What it was, honestly, was just about locking in. We were just all completely fused together. We got quiet together, and loud, and quiet again, and rhythmically it was like we weren’t capable of playing outside one another’s beat. And somehow the whole time I knew exactly what to do, like I could hear every note the moment before I played it, and honestly the whole time a part of me was terrified that there was a limit to whatever was happening, and it was going to suddenly run out, but it didn’t.
After about an hour of just playing, without any song or plan, Ash started giving us little bare-bones sketches of songs she had written. The lyrics were pretty hard to make out but seemed to be a little bit gonzo ’90s fringe lyrics like Ween or King Missile and a little bit not-super-rhymey conversational lyrics like Courtney Barnett. The titles were, too, but more intense.
God Has No Thoughts
Suburb of the Abyss
Everyone at Wendy’s Was Dead or a Robot
Trees Are Eating My Dad Right Now Pt. 1
Love Plague
This Sex Sucks
Shark Contest
I Am Such a Mess from Werewolf PMS
They Told Me You Are What You Eat So I Ate Roger Federer
and my favorite,
If You Love Your Dog So Much, Why Don’t You Fuck Him
Ash plugged a microphone into her guitar amp and did all the singing, and her singing voice was sort of like she took her speaking voice and gave it fresh batteries. It was a voice that cut. It was the voice of someone who gave zero fucks and rode around on a bear. It was the kind of voice where you didn’t care if you could tell what she was saying, because you knew what she meant.
The bass and guitar were all thick and distorted and buzzy because we turned our amps up higher than they were supposed to go. Corey ended up mostly thumping things out on his bass drum and toms and used his cymbals only when he absolutely had to. So the effect was this chunky thumpy sound that kind of made you think of the most badass possible rabbit. I know that sounds idiotic. I don’t care. That’s how it sounded. It was like the war music for an elite army unit of giant, bear-riding, eyepatch-wearing rabbits who were riding off to a battle that was actually just a huge party.
Ash took audio of the whole thing by hanging her phone from the ceiling with a shoelace. We played for three and a half hours, and between every song Corey and I were afraid to do any talking. The entire time it was incredible. Then we went out into the hall and tried not to freak out too much.
At that point, I would say Ash felt like one of us.
WES, punching a wall: yeah
COREY, punching himself: yeah
ASH: fuck yeah guys
COREY: heeeeerrrrrrrRRRRNNNNNNNNNN
WES: i know this is gross but it feels like we all just had sex with each other for three hours
COREY: i can never play jazz again
ASH: fuck jazz
WES: to continue to play high school–type jazz would be a catastrophic mistake for us
COREY: the very thought of having to play another two weeks of jazz with the many herbs of this camp is making my dick retreat into my body like the head of a turtle
[a hyped-up silence during which corey punches himself again]
ASH: so actually that was the first time i’ve ever gotten to play those songs like with a band and everything
COREY: no
WES: what?!
ASH: i’ve just never had anyone to play with
COREY: fuck you! that’s not even possible!!
WES: you’re telling us Trees Are Eating My Dad Right Now, for example, you’ve never gotten to hear that song played by a band before
ASH: no. i mean i tried to play it with one of my sisters on piano once, but that doesn’t count
COREY: that probably sounded like ass
ASH: it did sound like total ass
WES: that song could work with guitar and piano if your sister had a certain kind of approach but it sounds like she did not
ASH: she plays like you gave billy joel mittens and a concussion
WES: daaaaaaaamn
COREY: real talk
[a silence in which everyone is thinking something different]
[the silence intensifies]
[he has been suppressing them pretty hard but wes’s hyper-developed hater reflexes finally kick in]
WES: so just,
COREY:
ASH:
WES: i mean, uh
COREY, with growing irritation:
ASH:
WES: i mean that was as good as we thought it was, right?
COREY: oh goddamn it wes
WES: what
COREY: wes. why would you even say that
WES, babbling like a maniac: it’s just that i just want to be prepared in case we listen back to it and it turns out we were being dumb or naive or whatever because i mean it was definitely good but what if it wasn’t as good
COREY: you have to stop talking immediately
WES: okay
COREY: if you keep talking i am going to commit an atrocity against you
WES: okay but let’s just listen to it and make sure
COREY: no
WES: what
COREY: no. we can’t listen to it in fear
WES: oh
COREY: we can only listen to it when you’re no longer at risk of hating on it
This was a tough thing to hear. Because I was, deep down, preparing to hate on it. But I figured Corey was, too. He’s even more of a hater than me.
We were at kind of an impasse, and fortunately Ash was there to break it.
ASH: let’s listen to it after dinner
WES: okay great
COREY: what’s for dinner though
8.
COREY LITERALLY EATS HIS TONGUE AND ASH LEARNS THE TRUE MEANING OF GARFUNKEL
Dinner at Bill Garabedian’s Jazz Giants of Tomorrow Intensive Summer Workshops was an array of steamed meats and vegetables that looked and tasted like we were getting them secondhand. There was also a pasta bar way off in an abandoned corner somewhere. Corey filled an entire bowl with sauce and drank it as if it were soup.
At first we were mostly silent, ignoring our gross food and gazing around the room in secret triumph at these other jazz kids in their various jazz-camp-hierarchy postures: the alpha kids sitting in too wide of a stance; the beta kids hunched over, intensely making Important Points; the gamma kids slumping around all demoralized.
We were feeling completely superior to these kids who were too chickenshit to throw a tantrum and walk out on jazz camp band practice for basically no reason.
ASH: oh my god this food sucks dick
WES: i feel like someone pre-licked all of these zucchinis
[ash chuckles again and wes feels a happiness so extreme that he momentarily cannot function]
COREY: the soup’s okay but there’s too many tomatoes
WES: corey, that’s spaghetti sauce
COREY: no it’s a soup
WES: you got it from the pasta bar
COREY: i think it’s the soup and pasta bar
WES: well
WES: hmm
ASH: you guys want to get second dinner?
[a silence in which it is clear that corey and wes had not even considered the possibility of second dinner]
COREY: oh hell yes
WES: like pizza?
ASH: i was thinking sushi
Second dinner was at a sushi place that Ash drove us to and then paid for, and it taught us a number of things about Ash. For one, she had a car. The car was a huge, black, new-smelling SUV that felt more like a rental than anyone’s day-to-day car. It certainly didn’t feel like the one my parents had. There weren’t inexplicable hair and crumbs ground into the seats, or ancient mud-encrusted stacks of papers and binders sloshing around everyone’s feet. There were no stray objects of any kind, and every surface felt cool and pebbly, like the skin of a lizard, but from space.
Another thing we learned was that Ash
had an entire strategy for ordering sushi:
1. buy the sushi chefs a beer
2. tell them the magic word
The magic word is omakase. It is Japanese for “Just make whatever.” And if you utter this word after buying the sushi chefs a beer, these sushi chefs are going to make you some epic stuff. I would not be able to tell you what any of it was, except that the production values of this sushi were top-notch. A lot of it didn’t even look like food. It was fish art. There was a little fish volcano. There was a seaweed pond with little fish stepping stones and ripples coming out from each one. And then they gave us each a sea urchin.
Sea urchin is called uni, and it looks like a human tongue, except orange and with bigger, more diseased-looking taste buds. Ash slurped hers up immediately. I put mine in my mouth without thinking about it too hard and managed to enjoy it. It tasted kind of like the sea, kind of like a burger. But Corey just stared at his with unconcealable horror.
The sushi chefs thought this was hilarious.
“Ha ha ha!” the main one yelled. “You should eat it!!”
Clearly, Corey and I had stepped into someone else’s life. It did not resemble our lives anymore. It was someone with an infinitely more baller lifestyle. But Ash was kind of guarded about how it had come to be.
WES: so how come you know so much about sushi?
ASH: i don’t know that much. i’ve had it a few times
COREY: what’s up with your crazy nice car
ASH: it’s my mom’s
COREY: how come you have it though
ASH: i dunno, she wasn’t using it
COREY: tell your mom she’s crazy because that car is baller
WES: so ash where are you from and everything
ASH: new york what about you guys
WES: uh, pittsburgh
COREY: and your parents they’re also from new york?
ASH, shrugging: they’re from a couple places what about yours
It didn’t take us long to figure out that she was kind of uncomfortable talking about herself and was going to deflect every question back onto us. So pretty soon we were just rapidly volunteering things about ourselves.
COREY: my dad’s jewish and my mom is irish catholic
WES: our high school is called benson and it’s like medium size with a couple thousand kids
COREY: my older sister becca made us get two different cats
WES: it’s an inner-city public school, so budget-wise kind of hurting
COREY: one of the cats is named fish-fish and he literally has feline AIDS
WES: the gym department is so strapped for cash that one of their units is called “the block run” and in it the gym teacher just forces everyone to run around the block
COREY: wes is adopted
WES:
ASH:
COREY: he doesn’t like to talk about it but it is kind of obvious from his name and then how he looks
WES: there are other possible explanations for that, but okay
COREY: sorry, maybe i shouldn’t have said
WES: i guess it was gonna come out sooner or later
ASH, deciding to ignore the adoption thing: so you guys have played a lot of music together, huh
[corey and wes both nod a little and then stop]
COREY: i mean not that much outside of jazz band
WES: we more just listen to music
COREY: sometimes we play the game garfunkel
ASH: i don’t know garfunkel
COREY: yeah because we invented it
Okay. We need to copyright Garfunkel. Because it’s the greatest game on earth. It’s incredibly simple and elegant. Literally all it is is, someone puts on a song, and the other person or people have to guess who it is. Not the song, but the person or band. That’s the entire game. If you’re playing it right, it’s all deep cuts and artists people think they know but actually don’t. But there’s no wrong way to play it really.
You get five points if you get it on your first guess, three if you get it on your second or third, otherwise one if you get it by the end of the song. And if you don’t, the other person gets a point, EXCEPT you can prolong the point by asking for a second song by the same artist/band/rapper/etc., in which case, you still get one point if you guess it, but if you don’t get it, the other player gets three. First person to fifteen wins, or you can just keep score for your entire lives, which Corey and I have been doing. Right now he is up 2,063 to 1,849. He went on an epic but controversial run last summer with Modernist classical composers that I’m still recovering from.
If you choose someone who it turns out the other players have never heard of, then the point is a wash. So obviously there’s an honor system component, because if you’re guessing, you can always be a dick and just lie and say, oohh, sorry, I’ve never heard of Mobb Deep, or Carly Simon, or Brahms.
But probably the strongest thing about me and Corey’s friendship is that neither of us has ever even accused the other of violating the honor system.
ASH: do you guys ever play with anyone else
WES: we’ve tried to
COREY: you can really only play with people who are at your level or it gets frustrating
[ash gulps a scallop and points to corey’s phone]
ASH: try me
Bear in mind, we’ve been playing Garfunkel for years. Also we invented it. So our game is ridiculous.
And Ash’s early lobs, Run–D.M.C. and the Jesus and Mary Chain, were pathetic and quickly destroyed by each of us.
But soon it became clear that she was a hundred percent at our level.
She threw on a Gary Numan arrangement of Erik Satie. Then she followed it up with a track that sounded like luau music but turned out to be the Strokes. She hit us with a Jonas Brothers ballad that stumped the hell out of us because who knew the Jonas Brothers had ballads. And on the guessing front she was holding her own, too. She was able to get Stewart Copeland’s solo work. She got the Baha Men on her first try. She had never heard of Hank Mobley, which admittedly was a little strange for someone attending a jazz camp, but we accepted that without argument and moved on.
We were in there for two hours just cranking tunes on her phone and munching high-grade artistic sushi and yelling bands and musicians at one another. And honestly, I know I told you how great it was jamming out earlier. But I think in terms of just overall happiness and contentment, playing Garfunkel with Ash and Corey in that sushi restaurant was probably the pinnacle of my entire life.
I just felt like maybe for those two hours I actually was being a person I could feel good about, or living a life that I could be happy about, or whatever. I don’t know. I know it’s stupid.
Corey got so psyched after Ash nailed the Baha Men that he immediately picked up the uni with his bare hands and swallowed it whole.
“TONGUE OF THE SEA,” he yelled.
“OH YEAH,” responded both of the sushi chefs.
Then Corey leapt to his feet and sprinted into the bathroom to throw up, and I panicked and ran after him because I thought he was having a fatal allergic reaction, but it turns out he just literally thought it was a tongue.
9.
RETURN TO THE JAZZ GULAG
So if this was a VH1 Behind the Music episode, now would be the part where the narration would get all ominous, and it would go something like:
“On the evening of Monday, June 13th, Ash, Corey, and Wes were riding high. They had just made the best music of their lives and then eaten a sophisticated and challenging sushi meal. But little did they know . . . that up ahead . . . the road was going to get super bumpy. Because they were about to be arrested and thrown into jazz prison.”
Okay. That’s not technically true, because jazz prison does not exist. But if there was one, we probably would have been sent to it.
Russell, the bass teacher, stormed up to us in the dorm parking lot as we were getting out of the car.
“This is not good, you guys,” he told us. “This is really not
good.”
It turned out we weren’t allowed to leave campus unsupervised. But then why was it so easy? This was not a question he was interested in answering.
“I want us to be cool,” he said, louder than I think he meant to. “But look. I gotta write you up for this. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be a cop about this whole thing. I’m a musician, like you. But I got no choice. I hope you understand.”
I nodded sheepishly. Corey nodded sullenly. But Ash just looked him up and down.
“No,” announced Ash. “I don’t understand.”
The way she said it brought some kind of new crazy electricity into the air.
“You don’t,” Russell repeated.
“I don’t understand.”
“You do not understand.”
“Nope.”
“You don’t get why I can’t let minors off the campus, out of camp jurisdiction, just running around.”
“I’m not a minor. I’m nineteen.”
“Oh. Okay. So, you’re saying, first of all, nineteen is an adult. And second—”
“Yup. Legally, an adult.”
“I don’t mean legally, I mean, come on. Nineteen? Sorry. Not an adult. Second—let me finish—second, you’re telling me if something happens to one of these guys here, you’re trying to tell me, you’re liable. If, say, he gets hit by a car, or you know, he freaks out and, you know, runs away to join the circus, you’re liable.”
“Does that happen? Do you guys have a chronic problem of kids leaving jazz camp to join the circus?”
“Don’t be smart with me. My point is, we’re liable, and, look. Do you think this is easy? You think having to police you guys, being responsible for you guys . . . you think that’s easy for us?”
“I don’t think any of this is easy for you. Because I don’t think any of you want to be here.”
Russell just stared at her. And suddenly he grinned, in this defeated, tired way.
“Okay. At this point, I think you need to come with me and talk to Bill.”