At this point Corey attempted to tell Ash that her dad was actually kind of a beast. But she was not receptive to this idea.
Anyway, after having Ash, her mom spent a bunch of years trying to get back into modeling. So Ash was raised north of New York City at her dad’s house, along with her two older half sisters, Natalie and Jessica. Mostly the parenting was done by a combination of West Indian nannies, private tutors, and a Russian tennis instructor named Evgeniy. And mostly her life was about tennis.
João was obsessed with the idea of his daughters crushing at tennis. He took them to the US Open every year, where they would all spend hours hanging out in a luxury box with whoever João’s girlfriend was and then at the end of the day get hastily introduced to sweaty, exhausted tennis superstars who clearly just wanted to be alone. And he forced all three daughters to train with Evgeniy from the age of six.
Evgeniy was responsible for many of the deeply terrible child-of-a-billionaire things that Ash experienced. Because Evgeniy was a sadist. For example, he did not value happiness or spiritual growth. What he valued was winning.
His worldview was: winners are just people who want to win more than anyone else on earth. So if you want to win, you must become pathologically obsessed with winning. You must come to find it viscerally revolting to lose to anyone, ever. The desire to win and the fear of losing are the same thing, and they must become the most powerful part of your soul, eclipsing all other wants and fears. Also, no sugar.
“He literally made an unflavored nutritious slurry that we had to eat at every meal for almost a year,” said Ash.
“Jesus,” I said.
“What’s a slurry,” said Corey.
“A slurry is a semiliquid mixture,” I said. “Like something with the consistency of mud.”
“Yup,” said Ash.
“Holy shit,” said Corey.
Evgeniy liked to talk about the time Joseph Stalin ordered a scientist to breed apes and humans together to create a new kind of super warrior, “insensitive to pain and indifferent to the quality of the food that they eat.” Stalin’s breeding project apparently was a failure. But Evgeniy still felt that it taught the world a valuable lesson about the benefits of being indifferent to the quality of the food that you eat.
João put an end to the slurry after he found out about it. But this turned out to be only because he believed eating flavorless gray food would make his daughters less beautiful. And being beautiful was his number-two priority for all three girls behind crushing at tennis, a priority that took the form of constant access to Japanese skin-care products and occasional fatherly suggestions of plastic surgery for Natalie, who eventually got a nose job that collapsed two years later after getting hit by a serve from a ball machine.
Anyway, the slurry episode led to the hiring of a family chef/nutritionist, a mysterious, ageless, soft-spoken Scottish man named Onnie, who had trained under the chef Thomas Keller at the French Laundry and also once briefly filled in as the lead guitarist of Slayer.
At this point Corey proposed that maybe this dad didn’t do everything for the best reasons, but you did have to admit that he was somewhat of a beast if he was hiring the guitarist of goddamn Slayer. But Ash did not feel that she had to admit any such thing about her fuckface of a dad.
So the three Ramos girls grew up playing an absolute dickload of tennis, becoming remorseless winning machines, and not having a ton of friends. Natalie, the oldest, with the still-a-little-bit-fucked-up nose, had been an undistinguished junior tennis player but managed to grind out a respectable pro career as an all-court player who had no glaring weaknesses but no overpowering strengths, either. At twenty-nine she was now ranked forty-first in the world, which was probably as high as she was going to get. Jessica had been a top-ten junior player with a 95-mph serve and actual sports people on ESPN saying she could become the Next Big Thing when at age seventeen she tore the rotator cuff in her right shoulder. Then at age eighteen she tore it again. Then, despite no longer having a huge serve, she made a moderately successful comeback as a gritty, tireless, annoying, hyper-defensive counterpuncher until she tore the ACL in her left knee at age twenty-three. Now she was twenty-six, unable to serve or run at a very high level, but still doggedly pursuing a comeback that only she and Evgeniy believed was possible and not, in actuality, depressing and doomed.
Ash was ten years younger than Natalie and seven years younger than Jessica, and apparently she was the best prospect of the three. She was fast, played smart, and had a monster serve like Jessica’s, except smoother and less likely to blow out her shoulder. Most importantly, she was great at hating to lose. Her signature move after a loss was squatting on the baseline like a frog, gripping fistfuls of her own hair, and letting out bloodcurdling screams as long as ten seconds in length. If the loss was really bad, she would then slash up her racket with a pocketknife that she carried around. She had a reputation on the junior circuit as an absolute psychopath. So in other words, she was the pride and joy of Evgeniy’s entire life.
Then at fifteen she had her appendix taken out. She was in bed for two weeks. Evgeniy, on the road with Natalie, had assigned her to watch a twelve-hour History Channel miniseries about horrible protracted wars. It was called Attrition. So she was lying there, watching Attrition, and Onnie came in with her dinner on a tray, and the narrator was saying stuff like, “Of the fourteen thousand men to set foot on that island, only three survived,” in way too intense and grave of a voice. It was the over-the-top dramatic voice of just some guy in a sound studio somewhere. Some gleefully dire, comfortable guy wearing comfortable clothes who you could just tell had never experienced any kind of real violence or danger at all, so there was nothing that qualified him as the guy who got to be the voice that told you about all these tens of thousands of deaths, each of which happened to someone and was awful. So somehow that plus Onnie walking in gave Ash the suspicion that her life so far had been pointless.
I think my life so far has been pointless, she told Onnie.
He told her that was far from the truth.
Can you put on something to watch that isn’t this, she asked him.
Onnie nodded, fished around on the Internet for a moment or two, and ended up putting on a John Lee Hooker concert. Why? Who knows. He never said. He must have just thought Ash would like John Lee Hooker. So they sat there and watched the whole thing. And then he left and she watched it again. And then she found some other John Lee Hooker videos. And for the next two weeks all she really did was lie there and watch and listen to Delta blues guys: John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Charley Patton, Ishmon Bracey.
Once she was on her feet, she told her dad and Evgeniy and her mom that she was done with tennis and was going to play guitar instead.
Evgeniy did not take it well. In a yelling match on the court behind João’s house, he told Ash she was being irresponsible. She told him she hated tennis. He told her that she hated tennis because she loved it so much. She told him that didn’t make sense and anyway it was her life. He told her she was being a coward. She told him actually it was taking a lot of courage to leave the game especially if he was going to be such a dick about it. He told her she was throwing away thousands of hours of not just her time but his and had she thought about that for even one moment no of course not. She told him it wasn’t her fault he chose a fucked-up line of work where you spend all your time thinking about how to develop the muscles of a girl’s body and also trying to give them basically the mindset of a Nazi conquistador rapist sociopath. He told her millions literally millions of girls would be ecstatic to have the instruction and expertise and care and everything else that had been invested in her and now she was just tossing it all in the garbage like the spoiled impulsive brat that he had always secretly suspected her to be. She told him the thing that excited her most about music was that she would never again have to pretend to listen to his dumbshit lessons from nature about how the spider lies in wait for hours but the wasp is never
still or whatever the pointless creepy fucking thing and also she would never again have to smell his gross breath. He told her he was too much of a gentleman to tell her what he really thought of her, and then he told her she was a cunt.
But João took it worse. He frowned and nodded and got kind of cold and formal and told her if that’s what she wanted to do, then that’s what she wanted to do, and there was nothing he could do about it, because she was her own person, and he respected that, and perhaps it was best if she moved in with her mother. So Ash moved in with Clotilde on the Upper West Side and started going to a high school and more or less never saw her dad again. He paid off her credit cards every month and made a point of dancing with her at his next wedding but that was about it.
Meanwhile, Clotilde was sort of supportive, but not really a mom. She was preoccupied with her fashion label and going out most nights and having rich boyfriends and abruptly being in Rome or Buenos Aires without telling anyone.
So Ash was alone. For a while she had Onnie, who gave her secret guitar lessons for two years, but then he left to start a restaurant in New Orleans, and then she had no one at all.
She spent all her time outside of school shredding guitar alone in Clotilde’s apartment and writing songs and listening to music constantly and sometimes going to shows and thinking about the band she would start but not having anyone to start it with.
Also she briefly was the underage girlfriend of a member of Animal Collective. She refused to say who because he could get in big trouble.
So that brought us pretty much up to date.
“So how old are you,” I asked.
“Nineteen,” she said. “I got my ID from the equipment manager of the New York Knicks.”
I sort of wanted to hear more about that, but mostly didn’t.
“Did you graduate?”
“Yeah. In June.”
“Are you going to college?”
“Taking a year off.”
“To play music or what?”
“I physically can’t talk about myself anymore,” she said, and we left the room and the hotel and spent the afternoon staggering red-eyed and jittery around Knoxville looking for a place to play that night, like jazz-camp-escaped zombies.
13.
THE ASH RAMOS THREE BOOKS THE PERFECT TASTE
It took us five hours to find a place that we could book. It was an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet restaurant called Perfect Taste in a strip mall on Route 70, and it had no stage or sound system. So there were some clear early signs that it wasn’t going to be the smoothest possible beginning to the tour. Also a lack of sleep paired with a diet of Coke and Airheads had made us all temporarily psychotic.
How did we find Perfect Taste? Basically, a huge amount of getting rejected by actual music venues, followed by an even huger amount of random driving around.
The rejections were uniformly swift and impervious to whatever script we used:
1. Hi. We’re a band called the Ash Ramos Three. Can we play here tonight? Oh. Okay. Well, uh . . . okay. Thanks. Actually, why are we thanking you.
2. Hi. We’re a band called the Ash Ramos Three. Can we play here tonight? Oh. Then can we talk to the guy who does the booking? Oh. Well, what hours is he in here? Wow. That’s a cushy job. Honestly, it sounds like you don’t even need him. You should just do the booking yourself! Just book us and maybe your boss will give you a raise and a new title. And then you’ve truly begun your ascent up the corporate ladder. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. No, we don’t want a table. We’re obviously not here for a table. We’re here to play a life-changing show that you can use to catapult your career into places you’ve never even thought possible. Well, fine. Bye. Enjoy never having a good job. Sorry, we didn’t mean that, we’re just stressed out because Corey ate the entire bag of Dale’s BEEF potato chips and now he won’t stop burping.
3. Hi. We’re the Ash Ramos Three and our manager told us he had a gig booked here, but it turns out he was lying about that and a bunch of other stuff, so we fired him, and now we’re seeing if we—yeah, it’s just us. We fired him. Yeah, we’re all twenty-one. Blues, punk, like a blues punk roots power trio, but really a lot of critics say we transcend genre. Unfortunately we have nothing you can listen to because our manager stole all our CDs for no reason other than he’s vindictive. Well, also Ash stabbed him in the dick. The foreskin. He’s fine. We’re pretty sure he’s a rapist. Can we just play here tonight? We don’t have anywhere to play. We can play after the other bands are done. We’ll seriously go on whenever. Okay. Sure. Bye. If you see a guy with a bloody dick, then you’ll know. Although, you guys are probably already best friends.
4. Hi. We’re Meatflower, and we’re here for soundcheck. Meatflower who you booked for tonight like it says out front. Our slot’s at ten after Fangs of the Mutant. Ugggh. Look. Yeah. I can’t believe they keep doing this. Those guys from earlier weren’t the Meatflower that booked this gig. WE’RE Meatflower. Those fucking guys are just a bunch of assholes who call themselves Meatflower so they can steal our shows! We went to high school with them, Corey stole one of their girlfriends, and now we’re mortal enemies and they’ve been fucking with us the entire tour. But we’re the real Meatflower! Don’t let them back in here. Okay, fine. We’ll wait here until they come back. Sure. We’ll just wait right here. Okay. Hey. Look. We’re not Meatflower. But fuck Meatflower. We’re definitely better than them. Just let us play instead. Okay. Chill out for just one second. We haven’t even done anything.
5. Hi. If we pay you one thousand dollars, can we play here tonight instead of Coach Nasty Cat? A thousand bucks in cash. Hmmm. Okay. Well, look. It was worth a shot. Where would it even say in the legal code that this is illegal. Oh.
Eventually we found ourselves just driving around, not really saying a lot, and on Route 70, without asking us, Ash pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall that Perfect Taste was in.
“Fuck it,” she said.
The cashier of Perfect Taste was also the owner, a woman named Lucy with enormous permed hair, and she seemed delighted and amused that a band wanted to play at her restaurant.
“What kind of music?” Lucy wanted to know.
“We’re a blues roots punk power trio,” said Corey.
“Oh!” she said. “That’s a lot of things!”
“Yeah,” Corey agreed.
There was kind of a standoff where she smiled intensely at each of us.
“I like the blues,” she announced eventually. She had one of those smiles that made you feel great about yourself. “We get most people around five-thirty, six P.M. You can play then. Play blues music.”
It was already four. We had a band meeting out in the parking lot.
“That buffet looked rock-solid to me,” I said, trying to be positive.
“I probably shouldn’t eat any of it because I don’t have my EpiPen,” said Corey.
“Fierce,” I said.
“Ash,” said Corey. “Is this really a place where bands could play.”
“We just booked it, so yeah,” said Ash.
“We might be playing for zero people, though,” said Corey.
“She told us we were gonna play when they get the most people,” said Ash.
“I do worry a little that the acoustics are a giant bucket of dick,” said Corey.
“Shut the fuck up and listen,” said Ash, suddenly losing all patience. “Good. I want to play here. I want to play for strangers in basically a Chinese prison cafeteria. Because that’s how you become a great band. Okay? This is exactly the shit I’m talking about. We have to play at tough places to play. If we can play a great show here, we can play a great show anywhere. So I’m fucking excited about this shit.”
Corey did a Robert De Niro–type face scrunch. He was pissed off because on the one hand he hated being told what to do, but on the other hand he did not want to be the one who was anti-greatness.
“All right all right,” I said, attempting to build consens
us. “All right all right all right.”
“Let’s fucking do it then,” said Corey.
“We’re gonna play a great fucking show,” said Ash.
“Let’s play the fuck out of the Perfect Goddamned Taste.”
“We’re gonna rock the shit out of it.”
“We’re gonna rock it so hard they have to shut it down. For safety reasons.”
“We are going to fuck this place with our guitar dicks,” I said, and then immediately made eye contact with a nearby man who was bringing his two young children out of a FedEx.
Anyway, as it turned out, we did not play the fuck out of a great show. Instead, we found ourselves playing a show that was epically terrible.
First, the only place to set up with electric outlets was a little rectangle of space crammed in next to the buffet itself. So we had to wedge Corey in next to the combination egg rolls and spare ribs tray and then set up directly in front of him. We couldn’t see him, and he couldn’t hear us, and also we were in the way of anyone who wanted egg rolls or spare ribs, which literally everyone at a Chinese buffet wants.
Second, the audience came and went but was never more than twelve people, all of which were old or families. So they did not constitute the ideal audience for loud warlike songs about eating Roger Federer and fucking your dog. The acoustics were bad enough that it was impossible to tell what Ash was saying, but her intent was still clear. Every single person in the restaurant chose to sit as far away from us as possible, and either tried to behave as though we were not there or just sat there munching and glaring at us like resentful cows.
Third, as a band, we sucked.
We sucked in every way. Ash’s guitar was out of tune. My bass sounded like you were hearing it through a mattress, except still loud and in fact way too loud. Corey’s bass drum kept sliding away from him. I forgot entire parts of songs. Corey forgot even more entire parts of songs and kept panicking and switching to super fast disco, first as a joke but then increasingly as a kind of nihilistic statement about the bleak absurdity of what we were doing. Ash apparently got bored of singing actual notes and switched to a combination of retching and shrieking. We were physically incapable of all ending a song at the same time. In fact, we couldn’t do anything at the same time. We were an animal with three different kinds of leg. We were the soundtrack to a mental illness.