distracted Grazing, and it is in effect at all times throughout the day and happens to foods that require the absolute bare minimum of preparation, e.g., uncooked vegetables dipped into a two-gallon vat of hummus that Dad gets every Saturday from a restaurant supply store. It's also been at least a year since either of them checked a single piece of my homework.

But look. I realize this might sound sad or self-pitying. That's not how I'm trying to sound. I love my parents, I know they love me, I know how awesome and rare it is that I get to be so independent, I try pretty hard not to let them down, and
it makes me happy that they do really important work really well.

I guess my point is just that when Corey's parents smother him with intense caringness every time he tries to leave his house, it doesn't always seem so horrible.

12.
ASH BRIBES A RECEPTIONIST

Obviously Ash was someone who was used to having money. She had her own new-seeming car, played a very expensive Les Paul, paid for group sushi dinners, and gave no shits about which gas station candy had a two-for-one deal. And we had pretended not to notice. But this became impossible when she booked a $519 room at the Knoxville Clinton Hotel and then bribed a receptionist named Wayne.

Wayne had asked us for ID to show that we were all twenty-one.

“My brothers don't have theirs on them,” said Ash, handing Wayne her driver's license and two fifties.

Wayne glanced at each of us in turn.

“We're adopted,” she said. “Will this work?”

“That will work,” said Wayne in a high voice.

“Ash, we should probably talk about band finances,” I said, once we were alone in our enormous Jacuzzi-equipped room.

She gazed at me without a facial expression.

“I mean, this is all starting to run into a lot of money. Gas, hotel rooms, food.”

She blinked.

“And uh—Corey and I don't really—”

“Everything's on my dad,” interrupted Ash. “The whole tour. All the expenses. If anything gets busted, he'll replace it. So just don't worry about it.”

Corey was examining the unnecessarily spacious bathroom in what seemed to be a state of shock.

“Does he know we're doing this?” I said.

“Nope,” she said. “But he won't care.”

“So are you nineteen or twenty-one,” called Corey from the bathroom.

“Why wouldn't he care, though?” I said.

“What are some rules of thumb for bribing people without getting arrested,” Corey said, coming back out of the bathroom and sniffing a bar of soap.

She sighed.

“I hate talking to people about my shit,” she told us. But she ended up telling us a lot.

Her dad was a billionaire. So her family wasn't the kind of rich where they were super comfortable and everyone went to private school and took summer vacations to Europe. That's millionaire or multimillionaire rich. This was billionaire rich, a.k.a. the kind of rich where everything that happened to everyone in the family was completely insane and usually terrible.

Frankly, it all would have sounded made up, except you could tell from how she was talking about it that it wasn't. Because she clearly wished that it was.

Her dad was João Ramos, a Brazilian mining-fortune billionaire
who mostly lived in New York, and her mom was his second wife, a French model named Clotilde. How did they meet? He saw a picture of her in a Calvin Klein underwear ad and decided to have her flown to his house on a jet. Because that is just one of the things you can do when you're a billionaire and you don't give a shit.

Apparently, he did this kind of a lot. If he thought a model in an ad was really beautiful, he would just straight-up order her delivered to his house like a pizza. I mean, the pretense was, he was friends with the model's agent, and the agent would suddenly get the idea that maybe his client and his good friend the Brazilian billionaire should go on a date. But in reality it was just João ordering women like pizzas from the basically infinite menu of all magazine ads everywhere.

João and Clotilde went on some dates and got married in less than a year, when he was forty-three and she was nineteen. A year and a half later, Ash was born, and João and Clotilde were already in the process of getting divorced, because João was having affairs not just with more underwear models but also with an honest-to-God princess, specifically of Monaco, the world's most rich-person-intensive country.

At this point Corey attempted to tell Ash that her dad was actually kind of a beast. But she was not receptive to this idea.

Anyway, after having Ash, her mom spent a bunch of years trying to get back into modeling. So Ash was raised north of New York City at her dad's house, along with her two older half sisters, Natalie and Jessica. Mostly the parenting was done by a combination of West Indian nannies, private tutors, and a
Russian tennis instructor named Evgeniy. And mostly her life was about tennis.

João was obsessed with the idea of his daughters crushing at tennis. He took them to the US Open every year, where they would all spend hours hanging out in a luxury box with whoever João's girlfriend was and then at the end of the day get hastily introduced to sweaty, exhausted tennis superstars who clearly just wanted to be alone. And he forced all three daughters to train with Evgeniy from the age of six.

Evgeniy was responsible for many of the deeply terrible child-of-a-billionaire things that Ash experienced. Because Evgeniy was a sadist. For example, he did not value happiness or spiritual growth. What he valued was winning.

His worldview was: winners are just people who want to win more than anyone else on earth. So if you want to win, you must become pathologically obsessed with winning. You must come to find it viscerally revolting to lose to anyone, ever. The desire to win and the fear of losing are the same thing, and they must become the most powerful part of your soul, eclipsing all other wants and fears. Also, no sugar.

“He literally made an unflavored nutritious slurry that we had to eat at every meal for almost a year,” said Ash.

“Jesus,” I said.

“What's a slurry,” said Corey.

“A slurry is a semiliquid mixture,” I said. “Like something with the consistency of mud.”

“Yup,” said Ash.

“Holy shit,” said Corey.

Evgeniy liked to talk about the time Joseph Stalin ordered a scientist to breed apes and humans together to create a new kind of super warrior, “insensitive to pain and indifferent to the quality of the food that they eat.” Stalin's breeding project apparently was a failure. But Evgeniy still felt that it taught the world a valuable lesson about the benefits of being indifferent to the quality of the food that you eat.

João put an end to the slurry after he found out about it. But this turned out to be only because he believed eating flavorless gray food would make his daughters less beautiful. And being beautiful was his number-two priority for all three girls behind crushing at tennis, a priority that took the form of constant access to Japanese skin-care products and occasional fatherly suggestions of plastic surgery for Natalie, who eventually got a nose job that collapsed two years later after getting hit by a serve from a ball machine.

Anyway, the slurry episode led to the hiring of a family chef/nutritionist, a mysterious, ageless, soft-spoken Scottish man named Onnie, who had trained under the chef Thomas Keller at the French Laundry and also once briefly filled in as the lead guitarist of Slayer.

At this point Corey proposed that maybe this dad didn't do everything for the best reasons, but you did have to admit that he was somewhat of a beast if he was hiring the guitarist of goddamn Slayer. But Ash did not feel that she had to admit any such thing about her fuckface of a dad.

So the three Ramos girls grew up playing an absolute dickload of tennis, becoming remorseless winning machines, and not
having a ton of friends. Natalie, the oldest, with the still-a-little-bit-fucked-up nose, had been an undistinguished junior tennis player but managed to grind out a respectable pro career as an all-court player who had no glaring weaknesses but no overpowering strengths, either. At twenty-nine she was now ranked forty-first in the world, which was probably as high as she was going to get. Jessica had been a top-ten junior player with a 95-mph serve and actual sports people on ESPN saying she could become the Next Big Thing when at age seventeen she tore the rotator cuff in her right shoulder. Then at age eighteen she tore it again. Then, despite no longer having a huge serve, she made a moderately successful comeback as a gritty, tireless, annoying, hyper-defensive counterpuncher until she tore the ACL in her left knee at age twenty-three. Now she was twenty-six, unable to serve or run at a very high level, but still doggedly pursuing a comeback that only she and Evgeniy believed was possible and not, in actuality, depressing and doomed.

Ash was ten years younger than Natalie and seven years younger than Jessica, and apparently she was the best prospect of the three. She was fast, played smart, and had a monster serve like Jessica's, except smoother and less likely to blow out her shoulder. Most importantly, she was great at hating to lose. Her signature move after a loss was squatting on the baseline like a frog, gripping fistfuls of her own hair, and letting out bloodcurdling screams as long as ten seconds in length. If the loss was really bad, she would then slash up her racket with a pocketknife that she carried around. She had a
reputation on the junior circuit as an absolute psychopath. So in other words, she was the pride and joy of Evgeniy's entire life.

Then at fifteen she had her appendix taken out. She was in bed for two weeks. Evgeniy, on the road with Natalie, had assigned her to watch a twelve-hour History Channel miniseries about horrible protracted wars. It was called
Attrition
. So she was lying there, watching
Attrition
, and Onnie came in with her dinner on a tray, and the narrator was saying stuff like, “Of the fourteen thousand men to set foot on that island,
only three survived
,” in way too intense and grave of a voice. It was the over-the-top dramatic voice of just some guy in a sound studio somewhere. Some gleefully dire, comfortable guy wearing comfortable clothes who you could just tell had never experienced any kind of real violence or danger at all, so there was nothing that qualified him as the guy who got to be the voice that told you about all these tens of thousands of deaths, each of which happened to someone and was awful. So somehow that plus Onnie walking in gave Ash the suspicion that her life so far had been pointless.

I think my life so far has been pointless, she told Onnie.

He told her that was far from the truth.

Can you put on something to watch that isn't this, she asked him.

Onnie nodded, fished around on the Internet for a moment or two, and ended up putting on a John Lee Hooker concert. Why? Who knows. He never said. He must have just thought Ash would like John Lee Hooker. So they sat there and watched the whole thing. And then he left and she watched it again. And then she found some other John Lee
Hooker videos. And for the next two weeks all she really did was lie there and watch and listen to Delta blues guys: John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Charley Patton, Ishmon Bracey.

Once she was on her feet, she told her dad and Evgeniy and her mom that she was done with tennis and was going to play guitar instead.

Evgeniy did not take it well. In a yelling match on the court behind João's house, he told Ash she was being irresponsible. She told him she hated tennis. He told her that she hated tennis because she loved it so much. She told him that didn't make sense and anyway it was her life. He told her she was being a coward. She told him actually it was taking a lot of courage to leave the game especially if he was going to be such a dick about it. He told her she was throwing away thousands of hours of not just her time but his and had she thought about that for even one moment no of course not. She told him it wasn't her fault he chose a fucked-up line of work where you spend all your time thinking about how to develop the muscles of a girl's body and also trying to give them basically the mindset of a Nazi conquistador rapist sociopath. He told her millions literally
millions
of girls would be ecstatic to have the instruction and expertise and care and everything else that had been invested in her and now she was just tossing it all in the garbage like the spoiled impulsive brat that he had always secretly suspected her to be. She told him the thing that excited her most about music was that she would never again have to pretend to listen to his dumbshit lessons from nature about how the spider
lies in wait for hours but the wasp is never still or whatever the pointless creepy fucking thing and also she would never again have to smell his gross breath. He told her he was too much of a gentleman to tell her what he really thought of her, and then he told her she was a cunt.