Alton invited him to try his hand with a display of parakeet seed and cuttlebones. Intuitively, he rearranged the products according to size and shape and color, leaving just enough room between each to allow customers to easily remove them from their rows of hooks. Alton smiled.
“I’d been in retail management my entire career,” she would explain. “There’s nothing creative or clever about pet supplies, but Maynard could take a pile of stuff and turn it into a beautiful display.”
Maynard remembered the lessons on perspective in Mr. Ingraham’s drafting class, the castles and fortresses he’d built in the Ravenna basement, the C.A.D. album art and the Kendall assignments—random successes that seemed now but preparation for one moment on one afternoon in a pet store in Lechmere Square. “This was more fun than it was a job,” he would recall. “It was like a living, moving sculpture in the form of a pet store.”
It wasn’t long before Alton appointed him merchandise manager in charge of the display crew. When the store took on new lines of cat treats and aquarium accessories, it was his job to reset the aisles, and when the rawhide candy canes and pet-sized Christmas stockings arrived in November, he created cheery displays to highlight the seasonal goods. “They actually recognized that I might have valuable input,” he explained. “They gave me a shot and I didn’t blow it. I took the opportunity and made the best of it and I thought, ‘Here we go.’”
Maynard took a critical look at the shop’s layout and suggested the bags of dog and cat food be moved from just inside the entrance to the rear of the store. His proposal met with not a little resistance. The bags were heavy, his coworkers reminded him, and relocating them would mean customers must lug an unwieldy 30 pounds the length of the store to reach the exit.
But the shoppers didn’t mind. En route to the one product they’d intended to buy, they passed plastic aquarium plants and name tags and hairball treatments and impulsively filled their carts with the pricey extras in their belief that their Tippy truly wanted a bright pink collar and Puff deserved a brand-new catnip mouse. “I invented the chew-bone pickup,” Maynard would explain.
For all the rhetoric of universal harmony and brotherhood of mankind, Boston remained a provincial small town where invisible boundaries kept outsiders at some remove. The stereotypes Maynard had been told of before he’d come east had proven true: The fabled Yankee attitudes of steadfast self-reliance and guarded privacy prevailed in this place where newcomers were suspect until they’d established themselves—a mysterious process that might take generations.
Being in Boston was like moving to Scottville all over again, back in a town where everybody knows you don’t belong here and you have to prove yourself. Kjiirt and I would go to Shays in Harvard Square for a beer. It was a nice little bar and I wanted to make it my home, but it just didn’t happen. Half my experience in Boston was like that. Nobody really wanted to open up.
Ever up for the newest of new music, Maynard and Kjiirt joined in the head-thrashing and moshing at Axis and Avalon on Lansdowne Street and when hardcore acts appeared at the Channel in Fort Point.
They watched the spotlights play over the Ramones or Devo and slammed with the metalheads and goths in the sunken pit, replicating the “Jerkin’ Back and Forth” dance steps they’d perfected at Johnny’s. The wooden floor bounced beneath their jumping and colliding, and the overhead speakers swayed precariously. The crowd moved as one with the driving beat, and when it became unruly, he and Kjiirt moved to the far edge of the dance floor just in time to avoid being led away by bouncers fearful for patrons’ safety.
Maynard approached band members during set breaks and asked about their innovative riffs and chord progressions. Unaccustomed to serious questioning from their fans, they turned a deaf ear to his natural Midwestern gregariousness. “He tried to talk to the bands, but they never seemed to be able to put two words together,” Kjiirt would remember. “We were the only ones talking to these guys in the entire Channel.”
The silent treatment didn’t diminish Maynard’s elation after a night of clubbing. At closing time, he and Kjiirt stepped around overindulgent revelers passed out in the parking lot and began the four-mile walk back to Somerville. The T had shut down for the night hours before, but, wide-awake in the evening’s aftermath, they made their way across the Mass Ave bridge, imagining what it would feel like to play music under the colored spots at Axis.
“Neither one of us had any idea what we actually wanted to do,” Kjiirt would admit. “We just felt like Boston was a transition point, and we knew we weren’t going to live in this uptight New England town forever.”
It would be impossible, Maynard realized, to win over the icy Bostonians. He was drawn to the few he could count on, the few who, like himself, had migrated from elsewhere: Ian and Elias, recently arrived from Brazil; Somerville neighbors Tina and Liz, whose warmth and sincerity marked them as not-quite-true Bostonians; the homeless man who could have been from anywhere but always offered a kind word when Maynard passed through the little park in Harvard Square. And, as he’d foreseen, Kjiirt and his sister.
Maynard and Kjiirt climbed the narrow staircase to Sarah’s fifth-floor apartment and stepped into a kitchen warm with roasting turkey or leg of lamb from DiPaolo and Rossi around the corner. Small as it was, the North End apartment always had room for one more, one more Midwest transplant whose pocketbook or family dynamics prevented their going home for the holidays. Their common roots made of them immediate family gathered to share in celebrations to which Maynard was not so much invited as expected.
They wedged mismatched chairs around the folding table in the living room, the table set with goblets for the Gewürztraminers and Malbecs selected by Kjiirt to accompany each course. Maynard might contribute an hors d’oeuvre tray, ripe olives and deviled ham and string cheese he’d braided for the occasion. He might bring, too, a guest of his own—someone he was dating, and never the same someone from Thanksgiving to Christmas to Easter.
Maynard and Kjiirt and the others stayed as long as politely possible. Their laughter echoed far into the morning in this unheated apartment in the heart of this impersonal city, this home where a candle burned and no one was alone.
Maynard’s haven was the Neighborhood, the cozy Union Square restaurant operated by the convivial Borgeses—Mario, master of Portuguese cuisine, and his sister Sheila, the feisty waitress in big hair and halter top.
He and Kjiirt took their usual table at the rear of the restaurant, eyeing the heaping plates of eggs and linguica and home fries, waffles and pastries and bowls of special-recipe Cream of Wheat.
There are places that have resonance. The Neighborhood is one of those places. I’d get there, and Mario would say, “Sheila, your friend Myron’s here. Gaylord? What’s his name? The guy.” He couldn’t remember my name, but he knew I’d order the seafood omelet.
You gravitate to places like that. Mario and Sheila were my Boston family. I could rely on them just being there for me.
And Sheila was there for him immediately, snuffing out her cigarette and answering his call: “Judy Patootie, get your ass over here and bring me some coffee right away!”
“This is not an easy town,” Sheila admitted in a 2013 interview. “It’s cold as hell. No one talks to you.” Recently arrived from New Jersey, Sheila struggled with her own outsider status. “A lot of the people I waited on were high-class, snooty, monied college kids who treated me like shit,” she recalled. “That stuff would hurt me. When Maynard and Kjiirt came in, they balanced that off.”
They lingered over coffee and bread warm from the restaurant kitchen, the Globe turned to the comics pages and the day’s Zippy the Pinhead cartoon, forgetting for a while the pretentiousness that characterized the city.
“Maynard was quiet,” Sheila would recall. “You didn’t hear too much from him, but he was a funny, sly, quick-witted kid, and so accepting. He must have been going through his ow
n Michigan withdrawal and being out of his comfort zone. I was out of mine, but we found each other and got through those years.”
Maynard remembered well the icy squalls that blew in off Lake Michigan, the deep snows that had kept school buses from their appointed routes, the mufflers and sturdy boots and thick gloves he’d worn while shoveling drifts from Mike’s driveway. But nothing could have prepared him for the relentless Boston winter. Pedestrians stumbled single-file down snow-choked sidewalks, and commuters shivered while they waited for trolleys delayed by the storms. A day of warm rain was a welcome but short-lived respite that left ankle-deep pools of slush in the gutters—pools that froze overnight to treacherous, slippery sheets. The cycle of deep freeze and snow, rain, and thaw might continue until April, creating along the streets mountains of ice black with exhaust and studded with yellowing cigarette butts and tattered Dunkin’ Donuts cups.
For a time, Maynard and Kjiirt braved the bitter winds that swept across the Mass Ave bridge and continued their nighttime visits to Lansdowne Street. But after weeks of snow and cold, even the prospect of discovering a new punk band wasn’t enough to lure them from their apartment. “Boston has the most miserable winters in the world,” Maynard would recall. “It’s cold and wet and miserable and you start to read serial-killer books.”
And just when he’d given up hope that he’d ever see spring again, rainy April made way for sunny May, warm with lilac breezes and blossoms pink against the brownstones on Marlborough Street. Folk musicians claimed their spots beneath the greening oaks in the park, and Sheila and Mario arranged umbrellaed tables on the patio under the grape arbor.
A change of apartments would mean new windows looking out over unexplored squares, where untold possibility might unfold. Kjiirt’s small flat on Cherry Street was plenty big enough to store his Bianchi 10-speed, and Maynard signed the lease for a room in a shared triple-decker only a few blocks away on Pearson Street.
“When he came to look at the place, I thought, ‘Who’s this freak?’” Steele Newman would recall. “If somebody had told me he’d gone to West Point Prep, I would have been, ‘What are you smoking?’” But Steele and his housemates, recent graduates juggling student loans and electric bills, overlooked the leather and the outgrown Mohawk in exchange for Maynard’s rent check.
He stowed his audio mixer in a far corner of his closet and set about creating an elaborate habitat for the zebra finches and fishes and salamanders and lizards he’d selected at the pet store. He arranged in his room potted plants and cages and an aquarium and installed a screen door so the birds could safely fly about. “If you’re talking per capita, those birds had some pretty big-ass spaces to fly around in,” he would recall.
I needed some kind of calm around me. Boston has its share of parks, but to get to them I had to travel through the chaos of traffic and busyness. And I felt like my home was a frat house. I needed to create an oasis where I could shut the door and disconnect. I turned my room into our front yard in Michigan.
Maynard found himself the odd man out on Pearson Street. Steele and Todd and Peter dressed each morning in Filene’s Basement suits and ties befitting their entry-level positions with investment companies and PR firms downtown. Even John Pashalakis, whose at-home wardrobe was limited to a selection of denim shorts in various states of fray, played by the rules and reported to work on time—and properly attired—at the Store 24 he managed.
But it was Maynard’s aviary, the unconventional hours he kept, his habit of quietly observing as if he were recording impressions for some future use, that the others found the most perplexing.
In the morning, he rose late, leisurely poured himself a bowl of Cheerios, and was in no hurry to join the others in their rushed commute to the office. “We thought, ‘What planet is this guy from?’” Steele would remember. “‘Why doesn’t he conform to what’s expected? Isn’t he going to get a nine-to-five job?’”
Only during the Pearson Street parties did they appreciate Maynard’s wit. The almost weekly blowouts were legend in the neighborhood, replete with multiple kegs of Budweiser and a steady stream of guests arriving all night long. Their dancing and laughter spilled into the yard, and inside, they bent over rolling papers and open gatefold albums. “It was an animal house,” Steele would admit. “All we cared about was how big our next party was going to be.” Somerville police appeared so regularly in response to noise complaints that a coffeepot and an assortment of mugs were kept near the front door especially for them.
A genial host, Maynard replenished through the evening artistically arranged plates of dog biscuits he’d set about the apartment, and bowls of tiny dried fish, the sort customers bought at the pet store for their gobies and tangs. “That was when we bonded most with Maynard,” Steele would remember. “When it was party time and we were letting loose and we all had drinks in us, we were like, ‘What a sense of freaking humor this guy’s got!’”
Intolerant of the smoke drifting blue across the living room, Maynard stood well apart with his White Russian and watched the others, overcome with the munchies, scoop up the tasty if unorthodox party treats.
His housemates may have questioned Maynard’s unusual schedule, but he considered it the chief perk of his job. The tarot readers in Grand Rapids had repeatedly advised him to pay closer attention to talents he’d ignored: They’d spoken again and again of his inner voice and urged him to make it heard.
Many of the tarot readers Ramiro and I went to told me the same thing. They said it was like I was looking at a wall or a window, almost like a puppy display, but the light wasn’t on. I just had to turn the light on and see what I was supposed to be doing. They used words like arrangement and presentation, and said it might take a while to figure it out, but that there was something I was meant to do.
At Boston Pet he could channel his artistic sensibilities, incorporate the principles of design and feng shui, and ensure that the shop’s form indeed determined its function. “We did something we’d never done before,” Alton explained in a 2015 interview. “We created an overnight merchandising crew, and Maynard was in charge of the receiving crew.”
The schedule freed him during the day to enjoy the sunshine he’d so missed all winter long. But despite his passion for the finches and macaws in the shop’s aviary, Maynard felt a prickle of discontent. Surely he hadn’t studied and observed and filled sketch pads with architectural drawings simply to arrange catnip and doggie sweaters.
Early on summer mornings, he arrived at North Station just as inbound commuters descended upon the city from Concord and Salem and Newburyport. He held Harpo’s cage in the crook of one arm and pushed past the parade of secretaries and CEOs, their faces fixed in permanent scowls as they marched in lockstep to their offices.
The Rockport train inched past the railroad yards and strip malls just outside Boston, then picked up speed and made its way through the forests and salt marshes of the North Shore. Maynard watched from his streaked window the piers crowded with lobstermen hoisting their traps over the gunwales, the marinas where masts glinted in the sunshine, their rigging ringing. And just beyond the hills and wetlands of Beverly Farms, the train stopped at the tidy Manchester-by-the-Sea depot, steps from the wooded path that led to Singing Beach.
Bounded by rocky outcroppings, the beach sloped to the water’s edge in a sheltered crescent. The silica sand whistled beneath Maynard’s bare feet and the aroma of seaweed drifted pungent on the salt air. He opened the door of the cage, and Harpo flitted out and perched on his shoulder, turned a questioning, beady black eye toward him, and then flew off and disappeared over the waves and the sand.
Maynard settled in a secluded cove, opened his package of Twizzlers, and gazed out over the water, a deeper blue and green the farther he looked. Glistening salt spray dashed against the nearby rocks, and in the distance, a sailboat glided slowly toward the Manchester harbor.
It wasn’t as though he�
�d never seen the ocean before. He’d spent hours at the Jersey Shore, distance training beside Sarah Llaguno past throngs of tourists at Asbury Park. He remembered the shrieks echoing shrill from the Circus Fun House, the honky-tonk music of the midway, the Ferris wheel a gaudy silhouette against the sky.
But the Jersey Shore was different—wasn’t, at any rate, an ocean like this one. Here, sky extended an uninterrupted blue over waves that gathered far from shore, broke, and receded slowly over the white sand. All but empty on a weekday morning, Singing Beach was the serene setting he required, a place of sand dollars and shells of the moon snail, forked tracks of seabirds, and shimmering dragonflies amid the beach grass.
Never a swimmer, Maynard lay back in the shallows, letting go his nagging concerns of what the future might hold. He closed his eyes and watched the play of color beneath his lids. For a long time, he submitted to the chilly water, tuning himself to the rhythm of the sea, to the silence broken only by sharp cries of gulls and cormorants swooping overhead.
At last he opened his eyes to the cloudless sky, to the small speck that was Harpo growing larger and larger as he flew straight and sure back to his cage.
Maynard paused in his walk back to the depot and knelt beside the tide pool. Colonies of blue mussels sent out their silky byssal threads and anchored themselves to the slick rocks against the rush of waves, the water and seaweed and foam a green, glittering mix in the bright sunshine.
Energized, he returned to Boston in time for the night shift and washed salt and sand from his neck at the sink at the back of the pet shop. When their schedules coincided, he and Kjiirt met for samosas and korma at one of the Indian restaurants in Central Square and hurried through their mango ice cream to make the show at the Cantab just up the street.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 12
