The Haters (4 page)

“You were shredding pretty hard. Then I called it Shredfest. And . . . that brings us just about up to date.”

“What?”

“Up to date on what has happened so far.”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” I said, and frown-nodded a
second time
, and then I made a big show of turning to my bass and tuning it, and she went back to shredding, and I spent the next five minutes not suddenly sprinting out of the room and into traffic.

6.
THE MEDIOCRE GENE KRUPA BAND PLAYS A BLUES IN F

One by one, the other rhythm section members appeared. They were mostly pretty chill and reasonable. The exception was the guitarist who wasn't the girl. His name was Tim, and he was a scumbag.

The primary indicator of him being a scumbag was that he did not acknowledge the presence of anyone except the girl, who turned out to be named Ash.

He began by positioning himself directly in front of her. Then he adopted a casual stance. “Well, hello there,” he said to her. “I'm Tim.”

“Hi,” she said, kind of distractedly. She did not stop playing. So he put his head right up next to her guitar. He kept his head there for a while and listened and scrunched his eyes shut with this doofy I-am-appreciating-your-guitar-skills face.

“Oh my goodness,” he said. “We've got a lady Robert Johnson in the house.”

Unfortunately, this made her look up at him as if maybe he wasn't a huge scumbag.

“You like Robert Johnson?” she asked.

“I wouldn't say I like Robert Johnson.”

“Why not.”

“Because I
love
Robert Johnson.”

“Oh. Okay, good.”

“They say he sold his soul to the devil. I say, it was
worth it
.”

“I'm Ash.”

“Ash. My goodness gracious. That's quite a name.”

“No. It's dumb. It's just less dumb than ‘Ashley.'”

“Ash, it honors me to share with you this humble chair,” he said, giving off the vibe of a forty-year-old man who has been divorced at least three times.

I was sitting there silently listening in and becoming inflamed with inappropriate territorial rage, like a rival elk or something. Meanwhile, by now literally every horn player was trying to play the loudest possible thing, which is the standard pre-rehearsal procedure of all jazz horn players.

All of this was brought to a halt when Bill Garabedian's drummer, Don, entered the room and started yelling. Don had black curly hair, a mild underbite, and a neck that was a little bit wider than his head. The pit stains of his white T-shirt made him an intimidating presence. They seemed to say,
You will probably never be able to sweat this much out of your armpits. Because you will never truly be a man
.

“Turn it down,” he yelled. “Hey. Turn it down
at least
90 percent. Okay? I couldn't hear myself talk
out in the hallway
. All right. Y'all tuned up? Need to tune? Tune up if you need. But do it quiet. We gotta get started. All right. Welcome to Gene Krupa. I'm Don. Some days you'll have me, some days you'll have a couple other teachers. If you have a calendar, it's probably on there. We all got charts? Share if you need to. Okay. Now, I don't have a ton of
teaching experience
. So
I'm up here figuring it out, just like you. So give me some slack, all right? You guys gonna be cool? Great. But don't forget you're supposed to have fun.”

He paused for a moment to stare at us with a kind of dull, blank horror. Then he continued.

“Let's stretch out with a blues in F. First rhythm section, give me, uh, Corey, Wes, Jeremy, and uh . . . Tim. Everybody gets twelve bars. No more than twelve, because there's a lot of you. Jeremy, start me off. Five, six, uh, uh.”

And so we embarked on a fifteen-minute journey through the blues, hopeful that each of us would have something new and cool to tell each other in the language of jazz.

Unfortunately, our hopes were completely in vain.

It was pretty rough. There was just kind of a stressed-out fraudulent vibe that was sort of the dark side of all that strivey-dude energy from the auditorium. The trumpets were all switching back and forth between grumpy squawking and trying to hit the highest and loudest possible note. The trombones were botching goofball quotations like “Flight of the Bumblebee” and then signaling surrender with sheepish atonal elephant noises. And each of the saxophone solos was basically the equivalent of the small talk that you are forced to make with the friend of your mom who cuts your hair.

As for me, I hate soloing. It just never feels like something the bass is designed to do. Basically every bass solo that I have ever taken is the soundtrack to an overweight cartoon bear putting on women's clothing and then trying to dance.

Corey didn't have it, either. He got through about eight bars of pleasant, forgettable snare patterns and then froze up and spent
the turnaround just sitting there in total silence. Don frowned and nodded thoughtfully at this. But it was sort of the face you would make if a super little kid told you there is no God.

After Corey we got the first good solo of the day, a spare and haunting jazz haiku from Tim. He definitely played the fewest notes of anyone. That is a time-honored approach by jazz kids who are technically proficient but also have great soulfulness.

So that pretty much sucked, too. The most sensitive, brilliant musical mind in the room seemed to belong to an unignorable scumbag. But that should not have been surprising. That's just how the music world works a lot of the time.

Halfway through this long and monotonous blues, Don had the other rhythm section take over, and as soon as they did, the whole room perked up, because they sounded way better than us.

Part of me was bummed out about that. But the other part also enjoyed listening to them. Or at least three out of four of them. The stubby, pale drummer was a lot flashier than Corey, the ponytailed, huge-handed bassist had a richer, jazzier sound on his upright bass than I did on my Fender, and the swim-team-captain-looking pianist basically just tried to impersonate Bill Evans, i.e., probably the greatest jazz pianist of all time. The soloists were way more energized by this group. Even Don started relaxing and muttering, “There it is” and “Yup.”

A third part of me was stressed out and upset that their weak link was Ash.

Her sound was the first problem. It was not a jazz sound in any way. Jazz guitar typically has a pretty soft attack and a clean sustain.
But Ash had this raw, chunky distorted sound with a big crunchy attack that really fought what was going on in the rest of the rhythm section. Another problem she had was a clear lack of knowledge of jazz chords. Mostly she was trying to comp with these garage-rock power chords that make no sense in the context of jazz.

It was sort of like a ballet recital where most of the kids were doing competent, reasonable ballet, in frilly skirts and leotards and stuff, but then off to one side this girl Ash was wearing a football uniform and doing the Worm.

This went on for a few solos. During the baritone sax solo, Tim tried stepping in.

“Hey, Ash,” he said. “Lady, I dig what you're doing. Why don't I try to give you a cleaner sound.”

She did not respond or make eye contact with him. But her cheeks turned bright red.

So Tim started messing with her knobs. And he did succeed in giving her a cleaner, jazzier sound. But power chords with a jazz sound are kind of the wimpiest, most pathetic possible thing. So now she was wearing a frilly skirt and leotard like everyone else but still writhing around on the floor doing the Worm.

I should have said something. But I didn't. So instead Corey was the one who said something.

“Hey,” he said. “Don't mess with her knobs.”

Tim ignored Corey completely.

Corey stared at Tim the way large dogs on porches do sometimes.

“HEY,” repeated Corey. “She doesn't want you fucking with her amp.”

Unlike Corey, I have an overpowering fear of confrontation. But I still got in there. To back Corey up but also to back Ash up but mostly because, fuck Tim.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, man.”

Tim, sensing that I was the wimpier one, chose to address me.

“I think she just forgot to switch it over,” Tim told me.

“Uhhhh,” I said, shrugging meaninglessly. I followed that up with, “Well, I don't know.”

Corey, impatient with my being a huge confrontation-averse puss, yelled, “Dude. No. She wants it the way it was. It sounds like ass now.”

“
No talking
,” yelled Don. “Come on. Have some respect.”

We all shut up. Meanwhile, the whole time Ash was staring rigidly forward and pretending like none of this was happening. But she definitely started playing quieter, and less. Which was probably an improvement, because the rest of the rhythm section sounded great. But now there was this sort of combative anxious atmosphere in the room because someone had gotten yelled at.

At the very end it was Ash's turn to solo. She soloed in E.

If you don't know music, just know that if the band is playing in F but you're playing in E, it's going to sound simultaneously very whimsical and very horrible. It's basically a horror movie starring the Muppets.

The bassist and pianist didn't know what to do. The pianist started doing these minimalist stabs that were not really key-specific, and the bassist stayed in F but looked terrified.

It was a huge enough train wreck that Don tried to intervene.

“F,” he called out. “Ashley. It's a blues in F.”

But she just shut her eyes and bore down on her solo, which also was not really a jazz solo, or even a solo at all. It was really just a bunch of gritty Delta blues comping, over which ideally a grizzled old man would be singing about how some woman had ruined his entire existence and now he lived in the river and had no shoes.

Don clearly felt obligated to continue trying to help.

“Now B-flat,” he said. “Sweetie, you're on B-flat now. The four of F.”

But she didn't acknowledge him in any way, unless it was via the quiet wordless grumbling she had begun to do, while continuing to crank out Delta blues with her eyes closed.

“Back to F,” he said. He started looking at the rest of us and shrugging and shaking his head, like he was apologizing to us for what she was doing, and I fantasized about slapping him around, or just if a giant hawk showed up and started eating him.

At the turnaround, he lost his patience. “Okay,” he said. “Band. Stop. I gotta stop you guys. Ashley? Hey. Ashley. Honey, I need you to stop.”

The band stopped. Ash continued for a bar or two, then also stopped. She refused to make eye contact with Don or say anything.

“Hey,” he said, kind of quietly and soothingly. “What just happened? What was that?”

Excruciating silence.

“You knew we were in F. I heard you comping in F. So why would you solo in E?”

Even more gut-twisting silence.

“Sweetie, it's not a rhetorical question. I'm not trying to embarrass you. I actually just want to know why you soloed in E.”

“Because she wanted to solo in E,” Corey kind of yelled.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I am not talking to you,” Don said to Corey.

“Why didn't the
band
switch?” Corey wanted to know. “Shouldn't the band follow the soloist?”

“Wrong, and I will talk to you in a second. Right now, I'm talking to Ashley.”

“I gotta go,” said Ash abruptly, and she stood and started packing up her stuff.

But it didn't seem like she was doing it out of embarrassment. It sort of seemed like her attitude was, she had finished what she had come to practice to do, i.e., take two-thirds of an alienating solo in the wrong key, and now that she had accomplished that, it was time to leave.

Some of the horn players started muttering to one another.

Don pretended to try to stop her from leaving. “Oh,” he said. “Now, hold on. You don't have to leave. Hey.”

“Band should've switched,” said Corey.

“Yeah,” I said again.

“
Wrong
,” said Don again. “Honey, you sure you want to leave?”

She looked at him with a completely blank look on her face, except for her perpetual-skepticism-expressing eyebrows. She nodded and butted the door open with her shoulder.

“Okay,” said Don. “Go hit the practice room. Brush up on the basics. And hey.”

But the door had closed before he could say whatever piece of encouragement he was about to say.

“Band should've switched,” said Corey again.

“You want to leave, too?” asked Don.

Corey looked at Don, then me, then Don again.

“Yeah,” said Corey. “We both want to leave.”

Oof, I thought.

“We gotta go do stuff, unfortunately,” I explained.

“No,” said Corey. “We don't have to go do
anything
. The only reason we're leaving is that this is
bullshit
.”

This did not really give me too many rhetorical options, so I tried to salvage the situation with, “All right all right.”

“I'll be outside,” said Corey to me. And then he left.

It would have been nice to make a quick dramatic exit. But first I had to pack up my stuff. So I did that, trying for brisk defiance but probably accomplishing something more like panicky haste. The various groups of horn players were mumbling to one another and Don was gazing at me with mostly just pity.

“Kid, you don't have to leave just because your friend told you to,” he said.

This was an ideal time for a biting retort, except that it wasn't. Because deep down I knew we were being melodramatic and ridiculous, and the real reason we were leaving was that we just didn't want to be there.

And also obviously a little bit because there was a girl.

7.
THE THREE OF US BOND OVER DICK HARM AND THEN PLAY ACTUAL MUSIC