The Haters (8 page)

“Nawww,” I said feebly. “Come on.”

“Yeah,” said Ash. “‘Air Horse'? Yeah. Close your eyes. It's clearly two hipstery dudes. One of them has a curly Jew 'fro like the guy who paints happy trees on public television. The other is a fat pale redhead. His stomach is bulging out from under the bottom of a very small pink T-shirt with a Pegasus on it. That's Air Horse. And you'd never go see them.”

We were quiet.

“Air
Wolf
,” I tried.

“YES,” shouted Corey.

“Air Wolf is the exact same band except maybe there's also an even fatter guy playing tenor sax,” said Ash.

“DAMN IT,” shouted Corey.

“That's best case,” mused Ash. “Actually, Air Wolf is probably just a third-rate metal band who found each other on Craigslist.”

“Air Wolf's probably like eight bands already, so let's look them up,” said Corey.

“Corey, you don't have your phone.”

There was a brief silence from the backseat.

“That's right,” said Corey, trying to sound amped. “And I am
amped
about not having my phone.”

“Give me a name that describes a band that I would actually want to go see,” Ash told us, “and we can go with that name. But I don't think you guys have one.”

The gauntlet had been thrown down. We were racking our brains for a name that Ash couldn't destroy.

We were up against an even bigger hater than ourselves, and I think it's safe to say that both of our hearts were sick with fear.

“I got one,” said Corey.

“I'm listening,” said Ash.

“Ash and the Shitheads.”

“Nope.”

“Yeah. I know it's not good. But I can't figure out why.”

“Here's one reason why it's not good. Swear words in the name tend to mean no one in the band has any idea how to actually play their instrument. Everyone met at like a summer art program and decided they were going to suddenly form a band, despite never having played an instrument before, and now they're Ash and the Shitheads. They sit around smoking
Camel Lights and trying to convince each other that it's cool that they sound terrible.”

I could actually hear Corey trying to think.

Eventually he said, “What if you pronounced it, Shuh-theeds? Is that still not good? Ash and the Shuh-theeds.”

“That's probably worse.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Ash and the . . . Burnouts,” I said.

“Jesus,” said Ash. “No.”

“Fine, but it's at least better than Ash and the Shuh-theeds.”

“No. No, it definitely is not. Ash and the Burnouts is the worst one so far.”

“It's not the worst
so far
.”

“It's even worse than Air Horse. Because the best-case scenario for Ash and the Burnouts is, they play Earth, Wind & Fire covers at corporate events. That's best case.”

“I agree but why,” said Corey.

“You guys have to stop with Name and the Somethings,” said Ash, “Because that's never good. That formula is just played out and it's never coming back. But when you add a pun in there, I mean, come on.
Ash?
And the
Burnouts
? They don't even pretend to have self-respect. They're a cover band, and they've opened every performance they've ever done with ‘Celebration' by Kool & the Gang.”

“Wes loves that song,” announced Corey.

“No I don't.”

“You did in eighth grade though.”

“Corey. Shut the hell up.”

“The song's not the problem,” Ash said. “Ash and the Burnouts playing that song is the problem.”

We kept lobbing band names at her, but it wasn't because we actually thought any of those names would work. It was just amazing to see a hater of her caliber in action. It was like watching a great athlete ferociously dunking on people.

Ensign:
“That's a prog-rock band with too many members. They all take turns singing and none of them is any good. The drummer has one of those huge, three-story rigs where it's kind of like he's in a hamster ball. Halfway into their first song, they're playing something in seventeen, or some other horrible time signature, and everyone has left the dance floor and is never coming back.”

Thundergarment:
“All right. That name is sort of likable, but in a coked-up way that is actually completely
un
likable. This is a punk-pop band that is the less-good version of one of those angsty bands where one of the members is famous for being something other than a musician, like an actor or a soccer player or whatever, and then
that
band is the way-less-good version of, I guess, Fall Out Boy or Imagine Dragons or whatever cokey emo thing. So basically Thundergarment is fifth-rate Blink-182.”

The Jacobins:
“Acoustic guitars . . . way too precise rhyme structures . . . uh, contrived love metaphors using like astrophysics . . . and two lead singers who are married to each other. They met at their day job at Google, which they still have. This band has a
pathological fear of kicking even a little bit of ass, and NPR brings them into their studio every four days.”

The Magical Singing Boner:
“Ugh.”

What The . . . ?!:
“Okay. I do like this name, but we can never use it, because it can only belong to a band that sucks. Because the unnecessarily elaborate punctuation means this is a band pretending to be way more experimental and interesting than it actually is. At heart, this is a disco band that's ashamed of itself. So it's got like harpsichords and tablas and, I don't know, a bass clarinet. But that is all a smoke screen for entry-level disco. Or like prog disco. It wouldn't be a bad name except that it dooms you to being terrible forever.”

Ramos Wahl & Doolittle:
“Stoner organ trio, dropped out of Juilliard, now they open for Phish, none of their songs has words or is shorter than ten minutes, and a decade from now they'll have given up music completely and instead be a pickle company.”

The Magical Singing Dick Surplus:
“Great. Ash Ramos Three it is.”

By 5
A.M.
the sun was starting to come up and Corey was asleep. Ash and I left him in the car at a rest stop and committed what would be the first of many irresponsible food purchases. We bought a twenty-four-pack of Coke, a twenty-four-pack of Mountain Dew, and family-size bags of every varietal of Airheads,
Skittles, Doritos, and Dale's, an off-brand potato chip whose flavors were just REGULAR, ONION, CELERY, and BEEF. I made an effort to get stuff without nuts in it, because Corey is fatally allergic to certain kinds of nut, and I was pretty sure Corey had left his EpiPen in Shippensburg.

The CELERY chips were my favorite. The BEEF chips had a taste that I would categorize as like a locker room, but for dogs.

Back at the car, I stacked everything on top of Corey's sleeping body, hoping he would wake up and freak out. But he just opened his eyes, nodded at us in a strangely authoritative way, and closed them again.

I offered to drive and Ash accepted.

“Are you guys gay,” she said when we were a few miles down the road.

“What?” I said. “Are
we
gay? No. Of course not.”

“Fuck you ‘of course not,'” she said. “I get to ask if you're gay. You act like you're married. And you talk about your dicks a lot.”

“What do you mean, act like we're married.”

“You do a lot of married-couple-type bickering. It's like you guys are sick of each other but can't escape.”

It felt wrong to say that he's like my brother, or basically we're each other's dog. Or to say, in ninth grade a kid slide-tackled me pretty hard during pickup soccer and I started crying and Corey decided to go bananas and get way up in that kid's face for messing with the jazz band rhythm section, making crazy eyes and bellowing that that kid was about to have a
big
motherfucking problem, and it probably should have been weird
between us afterward, like I was a woman who got mugged in an alley and he was Batman, but somehow instead it cemented our doggy brotherly bond.

The best I could do was, “Real gay dudes don't talk about harming their dicks.”

She shrugged. I glanced over at her. She looked back at me. We made kind of a lot of eye contact. I didn't know what to do.

“You're in two lanes,” she said, and I was, so I dealt with that in hopefully a calm and commanding way, causing Corey to make an irritable groaning noise.

It's impossible to talk about how a girl is hot without sounding gross or embarrassing, but here's how she was hot. She was just very, very confident. I mean, she was also pretty and vaguely athletic and stuff, but the main thing was she had this way of carrying herself with her chin tilted up and her shoulders kind of back in this way that was like, yeah, I have kind of small probably great-looking boobs and in general am just really hot, and if you don't agree, then definitely go fuck yourself. Somehow all of that was conveyed by how she carried herself. It was hot. Okay. I'll shut up.

“What about you? Are you gay?” I said, in a transparent attempt to turn the tables.

“I used to think I was gay,” she said. “Now I think I'm not.”

“Why,” I said.

“Why which.”

“Uh, why both.”

“I thought maybe I was gay because I didn't want to hook
up with boys. But after a while I realized I didn't want to hook up with girls, either.”

“Mmmm,” I said. I was both disappointed and extremely interested in hearing more. But I didn't want to tip my hand. So I was attempting to say “Mmmm” in a way that would convey the idea of, “Cool. Thanks for telling me this. By the way, this is no big deal. Girls tell me about their evolving sexuality all the time.”

“You've always liked girls, huh,” she said, and turned to me, and in my peripheral vision I could tell she was looking at me in this careful, studying way, and I tried to make a face of relaxed uninterestedness, but it was probably more the face of someone in a coma.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Have you hooked up with a bunch of girls?”

“I wouldn't say a bunch.”

“How many would you say.”

“Uhhhhhh.”

I probably spent a few too many seconds pretending to count how many fake hookups.

“Zero,” she said.

“No. Hang on. I'm counting.”

“It's fine if it's zero,” she said. “We're in a band. We have to be open with each other or this isn't going to work.”

“It's just embarrassing saying zero,” I kind of blurted. I hated the sound of my voice. I sounded like a little kid.

“Hey,” she said. I looked over at her. She had a look on her face that I couldn't really classify. “Zero's not bad. Zero means
someone gets to be your first. That's a good thing to have. Once you've lost it, you'll want it back.”

“I definitely won't,” I told her.

“You're in two lanes again,” she said, and I was.

“What if you drove not like a herb,” mumbled Corey from the backseat.

By 6
A.M.
the sun was above the horizon. The Virginia landscape looked more or less identical to the Pennsylvania landscape except maybe the trees were fluffier. Every five minutes I found myself reaching for my phone, and it wasn't there, and I felt a little bit like my mind was disintegrating.

“How come Corey's parents are going to freak out but not yours,” Ash said.

“Wes has the greatest parents of all time,” Corey announced. “They probably won't even notice he's gone.”

“Nnnnnnnope,” I said. I was trying to sound amped about it.

11.
MY PARENTS VERSUS COREY'S PARENTS

Here's the difference between my parents and Corey's parents. Corey has never once successfully left his own house without at least a twenty-minute interrogation by one or both of his parents. I have been present for a lot of these interrogations. They don't vary a lot in substance or tone. I can reproduce the beginning of one here basically verbatim from memory.