A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  Despite Maynard’s track record in Boston, the higher-ups at Petland couldn’t quite see the value of his strategies, much less understand how to implement them. As far as they could tell, he did little more than move products from one aisle to another, relatively pointless work, they thought, that didn’t justify his top-dollar salary. Two weeks before his probationary period was to end, they took back the keys to the company truck in exchange for his final paycheck. “Everybody has moments of doubt when they think, ‘What the hell’s going to happen next?’” Maynard would explain. “And then you find out.”

  With six months remaining on his lease and no job prospects in sight, he panicked. His career path hadn’t been exactly focused, and without a college degree, his chances of receiving another offer seemed unlikely.

  Early every morning, he and Zippy walked to the bus stop on the corner and rode the five miles to Adam’s apartment in the Valley. The big backyard would give the energetic puppy plenty of room to play and explore while Maynard crisscrossed the city in search of work, his pockets stuffed with bus tokens and a map of the Metro system. Out Sunset, along Santa Monica Boulevard, as far as Culver City, he pressed buzzers and knocked on doors and followed the blind alleys listed in the classified section of the Times. And after a particularly discouraging day of interviews, he returned one evening to discover a freshly dug tunnel below Adam’s fence and Zippy gone.

  I walked up the street, trying to figure out where Zippy might have run. I asked some people if they’d seen a dog and they said, “Yeah. He went that way.”

  I went in that direction until I saw a couple guys doing construction and I asked them, “Have you seen a little black dog?”

  Then the cops pulled up. I went straight to Officer Butts and said to her, “I’m looking for a small—”

  “Hands on the car.”

  What? “I’m looking for a small—”

  “Yeah, sure you are.”

  “No, just ask those people. My dog got out of a backyard right over here on Willowcrest.”

  “Yeah. You’re looking for drugs.”

  “I’m not looking for fucking drugs. I’m looking for my dog.”

  Turns out I had some parking ticket I didn’t know about on that pet store truck, so they arrested me and took me to the station. They handcuffed me to a bench and took me to a cell and locked me up overnight because of the bullshit warrant I didn’t know I had.

  Adam and his buddy Sean came down and bailed me out. They waited for hours, and at three in the morning, they asked, “So, could we have our friend?” And a guy comes out from the back and goes, “Oh, yeah, your friend was processed out like three hours ago.”

  Now I’ve got to pay Adam back for bail and I don’t have any money. And if I’d had any chance of finding Zippy, it was gone now.

  The path that had been so clear after he’d read Little, Big seemed now impassable, shadowed and forked in nothing but dead ends. John Crowley’s book had resonated with his deepest belief, his certainty that taking one step after the next could propel him toward his deepest desires. But as with any mountaintop experience, the elation faded in the face of the demands and disappointments of everyday life.

  Had Maynard read Little, Big with a more analytical eye, he would have noticed in the final chapter Crowley’s hint of that inevitable sense of loss. “One of the central feelings of sophisticated modern people is that they somehow missed out on participating in a magical world,” Crowley explained in a 2014 interview. “We only find traces of it in songs and stories and poetry. But we’re always disappointed, because we’re not really in it. And experiencing that magic through movies and books is worse than never having it, because we get exiled when the book’s over.

  “There’s an acknowledgment of that at the end of Little, Big, and if the book affected Maynard that much, he’s got to have felt that same sadness of exile from the magic.”

  Maynard’s feelings were more profound even than that. “I was freakin’ the fuck out,” he would remember. “I lost my dog, lost my apartment, lost my job, lost my car, all within the space of three months. I went from having a little extra money to play with to nothing.”

  Maynard had reached an ending, yes, but one he had the power—in fact, the duty, he realized—to alter. He could return to Boston, yes, would be welcomed back at Boston Pet with open arms. “I was not happy at all when he moved to California,” Debra Alton would explain. “That was the end of the overnight crew and the beautiful merchandising.”

  But it wasn’t time to turn back yet. As long ago as junior year in high school, Maynard had vowed to take advantage of every opportunity to write and draw and sing, and surely his passion for art and understanding of its practical application were all the magic he needed.

  Hollywood’s production companies depended on the out-of-work actors, the between-gigs musicians, and the L.A. newcomers to perform the minimum-wage grunt work that brought their films and commercials to Technicolor life. Artistic vision was necessary to succeed even as an art-dog temp, the ability to craft scenery and props on the fly, to assist the art department with set dressing for Boyz II Men videos and movie trailers. “And, God help me,” Maynard would recall, “a Cinderella video.”

  He quickly learned the tricks of his new trade, tricks not so different from foraging scrap lumber from Mike’s workshop to construct a stand for his stereo. Resourceful as always, he fabricated illusion from the most mundane of materials. Nailed just so to the studio floor, he discovered, inexpensive paneling from the discount aisle at Home Depot would easily pass for costly oak under the flashing strobes of a dance video.

  A shoot might last from dawn to dusk, 16 hours or more, a job interrupted time and again when the director realized a part of the set must be rebuilt or a prop hadn’t yet been acquired. It was Maynard’s job to create glamour and opulence from wood and brads and tape and backbreaking manual labor.

  On one project, they needed riding crops for an R&B video. The scene was an alley, wet like after a rain and with steam coming out of manhole covers. Dancers were supposed to do a Michael Jackson–type routine, all of them dressed in black leather and carrying riding crops. But somebody had forgotten to get riding crops.

  It would take too long to go out and find real ones, and time was money. So I just jumped in the dumpster, found some long, semi-flexible things and wrapped them with black gaffer tape. With all the action and the lights, nobody would figure out what they really were.

  The unpredictable schedule might mean two long days of work, four at the most, followed by a week of waiting for the phone to ring. And when the call finally came, Maynard rose early and wasted a precious hour in a circuitous bus route to the studios.

  Before long, the commute became tedious—and costly, given his meager pay. Sharing Adam’s apartment would do until he was back on his feet. And sleeping on his floor wouldn’t be so bad if it meant an extra few minutes in his bedroll in the morning before walking down the block to catch his ride with a fellow set designer.

  By now, Adam had found work creating special effects for films, and his companionship was a welcome break from the grueling hours in the studio. Maynard looked forward to hearing of his plans for his fledgling band, Mother, and of the stop-motion film techniques he was learning. And fascinated, Adam listened to the cassettes Maynard popped into the player, bands he’d never before heard of, TexA.N.S. and C.A.D. and their driving lyrics about stalking butlers and paths of “must we.”

  And in the mornings, Maynard checked behind the cushions of Adam’s chairs for the nickels and dimes that must stretch until payday, and left at sunrise for the studio. “It was a bitter time,” he would recall. “I’m working 15-hour days, but I’m still fucking broke. The money isn’t steady, and it isn’t much—maybe $100 for 24 hours. It’s long days, but at least I know I’m going to have food on the table.”

  In the short time Maynard had live
d in L.A., the city’s music scene had undergone a sea change. Leaflets no longer cluttered Sunset Boulevard and the tattered flyers still posted outside the clubs announced performances long past.

  The Seattle grunge scene had spawned by the late ’80s scores of garage bands across the country, underground and heavy metal and alternative groups that, with a little help from friends willing to share studio space, formed on a shoestring a cottage industry of independent recording companies. Every week had seen the release of countless indie albums and EPs, vinyl and cassettes that overflowed the bins at Music Plus and Tower Records, a smorgasbord of experimental sounds and lyrics and subgenres to satisfy the most discriminating of audiences.

  It didn’t take long for established recording companies like A&M and Geffen to recognize the gold mine just within their reach. They had the resources and infrastructure to promote and market the handful of albums sure to be million sellers and the deep pockets to pay for ads and performance space and radio play. They engaged in frantic bidding wars to sign the most promising bands, the handful of rap and alt and rock groups guaranteed to outsell all the rest. And by mid-1990, the customer-driven music model had been turned on its head.

  The record-buying public had been as autonomous as the bands, but the new model directed their tastes and their wallets toward the industry favorites. The indies found themselves head-to-head with the likes of Soundgarden and Alice in Chains and Nirvana and, without the means to compete, receded further into obscurity.

  Only a few clubs were willing to even book under-promoted acts—acts that might never come close to filling the house. The Whisky a Go Go remained, and the Rainbow, the Gaslight and Al’s Bar and the Central, where unknown bands were still welcomed and assured of a first-time public performance.

  On many nights, Maynard and Tom could be found at one or another, in support of Mother, of Tom’s musician friends, of the bands that refused to play the corporate game. They made their way from Club with No Name to Raji’s, up the moonlit blocks to the pub hosting Green Jellö, the quirky spoof-rock band formed in Buffalo some years before.

  Leather-jacketed friends might go their separate ways halfway through the night and reassemble later at another club across town, their entourage growing larger and louder at every stop: Adam and Sean, Joe and Curt and Kyra, and Caroline, who knew the Green Jellö members well. And Maynard, who sat in the shadows sipping his White Russian, observing the shifting scene and wondering all the while where he might fit in.

  The squat, white building on Hollywood Boulevard was renowned for having been during the film industry’s earliest days the Cecil B. DeMille production studio, and now continued the tradition of creative innovation as home base of Green Jellö.

  The group’s founder, Bill Manspeaker, lived there, Caroline explained when she introduced the band members to Maynard, and drummer Danny Carey had a loft nearby. The neighborhood sounded to Maynard like a microcosm of Hollywood itself, a vibrant place, energetic and devoted to unbridled creativity. And although the space was already home to Manspeaker, his wife, and old friends from Buffalo, a vacant room could certainly be Maynard’s if he’d like to move in.

  The building’s topmost floor was taken up by the enormous open loft with small bedrooms partitioned around its periphery. DeMille’s projection booth had been converted to a kitchen, and a window still opened onto the living area where his crew had gathered to view dailies of The Ten Commandments or Cleopatra after a day’s filming.

  One more roommate would hardly disrupt life at the loft. The space was stacked with couch cushions salvaged on trash night from Hollywood sidewalks, foam squares and rectangles that would see new life once Bill fashioned them into the heads and body suits of the Green Jellö characters: Cowgod and Rock ’n’ Roll Pumpkin and Shitman. Deep into the night, the loft jangled with the sounds of arcade games—buzzers and bells and metallic beeps of Space Invaders and Operation Wolf—a counterpoint to the Ministry Bill blasted as he bent over his worktable assembling the band’s outlandish costumes.

  On weekends, the loft became Party Central. Friends and friends of friends came and went sometimes until four in the morning to mosh with the latest L.A. bands who performed at one end of the room, much to the chagrin of the neighbors on the other side of the common wall.

  “I built the loft so that people could come here and do whatever they wanted,” Manspeaker explained in a 2014 interview. “And here was Maynard. He was kind of quiet and shy and grumpy. I believe that loft was a door for him. All of a sudden, he was in this place where it was OK to be weird.”

  If he sometimes needed a break from the pandemonium, Maynard walked across the lot to Danny’s building, the old DeMille livestock barn where under the carpeting, traces of feed troughs could still be seen in the concrete floor. Danny had fashioned from the space a compact apartment and adjoining rehearsal room where Green Jellö explored their routines. On the nights he didn’t perform with Carole King or Wild Blue Yonder or Pigmy Love Circus, he set up his drum kit and worked on new numbers with the band. And Maynard listened, delighting in the characters and costumes, the music, the masks.

  Even amid the chaos and commotion of the loft, Maynard managed to re-create his oasis, a retreat amid the comings and goings and Bill’s heaps of papier-mâché, glue pots, and bolts of fabric. Against one wall of his room, he built a sleeping platform high above the floor to make space for potted plants hung with tiny nests for Harpo and the other finches, for aquariums stocked with geckos and chameleons, for an elaborate ecosystem of waterfalls and ferns and luminous goldfish.

  Across a 4-by-8 length of plywood, he constructed embankments and valleys molded with Quikrete over a chicken-wire frame and painted in soft greens and browns. Water spilled from the reservoir atop the highest hill down into the fish pond and, through a system of pumps and hoses, circulated again up the hill, gurgling gently.

  Late at night, the sounds of arcade games faint behind his door, Maynard gazed down from his bunk at the dozing animals, the tiny gray birds settling into their nests, the fish gliding slowly among the aquatic plants. Lulled by the bubbling waterfall and the soft chirping of his menagerie, he drifted toward sleep, imagining sand dunes and stars, snow across some faraway bridge, stories shared around a campfire.

  On Friday and Saturday nights, the streets below Maynard’s windows echoed with shouts and raucous laughter, car horns and the pointless revving of souped-up engines. Those were the nights suburban youths descended upon the city to cruise the boulevards, to see and to be seen. Along Hollywood and Sunset, traffic was at a dead stop in a gridlock that stretched from Western all the way to La Brea, car stereos blaring a cacophonous medley of the Pogues and Motörhead and the Alarm.

  On more than one occasion, I stood on the roof and watched women go from one car to another and rabbit-punch each other in the face. I guess these girls recognized rivals in the car behind them or some chick who’d looked at their boyfriend wrong. Who knows.

  The girls would get out of one car and swoop in on the other car. They’d open the doors and grab a handful of hair and start punching the shit out of some other girl.

  Watching this, I started wondering how extensive my atrium had to be and how thick I needed to build my walls.

  The stream of customers at the discount Regal Liquors next door only added to the mayhem and tense atmosphere. Vagrants and derelicts stumbled all night long into the shop to trade their begged, borrowed, and stolen change for off-brand strawberry schnapps and nickel nips, then claimed the nearby stoops and alleys as their weekend turf.

  “Our neighborhood was a war zone,” Danny would recall. “We had to fend off bums and cretans and criminals and all these people that came back into the parking lot and slept on our doorsteps, urinating and defecating everywhere. But there was strength in our numbers.” Maynard’s street smarts, honed in the anti-punk neighborhoods of Grand Rapids, served him well. “He had good survival skills
and knew how to get rid of these people,” Danny said. “We bonded over that from the beginning and made the best of an ugly situation.”

  When Maynard noticed particularly disruptive activity in the lot, he shouted from his bedroom window to Danny, and the two met outside, baseball bats in hand. “We’d make them pick up their doody so I didn’t have to do it,” Danny explained. “It was just painful.”

  Maynard had known when he’d come to L.A. that his choice would bring both benefits and consequences, but the swaying palms and balmy afternoons and even living in the center of a vibrant music scene couldn’t offset his despair. What had been promised had turned to its shadow side, a no-man’s-land of insecurity and wariness.

  His set work was satisfying enough—his last-minute cleverness when the art department panicked over missing props. When halfway through the shooting of Tom Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open” video they found they were short a microphone, it was Maynard to the rescue. “Running down to SIR to buy or rent one would cost them two hours,” he would explain. “I told them to hold on. I could take care of it.” A length of duct tape and an empty toilet paper roll was all it took to fashion the realistic-looking mic Johnny Depp held in his nightclub scene.

  But quick thinking and ingenuity didn’t pay the bills, nor did the quarters and dimes he found scattered on the sidewalk outside Regal’s on Sunday mornings. He’d seen the flyers posted throughout the city calling for background extras in films and television shows, and now he began to read them more closely. Nonspeaking actors could earn $50 a day, he learned, and if their appearance was especially unique, they could command even more. Perhaps his long, wavy hair, wiry frame, and studded leather were unusual enough to land him a role or two.

  Jack Olsen, he realized, might serve as a mentor of sorts, a film industry professional with insider insights, and Maynard arranged a lunch meeting to discuss his possible entry into show business. “Here was a guy thinking about working as an extra talking to a guy who read screenplays,” Jack would recall. “We couldn’t have been anywhere closer to the absolute bottom of the entertainment pyramid, but we proceeded with great seriousness. Maynard always had a kind of adult focus.”