The Haters (22 page)

Even if she wasn't done with us as a band, I was starting to think, maybe she should be. Maybe we didn't deserve to be in a band with her. She belonged to a different world than we did. We belonged at jazz camp. We belonged with the Adams and Tims of the world. If everything was in its right place, we'd be calling each other “cat” and “froond” and wearing filigreed vests made out of alligator skin. And Ash would be onstage at clubs and concert halls. She'd be in front of a real band playing huge music for real people. And the longer we tried to stay with her, the more we were holding her back and dragging her down, and it was shitty of us to do that.

It was shitty of us, I couldn't help thinking, it was just super selfish and shitty, and a couple of times on the highway I found myself relaxing my foot on the gas pedal, and letting Cookie and Ash start disappearing past the cars in front of me.

I was just thinking, I could make this easy for everyone right now, and let their pickup truck escape into the distance, and we
could turn around and start the long drive back to Pennsylvania, or turn ourselves in to the police, or whatever.

But each time I did that, I thought,
Wes, that would be a mistake
.

Because yeah. Maybe Ash doesn't want you tagging along
.

But what if Cookie actually turns out to be a psychopath rapist murderer
.

I couldn't dismiss this thought. I was thinking,
Wes, you can't ignore that there is something kind of off about this dude. He might try to pull some shit. And if he does, you need to be there to stop it. You
and
Corey
.

Although who knows how much help Corey is going to be
.

Look at him trying to be passed out on that seat. He's snoring but he still seems to be awake somehow. His eyes are a little bit open and he keeps flopping around in an irritable panic
.

How long has it been since he last brushed his teeth? Remember that time he once tried to argue that you don't need to brush as long as you floss? Man
.

Poor Corey
.

I was sitting there in the driver's seat not quite letting the pickup truck get away and looking over at Corey sometimes to make sure he wasn't dead or peeing again, and in addition to the stuff about Cookie, I was wondering whether Ash would be a little more understanding if she knew Corey's family actually was kind of poor.

I mean, “poor” can mean a lot of things. Corey's family was
the kind of poor where you'd forget they were poor until something would happen to remind you of it, like they wouldn't replace a broken pane of glass for a while if it was the summer or a part of the house that didn't face the street. Or all of a sudden they just wouldn't be able to use their car, because they didn't have two thousand dollars to spend on a new transmission to get the Check Engine light to turn off to get the car to pass inspection. Or they'd invite your parents over for dinner, and you'd watch the way your mom ate the cheese from the predinner cheese plate. The same bright-orange mostly salt-flavored cheese that you and Corey would eat a bunch of in the basement. You'd watch your mom pick at it, and you would just know from her eyes that she was thinking,
wow, this is the most budget cheese there is
, this pity that she was trying to hide and that you really hoped you were the only one who could see.

Here's the kind of poor they are. Both of his parents are musicians. His dad is a pianist who wanted to be Elvis Costello
and
Stephen Sondheim simultaneously and wrote a few unproduced musicals and led a couple of super hurting piano-driven bands and just in general never made it. And at the same time he doesn't like teaching piano and has had a huge amount of trouble holding down a job outside of music, because everywhere he goes he feels like his bosses are evil or stupid. This is a recurring thing that you pick up on if you're Corey's friend and you're paying attention. And Corey's mom is a jazz singer who got certified as an accountant when Corey was ten, but she also has trouble finding work, partly because she got started so late and partly because she just really hates being an accountant. She'll even complain about it to you,
Corey's random teenage friend, when she's picking you guys up from band practice. So you know she just hates the hell out of it. And then Corey's older sister, Becca, was born seven weeks premature and didn't get great treatment right away and probably as a result but also maybe just genetically she's got cerebral palsy. I mean, she's really smart and with it and everything, but she has a huge hitch in her walk and balance problems and her speech is kind of smashed together and hard to understand, and she's needed a lot of special medical attention and physical therapy her whole life.

So, bottom line, it's a family with a super unstable income, frequent periods of no health insurance, and crazy medical bills, and so they're definitely poor, like they definitely get food stamps, and bill collectors are constantly calling their house, and Corey's drums are all hand-me-downs from his uncle, and the only vacations they take are just to Corey's mom's parents' house in Delaware where they sleep on cots in the living room and basement, and maybe if Ash knew all that, she'd be a little more understanding about why Corey lit into her for being rich and, I don't know, hopefully you are, too.

That's the only reason I'm bringing it up. I sort of wish you didn't know any of it. It's the same with telling people I'm adopted. It's just, now you're thinking about
poor
, and that's different from thinking about
Corey
.

I liked it better when you knew Corey's parents only as these oppressively caring doglike people who love their son so much that they have to constantly thwart his efforts to leave his own house. Because now instead you're thinking of them as these semi-deadbeat
failed musicians whose debt is probably going to ruin Corey's life.

Which might be true. But not as important. I think, anyway.

Anyway, I trailed that stupid pickup truck for three stupid hours, with no stops or human companionship because Corey was pretending to be dead the entire time, and I managed not to lose them, and eventually we took an access road and came to a rest on a little unpaved meadow in front of a giant house, near a handpainted sign that said
PINEFIELD
.

WES: corey

COREY:

WES: we're here man

COREY:

WES: hey corey

COREY:

WES: corey

COREY: WUNGH

WES: we're here

COREY: fuu uu u ung

WES: we're at the place

COREY: fuuucckkh h

26.
MEET THE PRITCHARDS

The house was huge and weird. It was clearly meant to look venerable and ancient, with slabby chunky stone and elaborate roof tile, but there was just something off about its shape and proportions. The windows were cartoonishly big, and the various pieces of roof were at unnecessarily crazy angles to one another. Also it was too new looking somehow. It looked like an old Scottish castle got married to a reality-TV mansion who was just way too young for it, like as a third or fourth marriage, and this was their awkward kid.

Anyway, we all got out of the cars and stood in that field and looked at one another. I could hear some muffled thumping coming from inside the house.

“Great driving, man,” Cookie told me. Something about him was still off. More off than before, even. “I mean we was up there just talking songs and music and
life
and the rest of it and getting lost in conversation, and I'd just completely forget you was back there, and then I'd think, ho, damn, I'm supposed to be guiding those two little Pennsylvania dudes, oh no, did I lose 'em, but each time I look in my little mirror there you was, and I'd go, ha ha, well
damn
, the boys are still
hot on my tail, God bless 'em, so great little piece a driving.”

I looked at Ash. Something about her was off, too. Her eyes were cloudy, and she couldn't get her mouth all the way closed.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don't even worry about it, little buddy,” said Cookie, “don't you even worry, and
you
need some Gatorade, Corey my man, that'll fix you right up, let's get you in the house get some Gatorade into you, and ohhhhh NO. Ha HA. Look out.”

Corey and I turned.

A bunch of people were slowly marching out of the house with musical instruments.

Wordlessly, we stood there and watched them approach us.

We would later learn that this was not any kind of organized band. It was just a group of random inhabitants of the house who were having a spontaneous living-room jam session and then saw us and decided to get up and walk out of the house to greet us in the form of continuing to jam.

The group included a guy who was probably Cookie's dad and the owner of the house. So that made this greeting feel a little more ceremonial and legit.

Nonetheless, this was not a band band. Like it wasn't the kind of band you would be able to look up on Wikipedia. Although who knows. People put all kinds of obscure stuff on Wikipedia.

List of the Band of People Slowly Marching Out of Cookie's Dad's House to Greet Us band members

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Band of People Slowly Marching Out of Cookie's Dad's House to Greet Us is a more-or-less-completely-for-shit American
acoustic jam band
that formed spontaneously in a house outside
Clarksdale
,
Mississippi
, in 2016 and immediately disbanded afterward because it wasn't actually a band at all. It was just a random jam session that Wes mistook for a band. But we still put it on Wikipedia because Wikipedia is an attempt to centralize all human knowledge, and that is incredibly badass and we take that shit for granted a lot of the time.
^[?]

Current members
^[edit]

Probably Cookie's dad
^[edit]

Instruments:
lead guitar
,
chanting

The guy that Wes assumed was probably Cookie's dad was a member of the original TBOPSMOOCDHTGU. He wore loose-fitting clothing, his body was the perfectly round shape of a giant egg, and his beard was like a bristly steel-wool lifeboat that his head was sitting in. His guitar playing consisted of nonstop technically proficient soloing, which he doubled by chanting gibberish in a gentle, reasonable tone of voice. It was his gentle but undeniable charisma that made Wes assume that he was Cookie's dad, which
indeed it turned out he was. His favorite gibberish syllables were “wuzza” and “fuh-
gee
.”
^[1]

A tall spindly man of roughly the same age
^[edit]

Instruments:
rhythm guitar

The other guitarist was a tall spindly man who was way less good at guitar. He was kind of frantically strumming the only chords he seemed to know, which were
A major
and
E minor
. He was just toggling back and forth between them endlessly. It was like watching a guy playing unwinnable ping-pong against himself.
^[2]

A curly-headed shirtless guy in his twenties or so
^[edit]

Instruments:
recorder

There was one chubby curly-headed dude playing a recorder, wearing no shirt at all, and skipping and galloping playfully from side to side like a hooved figure from Greek mythology, e.g., Zacchus, the Greek God of Being a Shameless Jackass.
^[3]

An all-female percussion section
^[edit]

Instruments:
tambourine
,
maracas
, Uruguayan
candombe drum, gong

The percussion section was four women who varied in both age and musical skill. The youngest, about fifteen, holding a tambourine, seemed to be trying to deconstruct the very notion of rhythm itself. The oldest, maybe thirty or forty, was also not really on top of things rhythmically, in that she could not get all the way through rippling her gong without collapsing in laughter like a maniac. But the college-age girl on the candombe drum was
keeping that shit together. And then the other who-knows-how-old woman was contributing quietly on the maracas, but for her it was mostly about shuffling around with her elbows above her head and her arms flailing hither and thither like tree branches in the wind. Sources
^[?]
have estimated the per-capita number of flowers in this rhythm section's hair at, conservatively, a billion.
^[4]

Former members
^[edit]

A 100% naked guy who was passed out near the front entrance on a couch under some tablas
^[edit]

Instruments:
tablas

This guy was a member of the original TBOPSMOOCDHTGU. He left the band in 2016 due to being completely passed out naked on a couch under some tablas.
^[5]

References
^[edit]

1, 2, 3, 4, 5. ^ your memory, from which you will never be able to erase any of this, especially the sight of a naked passed-out dude just chilling under some tablas and no one is freaking out or even acting like this is a big deal

As far as I could tell, it wasn't anyone's birthday, or the Super Bowl, or any other reason to have thirty people at one house. But as Cookie led us on a little tour, we could not help but notice that there were, minimum, thirty people in there. Maybe closer to fifty. I had a lot of questions that I didn't ask. Were all of them related to Cookie? How many of them lived there permanently? And where did they all sleep? Normally, the answer to this question would be in the
rooms that are designated for sleeping. But that was not an option in this house. Because it was a house of zero bedrooms, and in fact, very few rooms at all.

You're probably thinking, Wes. That's impossible. A house is nothing
but
rooms. Yeah. I know. But basically every roomlike space in this house flowed into the next, through eight-foot-wide doorless entrances. Even the closets had no doors at all. So it was sort of all one big aboveground rabbit warren.