Jeff was first to go but he was our bass player so it wasn’t till day 39 that we noticed. There was already a smell, like deep wells and damp wool, but we were touring and we’d run out of Gold Bond before we even hit Brooklyn. Before we entered the Sour Patch House. Before smell, like all sensation, became strange and something to recoil from.
At first it was wonderful, like the Johnny Depp Willy Wonka but, like, with interns instead of Oompa-Loompas. We just laughed and ate the Sour Patch Bears offered to us and never seemed to notice that we never seemed to sleep and my guitar was always out of tune. Or, rather, not out of tune, just in a tuning we couldn’t place, sickly and disorienting. Like far off insects.
When the Professor asked us if our target audience was teenagers, we said, “Sure!” I mean, teenagers love guitar rock. And when the Professor looked over my shoulder at the wall-sized painting of an elongated gummy worm circling Saint George and asked, “Are you prepared to be Scionists?” I misheard and gave my stock answer, “Well, it’s awfully complicated but I did go to temple.”
The Professor laughed and I felt my shadow move away from me.
The Sour Room was where all the "filming" was done. The room was bare and consisted of a camera extended from the floor that would follow us as we ate plate after plate of sugared candies. None of us had even had a sweet tooth before but from the moment we entered the house, we never stopped craving… sweetness. I was once a vegan, I’m sure of it, but my memory of before Brooklyn, before The Patch, is like the memory of a story my mother would tell me on her knee. I wonder if my mother will miss me. She wanted me to be a doctor.
When we asked the Professor when we’d be asked to provide content, she just smiled. The sign over her office said, “You Need To Break Culture To Make Culture.” Jeff had joked that it sounded like a Beulah album title but he was older than us and his references sometimes seemed arbitrary. When I stand in the Sour Patch lavatory and rest my head against the mirror, I can hear him still. It feels like he’s gibbering Pavement lyrics from behind my eyelids. The Professor calls this "being part of the conversation."
When Sarah, our drummer, went into the Sour Room that final time, we didn’t think anything of it. She didn’t come out for two days. Before she leapt from the window to the sidewalk below (the same window that had previously been unbreakable no matter how hard we banged but for Sarah it just… accepted her) Sarah looked at me and whispered, "something that has a lot of legs. A LOT of legs."
She was my roommate at Wesleyan. I don’t think I've stopped crying since but after—God, I have no idea how long; Months? Years?—here, the saccharine moisture that we secrete doesn’t feel like something that can be named.
The DIY kids had warned us. They said, "Don’t sell out! Stay with us in our loft in Bushwick! You’ll lose your souls!"
But they always said that.
There is just me now. I’m all alone, unless you count the interns with indistinct faces and their curious lope where their feet never seem to leave the floor. In fact, I feel as though my own feet have never been stickier. I know we had shows but I can’t remember where they are or who booked them. I assume Todd P but what do the words "Todd P" even mean? I repeat them to myself regardless. It’s the only comfort I have. I haven’t even looked at my phone in weeks, which, more than my dead friends and loosening skin, worries me the most tbqh.
I just wanted us to make art and share our music through various social medias and streaming platforms. The Professor swore she would help us. What other options were there if not a multi-media movie snack sponsorship?
I may make one more attempt to leave, reach the safety of Queens, or, dare to dream, New Brunswick, but oh dear sweet Jesus I do fear what lies beneath that pink and sugar encrusted lab coat of the Professor. Even when she’s motionless for hours, I hear rustling beneath it. It sounds like Sarah and Jeff and our merch girl and my mother and an endless, timeless pit of eels and crickets and soft wood collapsing from inward rot.
Oh god, oh mother, oh loving universe, oh golden age SPIN… I wish to all that’s holy we’d stayed at the Snickers Long Island City pied-a-terre instead.