A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  Maynard arrived at Pearson Street to find his birds and fish just as he’d left them, and he shared with his housemates the clipping from the Ludington Daily News. “It didn’t surprise me that he’d made it all the way,” Steele would recall. “It was just an example of the quirkiness of Maynard.”

  The freedom and elation they’d experienced on the road left them impatient with their friends. Their lack of spontaneity annoyed them, their complacent acceptance of daily routines that left little energy for anything but curling on the couch after work with another movie from the rental store.

  “The walk to Michigan planted the seed of OK, that felt right. Let’s go further,” Maynard would remember. “It wasn’t a case of the grass being greener on the other side. It was more like, how was I going to apply the things I’d learned in a place like Boston? I sure wasn’t going to apply them riding the T.”

  “That’s the shadow side of living for experience only,” Kjiirt explained in a 2013 interview. “If the big plan doesn’t show up on the radar and nothing happens for months, you get self-loathing. You’re in the middle of the ocean and there’s nothing you can do but make friends with the jellyfish. The experience you’re dealt is the one you have to live with.”

  The hand Maynard held—one he had perhaps himself drawn in an access of faith—was a straight flush of go-nowhere romances, guarded friendships, and a job that grew daily more repetitive and unrewarding.

  I was committed to Boston Pet, but I started wondering what it was preparing me for. Kjiirt and I had learned a few things about ourselves, but we realized if we continued the way we were, we’d just be going in circles. We were embracing life, we were drinking in our bliss, but it seemed like there should be a next level to it all.

  His one redeeming relationship was with Gloria, a fellow Midwesterner who’d come east from Libertyville, Illinois, and whose intelligence and warmth helped him forget sometimes his loneliness and the vision of plodding Ravenna laborers, their dreams abandoned under the dismal Ohio sky.

  In late September, Maynard took the train north through forests red with autumn to Rockport, the Cape Ann town empty now of summer tourists. He passed shop windows sparkling with beach-glass jewelry and glossy metal sculptures like the ones he’d made not so long ago at Kendall. At the town center, he turned a corner and saw it, a red-shingled house set back from the sidewalk, a black and white placard suspended over the door: Psychic Readings. Walk-Ins Welcome, and he walked in.

  A cheerless woman sat in shadow at a small table, its surface draped in a bright red cloth, curls of incense rising from a tarnished brass bowl at her elbow. She motioned Maynard to sit opposite and arranged her worn cards in a pattern across the table—the magus, the hanged man, cups and pentacles, and a figure eight resting on its side. She studied the spread for a moment, then looked up at Maynard and spoke. He’d be moving soon, she told him. Los Angeles or Chicago, yes, that was it. One or the other was his destiny, though she couldn’t tell which, and even her cards couldn’t divine what he’d find there.

  I believe in magic. Well, I don’t believe in crystal magic and I don’t believe somebody can take a photo of your aura that shows the color of your emotions. I don’t believe in any of that stuff, but I do understand some people’s attachment to the zodiac. You have to acknowledge the pull of moon on tides and how such a huge energy could leave a residual pattern on you the day you’re born, because you’re an electromagnetic being.

  Whether that continues, whether nurture ends up amplifying nature or muting nature, I don’t know. I don’t think we’re even capable of understanding that.

  But the power of tarot cards just goes back to the storyteller. It wasn’t like that reader in Rockport was some spirit guide. She was doing a cold reading on a person she’d never met, and if I thought about what she said, it might help me clarify things.

  You go to psychics and tarot readers not to have some miracle ghosts speak from beyond and tell you what to do. You go for clarity, almost as a meditation. The answers are within you, and if you get out of the way, you can hear them. You answer your own questions.

  Her analysis was as vague and disappointing as all the others, and he left the little red house shaking his head, no more enlightened than before. Surely his future wasn’t in Los Angeles or Chicago. He had no ties to either city, no reason to move to the other side of the continent, and he certainly wasn’t about to trade Boston’s snow and cold for the even more intolerable lake-effect winter.

  Winter swept in fast and resolute and by November brought rain and temperatures in the 20s. Maynard walked with Kjiirt toward Central Square, the streets and sidewalks veiled in ice. He bounded over the deep puddle in the gutter, leapt to the curb, slipped, and came down hard on the wet concrete. He staggered to his feet, knowing this was only the beginning. It would be months before he’d walk in the sand at Singing Beach, months before he’d see from Kjiirt’s deck the Boston skyline shimmering in the heat. He glowered at the deep tear in his jeans as if it symbolized all his life had become. Cold rain dripped from his long hair and under the collar of his black leather jacket.

  Sometimes when he entered the aviary at Boston Pet, he imagined the parrots there squawking from stands of sugar-apple and mangrove, their bright plumage camouflaged among passion flowers and orchids. The birds, he knew, had been wild things once, snatched from the sunshine and blissful humidity of the Amazon, and brought here to live in this cold, gray city he suspected they found as hateful as he did.

  Elsewhere, a coworker told him, humane birders bred macaws and cockatoos and conures and tenderly hand-raised them from hatchlings. Her friends in Los Angeles, she said, nurtured parrots in a climate as warm and sunny as their native rain forest, and the birds grew trusting and accustomed to humans.

  She told him something else, too. Her colleagues had recently embarked on an extensive redesign of their stores, a long-term project and one requiring the same expertise and vision he’d applied at Boston Pet. Might he be interested in flying to L.A. to investigate and perhaps apply for the job?

  There’d be no harm in interviewing, Maynard decided. At the very least, a few days in the California sunshine would lift his spirits. And Gloria was certain her old high school classmates Tom and Jack would make room for him in their apartment just off Sunset Strip.

  Maynard’s work ethic and track record at Boston Pet won over the project manager. He’d be happy to bring him onboard, he said, contingent on his performance during a six-month probationary period that would begin as soon as Maynard wished.

  Letter of hire in hand and two days remaining of his California visit, Maynard enjoyed the company of his hosts and their friends, passionate artists willing to live in a cramped studio in the name of working toward their goals. They talked long into the night of Tom’s plans for his fledgling band, Lock Up, of the screenplays Jack would write, of the ambitions and desires that would surely be realized by these Libertyville transplants who’d come west to follow their dreams—Andy and Vicki, Joel, an aspiring puppeteer, and Adam Jones, a guitarist who spoke of one day forming a band of his own.

  The decision wouldn’t be made by anything as arbitrary as a coin toss. If a single influence led to Maynard’s departure from Boston, it was John Crowley—or, more precisely, Little, Big, the book he’d read as he’d walked toward Scottville and consulted for direction as often as his Rand McNally.

  He’d go to California, then, just as the fortune teller had hinted he might, doubtful as he’d been sometimes along the road to Michigan, but trusting in the destination just the same. His time at Boston Pet might lead to his working with the bird breeders, or it might come to nothing. No matter. The friendships he’d made in New England would surely endure, marking like bread crumbs his path should he need to retrace his steps and come home.

  Maynard left without fanfare, without so much as a goodbye, with little more assurance than a faith in his own decisio
n. He returned the fish and finches to the pet store and loaded a U-Haul with his belongings, his salamanders and lizards and plenty of crickets and lettuce, should they get hungry along the way. He placed Harpo’s cage on the seat beside him and drove across Cambridge to Soldiers Field Road and the entrance ramp of the Mass Pike, westbound.

  1 “Former Residents Return,” Ludington Daily News (Michigan), August 14, 1989, 2.

  2 Ibid.

  Tinsel stars hung from utility poles all up and down Sunset Boulevard, glittering in the sunshine, and plastic sleighs and reindeer stood on green lawns as if abandoned mid-route, Maynard imagined, during a sudden thaw.

  He moved his belongings into a corner unit on the top floor of the Havenhurst, a 1925 pastiche of architectural styles, its spiraled columns and ornate fleur-de-lis frieze seemingly tacked on as decorative afterthoughts to the otherwise solemn white stone building. His windows admitted a gentle cross breeze and the traffic sounds of Hollywood Boulevard, and outside his French doors, a small balcony overlooked the palms and red tile roofs along Whitley Avenue.

  One long wall would be the perfect expanse to display his Kiss memorabilia, he determined—posters and photographs and ticket stubs he’d amassed over the years. He’d have plenty of time to arrange the collage later, but just now, he was eager to return the U-Haul and explore his new neighborhood.

  His first order of business was a visit to Tom and Jack’s apartment, where he left a magnum of Mumm champagne at their door in thanks for their recent hospitality and to announce his arrival. “We were young, and it seemed both extravagant and a remarkably adult thing to do,” Jack would later recall of his gift. “It was as though one of our peer group was acting like an actual grown-up.”

  The afternoon was warm as June, the streets crowded with tourists and locals and abuzz with the energy Maynard had missed in Boston. He passed the Whisky a Go Go and the Palace and the Palladium, clubs shuttered and silent at midday, but topped with marquees promising light and sound and music come evening. Handbills littered the sidewalks, colorful flyers printed to their edges with drawings and grainy photographs and announcements of the punk and metal and grunge of the Dickies and Helmet and L7. He stopped to read message boards layered with leaflets three and four deep, outdated notices of appearances by Jane’s Addiction and Soundgarden and the Pixies stapled over with news of upcoming concerts: Celebrity Skin, Hole, and the Imperial Butt Wizards, whose act, he would learn, often included setting fire to the stage.

  Los Angeles waitresses weren’t really waitresses, he discovered. Short-order cooks and bank tellers fancied themselves frontmen of the next hair metal band, and tour bus drivers had higher aspirations than forever transporting gawkers to stars’ homes in the Hollywood Hills. They scheduled their day jobs around rehearsals and casting calls, gigs and costume fittings, and rushed to lessons in guitar and voice and the Method in their relentless determination to become the best in a city of bests.

  Maynard approached his duties at the pet store with the same commitment, the unquestioning work ethic he’d learned by necessity in Scottville. “In Michigan, you don’t shovel snow to build your biceps. You shovel snow because you need to get the car out to go to work,” he would explain. “You lift weights and work out because you want to win the wrestling match and the track meet. Working hard in order to reach a goal, to finish the job, always felt to me like a natural, human-instinct thing to do.”

  Finishing his Petland project would entail three or four days at each of the chain’s stores throughout the region, his supervisor told him, dismantling shelves and endcaps and reconfiguring aisles. But if it were to be done properly, his assignment would take longer than that. Stock boys and cashiers must be trained to take advantage of the new layout, and it fell to Maynard to teach them the secrets of the upsell, the chew-bone pickup he’d so successfully instituted at Boston Pet.

  The little black schipperke cocked his head, his dark eyes following Maynard’s every move as he rolled a pallet of dog chow toward the back of the store. Maynard paused before the puppy’s illuminated cubicle. It would take time, he knew, to establish a faux family like the one he’d formed in Boston, and in the meantime, the devoted and curious Zippy would be companion enough.

  And with so much to discover in the city of excess and possibility, loneliness was the furthest thing from Maynard’s mind. His holiday gift to himself was a choice seat at Devo’s Christmas Day show at a club just up the street, and a week later, he took the short flight up the coast to attend the B-52s’ concert at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. The next night, accompanied by longtime friend Kathy Larsen, he rang in 1990 at the Psychedelic Furs’ Berkeley stop on their East of Eden tour.

  It didn’t, after all, take him long to find his social niche. By virtue of his relationship with Gloria, the Libertyville transplants—his hosts Tom Morello and Jack Olsen and their classmates who’d followed their passions to L.A.—accepted Maynard as one of their own. Theirs was an instant friendship that nearly didn’t happen at all.

  Gloria had called them explaining that I was coming to town for a job interview and needed a place to stay. Tom checked their machine and wrote down her message for Jack to find. On it he wrote, “Tell her no.” But Jack never saw the note.

  “When Maynard showed up at our door,” Jack would recall, “Tom and I looked at each other like ‘Who is this guy?’”

  The close-knit community provided a sort of psychological ballast as its members struggled to gain a toehold in the entertainment world. Their relaxed gatherings helped ease doubts about their careers: whether Jack’s entry-level position as a script reader was the first step toward his becoming a writer, what new music venture Tom would embark upon after the imminent dissolve of Lock Up, whether Adam Jones’s studies at the Hollywood Makeup Academy would bring success.

  “The group was a good grounding element amid the insecurity of trying to make our way in our creative endeavors,” Tom would remember. “It was good to maintain all these friends from the ‘old country,’ much like immigrants would do when they came to America. We were really charmed by Maynard. He came across as a good Midwestern dude, and he was a welcome addition.”

  Like Maynard, the Libertyville expatriates were bright and talented, had excelled in high school dramatics and found inspiration in heavy metal, and their Midwestern warmth and sense of humor equaled his own. On Saturday afternoons, Maynard joined them in touch football games in the park, and, despite his lackluster skills, he became a member of their midnight bowling team.

  When you first get to L.A., it’s very romantic, but it’s huge. It seemed like everybody had some connection with somebody else and everyone was one-upping each other with cool stuff that’s going on.

  The Libertyville crew took the sting out of the move. So many people were trying to suck your blood in that town, and here was a place with no agendas. I didn’t give a fuck about how well they could play guitar and nobody cared about Jack’s chiseled chin. We were just bowling.

  Before long, Maynard was a fixture at the weekend barbecues, cookouts attended by as many as 25 Libertyville alumni. They brought potato salad and six-packs to Tom and Jack’s pool or Adam’s loft, where they reported on the week’s auditions and job offers and reminisced about high school escapades and Electric Sheep, the garage band Tom and Adam had formed when they were sophomores. And they introduced Maynard to the Libertyville song written by Tom and Electric Sheep vocalist Chris George and Adam, a silly campfire song they called “Country Boner.”

  They were as impressed with Maynard’s accomplishments as he with theirs, eagerly viewing the Polaroids he shared around the picnic table of his arrangements of Habitrails. “He was the most successful person we knew,” Tom would recall. “He had a career and a company car and he was very proud of his work.”

  “Here was a guy who could walk into a Petland and decide where everything should be put,” Jack would ech
o. “As quirky as that sounds in retrospect, at the time, it seemed like a genuine, actual job to us.”

  Committed to one day finding his true place in contemporary rock, Tom kept his finger on the pulse of the L.A. music scene, learning all he could of cutting-edge sounds and industry trends. “I went to shows six or seven nights a week,” he explained. “In those days, you went to your friends’ shows, you went to shows of people you didn’t know. I just lived rock.”

  Maynard was a more-than-willing companion in Tom’s darting from club to club, elated to explore with him the many and varied venues scattered about the city—Club with No Name, English Acid, Raji’s beneath the old Hastings Hotel, and the Coconut Teaszer, with its sawdust-covered floors and complimentary barbecued hot dogs on Sundays. Established musicians mingled during set breaks with unknown hopefuls, with A&R reps and ardent groupies alike, in a convivial and spirited atmosphere that encouraged a healthy competition among performers.

  “We met Gene Simmons at Club Lingerie one night,” Tom would recall. “He would often come to club shows, and Maynard told him excitedly, like a fan, about his hallway covered with Kiss collectibles.”

  “That was the beginning of my living high on the hog—for a minute,” Maynard would remember. Perseverance and unexpected turnings had brought him inexorably to this: enviable and satisfying work, a sudden circle of supportive friends, the diner near Tom and Jack’s apartment that welcomed him among its breakfast regulars. And blocks from his door, a vibrant music milieu where chance encounters with longtime idols were a matter of course.

  At night, he stepped from his French doors to his balcony. Zippy lifted his nose to the warm breeze, and Maynard sipped his tea, looking down across the white city where lights extended bright beyond Wilshire Boulevard all the way to Culver City.