The new look offered an unexpected benefit. Shorn, Maynard found he could go about the city incognito and fear no censure should his activities conflict with his public’s expectations. As the band had become more and more well-known, fans and followers were quick to recognize on the sidewalk the wiry frontman with the long curls, and Maynard found the attention not only annoying, but limiting.
I felt like this thing on my head had become some kind of a signature, and I needed to get rid of that so I could move about freely. On the one hand, being part of Tool meant people knew who I was, and that was cool. But the paradox is that that public image ends up stifling you. It slows you down and boxes you in.
Back then, there was no Facebook to be throwing pictures at you. So if I changed my look, I could be anonymous and walk around unrecognized. That made it easier to move forward and discover new things.
At the gingerbread house, he rediscovered pastimes and passions he’d long neglected. He brought out sketch pads and pens and recipes for quiches and chocolate chip cookies, and invited in old friends and new, Tom Morello and Brad Wilk and Moon Unit Zappa, and their camaraderie provided the connection and centering he’d so missed while he’d been on the road. They shared stories and laughter, updates on the role they’d read for that week and the upcoming gig, take-out orange chicken and crab Rangoon.
“We connected intellectually and heart-wise,” Zappa recalled in a 2014 interview. “Maynard was an extremely soulful person. There was such a difference between this mild-mannered Clark Kent type living in that funky little house and his contained-electricity punk rock persona. The dichotomy was fascinating.”
And before they settled in for a screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Maynard led his friends to the backyard to greet Butterball, the newest addition to his menagerie. The fat tom turkey stomped and charged and fluffed his feathers and jerked his head toward Tom and Brad.
His L.A. family grew to include the waitresses at Millie’s Café, the Silver Lake diner fitted out in campy 1940s Hollywood décor. They greeted him by name when he came in the door and served up his scrambled eggs with spinach and toasted pine nuts and news of the day. “I felt like I’d finally found my groove,” he remembered.
And Maynard and Danny and Adam and Paul found themselves not so much invited as expected at Lou Maglia’s over-the-top feasts. “Every holiday, I had open house,” Maglia would explain. “The rule was, the line starts at 2 o’clock, and if you’re late, you’ve got to put your food in the microwave yourself.”
There was always room for one more at Lou’s house, one more musician whose schedule prevented their going home for Thanksgiving, one more songwriter with deadlines that kept them in L.A. at Christmastime. Before the day was over, 200 guests might circle the buffet table to heap their plates with turkey and ham, lasagna and candied yams, asparagus parmesan and garlicked green beans prepared by Lou himself.
Maynard and the others stayed as long as politely possible, prolonging their visit with another slice of pie, one more cannoli. Their laughter echoed long into the morning through the big house in the Hollywood Hills, this home where candles burned and no one need be alone.
By midwinter, Maynard’s was a familiar face at the city’s premier comedy clubs—Beth Lapides’s UnCabaret and the Diamond Club on Hollywood where Laura Milligan hosted her Tantrum shows.
He and Gary took their place at a table near the stage and escaped for an evening in the routines of David Cross and Bob Odenkirk and Jack Black, aspiring comics testing their routines and honing their timing. Maynard listened to the satire and send-ups of Craig Aston and Brian Posehn and began to imagine himself on the Tantrum stage. If ever there were time between Tool tours, he might just give it a try.
“I saw unlimited potential in him,” Zappa would recall. “Maynard is a batch of raw materials. It’s like those reality shows where they tell you to make clothing out of things you find at a recycling center or give you a bunch of ingredients and say, ‘Make a meal out of gummy bears and mustard.’ It’s like he had too many talents.”
At closing time, he might dart off to a romantic liaison, to his room to finish a new song or begin a new drawing, or to the airport to make the flight to Honolulu and the next night’s performance there.
“It felt like he was running from something,” Zappa would remember. But his was not a race against an opponent. He was determined to stay ahead of the thing that pursued him, the echo of dismissal and underestimation, as if the mediocrity he must outdistance were his own.
So much was still possible, Maynard believed, and nothing would get in his way. Few performances were on the docket, and no romantic entanglements, and with the departure of Pepper Spray Jerry and the arrival of a new housemate, Tool guitar tech Billy Howerdel, the La Maida house had settled into a comfortable domestic routine. He would take advantage of the calm and focus on the next album.
But the universe, he should have known by then, has a habit of bollixing the best of intentions. One telephone call, and his every certainty was replaced with doubt. Fatherhood was one piece of the puzzle that hadn’t exactly been on his radar.
“My dad hadn’t been around for me when I was young,” he would recall. “Now here I was in a similar situation, which sucked. I didn’t want to repeat that pattern. I wanted to break it.”
Of his many doomed romances, this had been the one ended not in door slamming or restraining orders but levelheaded kindness. After only a few dates, the two had recognized their passion wasn’t destined for the long term and had said their respectful goodbyes. “We agreed as adults that it wasn’t working, and we parted ways,” Maynard recalled. “I finally handled a breakup the way it should be handled.”
A white picket fence and a two-car garage weren’t entirely out of the question. The year before, he’d congratulated Kjiirt on his marriage and the birth of his daughter not with a little envy. He imagined that one day, it would be his turn to gather with family at the dinner table every night and spend Saturdays teaching his children to plant peas and lettuce in the garden behind the house. But not yet, not now. “I wanted all that, but I wanted to be with the right person,” he would explain.
But whatever his fears, whatever his reservations and regrets, this child—his child—would never doubt his love, never twist in its car seat to catch one last glimpse of its father. If he and the baby’s mother had managed a respectful breakup, he resolved, surely they could maintain that civility for the sake of their baby.
Maynard’s demands were few but firm. He’d have a say in choosing the best schools and the best orthodontists. His child would spend Christmas with him, and together they’d sprinkle cookies with powdered sugar and create pinecone Santas and hang them on their real tree.
“It’s just a ride,” Bill Hicks had told him often enough. No matter what, he’d said, things would always work out. Maybe so, but just now, Maynard was hard-pressed to reconcile instant family with his artistic ambitions, not to mention an increasing abhorrence for the city he lived in. “There are those moments when you feel like you’re losing touch with your identity,” he would later explain.
The Melchizedek tapes had only scratched the surface in helping him to understand cosmic order, and when he saw the announcement of an upcoming Flower of Life seminar, he drafted his tuition check and cleared his Day-Timer. A weeklong immersion in Melchizedek’s teachings of pattern and structure might bring the clarity he needed.
Early each day, Maynard arrived at the house in San Fernando Valley and joined his fellow students in a meditation, visualizing the creative energies supposedly crackling in the instructor’s living room. She lectured on tragedy and hope and the mathematical formulas that formed Melchizedek’s teachings, while Maynard and the others sat on their pillows and exchanged smiles as if they shared in some great secret.
After lunch, the lights were dimmed, and Melchizedek’s i
mage filled the screen against one wall. Maynard watched rapt as the ponytailed guru enlightened the group about the earth’s forgotten histories: of extraterrestrials who’d long ago come from the star Sirius and left their mysterious marks upon the land, of Stonehenge and the pyramids on the Giza Plateau, their designs suggesting some occult universal system of measurement.
In the evening, over IPAs in the backyard, Maynard updated Gary and Billy on the day’s lessons. He reported on the cataclysmic changes to come, changes predicted for millennia by seers long separated by space and time. Any time now, Melchizedek had taught, great seismic shifts would heave the earth’s plates and set them down again willy-nilly, creating a new landscape of ocean waves crashing over Arizona. As best he could, he told them of the new breed of humans beginning to populate the earth, a race evolved with not only the usual 46 chromosomes but an additional two, equipping them to usher in an age of cosmic consciousness—a race Melchizedek called Indigo Children.
“My friends thought I was fucking bananas,” Maynard would recall.
I don’t care whether there’s aliens or not. That’s a great story and it makes for great movies. The more logical story, just like Crowley wrote in Ægypt, is that there are way more histories to the world than you can imagine and that records of them survived violent changes throughout time. But it’s not aliens. It’s just us leaving messages for each other.
And I don’t believe in psychic power stuff. I do believe in creative energies. I believe information is out there if you just tune to it. I don’t think it’s anything spiritual. It’s just there. If all of a sudden people on different continents discovered electricity, it’s not like they had some cosmic Internet and shared that information. It’s just that on some unconscious level, people end up being at the same stage of readiness.
The seminar included somewhat more pragmatic topics as well. The principles of sacred geometry, Melchizedek claimed, manifest themselves in all things seen and unseen. The universe hums with the energy of the Fibonacci sequence—a series of numbers, each the sum of the two that precede it—the mathematical pattern that determines the shape of the spiraling galaxies, and hurricanes, too, and garden snails and cochlea inside the human ear.
The larger-than-life Melchizedek spoke from the screen, and Maynard scribbled notes, imagining sketches or even lyrics he might create based on this new knowledge. Every emotion, Melchizedek claimed—love and compassion, fear and anguish—has its unique sine wave signature, and neuro researchers had recorded and then converted them to three-dimensional polyhedrons, their angles and lines as predictable as the recursive patterns of a Bach fugue, as precise as a Midwestern highway grid.
“Those patterns have to do with consciousness,” Maynard would explain. “They clearly have to do with art and music and how your body reacts to their structures. When artists figured out this mathematical proportion thing, they created paintings that vibrate in us at more powerful frequencies. The same with classical music. Beethoven could barely hear. He wrote music based on math, and that music makes you cry.”
Even synchronicity and coincidence, Melchizedek explained, are natural and expected expressions of mathematical order. Nothing magical about them. Real magic happens with consciousness, the force that causes events and inventions to come into being in the first place.
Maynard sat forward as Melchizedek trained his laser pointer on images of circles, of angles and arcs and simple geometric forms. Any beginner, Melchizedek explained, can take up compass and straightedge and pen and draw triangles and squares, pentagrams and hexagons, and the star in all its variations: the cross and the star of David and the swastika.
But to reach the next level, to draw a form no compass, no Spirograph, no idle doodler can produce, is to enter into the divine. Participation and will are required to draw the heptagram, the star of seven lines, seven interlocking nodes, seven points. Seven: the number of chakras as the Buddhists count them, the number neo-pagans give to the entrance to the realm of Faerie. Seven: the holiest of holy numbers signifying the completion of God’s creative act. When a man applies conscious thought and draws a seven-pointed star, he becomes with God a cocreator of the universe.
If I built on Melchizedek’s principles—not that I understood any of them—at least I could get something out of the classes. I wanted to do more, I wanted to create. I wanted quality of life and I wanted to take care of my child. I wanted to boil Melchizedek’s story down to the basics and to understand the practical nature of geometry as it applies to emotions, to human behavior, to music, to architecture, to food, to wine.
When the final class was dismissed, Maynard pulled his battered four-track recorder from the back of his closet and experimented with vocal levels from whisper to scream. He replayed Bill Hicks’s cassettes and considered the union of comedy and tragedy, the vibrations that might exist between them, the intersections that might produce in an audience deep resonance.
“Maynard has a very practical, logical side,” Moon Zappa explained. “You can hear it in the complex point of entry where he brings a story to you. He can direct information. And you can only do that if you’re working on yourself, discovering, and doing deep work.”
And the orange moon followed its own geometric trajectory across the L.A. sky as Maynard curled on his bed with pen and ink and tried his hand at sketching seven-pointed stars.
If, as Melchizedek believed—as Bill Hicks had predicted and the Bible too—the end times were just around the corner, it would probably be a good idea to be prepared. “OK, I signed on for this ride, and if I couldn’t jump off, I at least needed to be able to physically endure it,” Maynard explained. “I had to be ready to defend myself or defend my space. At least, I had to become centered enough to stay calm in the face of whatever might happen.”
Tool’s local performances that winter had featured the innovative metal band Laundry, and over the months, its drummer, Tim Alexander, had become a frequent guest at the house on La Maida. He arrived one afternoon, updated Maynard on his work with Primus, paid the obligatory visit to Butterball, and presented to Maynard a set of VHS tapes of the pay-per-view Ultimate Fighting Championship.
This was geometric principle in action, Maynard realized. Long after he should have returned to his writing, he marveled at Royce Gracie, UFC founder and its three-time champion, as he bested opponent after opponent with his singular jiu-jitsu moves.
The Gracies, Tim explained—Royce, his father Hélio, and his brother Rickson—had made it their mission to revolutionize mixed martial arts, to incorporate into jiu-jitsu cross-training and new ways of applying leverage and sensitivity to turn an adversary’s energy against himself.
In those days, every martial arts studio claimed theirs was the best and that they could teach you how to kill a man in under five seconds. I love to be part of a movement that’s calling bullshit, and the Gracies were clearing up the mysteries and nonsense surrounding most of the other martial arts and all their dance steps. And these guys were actually fairly nonviolent. Half the time, they disabled their opponent without even striking.
Maynard was soon a regular at Rickson’s L.A. studio, studying grappling and joint locks and chokes under the black belts there. He learned to transmute his body to fulcrum and pivot, to maintain a disciplined control of his torso and limbs, of line and leverage and angle. “That was the beauty of Brazilian jiu-jitsu,” he would recall. “I was learning physical, practical skills that kept me grounded during a time when I was trying to figure out what really mattered and trying to maintain my center in this ocean of chaos in L.A.”
Bill Hicks’s death—at 32 and with so much yet to accomplish—left Maynard with a sense of urgency. He’d seen bands achieve sudden fame, receive accolades and awards and astonishing royalties. He’d seen the downside of success, too, the one-dimensional existence that came of the single-minded focus required to stay in the spotlight.
“Tool was mo
ving in a direction that was keeping me from pursuing other interests and dreams,” Maynard explained. “I felt I had to do something before we got to the point of no return.”
The Diamond Club on Hollywood Boulevard offered an eclectic lineup from disco on Saturdays to Wednesday night comedy. Laura Milligan’s Tantrum shows weren’t the predictable stand-up monologues and timeworn mother-in-law jokes, but variety shows of mini-skits and offbeat humor, and Maynard and his friends made it their go-to spot to experience the new generation of comics: Kathy Griffin and Bobcat Goldthwait, Janeane Garofalo and Margaret Cho and Mark Fite, and David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, whose sketch comedy series Mr. Show would premiere in November on HBO.
He looked forward most to the recurring comedy-club-within-a-comedy-club routine featuring Laura’s character Tawny Port, a former child star who’d descended into the shadow world of drugs and rock star romances and had only now begun her climb from the cycle of self-abuse. Recently released from yet another rehab program, Tawny had turned to comedy as her first step in reentering the limelight.
The skits always ended with the same gimmick. Tawny stood alone on the stage waiting for her down-on-his-luck boyfriend Vince to appear with his band and close the show. “He’d never show up,” Laura explained. “The show always had this anticlimactic ending.”
The disappointing denouement was humorous enough, but Maynard imagined taking the sketch further. What if, he suggested, Vince did show up, and not alone but with his ragtag band in tow? The attentive man with the shaved head, Laura had learned, might know a thing or two about music, and, intrigued by his idea, she agreed to offer him a few lines in the next week’s performance.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 22
