I could actually hear Corey trying to think.
Eventually he said, “What if you pronounced it, Shuh-theeds? Is that still not good? Ash and the Shuh-theeds.”
“That’s probably worse.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Ash and the . . . Burnouts,” I said.
“Jesus,” said Ash. “No.”
“Fine, but it’s at least better than Ash and the Shuh-theeds.”
“No. No, it definitely is not. Ash and the Burnouts is the worst one so far.”
“It’s not the worst so far.”
“It’s even worse than Air Horse. Because the best-case scenario for Ash and the Burnouts is, they play Earth, Wind & Fire covers at corporate events. That’s best case.”
“I agree but why,” said Corey.
“You guys have to stop with Name and the Somethings,” said Ash, “Because that’s never good. That formula is just played out and it’s never coming back. But when you add a pun in there, I mean, come on. Ash? And the Burnouts? They don’t even pretend to have self-respect. They’re a cover band, and they’ve opened every performance they’ve ever done with ‘Celebration’ by Kool & the Gang.”
“Wes loves that song,” announced Corey.
“No I don’t.”
“You did in eighth grade though.”
“Corey. Shut the hell up.”
“The song’s not the problem,” Ash said. “Ash and the Burnouts playing that song is the problem.”
We kept lobbing band names at her, but it wasn’t because we actually thought any of those names would work. It was just amazing to see a hater of her caliber in action. It was like watching a great athlete ferociously dunking on people.
Ensign: “That’s a prog-rock band with too many members. They all take turns singing and none of them is any good. The drummer has one of those huge, three-story rigs where it’s kind of like he’s in a hamster ball. Halfway into their first song, they’re playing something in seventeen, or some other horrible time signature, and everyone has left the dance floor and is never coming back.”
Thundergarment: “All right. That name is sort of likable, but in a coked-up way that is actually completely unlikable. This is a punk-pop band that is the less-good version of one of those angsty bands where one of the members is famous for being something other than a musician, like an actor or a soccer player or whatever, and then that band is the way-less-good version of, I guess, Fall Out Boy or Imagine Dragons or whatever cokey emo thing. So basically Thundergarment is fifth-rate Blink-182.”
The Jacobins: “Acoustic guitars . . . way too precise rhyme structures . . . uh, contrived love metaphors using like astrophysics . . . and two lead singers who are married to each other. They met at their day job at Google, which they still have. This band has a pathological fear of kicking even a little bit of ass, and NPR brings them into their studio every four days.”
The Magical Singing Boner: “Ugh.”
What The . . . ?!: “Okay. I do like this name, but we can never use it, because it can only belong to a band that sucks. Because the unnecessarily elaborate punctuation means this is a band pretending to be way more experimental and interesting than it actually is. At heart, this is a disco band that’s ashamed of itself. So it’s got like harpsichords and tablas and, I don’t know, a bass clarinet. But that is all a smoke screen for entry-level disco. Or like prog disco. It wouldn’t be a bad name except that it dooms you to being terrible forever.”
Ramos Wahl & Doolittle: “Stoner organ trio, dropped out of Juilliard, now they open for Phish, none of their songs has words or is shorter than ten minutes, and a decade from now they’ll have given up music completely and instead be a pickle company.”
The Magical Singing Dick Surplus: “Great. Ash Ramos Three it is.”
By 5 A.M. the sun was starting to come up and Corey was asleep. Ash and I left him in the car at a rest stop and committed what would be the first of many irresponsible food purchases. We bought a twenty-four-pack of Coke, a twenty-four-pack of Mountain Dew, and family-size bags of every varietal of Airheads, Skittles, Doritos, and Dale’s, an off-brand potato chip whose flavors were just REGULAR, ONION, CELERY, and BEEF. I made an effort to get stuff without nuts in it, because Corey is fatally allergic to certain kinds of nut, and I was pretty sure Corey had left his EpiPen in Shippensburg.
The CELERY chips were my favorite. The BEEF chips had a taste that I would categorize as like a locker room, but for dogs.
Back at the car, I stacked everything on top of Corey’s sleeping body, hoping he would wake up and freak out. But he just opened his eyes, nodded at us in a strangely authoritative way, and closed them again.
I offered to drive and Ash accepted.
“Are you guys gay,” she said when we were a few miles down the road.
“What?” I said. “Are we gay? No. Of course not.”
“Fuck you ‘of course not,’” she said. “I get to ask if you’re gay. You act like you’re married. And you talk about your dicks a lot.”
“What do you mean, act like we’re married.”
“You do a lot of married-couple-type bickering. It’s like you guys are sick of each other but can’t escape.”
It felt wrong to say that he’s like my brother, or basically we’re each other’s dog. Or to say, in ninth grade a kid slide-tackled me pretty hard during pickup soccer and I started crying and Corey decided to go bananas and get way up in that kid’s face for messing with the jazz band rhythm section, making crazy eyes and bellowing that that kid was about to have a big motherfucking problem, and it probably should have been weird between us afterward, like I was a woman who got mugged in an alley and he was Batman, but somehow instead it cemented our doggy brotherly bond.
The best I could do was, “Real gay dudes don’t talk about harming their dicks.”
She shrugged. I glanced over at her. She looked back at me. We made kind of a lot of eye contact. I didn’t know what to do.
“You’re in two lanes,” she said, and I was, so I dealt with that in hopefully a calm and commanding way, causing Corey to make an irritable groaning noise.
It’s impossible to talk about how a girl is hot without sounding gross or embarrassing, but here’s how she was hot. She was just very, very confident. I mean, she was also pretty and vaguely athletic and stuff, but the main thing was she had this way of carrying herself with her chin tilted up and her shoulders kind of back in this way that was like, yeah, I have kind of small probably great-looking boobs and in general am just really hot, and if you don’t agree, then definitely go fuck yourself. Somehow all of that was conveyed by how she carried herself. It was hot. Okay. I’ll shut up.
“What about you? Are you gay?” I said, in a transparent attempt to turn the tables.
“I used to think I was gay,” she said. “Now I think I’m not.”
“Why,” I said.
“Why which.”
“Uh, why both.”
“I thought maybe I was gay because I didn’t want to hook up with boys. But after a while I realized I didn’t want to hook up with girls, either.”
“Mmmm,” I said. I was both disappointed and extremely interested in hearing more. But I didn’t want to tip my hand. So I was attempting to say “Mmmm” in a way that would convey the idea of, “Cool. Thanks for telling me this. By the way, this is no big deal. Girls tell me about their evolving sexuality all the time.”
“You’ve always liked girls, huh,” she said, and turned to me, and in my peripheral vision I could tell she was looking at me in this careful, studying way, and I tried to make a face of relaxed uninterestedness, but it was probably more the face of someone in a coma.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Have you hooked up with a bunch of girls?”
“I wouldn’t say a bunch.”
“How many would you say.”
“Uhhhhhh.”
I probably spent a few too many seconds pretending to count how many fake hookups.
&n
bsp; “Zero,” she said.
“No. Hang on. I’m counting.”
“It’s fine if it’s zero,” she said. “We’re in a band. We have to be open with each other or this isn’t going to work.”
“It’s just embarrassing saying zero,” I kind of blurted. I hated the sound of my voice. I sounded like a little kid.
“Hey,” she said. I looked over at her. She had a look on her face that I couldn’t really classify. “Zero’s not bad. Zero means someone gets to be your first. That’s a good thing to have. Once you’ve lost it, you’ll want it back.”
“I definitely won’t,” I told her.
“You’re in two lanes again,” she said, and I was.
“What if you drove not like a herb,” mumbled Corey from the backseat.
By 6 A.M. the sun was above the horizon. The Virginia landscape looked more or less identical to the Pennsylvania landscape except maybe the trees were fluffier. Every five minutes I found myself reaching for my phone, and it wasn’t there, and I felt a little bit like my mind was disintegrating.
“How come Corey’s parents are going to freak out but not yours,” Ash said.
“Wes has the greatest parents of all time,” Corey announced. “They probably won’t even notice he’s gone.”
“Nnnnnnnope,” I said. I was trying to sound amped about it.
11.
MY PARENTS VERSUS COREY’S PARENTS
Here’s the difference between my parents and Corey’s parents. Corey has never once successfully left his own house without at least a twenty-minute interrogation by one or both of his parents. I have been present for a lot of these interrogations. They don’t vary a lot in substance or tone. I can reproduce the beginning of one here basically verbatim from memory.
[COREY’S MOM, appearing from nowhere as Corey opens the front door en route to trying to leave his house]
[COREY’S DAD, yelling from other room]
—Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where are you headed off to?
—Close the door!
—Slow it down. Slow-w-w-w it down. Tell me where you’re going.
—Corey! Close the front door! Cold air is entering the house.
—I see that you’re going somewhere with Wesley. Hello, Wesley. It’s very nice to see you.
—I can feel the cold air coming into the house, up here.
—Okay. You’re going to be at the Oh Yeah Ice Cream store for how long?
—Close the door. CLOSE. THE DOOR.
[Corey’s dad appears at top of stairs]
—An hour and a half? It takes that long to eat ice cream?
—COREY. CLOSE THE DOOR.
—Corey, don’t slam the door.
—You did slam it, but it’s fine.
—Not “slam the door.” “Close the door.” I asked you to close it a number of times. Hello, Wes. How are you.
—An hour and a half is how long it takes to eat ice cream? Isn’t it kind of cold for ice cream anyway?
—Fine. Fine, fine. Don’t get mad. Listen. Make sure they wash absolutely everything before serving you. Okay? Everything. Are you coming home after?
—Wes, it’s funny—last month’s gas bill came out to precisely the same dollar amount as Corey’s entire college savings. What do you think of that?
—I know! It is a coincidence. It is quite the coincidence indeed.
—Then what are you doing?
[Corey’s dad pauses to stare at Corey in exaggerated alarm]
—Are you going to at least call me and tell me when you know?
—My God, Corey. Are you planning to go out in public like that?
—If I don’t hear from you in an hour, I’m going to call. So pick up. I don’t care. Pick up or I’m going to come find you. Do you have your EpiPen?
—Your T-shirt is decrepit. In fact, to the naked eye, you appear to be wearing the Shroud of Turin.
—Is your phone charged all the way?
—And your jacket looks like a Sex Pistol died in it.
—That’ll run out. Here’s a charger. Use one of the outlets. I am sure they’ll let you use one if you ask. Now let’s just go over your homework situati—hey. Don’t get mad at me.
—Wait here. Let’s see if we can find you some clothes that weren’t foraged from a landfill. By raccoons.
—Diseased, sightless raccoons.
So you can’t really blame Corey if sometimes he gets kind of surly and dickish with authority figures and people trying to make him do stuff. He has basically spent his entire life under constant assault.
My home life is a little different. If you’re Corey, Corey’s parents constantly want to hang out with you in this state of half love, half panic. So they’re a lot like dogs. Mine are more like cats. If you’re me, my parents are happy to have you around, but they also seem perfectly happy to have you not around. Plus, like cats, they themselves are mysteriously not around a lot of the time. I mean, I guess it’s not that mysterious. They’re at work.
My mom and dad are first- and second-grade teachers at Mellon Elementary, a public school in South Oakland. And together they do this very effective two-year bilingual thing that wins awards every year and gets the school a ton of federal grant money and clearly has major impacts on kids’ lives.
But it means they have to be at the school kind of a lot, like from 7 A.M. until 8 or 9 P.M. during the week, and then on the weekends they’re sort of exhausted and checked out. So we’re not all that tight-knit of a family unit. Family Dinner is not a thing that happens in our household, for example. I mean, even on an individual level none of us eats in an organized enough way that you would call it Dinner. Or Lunch. Instead you would probably have to call it Constant State of Distracted Grazing, and it is in effect at all times throughout the day and happens to foods that require the absolute bare minimum of preparation, e.g., uncooked vegetables dipped into a two-gallon vat of hummus that Dad gets every Saturday from a restaurant supply store. It’s also been at least a year since either of them checked a single piece of my homework.
But look. I realize this might sound sad or self-pitying. That’s not how I’m trying to sound. I love my parents, I know they love me, I know how awesome and rare it is that I get to be so independent, I try pretty hard not to let them down, and it makes me happy that they do really important work really well.
I guess my point is just that when Corey’s parents smother him with intense caringness every time he tries to leave his house, it doesn’t always seem so horrible.
12.
ASH BRIBES A RECEPTIONIST
Obviously Ash was someone who was used to having money. She had her own new-seeming car, played a very expensive Les Paul, paid for group sushi dinners, and gave no shits about which gas station candy had a two-for-one deal. And we had pretended not to notice. But this became impossible when she booked a $519 room at the Knoxville Clinton Hotel and then bribed a receptionist named Wayne.
Wayne had asked us for ID to show that we were all twenty-one.
“My brothers don’t have theirs on them,” said Ash, handing Wayne her driver’s license and two fifties.
Wayne glanced at each of us in turn.
“We’re adopted,” she said. “Will this work?”
“That will work,” said Wayne in a high voice.
“Ash, we should probably talk about band finances,” I said, once we were alone in our enormous Jacuzzi-equipped room.
She gazed at me without a facial expression.
“I mean, this is all starting to run into a lot of money. Gas, hotel rooms, food.”
She blinked.
“And uh—Corey and I don’t really—”
“Everything’s on my dad,” interrupted Ash. “The whole tour. All the expenses. If anything gets busted, he’ll replace it. So just don’t worry about it.”
Corey was examining the unnecessarily spacious bathroom in what seemed to be a state of shock.
“Does he know we’re doing this?” I said.
“Nope,”
she said. “But he won’t care.”
“So are you nineteen or twenty-one,” called Corey from the bathroom.
“Why wouldn’t he care, though?” I said.
“What are some rules of thumb for bribing people without getting arrested,” Corey said, coming back out of the bathroom and sniffing a bar of soap.
She sighed.
“I hate talking to people about my shit,” she told us. But she ended up telling us a lot.
Her dad was a billionaire. So her family wasn’t the kind of rich where they were super comfortable and everyone went to private school and took summer vacations to Europe. That’s millionaire or multimillionaire rich. This was billionaire rich, a.k.a. the kind of rich where everything that happened to everyone in the family was completely insane and usually terrible.
Frankly, it all would have sounded made up, except you could tell from how she was talking about it that it wasn’t. Because she clearly wished that it was.
Her dad was João Ramos, a Brazilian mining-fortune billionaire who mostly lived in New York, and her mom was his second wife, a French model named Clotilde. How did they meet? He saw a picture of her in a Calvin Klein underwear ad and decided to have her flown to his house on a jet. Because that is just one of the things you can do when you’re a billionaire and you don’t give a shit.
Apparently, he did this kind of a lot. If he thought a model in an ad was really beautiful, he would just straight-up order her delivered to his house like a pizza. I mean, the pretense was, he was friends with the model’s agent, and the agent would suddenly get the idea that maybe his client and his good friend the Brazilian billionaire should go on a date. But in reality it was just João ordering women like pizzas from the basically infinite menu of all magazine ads everywhere.
João and Clotilde went on some dates and got married in less than a year, when he was forty-three and she was nineteen. A year and a half later, Ash was born, and João and Clotilde were already in the process of getting divorced, because João was having affairs not just with more underwear models but also with an honest-to-God princess, specifically of Monaco, the world’s most rich-person-intensive country.