The Haters
We probably should have stopped after our first song. We definitely should have stopped after a completely improvised fifteen-minute blues during which two different children started crying. And we even more should have stopped when an angry old dude came over during “Sex Plague” and yelled at us over and over, for two entire choruses and a verse, “This isn’t music!! THIS ISN’T MUSIC!!!”
So it was a traumatizing forty-five minutes. For the audience, sure, but I think even more for us. When it was over, no one applauded and multiple people loudly thanked God.
“I just came here for my moo shu,” yelled the old dude, aiming his head around in search of people who agreed with him. “I didn’t come here for that. I came for the moo shu and that’s it.”
The only person who thought we were any good was Lucy, and actually in retrospect she was almost definitely just fucking with us.
“You kids have real talent!” she came over to tell us as we were packing up. “Real emotion! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
But she also gave us a three-for-two deal at the buffet. So we hung around for twenty minutes, eating noodles and General Gao’s chicken and saying little. Ash was stony-faced. Corey kept sighing miserably.
At least it felt like Ash was one of us again.
ASH: wes
WES: what
ASH: stop saying that
COREY: for real
WES: stop saying what
ASH: “all right all right”
COREY: yeah you’re muttering it like an insane person
WES: oh
ASH: you’ve said it like a billion times
WES: i wasn’t even aware that i was saying anything
ASH: well you were so stop
COREY: why the fuck were you saying it so much
WES: i guess it’s a reflex
COREY: why would you have that as a reflex though
WES: it’s just like a thing to say to make peace or build consensus
COREY:
ASH:
WES: like in times of difficulty
COREY: i am going to kill myself
We loaded up Ash’s car and managed to drive back to the hotel without getting lost or having a horrific accident.
It would make sense if we were all consumed with terrible shame upon entering our over-the-top lavish hotel room, with its hot tub and very rich-feeling carpet and enormous bed and panoramic views. Shame about how little we had done to earn this. But what I felt, at least, was relief. Who even knows why. It was somehow a big relief to get to hang out in this incredible room with a hot tub. I walked over and stared at the hot tub for a while.
“Fuck it,” I said, I think out loud, and without asking permission or guidance or anything, I turned on the hot tub, and it started roiling and foaming, and I stripped to my boxers while trying not to be weird about it. And after a while the water was hot, and I got in there and sat there for a while.
Obviously, on some level I was hoping that Ash was going to get in there, too. Maybe on most levels. If that meant Corey was getting in, fine. He would also be in there. I mean, getting in the hot tub wasn’t like a move. I didn’t think it was going to lead to me hooking up or anything. I just thought at least it was a chance to be in a hot tub in my underwear with a girl in her underwear, and that would be something.
But within a few minutes it was a moot point because I had passed out.
14.
A TURBULENT MORNING AT THE KNOXVILLE CLINTON
I woke up on the floor. My mouth tasted like a landfill and my neck felt like horses had been standing on it. Also, the fly of my boxers was open, because there was a full-on Code Red sleep boner awkwardly lunging out of there.
It was definitely my boner. So immediately I was wide awake and consumed with panic.
Fortunately, no one was awake to stare in disgust at the lurchy jailbreak of my sleep boner. Corey was asleep, fully clothed, on top of half of the bed. Ash was under the covers of the other half. So I ran into the bathroom, contorted myself over the toilet so that I could pee into it and not onto the wall or ceiling, laboriously peed, still had the boner, masturbated in a brisk businesslike manner into the sink with the hotel conditioner, rinsed out the sink, took a shower, and then put on clothes.
Everyone was still asleep. And I still did not have a phone. So I turned on the TV and flipped around until I found David Attenborough’s Blue Planet and watched the segment about tubeworms for probably the seventy-fifth time in my life.
Corey was next to wake up. He went straight for the bathroom.
Pretty quickly he came back out again.
COREY: wes
WES: what
COREY: what’s in the sink
WES: i don’t know
COREY:
WES: what
COREY: well i don’t know either but it looks a lot like jizz
WES:
ASH: nnnggh
COREY: wes, true or false: that’s your jizz in our sink
WES: corey stop talking so loud
COREY: wes you gotta at least clean up the sink after you’ve jizzed in it
WES: shut up i thought i did clean it
ASH: both of you shut up about wes jizzing in the sink
It turns out that rinsing isn’t always enough to get jizz all the way out of a sink. Anyway, I hastily cleaned up the rest of it, but the damage was done, and things were awkward at breakfast in the hotel buffet afterward.
But I figured it wasn’t just awkward because I had masturbated into the hotel sink. I felt like the awkwardness had just as much to do with the disgrace we had all brought upon ourselves the day before at Perfect Taste.
How had it happened? Could it really just have been the circumstances? The lack of stage or sound system? The super inappropriate audience?
My suspicion was that those factors were not it. They served only to conceal the deeper truth. And that truth was, perhaps we were awful.
You can talk about circumstance all you want. It was still us up there. It was us whose performance had constituted an atrocity against music and possibly humanity itself. Circumstance or not, we had proven ourselves capable of limitless monstrosity.
And not even the good kind of monstrosity. Not “monstrosity” in the sense of eating Roger Federer. “Monstrosity” in the sense of being so lame that it makes everyone question the very project of human life. Monstrous not like the sudden eruption of a completely ass-kicking volcano, and instead monstrous like a desert, which will also kill you, but mostly by being so monotonous and irritating that you finally decide to lie down and be eaten by a vulture. That was the kind of band that maybe we were.
And that’s what I figured we were all sitting there silently thinking. Then when Ash got up to look for coffee, it became clear that I was at least part wrong.
COREY: um
WES: what
COREY: so uh
COREY:
WES: corey what
COREY: so just so you know ash and i hooked up last night
My first reaction was, I found myself doing Corey’s signature Robert De Niro Face Scrunch. I did it for kind of a really long time.
I was overcome with something. But it wasn’t anger. I think it was more just the question, How. It was just a huge existential bafflement at how someone like Ash could ever want to hook up with someone like Corey.
COREY: so yeah
WES: all right all right
COREY: yup
WES: you guys just hooked up while i was lying there in the tub?
COREY: first we moved you out of the tub and onto the floor because we were worried you would fall in and drown
WES: hmm
COREY: you were in like a coma or something
WES: and then you guys, uh
COREY: yeah
WES: well uh
COREY:
WES: well . . . good job?
COREY:
WES:
COREY: are you mad
What I was thinking was, Look. I know I?
??m no prize. I’m somewhat walleyed. I have dumb floppy hair and no visible muscles of any kind. In general I look like I’m twelve and probably will for the next two decades. The list goes on and on. But Corey? Corey has one of those heads where the back of it extends an unnaturally long distance, like a dinosaur’s. His breath always smells like a corpse. Speaking of corpses, his hands and feet are frequently cold and purple, from terrible circulation, which I guess you shouldn’t hold against him, but I’m just saying. Also, if I look like I’m twelve, he basically is twelve, like psychologically.
WES, lying: no i’m not mad
COREY: okay
WES:
COREY: well thanks
WES: thanks for what
COREY: thanks for being cool about this
WES: sure
COREY:
WES:
COREY: i have to say you do seem a little bit mad
It was just, we had a ninety-ninth-percentile girl on our hands, in pretty much every respect, the smartest, sexiest, most interesting girl we were definitely ever going to meet, and it turned out she had a totally bizarre and crazily permissive taste in dudes and was willing to hook up with a completely subpar dude, a dude flailing around in the forties or thirties, in terms of percentile of dude, which meant I maybe had a chance with a girl like Ash. But because Corey had blundered in there first, now there was definitely no chance at all and an opportunity like this was never going to happen again. So actually I was suicidal with rage.
WES: yeah i’m a little bit mad
COREY: yeah i could tell
WES: i mean i’m mad because it’s gonna make things weird for the band now if you keep hooking up, because this band is now gonna feel like it’s a married couple on tour with this third random dude, i.e., me
COREY:
WES: but it’ll also be weird if you stop hooking up, because then you guys will probably start fighting or getting mad at each other
COREY: oh
WES: so yeah it feels like something that’ll fuck up the band no matter what and i’m a little mad about that
COREY: i figured you were mad because you wanted to hook up with her
It was like this. Have you ever suddenly realized that someone older than you, whom you’ve always assumed is smart, because they’re in a position of authority, actually isn’t very smart? Like you’re getting nachos at a Pirates game with your Uncle Bill and he tries to pay with exact change and he keeps getting it wrong? Even after the cashier has explained it to him? Until finally the huge dude behind you guys has to physically take the right change out of Uncle Bill’s hand? And you’re standing there feeling embarrassed for Uncle Bill but even more for yourself and you just want to get out of there?
Okay. Now imagine having that feeling about the entire universe. Like God and everything. That is what I felt like when I found out that Ash had decided to hook up with my idiot best friend. There was a God who was in charge, and He was just way dumber than you had ever even suspected.
COREY: i mean i’m just saying
WES: fucking drop it
COREY: okay
WES: jesus
COREY: i knew you weren’t gonna be cool about this
WES: i’m not being cool?!
COREY: yeah you’re freaking out
WES: you’re the one insisting on talking about it right now like a big freckly tampon
COREY: i’m just being honest with you
WES: i’m also being honest when i tell you that you’re being a gummy wad of used horse condoms at this time so please shut up
COREY: i knew you’d be mad
WES: yeah i’m fucking mad because you did some typical selfish impulsive destructive bullshit because you’re the dinosaur-headed goat foreskin that you are somehow always incapable of not being, so just shut the hell up
The small part of me that was able to have some perspective and not just selfishly feel horrible about Corey and Ash was feeling horrible about what I was saying to Corey. Because this was different from the ambient low-level bickering that we often do. That stuff is just riffing and no one’s out to make anyone feel bad. This was clearly something else. This was not playful dogs-romping-around behavior. This was shitty spiteful human behavior, but I couldn’t help it.
COREY: just tell me this and i will shut up
WES: tell you what, ass
COREY: would you have hooked up with her?
WES: what?
COREY: just would you have hooked up with her if she was like, wes, let’s hook up
WES:
COREY: that’s all i’m asking
WES: the answer is no
COREY: what? bullshit
WES: the answer is no so choke to death on sasquatch’s dick
That was the point at which Ash returned. So we shut up about it and resumed our awkward wordless consumption of low-quality sausage.
We tried doing Internet in the hotel’s business center, a dank, windowless, fluorescent-lit closet of ancient computers that kept asking us to update their versions of Windows. But when we tried updating one computer, it had a panic attack. So we ignored the other ones’ software update pleas, which was difficult, because they kept popping up every thirty seconds or so in front of everything you were trying to do, and also because you did feel pretty bad for these poor dinosaur computers.
ASH, reading email: fuck
WES: what
ASH: we can’t use my car anymore
WES, alarmed: what?!
COREY: hey i’m getting the software update message again
ASH: yeah we’re all getting it so just ignore it
WES: ash what’s wrong with your car?
ASH: my mom emailed me. she’s pissed off because the jazz camp people keep bothering her. she says the police are looking for my license plate and are going to pull us off the road
WES: fuck
ASH: so we should stop using my car
COREY: how do you get this message to go away
WES: click “cancel”
COREY: it won’t let me
ASH: uncheck the little box and click “cancel”
COREY: it says don’t uncheck the box
WES: uncheck it anyway
COREY: ok
WES: christ
COREY: in my defense i didn’t know you could do that
WES: so what are we going to do?
ASH: we need another car
WES: oh
ASH: with its own plates
WES: how much does a new car cost?
ASH: we don’t want a new car. we want a used one that already has a plate
COREY: the box came back
WES: corey jesus christ
ASH: get rid of the box every time, don’t update the software, and hurry up because we need to get moving
WES: how much cash do we have?
ASH: i’ll take some out today. it shouldn’t cost more than a couple thousand to get a car that works
WES: whoa
COREY: uh wes
WES: what
COREY, typing: uhhhhhh
WES: corey what
COREY: wes do you remember any of my passwords
WES: oh my god of course not
COREY: i don’t remember them either but i know they’re all super complicated
ASH: wes what have you heard from your parents
I had heard nothing. They hadn’t emailed me, or Facebooked me, or chatted me, or left me any voice messages. They had made no effort to get in touch with me at all.
Honestly, it was just embarrassing. If they had sent me something about how angry they were, or worried, or disappointed, or whatever, that would have made me feel pretty terrible. But this made me feel worse. I was sitting there thinking, Come on, guys. Even Ash’s delinquent mom is making you look bad right now.
WES: they seem very upset and worried
ASH: what did they say specifically
WES:
ASH:
WES: well i’m assuming they
’re upset and worried
ASH: oh
WES: they haven’t contacted me in any way
ASH: huh
WES: but uhhhh
ASH: that sucks. fuck them
WES: no they’re pretty busy. it’s not a big deal
ASH: no fuck them
WES: i mean i guess a little but they don’t usuall
ASH: your parents need to get it the fuck together
WES: well
ASH:
WES: i guess yeah
COREY: uh guys
ASH: what
COREY: i think i just tried to update the software
WES: you think you tried to update the software
COREY: well i did try to update it
WES: corey why the fuck would you do such a thing
ASH: we’ve been saying this whole time not to
COREY: just to get it to shut up but now it’s all fucked
WES: how are you even still alive
ASH: let’s get the fuck out of here
We did, but there was a part of me that did not want to leave that room. For one thing, it had Internet. I was really starting to feel like I was going insane without my phone. I was reaching my hand into my pocket like every thirty seconds and then realizing yet again that there was no phone in there, and every single time that realization was unbearable. I was dead to the world minus two people, and it felt like all around me terrible things were probably happening, and I didn’t even get to know about them.
Basically going through your life with no phone is like driving a car from inside a chicken suit.
But for another thing, I sort of just didn’t want to be on the run anymore, with my nitwit best friend and the girl who was choosing to hook up with him and not me. I really just wanted to sit on the floor of the business center like a four-year-old until someone came to pick me up.