The Haters: A Novel

1.

WE DIDN’T KNOW JAZZ CAMP WOULD BE THIS MANY DUDES

Jazz camp was mostly dudes. It was just a scene of way too many dudes.

Corey and I were in Shippensburg University Memorial Auditorium for orientation, and it was dudes as far as the eye could see. Dudes were trying with all their might to be mellow and cool. Everywhere you looked, a dude was making a way too exaggerated face of agreement or friendliness. And every ten seconds it was clear that some dude had made a joke in some region of the auditorium, because all the other dudes in that region were laughing at that joke in loud, emphatic ways.

They were trying to laugh lightheartedly but it was unmistakably the crazed, anxious barking of competitive maniacs.

Corey and I found some seating way off to the side, and our hope was that we would not absorb or be absorbed by other dudes. Inevitably, however, a dude approached us. He was white. Jazz camp was mostly white dudes. This dude was clutching a gold-embossed tenor sax case, and on his head was a fedora with two different eagle feathers in it.

Corey was drumming on some practice pads and had spaced out completely, so I was the one addressed by this dude.

You cats mind if I make it a trio? he asked me, and it was not a huge surprise that a dude of his appearance was speaking in Jazz Voice.

This dude was attempting a big relaxed smile, but his eyes were needy and desperate and I knew we had to accept him at least for a little while.

Sure thing, man, I said. I’m Wes.

Adam, said this dude named Adam, trying to lead me through the stages of a way too long handshake. Sorry—could you lay your name on me again?

It was even less of a huge surprise that this dude was not prepared for my name to be Wes, based on his careful appraisal of my face and skin.

Wes, I said. Wes, like uh, Wes Montgomery.

Wess, he repeated, pronouncing it sort of Mexican. Very cool, very cool. And where in the wide world are you from, Wes?

Me and Corey are both from Pittsburgh, I said, hoping Corey would help out.

Corey stared at the dude but did not stop drumming. Corey basically has no sense of social cues, and you would think that would make his life harder, but it’s the opposite.

Pittsburgh, repeated Adam finally. Great little jazz town. Well, I’m a reedman from Jersey. My axe of choice is the tenor horn.

Cool, I said. I play bass. And Corey here is obviously world-class at jazz bassoon.

For a couple of seconds, we were an auditorium laugh bomb. Adam threw his head back and went, OH HA HA HA HA HA. ‘JAZZ BASSOON’?! OH MAN. WESS, YOU ARE ONE FUNNY CAT. A number of dudes looked over at us. I attempted to come up with a decent I Guess I Just Made a Good Joke Face that wouldn’t make anyone want to punch it, but it turns out that’s an unmakeable face.

For real, though, we should all jam sometime, said Adam, but fortunately at that moment Bill Garabedian walked onstage with his band, and everyone started cheering and trying to freak out the most.

Bill Garabedian was the famous jazz guitarist whose jazz camp it was. He was an emaciated white dude with a shaved head and a complicated soul patch/goatee arrangement, and it was kind of clear that he had not written his Opening Address out in advance. He spoke a mellow adult variant of Jazz Voice, and his points were these:

—I’m Bill

—Thank you, thank you

—Ha ha

—Okay, settle down, for real

—Thank you, all right

—Welcome to my fifth annual jazz camp

—Ha ha, yeah! I think fifth, anyway

—What do I even say? Someone else want to get up here and talk?

—I’m serious

—Ha ha, though, all right

—You know, I’m getting too old for this, man

—Every year you kids just keep getting younger and younger

—Ha ha, though, but for real

—I’m up here looking out at all these young faces

—You know, I remember when I was your age and all I wanted to know was, where’s jazz headed?

—What’s the future of jazz, you dig? The future . . . of jazz

—Then when I was seventeen I got my first Grammy nomination

—And that’s when I realized: the future of jazz is now

—Because before you know it, the future is the present

—Think about that. Future sneaks up on you

—And before you know it, you’re old

—Old and wrinkly and the girls don’t like you as much! Ha ha

—Okay, you don’t have to laugh so much, Don

—They don’t like you that much, either

—Anyway, what was I saying

—For real, though

—Russ, you remember what I was gonna say? No?

—We weren’t just talking about it?

—Maybe that wasn’t you

—Well, uh, look

—Oh, I remember now. Okay. Dig this. These next two weeks are about exploring your musical personalities

—We really want you guys to form combos, you know, mess around on the side and really stretch out, all right

—And here’s what we did to make that possible

—This year we admitted double the rhythm section players

—Double the drummers, double the bassists, double the pianists, double the guitarists

—So you horn players got double the opportunities to jam

—Ha ha, don’t mention it

—You’re welcome, horn players

—And rhythm section players, don’t you worry, you’ll get plenty of opportunities to play, all right

—We’re gonna have tryouts in a minute, divide you up by skill level

—But first, the other teachers and I need to stretch out a little bit

—Let’s see Miley Smiley do this

And with that, Bill and the teachers launched into this super angular, up-tempo, hard-bop thing.

The goal was to demonstrate that they were all jazz geniuses with insane chops, and they completely achieved this goal. The entire song was sort of a way of making sequences of musical notes that refused to form melodies of any kind. That’s incredibly hard to do, and accomplishing it is one of the final stages of becoming a hard-core jazz dude.

Our new friend Adam was almost orgasmically psyched. Literally every fifteen seconds he said something along the lines of, Shit! Those cats can blow! or Bill is a real motherfucker of an axeman!! He could not decide whether he was supposed to pronounce the r’s in motherfucker. But this was the only thing limiting how amped he was.

Corey and I were not as amped. I mean, on some level, we were also admiring the ridiculous chops of these jazz assassins. But on a deeper level, we had become apprehensive about our roles at this camp. You see, we were solid at our instruments, but not exceptional. And Bill Garabedian’s Jazz Giants of Tomorrow Intensive Summer Workshops had the reputation of only being for the highest-level jazz kids. Back in the winter, we had figured we had no chance of getting in. We really just applied because our music teacher made us. And when we learned we got accepted, it sort of made us more confused than amped.

Now, however, it was starting to make sense. Corey and I were two of the lower-quality drummers and bassists that the camp needed in order to inflate its rhythm section numbers. We were jazz-nerd chaff. The worst of the best. And I was familiar enough with the tactics of music educators to know that Bill Garabedian’s promise of You’ll get plenty of opportunities to play was also the promise of You’ll get even more opportunities to irritably sit around listening to other kids who are roughly as mediocre as you.

We were coming to terms with the enormity of our situation. We were stranded for two weeks in a little town three hours east of Pittsburgh, awash in a veritable sea of anxious strivey dudes, not even going to get to play half the time, and it was making us not amped at all.

Another thing that made us not amped was Bill Garabedian’s band’s encore, a smoothed-out fusion song entitled The Moment. Basically, it was the soundtrack of any time a high school principal decides to have sex.

2.

TRYOUTS DIDN’T GO GREAT

There were nine other bassists at tryouts. The bass instructor was a big tired-looking Asian American dude named Russell, and he laid it out for us:

1. You’re trying out for five big bands: the Duke Ellington band, the Count Basie band, the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis band, the Woody Herman band, and the Gene Krupa band.

2. Each band will have two bassists alternating song by song.

3. They’re all great bands to get into, okay?

4. So don’t get all hung up about what band you’re in.

5. Unless it is Gene Krupa.

6. If you get put in Gene Krupa, you may want to consider spending the next two weeks not being at this camp and instead living under a bridge.

Maybe he didn’t make the last two points out loud. But I felt like I could hear him thinking them.

Obviously, I got Gene Krupa, the lowest-skill-level band. My tryout didn’t even go too badly. But I think it hurt me that I was the only bassist playing bass guitar and not string bass. It probably made me seem less committed to jazz. Another thing that hurt me was that pretty much every other bassist was an unspeakable beast.

Corey got Gene Krupa, too. He was as despondent as I was. We commiserated about it over lunch.

COREY: does this mean i have to drum like gene krupa?

WES: if you even get to play which may never happen

COREY: gene krupa drums like a herb

WES: no he doesn’t

COREY: he drums like the king of all herbs

WES: he doesn’t drum like anything because he is super dead

COREY: that’s a good point but he did drum like the biggest herb in america

Herb is just a generic term for someone lame. Corey is probably the last person on earth who uses it. I think he likes it because it reminds him of Herb Alpert, a smooth jazz trumpeter who both horrifies and fascinates us.

COREY: i have a new favorite song

WES: oh yeah what

COREY: the song is known as . . . the moment

WES: ohhhhhh yeah

COREY: i was lucky enough to hear it performed recently

WES: yeah i was there

COREY: it was a performance so buttery and smooth that i had to do harm to my dick

Dick harm is a thing that comes up with us a lot. It’s kind of our go-to trope.

WES: oh hell yeah

COREY: specifically i had to go to the reception desk and unload an entire clip of staples into the side of my dick

WES: right in that side part. a classic gambit

COREY: yeah right into the side part of my dick skin

Basically, the idea is, if something is really great, we get so amped that we have no choice but to do harm to our own dicks. That is the true measure of how wonderful a thing can be.

WES: i didn’t want to say anything but upon hearing that beautiful and mysterious song i also had to inflict grievous harm upon my own dick

COREY: i would like to hear about that in the maximum detail

WES: i wandered the parking lot for what must have been hours or even days until i happened upon an unlocked parked car at which point i summoned a boner so that i could slam the car door on my own boner

COREY: well that just sounds great

It is important to note that dick harm also happens when something is terrible. But usually when things are terrible, it’s less you harming your dick and more your dick just trying to flee the situation at all costs. So there’s all kinds of nuance to dick harm that we’ve been developing over the years.

COREY: that soprano sax solo in particular was so velvety and pure that i had no choice but to pluck my dick off like a ripe tomato from the vine and feed it to cats

We were forced to stop when Adam came striding up to us. He had become much more relaxed, and his jaunty walk was causing liquids to spill off of his lunch tray.

Tryouts were crazy, he told us. There are some talented cats in this muthafuckerr!

Yeah, man, I said.

Rurnh, said Corey, who was unable to pretend to be interested in talking to this dude but knew he had to make some response noise or it would be weird.

It kills me to be around so much talent, marveled Adam, not yet sitting down. I was listening to some of the other reeds and I was thinking, do I even belong here?

Sure, I said.

But I did okay.

Oh, good.

I mean better than I expected, for sure.

That’s good at least.

I might even be in over my head!

Oh yeah? Probably not, though.

I don’t know, man! Ha ha. I just don’t know.

Clearly this would go on indefinitely until I asked him what band he was in. Do you mind if I ask what band are you in?

Count Basie. First chair.

Oh, nice.

Will I be spying you fools behind the skins and the bass fiddle? Or did you crack the Ellington outfit?

Actually, we’re Gene Krupa, I said.

Oh, he said.

He kept smiling, but some kind of almost-invisible flinch traveled across his eyes. And then he actually began slowly backing away from us.

I am not making this up. It was like he thought our jazz mediocrity were contagious or something.

Very cool, very cool, he said, his eyes darting around. Well . . . I gotta chow it up, on the lunch side.

Maybe we can jam soon! I said, hoping to make him feel guilty.

"No doubt," he said. His head was already aimed in a completely different direction so he ended up saying it to someone else.

COREY: why would you ever want to jam with a private-eye-hat-with-bird-feathers-wearing dude

WES: there is no risk of him jamming with us or even talking to us again now that he knows that we are gene krupa

COREY, eating so fast that it is messing up his breathing: ernt

WES: we will be choosing jam partners from an exponentially lamer pool of dudes

COREY: my point is that i may have to slap you around a little if you keep befriending random herbs

WES: thank you for that warning

COREY: there is a hundred percent chance of the following scenario

WES:

COREY: a second tiny private eye with bird feathers hat is delicately perched on the tip of that dude’s dick

3.

FINALLY A GIRL IS SIGHTED

We finished lunch early. Corey’s mom called him, so he had to deal with that. I wandered into the Gene Krupa practice room twenty minutes before rehearsal was supposed to start. There were a few other kids in there, too.

One of them was unmistakably a girl.

Now, look. I’m not girl crazy. I’m not the kind of dude who’s going to be a huge jackass to the other dudes in order to try to improve my chances with girls. It drives me completely insane when dudes do that.

I’m also not the type of dude to bust out a special persona to make girls like me more. Like the kind of dude who is perched on the front steps of your school with an acoustic guitar trying to convince girls that he is Jason Mraz. Or the dude who is a dick to all girls because he thinks it will make them fall hopelessly in love with him. He has grown his hair out super long and fastidiously washes it many times a day, and it hangs over his face so he is constantly pushing it out of his eyes and then looking around to see if anyone is witnessing this battle he is having with his own unspeakably beautiful hair and then rolling his eyes or quietly snarling to himself.

I think we can all agree that nothing is worse than those dudes. So I don’t try to reengineer my behavior in order to get with girls. But this does not mean that I am not thinking about girls all the time. At all times, at least part of my brain is going, Girls girls girls. Girls who are cute and girls who are nice. Girls who are sexy and funny and smart. Girls. It would be so great if a girl liked you. It would be a happiness so extreme that you probably wouldn’t be able to function. So maybe it’s for the best that that never seems to be what is happening, or will happen. In conclusion, girls.

So yeah. Ignore what I said earlier. Clearly I am sort of girl crazy. It’s not on purpose, I can tell you that. Being girl crazy is a good way to end up looking like an idiot. But I can’t really help it.

The only reason I play bass is a girl. To quote my history teacher, that’s a true fact. In middle school I had a crush on a girl who liked the Nicki Minaj song Super Bass. Her name was Lara Washington, and I spent a number of months not talking to her in a state of barely manageable fear. Then we got put in lab together, and she was singing about how a dude had that boom ba doom boom boom ba doom boom he got that super bass. So I was like, what’s super bass, and she said, super bass is when a man is sexy. She told me that super bass meant everything you could want in a man.

So immediately after that I started playing bass. And for whatever reason I picked it up pretty quickly, and that felt great. It was good to be good at something. And even if I hadn’t been good at it, it was really nice just to have a thing. Because I had always been jealous of the kids who had a thing. Kids who had soccer practice and ballet recitals and it wasn’t just something for them to pass the time. It was their thing. Even Kerel Garfield, who did origami with all of his paper homework in this obsessive kind of uncontrolled way. That was definitely his thing and you had to respect him for it.

So music became my thing. And that felt great. And it continues to feel great. I’m good at it, and I know a lot about it, and I never tell anyone about the messed-up part, which is, I don’t love it.

Well, okay. Hang on. That’s not true. I do love music. But I also hate it.

That’s not right either. Because hate is not quite the right word. What I’m really talking about is hating on. I’m talking about being a hater.

Haters aren’t people who hate stuff. Haters just hate on stuff. And just because they’re haters doesn’t mean they don’t love stuff, too. You can love something and hate on it at the same time. In fact for me it’s kind of impossible not to.

This is going to get complicated, but maybe if I make a new chapter it will not be as complicated.

4.

NOPE, STILL AS COMPLICATED

Look. I know we should be getting back to the girl in the practice room. But this is sort of important to know about me. Any music I love, I end up hating on, too.

I’m embarrassed to tell you who this started with. But that’s the whole point. It started with a band called Kool & the Gang.

Once upon a time, I was way way into Kool & the Gang. I got into them through my dad, who is also super into the Gang, and above all, Kool. As an impressionable child, I was completely on board with Dad’s love of Kool & the Gang, and in particular, his belief that their fourth studio album, Wild and Peaceful (De-Lite, 1973), was the greatest album ever made. We felt that the bass lines were unstoppable and that the horn section was crazy tight. Additionally, the party guitar stylings of Clay Smith made me want to roll around on the carpet like an animal.

But really the best part was, these dudes were having epic amounts of fun. Everyone is having so much fun that they sound like they are on the brink of a crippling panic attack. Here. Go look up a track off Wild and Peaceful called Funky Stuff. Put that track on and then keep reading this. Okay. Yeah. Do you hear how much fun these guys are having? Do you hear the dudes shouting uncontrollably from sheer happiness? And the dude just completely going to town on a slide whistle of the variety that a clown would use? Are you bopping around in your seat with a huge grin on your face? Of course that is what you are doing. Because that groove is the funnest thing ever.

Once you’re done, throw on a track called More Funky Stuff. Yeah. You hear that? That’s a different track from the same album. But it is also a hundred percent the same groove. That’s how good that groove is. They reused the groove in a completely unapologetic way. And until I was thirteen, I saw nothing wrong with that. I would have listened to, literally, a hundred songs of that groove. A thousand.

I thought Kool & the Gang was nothing less than the soundtrack to pure human happiness. Then one day I played it for my newfound buddy Corey Wahl, the drummer from school jazz band. He had recently demonstrated our friendship by yelling at a dude who knocked me down in soccer. So I attempted