The Haters (15 page)

“Well, one thing's for sure,” said Corey.

We waited for him to tell us what that thing was.

“We would not be dealing with this shit if we were at a Motel 6,” Corey said.

“Jesus, Corey,” said Ash.

“What.”

“‘This shit'? We wouldn't be dealing with ‘this shit'?”

“Yeah. We wouldn't be intruding on other people's shit. Why the fuck can't I say that.”

“They're the ones dealing with serious shit. Not us.”

“Yeah, good point, except I'm already making that point, so fuck you, because my whole thing is, we're making it worse by being here, and on top of that at least I'm trying to engage people instead of being silent and weird.”

“Oh right. By talking about how Wes's dick needs medical attention. And telling Charlize she looks like a thirty-three-year-old.”

“That is called flirting, and when a young dude flirts with an older woman, that is always her favorite shit, ever, a million percent of the time.”

“Yeah. You really know a lot about what older women like.”

“Everyone in that house thinks you're a fucking sociopath, and they're probably right.”

“BOTH OF YOU QUIT DICKING ON EACH OTHER,” I said.

They stared at me.

I was thinking, maybe Ed was right. Maybe I actually
was
the leader of this band.

“I know you guys hooked up last night. And now it's weird for whatever reason. But at least try to be cool about it. Because we're a fucking band. And that's the most important thing. So we got to make this shit work.”

Ash nodded kind of sullenly. Corey just stared at me. There
was no way either one could actually be the leader of any kind of group, I was realizing. They were too inside their own heads.

“You guys both agree that family is in there dealing with some way heavier shit,” I said. “So what is there to even argue about? Can we not just all agree that we don't get to be fuckups right now? And we need to have our shit together?”

Corey hiked up his eyebrows and turned to the ground so he could stare at it.

“Look, man,” I said to him. “We know what we're capable of. We know we can make some great music. So what that means is, we can give this family a really cool gift tonight, at a time when they could really use it, if we just focus up and let go of all this negative shit and
be a band
.”

Corey exhaled hard through his nose. Then he said, “Awwww yeah.”

But he gave it the melody of someone walking through a front door and saying, “Anybody home?” So it was like, “Awwwww yeah??”

It was a weird good thing. And it was weird and good enough that Ash chuckled at it.

A small part of me was jealous. But mostly I was amped.

“Let's fucking do this,” said Ash. “Let's do it now.”

18.
WE WERE THIS CLOSE TO DOING A MAROON FIVE COVER THAT WE HADN'T EVEN PRACTICED

We set up, tuned, and started playing. For the first couple of songs we had no audience. But as we started up on our third song, the door opened and Little Ed came out.

He nodded at us, lit a cigarette, and sat on the steps.

The song we were playing was “If You Love Your Dog So Much, Why Don't You Fuck Him.”

He said nothing. He just watched us and took long, exhausted drags on his cigarette.

Pretty soon, more family members opened the door and joined him and watched us play.

We were locked in. We were sounding pretty good.

But I was feeling increasingly anxious about the song we were playing.

The chorus was:

If you love your dog so much

Why don't you fuck him

I bet he would love it

At least you should suck his dick

It is going to be pretty hard to describe the facial expressions of the family members that were the audience to this song.

I guess I would say, imagine you've just learned something possibly really terrible about your mom's health, except she doesn't want you to think it's that terrible, so maybe you're arguing with her and maybe you're just bottling it all up. Okay. So that's super heavy, emotion-wise. It's really hard. All right. Now imagine, you go outside, and there are three kids out there trying to cheer you up by playing a song. But that song is about fucking a dog.

The facial expression that this would cause to happen on your face is probably one of the ones that we saw that evening.

The kids tried to come out and listen, too, but the moms physically forced them to go back into the house.

“
Oh
no,” they yelled. “
Nuh
uh. This is not for your ears.”

We kept playing the song, and the family kept sitting there listening to it. Fortunately, the verse was completely unintelligible. But the chorus was not. It was unmistakably a recommendation that you have sex with your dog, or at least suck his dick.

Eventually, we finished. There was a small amount of ragged applause. Most of it came from a few guys out on the street who had gathered up against the fence.

“Thank you,” announced Corey. “We are, What The . . . ?!”

Unsurprisingly, this announcement did not make the audience any less alienated or confused by us.

“That's our name,” clarified Corey. “What The . . . ?!”

Again, nothing was clarified. Ash squeezed her eyes shut.

Next on our setlist was “Trees Are Eating My Dad Right Now Pt.1.” But I stopped Corey before he could count us off.

“This song about a dead parent is not a good song to play at this time,” I said.

“What do you think we should play,” Ash asked.

I was realizing another thing: Even if we were playing it really well, our music had serious limitations, as far as being something you would want to play for people. And one of those limitations was, if people needed to be comforted or put at ease, our music was not going to accomplish that. It was kind of like asking the craziest possible dog to be one of those hospital comfort dogs. He's not going to sit there all docile so a frail kid with a shaved head can gently stroke his ears. No. What he's going to do is bark insanely, smush his nose into that kid's junk, and then gallop out the door in a total panic. That was the dog we were being.

“‘Sex Sucks,'” suggested Corey.

“‘Roger Federer,'” countered Ash.

“The one about how God is just a mindless robot without a conscience,” said Corey.

“Consciousness.”

“That's what I said.”

“No. It's not.”

“Hey band,” called out one of Ed and Charlize's sons, a guy named Quincy.

We looked up.

“Do y'all know ‘Free Bird,'” he asked.

Next to him, Little Ed was shaking his head. But it was from giggling.

The giggle kind of spread through the group. And suddenly some of the tension sort of melted away.

Other suggestions started coming in and they were all joke suggestions.

“‘Party in the USA.'”

“‘Moves Like Jagger.'”

“‘You Don't Know You're Beautiful.' Because you got some One Direction fans in the crowd tonight.”

Each suggestion was setting off a bigger collective giggle than the last. Ash and Corey were both looking at me. I was the leader of the band. I was frantically brainstorming stuff.

Or at least I was trying to. Because I also had the a-guy-whistling-plus-party-guitar intro to “Moves Like Jagger” ricocheting around in there, and it was kind of obliterating every other thought that I had.

I started to say to Ash and Corey, “How well do you guys actually think you know ‘Moves Like Jagger,'” when I heard one of the fence dudes call, “Ed, you think maybe
we
could do a couple songs?”

We looked at the fence dude. Then we looked at Ed.

Ed's eyes were kind of red and painful looking. But he smiled and said, “Ask the kids.”

We let them. I mean, of course we did. They weren't pros or anything, but I guess they played together at church, and they did some gospel and some blues and a lot of just messing around and wandering from groove to groove, and sometimes a dude would get up and rap a little bit over it, and all of it sounded good. I mean, they weren't breaking any new ground or shredding your face off. But it was music that made you relax, and music you
could dance to, and pretty soon that's what people were doing in Ed and Charlize's yard, and Ash and Corey and I sat to one side and just watched it and took mental notes and stuff.

Corey managed to drink four different beers in about an hour. Then he got up, immediately sat back down, got back up, and walked very rapidly into the house, and that was the last we saw of him.

I wasn't drinking. Ash was, but slowly. We didn't really say anything to each other. We just watched the church band play while mosquitoes ravaged our flesh.

At some point the church bassist got called back home by his wife.

“Fugitive!” Ed called out, standing by the band. “Where is our fugitive bass player.”

I walked up there.

“Do you know ‘Mustang Sally,'” he asked me, and winked, and walked over to the back porch to pull Charlize out into the yard.

The drummer was fun to play with. He had a huge backbeat and a way of staring at you with his mouth open like he was seeing through your head all the way to space, or God. The guitarist was fine, too. His singing was a little showy and vibrato-heavy. But his playing was super precise and easy to follow.

The best part was obviously watching Ed and Charlize boogie up and down the backyard with Ed mouthing along to the song and dipping Charlize and twirling her around and Charlize's face completely transformed with this tight O-shaped smile and these
hitched-up eyebrows that were sort of like,
who is this man who is dancing with me, I've never met him before in my life, I've got my guard up but I think maybe I'm in love
.

I looked over at Ash a couple of times and her face was in the shadows, but it looked like she might have been smiling, too.

It turned out Corey passed out in the second-floor bathroom, woke up, threw up, and immediately went to his room and passed out on his bed, which was where we found him. We wiped the excess barf off of his mouth, and then I went into my room, and Ash followed me in there and sat next to me on my bed.

I had no idea what was going to happen next.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

Outside someone not very good had taken over on bass and the band had acquired a trumpet and a harmonica.

“Sorry for hooking up with Corey,” she said.

“I thought you didn't want to hook up with boys,” I said.

She shrugged, kind of staring me down.

“It reminded me why I don't,” she said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. It wasn't a good hookup.”

The harmonica playing was completely for shit. The trumpet sounded okay but sleepy.

“What do you mean.”

“I mean, literally all it was was, he went down on me for like half an hour.”

“Oh.”

“But he wasn't good at it.”

“Oh.”

“And by the time I got him to stop, he was so on edge that he lost his hard-on and couldn't get it back. So we just called it quits and went to sleep.”

“Okay,” I said.

I felt horrible for Corey. But I also felt pretty good that their hookup was such a disaster. It put Corey back on my level somehow. I mean, I wasn't happy about it. I guess I was just kind of relieved.

The room was Quincy's old room. There were trophies and pictures of him everywhere. There was a painting he did of himself playing football.

“All boys need to know this. Never go down on a girl unless you actually like to go down on girls. If you're just doing it because you feel like you have to, and you have no idea what you're doing, it's just not gonna work out.”

“Right, right.”

“Your approach can't be, I'm going to jam my tongue in here until you come. If that's your attitude, you need to step back and figure some shit out.”

The painting Quincy did of his team was one of those paintings where everybody's head and body are facing in completely different directions, and every eye is just a black circle in a brown circle in a white football-shaped circle.

“But why'd you hook up with him in the first place?” I said.

Ash shrugged again. She looked at me.

“Sometimes I get lonely,” she said.

That sentence kind of changed everything and I became a different person for a while. I leaned in and kissed her. I pulled back and she looked at me. And then she leaned in and kissed me and I kissed her back and that's what we did for I don't know how long.

I mean, I became a different person in the sense of what I
wanted
to do was press my mouth into her mouth as hard as I possibly could and smash my body into her body and just in general completely spaz out and flail around because my heart was beating out of control and every muscle in my body was on the verge of seizing up completely, but I didn't do that. I basically just kissed her as slowly as possible. Because I knew it could end at any time, but if I slowed it down, then it would last as long as I could make it.

So I was kissing her and she was kissing me and her hands were up my shirt and on my skin, but it was kind of clear that it didn't mean This Is the Part Before We Have Sex. It just meant Sometimes I Get Lonely. But that was okay with me. Actually, I was realizing it was probably the thing I was telling her, too.

Her lips were kind of cool on my lips. They felt softer and smaller than I thought they'd feel and they had that hot-summer kind of spit-smell taste. My hands were on her waist and her back and her shoulders and touching her skin felt like licking ice cream.

“Okay,” she said, meaning stop, obviously sooner than I wanted.

But she didn't leave my room. Instead we sat cross-legged on
the bed, facing each other. It was at least midnight. Outside an old-sounding woman had started yelling at the party from her window.