A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  Jim returned to Fort Monmouth eager to share his adventure with Sarah. She would appreciate the thrill of standing among thousands swaying to “Young and Wasted” and “Detroit Rock City,” his own heartbeat in time with the rhythms. As best he could, he’d tell her of his sudden sense of pitched weightlessness, as if his every choice—however small—had led inexorably to this swirl of colored spotlight and costume and story, this warm theater and the snow falling gently over the city.

  Sarah Llaguno was the sole woman on the USMAPS postseason cross country team. Jim was one of the ten men who’d qualified for the team, and they’d discovered in the sport their common bond. They ran side by side during training runs at Asbury Park, each understanding with a glance the other’s unspoken jokes and straining to glimpse the ocean behind the rows of garish hot dog stands and clamorous pinball arcades that lined the boardwalk.

  Before long, Sarah and Jim were constant companions, discussing over tea the movies they saw together in Eatontown and the music they loved. On Saturday afternoons, they walked to nearby Monmouth Mall to flip through the bins of Psychedelic Furs and the Pretenders, albums brand-new to Sarah. “Jim had such a sense for music,” she would recall. “If he thought a new release was good, you could almost assume that band was going to make it.”

  The two looked as if they belonged together, Sarah slim and petite and Jim toned and fit and more and more resembling his high school illustrations of the small, wiry character he’d called Maynard.

  They spoke of marriage, albeit knowing neither was ready for such a commitment. Jim referred to Sarah in a letter to Kjiirt as his “one and only,” while Sarah struggled with the realization that she most probably was gay. Their intimacy, though, was deeper than sexual. Theirs was the nonthreatening, respectful relationship Sarah required and the foundation of a lifelong friendship. “Jim is the only man I’ve ever allowed to hold my hand,” she would admit decades later. He would change who he was for no one, she recalled, and he instinctively extended to her the same expectation of integrity.

  Early that spring, in another of the military’s unexplained reorganizational maneuvers, the CCs were allowed to select new roommates, and Jim requested of his section captain that he room with John. Six feet tall, sensitive, and a skilled concert pianist, John struggled through his days at the prep school, his attendance there a fulfillment of his parents’ wish that he become a soldier.

  Jim had heard his flawless performance at the piano and seen the lengths to which John went to be accepted among the more aggressive CCs. He’d watched him return from evenings with his tormentors, seen him subject his previous roommate to inebriated stupors and their messy aftermaths. “I was like, Jesus, dude!” he would recall. “This must be breaking your heart!”

  John was clearly unhappy, in prep school only to please his parents and going along with what the others forced him to do. They’d pour all this shit in a glass and spit in it and dare him to drink it. And then he’d completely puke all over his blanket and bed. It makes me retch thinking about the shit they did to him.

  He would come in drunk and I would fucking drill sergeant all over his ass, lay into him and go, “You don’t need to fucking listen to these assholes,” just trying to push and push and push him to what he really wanted to do, which was play piano. It burned me up to see that he could do something better than most people, and yet he wasn’t doing it. I couldn’t sit back and watch this happen. I told him, “You’re your own person. You don’t need to behave this way. You’re loved. You’re talented. You don’t need to do these things to impress these knuckleheads.”

  But he was smart and did all the testing properly and he ended up getting his appointment to West Point and came out as a private. Of course, there’s a punch line: John couldn’t take the pressure and later committed suicide.

  Who knows. He may have gone down that path anyway, even if he’d become a pianist. But at the time, I knew something was wrong, that he wasn’t supposed to be there.

  “When Jim saw someone who wasn’t following their heart and was choosing the wrong path, he tried to bring out what they should be focusing on,” Sarah recalled. “He was always impatient with people who just followed the crowd. He had a name for people like that. He called them tools.”

  “Good News + Bad News! I need a good tan and I’ve got the ultimate solution to get one,” Jim wrote Kjiirt in early May. “I received my appointment to West Point last week and turned in my declination of appointment card. I’ve been re-stationed at Fort ‘Microwave of Armpits’ Hood, Texas, hence the awesome tan.”

  The decision had not been an easy one. Jim had enjoyed his success at prep school and had forged comfortable relationships with the like-minded Sarah and Dean Beal. Accepting the appointment was tempting, yet he felt he’d come too far to relinquish the dream of art school.

  As his grades continued to improve and his skills on the mat and track brought him recognition, Jim had begun to suspect that his achievements might just qualify him for the appointment. And if he accepted, his fate would be sealed: He’d be groomed for a military career as an officer, and he knew that if he were to make such a commitment, he’d take it seriously and see it through to the end without a backward glance at the tuition fund he must forfeit.

  He could think of no one to ask for unbiased advice. Even Sarah, her own direction clear, hadn’t known him long enough to truly understand the doubts and certainties he held in equal measure. Mike, convinced of Jim’s eventual acceptance, had proudly announced it to his fellow teachers months before. The people of Scottville equated West Point with achievement and prestige, and Jim knew that if he turned down the appointment, he must suffer the dismay they’d feel as deeply as if his decision represented some failure of their own.

  At that moment, all these voices are ringing in your head, telling you what you’re supposed to do. I knew I’d hear the wind go out of my father if I turned this thing down.

  And I heard Newkirk pounding his shoes on the desk going, “Don’t let anybody influence your decision. It’s your life. It’s your choice. Don’t just jump on the cheerleader bandwagon.”

  And Jim knew, as he’d known for a long time, which was the right path. He moved his belongings across the courtyard to the washout section, the barracks where those dismissed for misconduct or failing grades were sequestered while they awaited their orders.

  His West Point slot was returned to the pool of willing candidates, and only weeks before the USMAPS Class of ’84 graduation, Jim said goodbye to Sarah and departed for Texas to serve the final 15 months of his military commitment.

  Two days in 90-degree heat had burned his skin to a redness no Solarcaine could relieve—had any been available in the field miles from the post. He scooped water from his steel helmet and splashed it across his face in a vain attempt to remove the thick film of dust. He could feel the grit caked deep in his nostrils and his ears, and he ran his fingers through his hair, an immobile mat of grime and sweat. “My hair feels like one of those horsehair doormats after Uncle Bob and the kids have wiped their muddy boots on it,” he wrote Kjiirt.

  Field training at Fort Hood had begun only days after his arrival with cavalry and fire brigades stationed about the massive installation, the all-too-familiar western landscape otherwise barren but for sparse stands of mountain laurel and red oak.

  His bay was a mirror image of his Kansas room, austere but comfortable enough. His roommate, Wayne, bright and personable, welcomed him, and he in turn extended his hand and introduced himself as Maynard.

  Early on his first morning at Fort Hood, Maynard came downstairs and crossed the lawn for formation in the parking lot at the front of the barracks. He stopped short, overcome by an unexpected vertigo. The asphalt, the vehicles along its periphery, the tall lampposts undulated in black waves, shiny in the sunshine. He blinked, regained his balance, and looked again. Crickets, black crickets, thousands of them hatched i
n the relentless Texas heat and humidity, had settled across the lot, where they would remain all summer long. The wriggling landscape seemed the plague and pestilence Maynard had been warned about from the pulpits in Ohio. As he stood at attention amid the heaving blanket of chirping insects, he performed a quick calculation. In 440 days, his only concerns would be turning in a drawing assignment on time and sweeping spilled Cheerios from the floor of his own apartment.

  Many of those days he’d spend at the shack behind the barracks inventorying the battalion’s survey equipment, or in the motor pool servicing its fleet of jeeps and Gama Goats, six-wheeled semi-amphibious vehicles last driven through the jungles of Vietnam. He’d check oil levels in vehicles never moved from the lot and order replacement parts long obsolete, just as he’d ordered them the day before and the day before that, just as sweaty, dusty men before him had ordered them each day for the past ten years.

  Every few weeks, the battalion marched with tents and equipment and a limited water supply to bivouac in the dry fields and take part in combat simulations at Fort Irwin. They sat upon the ground at mealtime and opened the foil and plastic MRE pouches, the ready-to-eat pork patties and stew and diced turkey with gravy no more appetizing than the C rations they’d recently replaced.

  Maynard knew next to nothing about cars. He’d never found the need to complete driver’s ed or earn his driver’s license, able always to ride with friends into Ludington and run to and from school each day as part of his cross country training. Even so, he was assigned the duty of taking the wheel of the Bronco and transporting the battalion’s command sergeant major throughout the encampment. If he didn’t quite understand gears and power train suspension, Jim consoled himself with the fact that he was upholding a family tradition by acting as chauffeur, just as Grandpa Gridley, a member of the 20th Armored Division, had when he’d driven his colonel behind German front lines during World War II. It passed the days.

  Walled by steep cliffs of the Tehachapi, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino mountains, the Fort Irwin National Training Center was an ideal location for desert training, situated as it was at the southern edge of Death Valley. Only the occasional Joshua tree interrupted the flat, arid canyon, a canyon continually swept by hot, dry winds that kept the valley in the 80s even through the night. The Fort Hood group fought a losing battle on their opponent’s home turf. The resident battalion was accustomed to the climate and the terrain, and Maynard watched buddies drop in the heat, overcome by endless darting among smoke bombs and dummy rounds in the 120-degree afternoons.

  Once they were back in Texas, he and Wayne tried to forget the punishing days in the desert. Maynard exhausted his pay at the record store at Killeen Mall, where he discovered Bauhaus and the Ramones and Romeo Void. He discovered, too, the nearby Irish pub and its happy hour club, a program he eagerly joined to help offset the doldrums of the otherwise temperate Bell County.

  One lonely Saturday, Wayne off on adventures of his own, Maynard sat at the bar and quickly downed his two tequila shots in a race against arriving late for the showing of Ghostbusters at the cinema next door. He entered the already darkened theater and slid into a seat in the front row. Craning backward, he found it almost impossible to focus, and in his distraction, the laughter behind him sounded oddly out of sync with the action taking place on the screen.

  He thought of crickets and of dust, of the music and shouts and taxi horns of Manhattan, of Lake Michigan, of the seat beside him where Sarah should be. Perspiration trickled from his armpits and down his sides, cold beneath his sweater. His salty fingers gleaming with butter and shards of popcorn kernels, he wiped sweat from his face, and his calculations muddled in his head: Three hundred days? Two hundred fifty?

  And before the autumn was over, he’d completed his art school application and walked it confidently to the Fort Hood mailroom.

  “From deep within the plum I pull the pie,” he wrote. He’d begun to approach his writing with a seriousness befitting an art student. Still unpolished to be sure, the poems he wrote in his Fort Hood room reveal a maturing sensibility, an adept use of metaphor and inverted language, a lyricist’s talent for conflating the visual and the aural to create a provocative synesthesia. No doubt as much to convince himself as his readers, he took as his theme his bold belief that dire straits might be transformed to triumph with only a shift in perspective.

  Eye of the Needle

  Waking from a bed of nails

  I slowly lift my tattered sails

  Against the cruel and cutting winds.

  I march the world in seconds flat

  And use the ball to hit the bat.

  I’m free of rights, moralities, and sins.

  Drawing pictures you can hear,

  I squeeze a river from a tear

  And move a mountain breathlessly at will.

  I stroll atop the estuary

  In a world so sanguinary,

  Loving not the death but just the kill.

  Holding whispers in my palm,

  I bring the troubled waters calm.

  From deep within the plum, I pull the pie.

  I make the fox run from the rabbit,

  Impossibility my habit,

  Passing in and through the needle’s eye.

  By January, he was traveling often to Austin, 60 miles distant, attending Black Flag’s Loose Nut tour concert there and dancing at the city’s New Wave mecca Club Iguana with Cheryl Carney, a nurse in Fort Hood’s medical division. He found in Cheryl a perfect companion, she with her spiked, bleached hair and he in neck chains crafted from razor blades and padlocks, both of them in dark eyeliner that matched their black spandex and fingerless gloves.

  “Cheryl taught me how to be yourself while you’re also being somebody else,” Maynard recalled in a 2012 interview. Living off-post with her husband and concealing her lesbianism from the military community, Cheryl had discovered ways to wear the mask within her mask and yet never sacrifice the integrity of either role. “She was able to put on her Clark Kent at work and then turn into Superman when the music started,” Maynard said.

  He grew his hair as long as he dared, keeping its sides neatly trimmed and tucking the wavy top beneath his cap. But on club nights, he tousled his curls and pulled them down across his forehead, one bleached strand extended over one eyebrow. He bleached tiger stripes down one leg of his tight jeans, tied a colorful scarf around each ankle, wrapped his waist in studded belts. A package of strawberry Twizzlers open on the bar beside his 7 and 7, he practiced the aloof attitude required of the serious punk, secretly pleased that this could be his way of life in 200 days and counting.

  And on August 4, the countdown reached its end.

  Sunshine flickered through Maynard’s window as the plane banked gently in its descent over Grand Rapids. Below were green fields and forests, lakes and winding rivers, and somewhere in the distance, the campus of the Kendall School of Design.

  Just inside the arrival gate, he spotted Kjiirt standing near the newspaper kiosk and raced to tell him what their first stop must be. They loaded the oversized black footlocker into the trunk of Kjiirt’s father’s Buick and made their way out along Patterson Avenue and 28th Street to Woodland Mall and the J. C. Penney hair salon. Still in his dress greens, SP4 Keenan placed his Penney’s credit card on the receptionist’s desk and politely asked a stylist to shave his hair into a Mohawk.

  The strip malls and office parks of Grand Rapids gave way to fields and maple groves already here and there bright red and orange. Maynard was as eager for school to begin as Kjiirt was about his upcoming move to Boston, and during the drive to Scottville, the two plotted how they’d spend their brief time together before embarking on their new ventures. They’d reestablish connections with old friends certainly, classmates and fellow cross country runners and girlfriends Maynard hadn’t seen since entering the service three years before.

 
A few miles past Muskegon, Kjiirt replaced the cassette in the boom box. They looked at each other and grinned. REM’s eerily appropriate lyrics urged them never to return to the wasted years of dead-end factory jobs in some faraway, xenophobic small town.

  “I heard you are a punk now,” Maynard’s grandmother had written from Ohio soon after he’d turned down the West Point invitation. “I thought being in the Army would make you grow up.” Hers was a typical reaction.

  Mike and Jan hid their shock when they saw his haircut, and Jan eventually admitted that the Mohawk was a fine example of creative expression. And once he reminded them that attending art school had always been his goal, they let go their disappointment over West Point and admitted their pride in his Kendall acceptance.

  But his former classmates quickly found excuses to cut their visits short. He watched them go, most likely to down a McDonald’s vanilla shake spiked with peppermint schnapps in preparation for another night at Johnny’s.

  I came back to Scottville and was completely ostracized and crucified by these guys and ignored by the girl who I took to the prom. I came back after the Army with my hair shaved into a Mohawk and they went, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Come on, dude. I told you I was gonna do this.

  As always, Maynard and Kjiirt found in each other all the company they really needed. Maynard shared with his friend the EP club mixes he’d brought from Texas: Gary Numan, Alien Sex Fiends, dark ballads of Lords of the New Church, the experimental structures and atmospheric harmonies that satisfied their search for the new, the different, the daring.