The Haters (20 page)

“How would they ever possibly let us play there,” said Corey.

Cookie smiled and said, “Well. If y'all interested, I could get you a slot.”

“Yeah?” said Ash again.

“They know me,” he said. “They know my daddy, my whole family. I could get you a slot tomorrow night if y'all want it. And I'm telling y'all, it's what y'all need.”

We processed this.

“Y'all want it?” he asked.

Corey was the one who said, “Yeah.”

Cookie grinned and went into the back room.

Corey didn't say anything else. But he nodded to himself, and frowned, and reached out, and clapped me on the back two or three times, like he didn't want to but he believed it was the right thing to do.

And look. We had just played yet another horrible show, and our drummer had made it clear that he could become a self-destructive idiot at a moment's notice. So there was no real reason to think that this next show would be any different.

But at that moment I was awash just in the warm thought of,
Holy shit. This is the one
.

Cookie came back out and told us he booked it, tomorrow night at ten, a one-hour slot, and we could spend the night at his daddy's house after the show.

This is the one
, I couldn't stop thinking.
This is the show that fixes everything
. Because all we needed was an actual stage and an actual crowd. We just needed some real place to take a chance on us. Our problem wasn't that we sucked. Our problem was that we had been playing literally impossible gigs.

Cookie was telling us about his dad's house in the valley.
Apparently, it had a lot of rooms, so we didn't even need to worry about it.

I was no longer afraid of him. I no longer worried that he was going to envelop my face with one of his big hands and lift me off the ground. Instead, I wanted to high-five that hand a million times. Because he was going to take us to the promised land. He was our big doofy angel of God.

Basically, I felt like suddenly we had God's attention, and He was like, GUYS, MY BAD ABOUT ALL THAT STUFF BEFORE.

WES. YOU SPECIFICALLY. I'M SORRY ABOUT THE ASH-COREY HOOKUP SITUATION. I WAS REALLY ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL WITH THAT ONE.

FROM NOW ON, I GOT YOU GUYS. AND TOMORROW YOU SHALL PLAY THE SHOW YOU'VE ALWAYS DREAMED OF.

YOU SHALL PLAY AT A REAL VENUE WITH A REAL SOUND SYSTEM AND A VENERABLE LORD-OF-THE-RINGS-LOOKING SOUND GUY AND EVERYTHING.

YOU SHALL PLAY FOR A VAST, APPRECIATIVE AUDIENCE, AND YOU SHALL ROCK THEM MERCILESSLY, BUT ALSO WITH GREAT SOPHISTICATION AND RANGE. AND THEY SHALL BE FREAKING OUT IN AN UNCONTROLLABLE ECSTASY THE ENTIRE TIME.

AND ONSTAGE YOU SHALL FEEL A CLOSENESS TO ONE ANOTHER THAT I RESERVE ONLY FOR THE MEMBERS OF THE SICKEST BANDS. YOU SHALL
PERIODICALLY MAKE EYE CONTACT, AND YOU SHALL NOT EVEN HAVE TO SAY ANYTHING. YOU SHALL JUST NOD, AND GRIN, OR LIKE SNEER OR SOMETHING, OR YELL SOMETHING SORT OF NONVERBAL LIKE, “YAH,” LIKE THE GUY FROM CAKE, AND IT SHALL MAKE ALL THE CRAZINESS AND STRESS AND HEARTACHE THAT HAS HAPPENED SO FAR COMPLETELY WORTH IT. AND THEN SOME. BECAUSE I AM GOD.

Holy fuck. God. Thank you. I am truly grateful. I can't even start to thank you enough.

DON'T EVEN WORRY ABOUT IT.

Also sorry I said “fuck” just now. And I guess in general sorry for swearing basically all the time.

WES. COME ON. THAT SHIT IS TRULY THE LEAST OF MY WORRIES. BECAUSE THINK ABOUT ALL THE OTHER TERRIBLE SHIT THAT IS HAPPENING ALL THE TIME EVERYWHERE. LIKE POVERTY AND TERRORISM. IN FACT I SHOULD PROBABLY GET BACK TO DEALING WITH ALL OF THAT. IT'S JUST NONSTOP SOMETIMES.

Well, anyway, thanks.

NO. THANK YOU. FOR THE FOUR OF YOU ARE MY CHOSEN BAND.

Wait. What.

24.
YEAH BECAUSE MEANWHILE BACK AT ELLIE'S COOKIE HAS SOMEHOW JOINED OUR BAND

At some point a tall and kind of downtrodden-looking woman walked in.

“Brought your stuff,” she kind of whispered to Cookie, stepping behind the bar.

“Thanks, baby,” he said, and he kissed her on the mouth and left.

She remained behind the bar, puffing a cigarette and resentfully surveying the landscape of equally resentful-looking drunk people.

Pretty soon Cookie was back. He had a guitar, a mic bag, and a couple of mic stands. He grinned at us like,
It's Christmas in June, and your gift is me
.

“Well, don't just sit there,” he said to us. “Get back onstage with me.”

Suddenly, we were his band. It happened before any of us could figure out what was going on. He was up there calling the songs, and we were playing with him, and we were unmistakably his band.

And I'd like to think that we would have left or mutinied or something if he had sucked. But that's hypothetical. Because he didn't suck.

He was really, really good.

He played guitar like someone who has been playing for hundreds of years. At no point did he play anything that sounded like a mistake, or that seemed to be in any way difficult for him to play. And then, on top of that, he had a singing voice that was even more beautiful than his speaking voice. He had a very straightforward vocal style, super unembellished, no vibrato or melisma or anything. But every note was beautiful. It had all this brightness and sweetness in it, and it made your heart beat a little faster. It was like if Coke could sing. Not Coke Zero, obviously. I'm talking red-label, bunch-of-calories, immediately-gives-you-diabetes original delicious Coke.

So he was fierce at guitar and fierce at singing. But he might have been the fiercest at being a bandmate. We were up there mostly playing rootsy blues covers, like “Preachin' Blues,” and “Catfish Blues,” and “Tupelo Blues,” and “Boom! Boom!,” and “Way Down in the Hole,” and Cookie was keying in on every single thing that each one of us was doing. He was effortlessly harmonizing with Ash, and playing parts that matched right up with mine, and glancing over at Corey to stay on top of the beat, and just in general supporting all of us and keeping track of us like one of those dogs who's been bred for thousands of generations to herd sheep, and now has no sheep, so he's doing it to humans instead.

It was of course different music from what we'd been doing. But I was on board with it. We all were.

Ash was singing lead about a third of the time and letting Cookie sing lead the other two-thirds, and sometimes even
trying to harmonize, and she wasn't doing any of the growly fuck-you vocal stuff that we were used to hearing from her. She was singing everything pretty straight, and her guitar parts were much more evened out and easy to follow. She was kind of completely transformed.

I was fully occupied with getting through each song without fucking it up. The songs weren't super familiar to me. But, as a musician, if I'm good at anything, it's using my ear and having a sense of the form and being able to hear my way through stuff. So I was able to play competent bass, and that felt good.

Corey was drunk. But, unexpectedly, this just made him docile and submissive. I guess it was because it was taking every ounce of his concentration to try to keep time and play like a person who wasn't drunk. So he just kind of locked it down and frowned with concentration and made a very simple pocket.

And people really seemed to like it.

Our first song was “Mother-in-Law Blues,” and eight bars in, we had everyone's attention. The backgammon guys stopped playing, the clusters of drunk swaying people stopped joking and arguing, and everyone just looked up at us and started nodding to what we were doing.

It was the complete opposite reaction from before, when everyone's top priority was to ignore what was happening. Not this time. People were getting into it.

When Cookie pushed his mouth into the mic and started singing, a couple of guys mouthed along. When Ash pushed her volume knob up and started soloing, people cheered. And when we finished, people applauded. Kind of a lot. There was whistling
and whooping and everything. Even Cookie's downtrodden-looking apparent girlfriend looked mildly psyched. And Rudd, who had been watching Corey like a hawk, visibly relaxed the muscles between his neck and shoulders.

So we kept playing, and people kept liking it, and it was sort of exactly the feeling I had been seeking all along.

But it sort of wasn't, either.

It felt like cheating, that we were making everyone happy with songs we hadn't written, and a guy we hadn't escaped jazz camp with. I mean, it
was
cheating. Because he was the best member of our band. And we were letting him call the shots. So why did it even need to be us up there? It could have been anyone. And that didn't feel great.

But I decided to just go with it. Because clearly we were doing something right.

So we played for a couple of hours, until about eleven, and people got really into it, and more people came in off the street, and it wasn't necessarily that I felt like I was the Wes that I had always wanted to be, or that we were the band that we wanted to be. But I was a Wes and we were a band that
other people
wanted us to be. And that was better and worse at the same time. And part of me was like, this is probably what it's like to be an adult, and that a little bit sucks, but it sort of doesn't matter if it sucks or not, because it's reality and you just have to deal with it.

I mean, that makes it sound like I was pissed. I wasn't. People were dancing and clapping. We had a nice little thing going on. Corey wasn't being a dick. I was doing my job. Ash
sounded good and Cookie sounded great. It was far and away our most successful gig, and it's shitty to want anything more than that.

Cookie was acting like our best friend afterward, and maybe he was.

“I guess Pennsylvania boys know how to
play
,” he kept telling people, reaching over the bar and clapping me or Corey on the shoulder. Now it was him and his girlfriend tending bar, because it had gotten so crowded. Basically, Ellie's contained the entire adult population of Furio, Mississippi, or at least the part that wasn't watching air-conditioned sports and eating fried breaded meats.

At some point Rudd came over to hang out. He mostly wanted to talk to me. This was probably because I was the most polite and responsive.

“Now
that's
music,” he told us, a bunch of times in a row. “That there is
music
. Hell yeah. Promise me that's the kind of music y'all are gonna play from now on.”

I found out a lot about Rudd. He was a former Boeing engineer, now trying to start his own business making jetpacks and hovercraft, and his oldest son was probably gay, and he wanted me to be super clear on how he did not have any kind of problem with that.

He even apologized for trying to pick a fight. “Look,” he said. “I wasn't gonna sock you or nothing. I knew you weren't a bad kid. I
was
gonna sock your friend. I was gonna toss him out the fucking window. Your friend was being an ass. But I
wasn't gonna fight you, man.
Ermp
. Put you in a hold, maybe. You ever learn any holds?”

It did not take long to reach a point where Rudd felt comfortable demonstrating some martial-arts-type holds on me. They were pretty painful but I tried not to be a puss about it.

“Here's what you gotta do in a fight,” he told me. “You're a skinny little shrimp. Now, I don't intend that as a criticism. I just mean, you're a tiny little kid. So your prerogative has got to be end the fight, ASAP. Get a mouthful of water if you can, or any type of liquid, and spray it in the guy's face. You gotta put your lips together and spray it. Pffffft. Right in the eyes. That's a big advantage because the reflex is, I'm gettin' sprayed in the eyes, close my eyes, turn my head away.
Harmp
. All right. No liquid, then you need to headbutt him right in the nose. Pop him with this part of your head right here. It's way stronger'n his nose. Stronger'n a fist, too. Plus a fist obviously you gotta wind up so he sees that coming. Headbutt's far and away your best bet. Far and away. Headbutt him like, POP, and you'll break that dude's nose nine times outta ten. You hear me? Pop. Fight's over. Hit him too hard, you might even kill him. Bottom line, ain't no dude gonna keep fighting with a broken nose. But you gotta hit him
hard
. All right? POP.”

“Or kick him in the nuts,” I asked.

Rudd was disgusted. “I guess,” he said. “If you want to be a dick.”

Corey was slamming whiskeys pretty hard. I wasn't drinking anything. Ash was sipping again, and just shook her head when anyone tried to talk to her, which happened a lot, because she was a girl in a bar.

“Think we can play Garfunkel somewhere,” Corey yelled a couple of times, but we couldn't figure out where.

Eventually, I realized Corey had become completely catatonic, and I had to pack up his stuff because there was no way he was capable of doing it. So I did. I packed us all up while Corey and Ash sat at the bar being two different levels of drunk. It was crowded and kind of deafening by then. Multiple different beers got spilled on me while I was crouched on the ground putting drums in cases and stuff.