A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

The women brought to the relationships dysfunctional patterns of their own, coping mechanisms and habits that perfectly dovetailed with his. The borders between their performance personas and their offstage lives were porous, their dramas enacted in suspicion and disparagement and angry outbursts. The criticisms and manipulation were subtle at first, but escalated over the weeks into irrational demands and attempts to control his every coming and going, into slapping and pummeling and windows broken in jealous rage.

  “I didn’t understand this weird abusive dynamic,” Maynard would recall. “My parents never hit me when I was a kid, and none of the women I’d known in Michigan or Boston ever acted this way. I was trying to be open to whatever might happen and just embrace whatever came, but much of the time, the relationships went in an ugly direction.”

  He explained and cajoled and struggled his way from one tumultuous amour only to find himself in another just as destructive. More than once, the violence and confusion led him to retaliate with passive-aggressive tactics of his own: abrupt and unexplained breakups and restraining orders against women he’d once believed he loved.

  “When I look back, I’m not happy with a lot of my behavior,” he would admit. “I was gaining understanding on a lot of levels, but on quite a few more, I was doing things I wasn’t proud of. I’m not ashamed, and I don’t regret anything, but I felt like I was losing myself to weird desires.”

  So many seemed unaware of such concepts as commitment and fidelity, and Maynard, caught up in the addictive cycle, succumbed to their allure and their attention, however superficial. And then he’d turn, as if just over his shoulder someone might appear to understand his unspoken joke, ask to hear his story, and be there to help rewrite it.

  On a morning in mid-January, Maynard awoke to find CDs and books spilled across the floor and the pictures on the walls askew. He’d slept through his first California earthquake, the Northridge quake centered in Receda only 12 miles away. He found only a broken saucer or two on the kitchen floor, but he soon learned of collapsed apartment complexes and parking garages and whole sections of the Santa Monica Freeway. Reporters called it one of the most powerful urban quakes in U.S. history, powerful enough to damage Gazzarri’s on Sunset so irreparably it would be demolished. The old Hastings Hotel would close, too, and with it Raji’s.

  He spent the morning putting his house in order and reflecting on Bill Hicks’s cassette and his prescient rant of fault lines and of L.A. slipping complete into the Pacific.

  Over the winter, Maynard had noticed in Hicks a shift in focus and enthusiasm. “I sensed something was off,” Maynard would recall. “I told him we had a short tour coming up in February and that we should talk about him joining us.” But Hicks was hesitant to commit to the project he’d embraced only months before. “He was like, ‘Yeah, we’ll talk about it,’” Maynard would remember.

  Hicks had always answered Maynard’s calls on the first ring, but now, without warning or explanation, the calls went unanswered. “Then I had another dream,” Maynard recalled. “Bill’s girlfriend Colleen and his manager Duncan and a lot of other people were at a motel, and everybody was crying. And Bill wasn’t there. So I called Duncan, and I said, ‘Man, I just had the most fucked-up dream, and I haven’t been able to reach Bill. What’s going on?’”

  Hicks, Duncan told him, had told only a few close friends about his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The weekly chemo treatments had had little effect, and in January, after a final show at Carolines on Broadway, he’d moved from New York to his parents’ house in Little Rock.

  “We talked many times after that,” Maynard remembered. “He was still hopeful like, ‘Well, maybe if I can beat the unbeatable cancer, we can still do this show.’ I felt like he just wanted to talk.” And they talked often, Maynard listening patiently as Hicks struggled to articulate his increasingly incoherent thoughts. The calls continued until Valentine’s Day, when Hicks—the man of unstoppable wit, the man with still so much to say, so much to teach of consciousness and compassion—could not speak at all.

  Los Angeles continued to live up to its reputation as a new age hub, its mediums and seers and self-proclaimed oracles peering into cards and tea leaves and crystals to bring insight and guidance to their anxious customers. Worried for his friend and frustrated by his own creative inertia, Maynard turned to a psychometry practitioner in the Valley, a woman who claimed the gift of reading magnetic energy patterns in metal. Allowing her to see what she could see in a piece of jewelry certainly couldn’t hurt and might offer some new perspective.

  He’d searched for a suitable object for analysis and chose at last a silver ring he hadn’t worn in years and with no particular significance. The reader held the ring between her palms and closed her eyes, channeling or meditating or perhaps only acting. “Then she asked me who Paul was,” he remembered. “And she goes, ‘Yeah, that’s done.’”

  Her words took Maynard by surprise. This Paul she sensed in the ring’s aura might be anybody at all, he reasoned, and surely not Tool’s bass player, who seemed as devoted to the group as he’d ever been. But he wrote the name on a slip of paper and asked what his next steps should be.

  “She goes, ‘I don’t know. Something about London,’” he would remember. He added London to the piece of paper and put it in his pocket, no more enlightened than he’d been that morning, but armed with a cryptic map, at least, should he ever need to consult it.

  In early February, the band’s short tour had begun as planned, a three-week barnstormer up the East Coast and through the Midwest that included an evening at the Orbit Room in Grand Rapids.

  “I saw Maynard firing up a lot of disenfranchised and disillusioned young people,” art instructor Deb Rockman would recall of the sold-out show. “He had to be really loud and scream this stuff to get through to that very angry generation.” She’d watched the crowd sway in trancelike attention before the stage, watched them lip-synch his lyrics. “The music was very mature,” Rockman said. “It wasn’t all about fucking and drinking and partying. Maynard was telling people to look around, to notice what was wrong. That was always his intention.”

  The Grand Rapids stop included a day of freedom before he was due in Detroit for Saturday’s show. Maynard walked with Steve Aldrich and Ramiro through the downtown, hearing the latest news of Aldrich’s radio program and Ramiro’s paintings and noting the changes to the city since he’d lived there. The amphitheater was empty of skateboarders on the subzero afternoon, and they stamped their boots against the cold and darted into the welcome warmth of a coffee shop, where record bins lined the walls and a narrow staircase led to the tattoo parlor downstairs.

  “And there,” Aldrich explained, “we find a Grand Valley art teacher.” The man sat alone with his design binders, his graph paper and ink bottles, the instructor who six years before had severely critiqued an assignment Maynard had believed was especially well-executed. “It was a metal sculpture that Maynard loved,” Aldrich would recall. “This guy had hated it and just ripped it apart, and now he’s departed the university and is working in a basement tattoo shop.”

  The professor looked up from his sketch pad at Maynard’s Mulhawk and faded jeans and asked what he’d been doing since he’d left school. Maynard’s response was matter-of-fact, emotionless. “Well, my band and I did a show at the Orbit Room last night for 1,500 people,” he explained, extending toward the astonished teacher a copy of the day’s Grand Rapids Press. “And here’s my picture on the front page of the paper.”

  “You have no idea how happy this made Maynard,” Aldrich recalled.

  With time to spare, his friends delivered Maynard at the stage door of the State Theatre, the Beaux Arts performance space that dominated Detroit’s Grand Circus Park. Once more, Tool pulled out all the stops, its energy drawing the crowd to its feet in frenzied appreciation of “Prison Sex” and “Sober” and the enigmatic “4 Degrees.”

  Exhausted,
Maynard went to his hotel afterward and fell into a troubled sleep. “I sat up in my bed not long after midnight, full upright like somebody just punched me,” he remembered. “It freaked me out. I’m wide awake in this room going, ‘What the fuck was that?’”

  He went to the window and looked out over the city. Cabs moved slowly through the streets below, and in the distance, the lights of the Ambassador Bridge reflected white against the dark river. All was well, he told himself, and set his alarm to be sure to wake up in time for breakfast with Danny.

  In the morning, his pager flashed, alerting him of some urgent message left while he’d slept. Perhaps his manager had called with last-minute schedule changes. Maybe Danny had phoned to tell him of the perfect bacon-and-eggs diner he’d found nearby. Maynard dialed his 800 number, and in the gray dawn quiet, listened to Duncan’s message. At 11:20 Little Rock time, he reported, Bill had died.

  Maynard powered through the evening’s show in Cleveland, his performance as professional and controlled as any other. The night flight to London would give him plenty of time to sort out his feelings. One thing was sure. He would not mourn.

  Bill and I had always talked about how life is just a ride. If you really believe that, then death shouldn’t be seen as an awful thing. But at the same time, I don’t think he was ready. His career was so right on the edge of exploding.

  I would imagine most people’s tendency would be to get obliterated, but I didn’t. My reaction wasn’t to get drunk on the plane. My reaction was to get some sleep so when I got where I was going, I could do what I do. I felt like the best way to remember Bill was to keep using my talents.

  He lay his forehead against the window and looked down at sea stretching dark in every direction to the horizon. And he slept, the sky brightening as the jet flew toward sunrise.

  The London show kicked off a summer itinerary as rigorous as that of the year before with stops in the Netherlands and France, a nonstop blitz across the U.S. and Canada, and a second European tour. In late July, the Shepherd’s Bush show opened with U.K. band Peach, a progressive metal group whose experimental melodies and daring psychedelic style complemented the Tool sound. Maynard was impressed by the inventive whammy work of Peach bassist Justin Chancellor, so much so that he and the others invited him to sit in for Paul on the evening’s performance of “Sober.” Chancellor’s growling low-end interpretation brought an unexpected depth to the song, and if this was all the metal reader had seen in her vision of London and Paul, it was enough.

  Nearly five months of downtime would be just the break Maynard needed to come to terms with Bill’s death, to think or not think at all, to laze away his afternoons, a package of Twizzlers beside him on the water bed and a supply of VHS tapes stacked nearby.

  It might be time to revisit Wings of Desire, or Bliss, but he was curious about the collection of Drunvalo Melchizedek lectures a friend had dropped by some months before.

  Peculiar as Melchizedek’s backstory was—that an otherworldly spirit had stepped into his consciousness to promote ancient esoteric teachings—Maynard was fascinated by his theories. The Egyptian pyramids, Melchizedek maintained, weren’t in fact tombs, as anthropologists had long claimed, but initiation chambers where a chosen few had been granted an understanding of sacred geometry.

  Melchizedek had accepted his mission, he explained, to enlighten twentieth-century minds of the power of mathematic principles underlying everything from spiraled nautilus shells to the structure of DNA to the arrangement of leaves on a long-stemmed rose, the recurring patterns that give order to the physical world.

  A lot of what Melchizedek talked about rang true. Never mind all the “I’m a walk-in spirit who existed back in Egypt and the god Thoth taught me geometry.” What I took from it was all the things that can be explained by geometry.

  It went back to what Boots Newkirk tried to teach us about a table with only two legs. Is it gonna stand up? No. Three legs? OK. When you do a transit survey, two points don’t tell you anything. Your target could be either one. But if you have a third point, you can calculate center lines and meridians and trajectories to pinpoint the artillery’s location and the direction of enemy fire. The geometry of three points makes things stable.

  Maynard lay back on the water bed and thought of the honeycombs his father had kept in a far corner of his garden, their endlessly replicating cells each the same, of fugues and canons, of the spiderweb hanging lacelike and precise in the cornice over the front porch, of the apple he’d sliced at lunchtime and the way its halves had fallen across his plate to reveal the shape of a star.

  His reading list that summer branched from novels to folklore to ethnographies, spiraling in an ever-widening study of fact and myth that, no matter the genre, came to the same striking conclusion: There was, it seemed, more than one history of the world.

  “Sober” had become a hit single in March, and in September, Undertow was certified gold by the RIAA. “I was absolutely aware of having put the dominoes in a row and of making them fall in the way that I had hoped,” Maynard would recall. But to take the next creative step and avoid the dread third album, he knew he must take the time to regroup, to revisit the concepts and notions that had first fueled his dreams.

  “All this touring is eventually going to catch up with you,” he would explain. “Now let’s do some sit-ups and try to see if we can’t maintain an edge. I needed to find a balance in order to bring structure to the art and still make it vulnerable and volatile.”

  He drew his blinds against the August heat and began to sort through the stack of books he’d accumulated during his time on the road. He turned first to his tattered volumes of Joseph Campbell and segued to the John Crowley novel he’d looked forward to reading for months. Ægypt, to his delight, was a tale even more fantastical than Little, Big. He read of a forgotten age when mathematics and magic, alchemy and astronomy weren’t antithetical but faces of the same reality, of days when scryers gazed into their glass and communed with the angels they saw there, learning from them their lost language.

  Accounts of those gone times weren’t recorded in history texts, Campbell had written, but they hadn’t entirely vanished. Their traces persisted across millennia in the symbols of the tarot, in rune stones and hieroglyphs and petroglyphs. They endured in the stories passed down from grandfather to father to son, tales of lead turned to gold, of giants and dwarves once as common as fruit flies, of gods and goddesses come down to live among men. They remained as parables and allegories, stories of transformations and transmutations that defied the laws of modern science.

  On the other hand, maybe it had all happened just that way. Maybe, as Crowley suggested, the laws themselves had changed, the very axioms that explained time and space and life and death and love.

  And perhaps another history determined Maynard’s own path, a forgotten or deliberately denied story as crucial to his success as Boots Newkirk’s lectures or maneuvers on the Fort Sill training ground. If he shifted his gaze, he thought, the details of his hidden tale would come into sharp relief, the way the picture in the Highlights magazine at the dentist’s office had changed from an urn to smiling profiles when he’d tilted his head just right.

  For a long time, Maynard had struggled to make sense of the hazy memories that returned sometimes when he least expected: the hours alone in the farmer’s house in Tallmadge, his distant and taciturn stepfather no one dared defy. Perhaps he’d only imagined the furtive glances between the otherwise stern church members when they’d come to the Ravenna house, the sudden silences that even as a small boy he’d known he must never question, the not quite covert touches passed between the adults gathered in the living room on a Saturday evening. The oddly uncomfortable memories might not have been real at all, but fantasies he’d created to cope with Mike’s departure, scenarios he’d dreamt to distract himself from Judith’s infirmities. But fabrication or fact, his narratives had left their trac
e, a vague sense of confusion and mistrust, of trespass and violation.

  His mother would remember more than he, he was sure, but drawing from her the details was no easy task, and their frequent phone calls that summer left him no more enlightened than before. “Judith was blocking things then,” Maynard’s aunt Pam would recall. “She was trying to forget the painful things that had happened when he was a little boy.”

  His unresolved bitterness and fear had inevitably found their way into his lyrics, but Maynard had for a long time sensed an untold subplot, a backstory that would explain his confusion and anger. It would take gentle prodding to reveal the truths that had gone unspoken for decades, truths that once he understood them, could only bring a deeper dimension to his art.

  “Eventually, the whole story came out in conversations with my mother and my aunt,” he explained. “It turns out the family included a classic inappropriate uncle. My mother was raped when she was a little girl. That’s what the songs are really about, the cycle of denial and abuse—emotional and physical—that, for all I knew, had been going on for generations.”

  When you’re exposed to that kind of abuse as a young child, you carry it with you, especially when everybody else pretends it never happened. My mother buried the memory of what her uncle had done, and it came out in her own lack of boundaries. She invited people into her home who had questionable boundaries, because that’s what she knew, that’s what she attracted. Then I grew up seeing that, so I learned “no boundaries.”

  Having that moral ambiguity could be the makings of a sociopath, but on the positive side, it could be that I think outside the box because I was never confined in one. I’d done some inappropriate things that I wasn’t even aware were inappropriate. But that lack of conventional boundaries helped me push the envelope in other areas. It’s the way I was wired.

  The palms that lined La Maida drooped in the heat, and the animals in the garden sought what little relief they could beneath the ferns and the rosemary bushes. When the temperature was at its record-breaking highest, Gary ventured to the market, and by the time he returned, Maynard’s Mulhawk was no more. “It was so fuckin’ hot,” Maynard remembered. “I took scissors and a razor and shaved it all off.”