The Haters (23 page)

Actually, it sort of had the vibe of an Ikea, because the design was so open. But then, decor-wise, it was pretty heavy on tapestries and cushions and incense and people just dreamily lounging around, so it also was a little bit the vibe of the home of a pampered Turkish sultan. And then also it was like a Dave's Used Instruments in the sense of, there were guitars everywhere, and egg shakers, and djembes, and didgeridoos, and güiros, and vibraslaps, and basically every acoustic instrument known to man.

At the way end of one wing on the first floor, we did finally find a few doored-off rooms. These were heavily insulated little studios with speakers and drum kits and pianos and stuff. One was connected to a sound booth.

On the walls were a couple of rows of framed gold and platinum records, all “Presented to Jarold Pritchard,” and I stood there examining them, and that was when the house started to make sense a little bit.

“Yes, sir,” said Cookie, coming up behind me. “Big Pritch produced all of those.”

They were records by Bobby Womack and Wilson Pickett and Lou Rawls and Etta James. A lot of them were autographed.
Wilson Pickett's said, “THANKS 4 NOTHIN' PRITCH!!! HA HA HA HA HA—W. Pickett.”

“So your dad's more of a producer than a musician,” I said.

“Oh, I wouldn't say that,” said Cookie. “No. You can't say that about Big Pritch. He's a
guitar player's
guitar player. But listen. You want your own big old house in the country, you want to take care of your people, listen up. You gotta put that guitar down and get back behind the glass. That's just how the industry goes. Now let me tell you about it.”

Fortunately, at that point his phone rang and he had to take it.

The three of us were left kind of halfheartedly inspecting the instruments in the biggest studio.

“This is pretty cool,” I said.

Neither of the other two responded.

“Great rehearsal spot, for sure,” I suggested.

Corey played a middle C on a piano that probably cost more than his parents' house.

“So uh,” I said.

They looked at me.

“You guys want to rehearse?” I said.

“Sure,” said Corey.

But Ash said, “Not right now.”

Corey nodded angrily to himself.

“I mean, if we're playing tonight, I guess, I think it'd be a good idea,” I said.

“Not right now,” she said again.

“Ash, what's going on,” I heard myself say.

“Look,” she said. “Cookie and I smoked up on the way over here, and so I'm just pretty high right now.”

“Oh,” I said.

She was glaring at me as though I was being a dick.

“Yeah,” she said. “So I don't want to play our stuff. That's just not what I need to be doing.”

“Are you going to be sober by the time we play?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Probably. It's not gonna matter, so just be chill.”

“Sorry,” I said, feeling my throat get hard.

“In general, I really need you guys to be chill. Just chill the fuck out. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “Are we not being chill?”

“You're not,” she said. “Neither of you is. Like, if you have to ask that, then clearly you're not.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Especially you,” she told me. “You're so fucking worried about everyone. You're like trying to be everyone's dad. You're what. Sixteen? Just chill the fuck out.”

“Okay.”

“I don't get why you can't relax and just try to enjoy shit,” she said, revving up. “I'm sorry, but it's so fucking stressful to be around you. You're just always staring at everyone. You're like staring at everyone, all the time, and analyzing everything and trying to figure out how you should react to everyone, and it stresses me the fuck out, and you need to turn it off. I need you to fucking turn it off, just for like an hour.”

“Ok
ay
.”

“Can you do that? Can you turn it off? Just for one hour?”

“Y , yyeah.”

She stared at me. “Fuck.”

I didn't reply.

“Are you crying right now?” she said.

“N ,
no
.”

She watched me stare at the floor with my chin all stupid and wobbly.

“
Fuck
,” she said quietly, and then Cookie came back and told us our gig got bumped because it's a Friday night and they needed the slot, but if we just show up tomorrow night around seven, we'd probably get to open for Deebo Harrison, and in the meantime we could definitely chill here tonight, so it's all good, just enjoy yourselves on the property and relax, oh and Ash, Big Pritch wants to meet you.

Ash said great.

They left.

Me and Corey stayed.

Corey sat at the piano and played a little bit of the Brad Mehldau arrangement of “Exit Music (For a Film).”

That took me out of it just a little bit. Because it's always kind of a shock when a drummer plays a nondrum instrument. It's like a dog speaking English.

WES,
eventually, calming down
: jesus

COREY: well what the fuck did you expect, wes.

He said that and it put me right back in it.

“What should I have expected,” I asked him.

“You should expect to get bitched out. Because Ash is a bitch. She's been bitching me out since Knoxville. So she finally just bitched you out, too. Oh well. Get over it.”

“Corey, what's your deal.”

“My deal is you're a hypocrite.”

“The fuck are you talking about?”

“You're a huge fucking hypocrite. That's what I'm talking about. You told me to go fuck myself because Ash and I hooked up, you got all self-righteous and pompous about it, you said you'd never do that and tried to make me feel like a dick, but now you guys are hooking up, so, you know, what the fuck.”

“We didn't hook up.”

“Oh. So you guys just sleep together now, every night, without hooking up. Sure.”

“For two nights, and yeah. That is what happens.”

Corey was staring at me like he found out that all this time I actually
had
been doing grievous harm to my dick.

“Well, that's fucking weird,” he said finally. “And pathetic.”

“It's not as pathetic as being so bad at going down on someone that you can't even get a hard-on afterward.”

In retrospect, I would say that Corey absorbed this blow with a lot of poise.

“Fuuuuck you,” he said, with that same “Anybody home?” melody, and then he walked out of there, and I was alone.

There was an iPad lying around, so just to do something I used it to check my messages, and this time I did have email from my parents. There were seven or eight or so.

Apparently, right after dropping me off at camp, they had gone to a yoga-and-meditation retreat without telling me. It was the kind of super intensive retreat where you give up all contact with the outside world. So even before Ash and Corey and I left our phones in practice space G, my parents had left their phones with a yoga retreat receptionist.

I looked at the timing and figured out that it wasn't until we were at Charlize and Ed's that my parents found out I was gone.

“We're not going to punish you,” went the first few messages. “We're not mad, Wes. We're just worried. PLEASE tell us where you are and whether you're okay.”

I didn't read more than three. I mean, it wasn't really that surprising that they had gone to the retreat. They had done stuff like that before. But for some reason I was imagining what would happen if I had died. Like if Ash's aggressive borderline-lunatic driving had put us under the wheels of a semi or something. My parents wouldn't even have known about it for a day and a half.

I wrote back as long and detailed an email as I could muster.

dear mom and dad,

i'm fine. we're somewhere in mississippi or maybe louisiana. i don't really know where because we don't have phones but we're all fine. we have plenty of money and food and a car and we'll be back by the end of camp. don't worry about me. you guys have always taught me to be independent and rely on myself and it's coming in handy now.

i am very sorry that this is inconveniencing you guys and making you worry. but it's important and i have to do it.

love,

wes

p.s. how was the retreat?

p.p.s. tell corey's parents that he's fine too.

There was all kinds of other stuff I should have wanted to do on the iPad. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Figuring out on a map where we'd been and where we could go. Seeing if there had been anything about us in the news. Even just getting to put on any song I wanted for the first time in three days.

But I didn't. What I did was, I logged out of email and sat there with the iPad on my lap and stared at the wall. I couldn't even tell you what I was thinking. I had a thought bubble above my head with the “. . .” of someone typing but not hitting SEND.

That's the state I was in when a bunch of Pritchards wandered into the room.

Some of them I recognized from the jam session that had slowly marched out of the house to greet us. Others I did not recognize at all.

“I heard y'all are opening for Deebo Harrison tomorrow night,” said one.

“Yup,” I said.

“Y'all must be real talented,” said another.

“We're okay,” I said.

“What are y'all called,” said a third.

“We're called the Magical Singing Boner,” I said.

“Ha ha ha ha ha,” said a fourth without actually laughing.

“Want to jam with us?” asked a fifth.

I didn't. But I did. Because I thought maybe it would help if I shut off every other part of my brain for a while and just played music.

So we jammed. It kind of worked. I mean, it didn't. But at least it was an opportunity for me to practice being more chill around people.

It was just another spontaneous jam session, and I was realizing that jam sessions just broke out in the house all the time among random groups of instrument-playing Pritchards, and there was no goal that they were ever trying to accomplish. They weren't out to write a song or make a recording or start a band. It was just about jamming, and it seemed like that was both a good thing and a bad thing.

No one seemed to be trying terribly hard. A high enough percentage of Pritchards were good enough on their instruments that they didn't make you want to stop playing music forever. There were two different saxophonists, but miraculously for saxophonists, neither one was trying to solo over everything, and instead they were content to brainstorm little riffs and stabs and other rhythm parts. And the pianist, a tiny shaggy guy who couldn't seem to get his eyes all the way open, played an interesting kind of funk stride piano that got everyone else in line, and he and I traded bass lines for a while as the various percussionists did their best to keep up.

One nice thing that was happening was, every time I
brought out some new bass line or other idea, this pianist was demonstratively psyched. His head would whip over in my direction, and he would make a point of writhing around and doing that one specific happy-musician face where you pretend that you've just smelled something completely horrible.

So that was pretty nice, and it did take my mind off of things a little bit, and we continued that way for a while until eventually the pianist dug into his hoodie and pulled out an enormous bag of marijuana and a pipe and a lighter, and he handed it to the tambourine girl, and she put the tambourine down and casually packed a bowl while he locked eyes with me.

I tried to make a face of dignified concentration.

He grinned and nodded maniacally.

Look. I'd smoked pot a few times at parties. But I'd never really felt anything. Not hungry, or giggly, or paranoid, or whatever you're supposed to feel. Mostly I just felt kind of out of touch with everyone else. Like suddenly everyone around me was way more impressed by basic camera-trick Vines, like ones where a guy pretends to jump through a window of a moving car, and I would sit around pretending to have my mind blown by it but secretly thinking,
guys, what are we all doing with our lives right now
, but then mainly just thinking,
if I open my mouth, I will definitely reveal myself to be a huge terrible hater, so I should probably figure out how to escape before that happens
, so I guess yeah a little bit paranoid.

But anyway that was the inferior-quality, probably-just-dirt-and-moss-from-a-parking-lot weed that was available to
the trombone section of the Benson High School Jazz Band. This Pritchard weed was a different thing entirely. And I feared it with all of my heart.

One reason for that fear was the look on this pianist's face. It was the face of uncontrollable psychosis. He was nodding and winking and baring his teeth maniacally. I mean, he was probably just trying to convey his enthusiasm for drugs. But in fact it looked like he was possessed by a demon. Specifically, a sheep demon. Because of his general shagginess and the sheepy way he was bucking his head around insanely.

The tambourine girl offered me the bowl.

I shook my head and tried to smile in a polite but nonchalant manner. I was trying to nonverbally communicate the idea of, “Thanks for offering me drugs. By the way, I have been around drugs a bunch of times in my life and am completely cool about them. Anyway, I'm good for right now. But I'm definitely not being uptight or weird. So, thanks, and, hopefully now we are done having an exchange about this.”

This nonverbal communication was a complete failure. The tambourine girl frowned and pushed the pipe closer to my face.

I looked into her eyes. They were kind of a green-flecked seawatery blue.

She put the pipe to my lips and lit it.

I didn't want to be a dick. So I inhaled a little bit.

She motioned for me to keep going. I did.

She smiled.