Plow the Bones (11 page)

This could perhaps have been predicted, dear Mr. Dhames. Any retard could have told you that the initial draw of your zine was the inclusion of an interview with the world’s only golem band. What other cadre of musicians crawling across the entire surface of our most unpleasant planet can hope to rest within the warm glow of comparison? My golem band is the very quintessence of post–post–post–punk rock–and–rolliana. American manufactured, driven to the point of obsession, filled with rage to which they are unable to match lingual noise, freakishly weird–looking, endlessly marketable and yet defiant of all markets. Behold, the new face of the beast! Throw your ersatz fingerhorns skyward, maggots of Parachute City! Pay fealty to thy new gods!

Marissa Taliofano:

Zero wanted Jan dead from the beginning.

Jan Landau (in a letter to Aaron Dhames):

P.S., Golem Zero would like to provide a romantic advice column to every issue. This will perhaps resolve your salability issue.

Marissa Taliofano:

Zero and I started dating after their sixth or seventh show. Okay, so, think about things from my perspective. You’re the hottest girl — I mean, yeah, I’m going to say it because back then, it was true — you’re the hottest girl in the Parachute City scene and it starts to get press, there are, like, fan sites devoted to you and stuff like that, and you start to buy it. You go, “I’m the queen of the new movement. I’m Debby Harry. I’m Patti Smith. I’m Lydia Lunch. I’m Janis Joplin.” So I started to… I was a slut. Because I had this idea that the queen of the scene had to be some sort of monstrous Uber–Paglia, plucking up boys and giving them a ride and then moving on, and it was making me miserable. I’m not built to be a slut. I was in show choir in high school. But yeah, I fucked everyone until… something changed the way I thought about stuff like that.

Casper Lynch:

I slept with Marissa…uh… twice. Yeah, two times, I think.

Theodore Ricks:

Marissa and I, we never dated, but we slept together.

Marcus Copper (accordions/vocals — The Only Children):

Did I fuck Marissa Strange? Yes. A thousand times yes.

Aaron Dhames:

Marissa? No. Not me.

Jan Landau (in a letter to Aaron Dhames):

I hath conquered the Strange wilderness and found it much less fearsome than its reputation would suggest.

Marissa Taliofano:

So here’s this guy… well, I guess
not
a guy… and he has no interest in sex beyond it being a wellspring of imagery for, y’know, all those dick songs they wrote. And he’s smart and he’s dark and he’s sweet and he doesn’t understand the world. We were so completely in love for a while. He wanted to keep me safe and he wanted to learn things from me, he wanted to know how people act, he thought I was beautiful, and I thought he was romantic and kissing him was like pressing your face against cool tile on a hot day. And he was just so broken and sad.

Jan Landau’s Golem Band — “Ken”

I have nothing to offer you, no traffic for your highway, no switchblade for your wound.

Marcus Copper:

Look, here’s the thing, you can talk to me, you can talk to Grace, you can do your little interviews with Casper and Theo or the dudes from Misanthropics — who, by the way, were never around for this, despite what they’ll try to tell you, fucking squealing college–radio piggies that they are — but this whole story, the whole fucking story belongs to three people: Marissa Strange, or whatever she’s calling herself, Aaron Dhames, and Jan Landau. And only two are still breathing, so…

Golem Zero (from his back–page column in Parasite City):

This was intended as a relationship advice column, but astute readers will have noticed that it’s turned into something else. It’s been a chronicle of my own evolution. Look back at those old columns some time, check out my clumsy aphorisms, my naïveté. I’ve grown up in front of you, reader. Well, I’m about to do some more growing. My father has suggested that the time has come for an upgrade. I don’t know what that means, but I know it’s going to take some time. So, this will be the last column you see from me for a while. But father knows best, doesn’t he? (See Marissa? Sarcasm! I’m getting the hang of this!) See you next year, Parasites.

Theodore Ricks:

I don’t know how anybody even noticed that the golems weren’t around anymore. I mean, the shows got a little quieter, there were fewer fights, fewer beer bottles rolling around on the floor, but frankly, I had no idea they were gone until it was brought to my attention by Marissa.

Aaron Dhames:

Everybody in the scene knew that something was going on, even Theo, he just didn’t want anybody to know he knew ’cause it would blow his cover as, like, aloof experimental music guru guy. We all read that thing Zero wrote about being gone for a while. It was freaky. The scene got tense.

Grace Sorbo:

Oh Jesus, the Misanthropics/Only Children show? The homecoming show? Oh wow. Yeah, that was bad.

Marcus Copper:

Hal Landau, y’know, Jan’s brother, he’s there because he loved Misanthropics for some reason, and he always, I mean,
always
had mushrooms, so I squeezed, um… six caps, I think, into a Snickers bar and ate that, so by the time we’re on stage I am… really gone.

Hal Landau:

I wasn’t at that show. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

Grace Sorbo:

Marcus was terrible that night. I mean, he was always a dick, but especially that night. He was on mushrooms, I think, and he couldn’t even feel the accordion in his hands, and he kept busting his lips on the microphone. I remember looking at Jack [Pelligrino, bassist] and just shaking out heads, because there were supposed to be record execs in the audience that night. We were basically like, well, there goes our last shot.

Marcus Copper:

And Kerrigan Malloy and Boyd Taupin, cause they’re so high and fucking mighty now that their band is hot shit, they took over the green room at Gardersnake’s and wouldn’t let us in. It’s no secret, right, that everybody in Misanthropics was doing coke. Anyway, they are all completely tweaky and obnoxious, and Kerrigan, with that stupid fucking haircut, he comes out of the green room and goes to the bar and orders drinks that his record label ends up paying for.

Grace Sorbo:

Marcus… that poor asshole. It’s hard to be angry at him now, isn’t it, knowing what happened? He opens up his big mouth. He sees Malloy and goes, “Look at this fucking big shot! Hey fuck you, Malloy! Sell–out! College–radio sycophant! Blah blah blah!” That sort of shit, and the crowd got nasty.

Marcus Copper:

This is one week,
one week
, before Matador signs us and Volcano Void, by the way, so we’re starting to draw crowds, the place is packed, and not just with Misanthropics fans. I get up on stage, right,
tripping… balls…
and I guess I started shouting at Malloy, I don’t know. Anyway I said something about the golems, I don’t remember what, like, comparing them to Misanthropes to get Malloy’s balls in a knot, and bam. That’s when Marissa, who was… sensitive about the golems… did her thing.

Marissa Taliofano:

Marcus said, “You ain’t nobody in this town unless you’ve fucked Marissa Strange, and Malloy, you ain’t fucked Marissa Strange.” It had nothing to do with the golems.

Aaron Dhames:

Marissa rushed the stage and put a beer bottle through Marcus’s accordion. Marcus spit in her face. And she broke the bottle on an amp and, uh…

Marissa Taliofano:

Marcus Copper lost his left eye. I don’t know how it happened, but it wasn’t me. Nobody ever pressed charges.

Aaron Dhames:

After that? Chaos. Riot. Biggest barfight I’ve ever seen. It was apocalyptic. The cops came. Everybody was arrested. The record company sent lawyers and posted bail for Misanthropics and the rest of us sat at the station all night, filling out reports and waiting for our turn to answer questions.

Marcus Copper:

This isn’t my story. I’m not the guy you want to talk to. I know it seems like I’m a part of it, but I’m not. What happened to me was… it was inconsequential.

Grace Sorbo:

It was great publicity. We got signed, and I said to the label guy, hey, y’know, sign Volcano Void, they’re great, mostly because I loved Marissa so much. She was always like my big sister, even though I think I might be older. Even after what happened to Marcus.

Aaron Dhames:

You saw it happen so slowly. What a bad time that was. With the golems gone and after the fight at Gardersnake’s. I had this awful feeling the whole time, like Jan was… I don’t know, on the ceiling or something, looking down. When he was around, he always felt so slimy and… like, diseased. But his absence? The space where he wasn’t? That felt even slimier. Like he’d left his mark there, warning us away from it, like he would come back and he didn’t want anybody to stand in his spot. Anyway, about two weeks after the Gardersnake’s fiasco, Marcus’s hands started to rot off.

Marcus Copper:

I thought it was the mushrooms. Poison, or something.

Hal Laundau:

I never gave Marcus Copper any mushrooms. I’d like you to leave my property.

Marissa Taliofano:

He didn’t deserve it. Nobody deserves to lose their eye and their hands. But if anyone was close to deserving it, it was Marcus. The only person I can think of who would have deserved it more is Jan Landau.

Theodore Ricks:

I had never played accordion in my life, I was always a pianist. But I get this call from Grace, like, “We can’t record the new record. Something’s wrong with Marcus’s hands.” So I learned and I recorded with them. It’s why the accordion sounds so awful on that record. I learned it in three fucking days. I wish you could have heard Only Children the way they were supposed to sound. They were a great band. I remember getting to the studio and Marcus just looked pathetic. He still had that giant white bandage over his left eye socket and now his hands were… kind of grey and… okay, when I was a kid, my mom used to drive my sister and I to the Natural History Museum, and my favorite exhibit was the one with the Egyptian mummies, with their parchment skin, meatless and close to the bone, the fingers curled in like dead spider legs. That’s what Marcus’s hands looked like.

Grace Sorbo:

They were smaller every day. We’d show up to practice and a little bit more of them had flaked away. A good breeze could take a layer of skin with it. And Marcus was so damned depressed. That was the end of us, of our band. He refused to go to the doctor. And soon they were just gone. All gone.

Jan Landau (in a letter to Aaron Dhames):

Regarding your recent letter informing me of the unfortunate condition of Marcus Copper’s hands and eye. I am sorry to hear about his eye.

Marissa Taliofano:

The first news I got of the golems’ return was a poster. A poster. I hadn’t heard from Zero in a month, maybe more, and here’s this poster outside of this café where I used to get coffee in the morning. “Jan Landau’s Golem Band! New and Improved! Better than Ever! Friday Night at the Infamous Gardernsnake’s Bar and Grill! Come Pay Your Fealty to the New Kings of Rock and Roll!” I was furious.

Theodore Ricks:

Everybody was excited, as though somehow the return of a shitty local band was supposed to be big news. So we all went. They were much better with their new hands.

Marissa Taliofano:

I wanted to hate Zero for disappearing. But then he shows up and he’s staring at me with those big soulful eyes… there was always something about those eyes, so big and brown, set on either side and underneath of the Hebrew letters in his forehead. I remember that he knocked on my apartment door one night, and his knock sounded different. You know how, after a while, you kind of start to recognize the way a person knocks? Like, not consciously, not like, “Oh, I bet that’s so–and–so,” but your brain kind of prepares itself for who will be on the other end, just based on how the knock sounds. Well, he knocks, and I had no idea it was him. I opened the door, and I saw his eyes, and of course I melted right away, all the anger was just gone. And I fell against him, just let my weight carry me forward, let gravity pull us together, and I plummeted into his chest. He could take it. You couldn’t push him down. No one could. He said, “Shh. Hey. Shh, I’m back. It’s okay. I’m not going away again.” And he put his arms around me. And I felt something warm and soft and clumsy kind of… I don’t know, kind of combing my hair, and I reached back and grabbed his hand. It was real. A real human hand. The clay ran down to tiny rivulets over the palm and the back, then under the skin like veins, or like IV drips, and he had these big beautiful fingers, plump and pink, perfect. Just perfect.

Jan Landau’s Golem Band — “You Ain’t Gonna Ruin My Fun”:

Little girls, little boys, I’m coming home, strapped to the hood of my GTO, and you ain’t never ever gonna ever go and ruin my fun.

Casper Lynch:

I mean, they were Marcus Copper’s hands. That’s obvious, right? Somehow, all five of the golems had Marcus Copper’s hands. I don’t know how that’s possible, but I don’t know how giving life to clay is possible either. I don’t think anyone really trusted the golems after that. Except Marissa.

Marissa Taliofano:

I know this sounds crass, it sounds like I’m living up to my reputation or whatever, but I don’t know how else to show you what we were, how we were. After they got their hands and before the whole thing turned to shit, I used to make love to Zero’s hands. They were the most sensitive part of his body. So we used to hold each other real close, and I would just… I’m not going to go into detail. We used to do that for an hour every night. I used to cry sometimes. It was like, there was just all of this emotion. Not happiness exactly, and not sadness, just… hugeness. Cosmic hugeness. I could feel it inside of him, inside of us. It seemed like the only appropriate reaction, the only way to acknowledge it, without it bursting out of our bodies and killing us, was crying. I know this is strange, but it was like… that hugeness was a constant for him, a sacred lonely status quo, and making love like that, it allowed him to… to share some part of that with me. He trusted me. Goddamn it.