What I think I want to write about is something I've been neglecting to write in full for a long, long time. And what I want to write about is Go-Tool Zoe, the Link, and how he rid me of a psychic parasite.
No, really.
I knew Zoe for only a short amount of time, its been about five years or so since I last saw him, but we had an immediate sense of kinship, like we were part of some `secret family', a species of psychology. Since him, I've met a few others and began to recognize, I think, what's behind it -- but he was the first one to really show me that I'm not entirely alone in the world of the weird.
Her, I know she knows who she is, I hope you're reading this.
Back when him and I crossed paths -- perhaps for no other reason than the fact that for a time we were headed in the same direction -- I wasn't so arrogant as I would be two years later when I thought I'd stumbled upon the answer to all this weirdness. With his brief entry into my life, though, the question began to come into greater focus and gain further elaboration.
That evening I was just getting over a cold. I’d come up to the all-night restaurant where Sandra worked as a waitress and I worked as dishboy -- a place that doubled as a hang-out. It may sound pathetic, but it was a place filled with interesting people to watch, and I could sit alone in my booth, feed off of free coffee, smoke a dozen cigarettes and write my heart away in my notebook. That night, my usual coffee was replaced by a mug of hot water, into which I was dipping a tea bag from the box I'd bought from a convienence store on my way there.
I was just getting comfortable when Punk Rock Larry arrived, with some stranger trailing behind him. I tried not to make eye contact, but the smoking section was rather vacant that evening and I quickly came to accept the fact that it was too late to run.
Larry dropped about two dozen cigarettes before me on the table of varying brands, and I just shook my head. This kid, he was a bit of a strange one. He’d officially `quit’ smoking nearly a year ago after an auto accident. While in the hospital, he’d gone a full two weeks without smoking and felt fine, so he threw his pack away and vowed never to smoke again. Then, shortly after he’d began dating Sandra and coming over to our apartment on a regular basis, someone had handed him a cigarette to hold as they went to go do something and, as he later told me, without thinking about it he had taken a drag. Since then he’d been bumming a cigarette from whoever was around every once and awhile -- and every once and awhile came to be more and more often.
He wouldn’t go out and buy himself a pack, no -- he was convinced that this action would make him become a `Smoker’. And he wasn't a smoker, after all, for he’d quit a year ago. He would just do his best to bum the equivalent of two packs from as many people he could on a daly basis.
For the first week or so when he’d come over to the apartment, he kept pushing for me to let him have a cigarette, and I often gave in and let him have one. He promised to pay me back, however, and I made sure to keep pestering him to live up to his promise for I, as is a consistent theme in my life, was always really tight when it came to money and spent more than enough supporting my own addiction.
His method of paying me back, unlike the normal human being, was not to go out and buy the two packs he probably owed me all together. No, as was quite apparent from the pile before me on the table, he instead decided to go around to every other person he knew in a busy evening at the restaurant and ask to bum a cigarette from them, and give me, in the end, the variety pack of stale cigarettes.
Looking up from the pile of cancer sticks to his dumb smile, I shook my head and rolled my eyes at him. He didn't seem to notice. He was too proud of himself for living up to a promise in a around-about way.
Still holding his shit-eating grin, Larry nodded hello to me, sat down, and introduced the stranger with him as Zoe, the drummer in the band that Larry was the guitarist for. I greeted the guy and shook his hand. Zoe looked like a younger, darker, more morose, serious and laid-back version of Tony Danza in a Tool T-shirt.
I turned to Larry and asked him why he didn't just buy me a pack. He told me that was impossible, for buying a pack would make him a smoker. As long as he didn't buy a pack, he assured me, he would never be a smoker. I nodded. I smiled. I told him he was a fucking moron.
We exchanged our usual bitter and sarcastic remarks for a minute or two until Zoe interrupted, pointing to some doodles I'd drawn on the back of my placemat -- an eye. He told me it looked really cool, and his enthusiasm revealed he wasn't just saying this to make me feel good. He meant it.
I suddenly began to wonder if Zoe was one of those people who had a lot of appreciation for art but never drew themselves, and who, upon bumping into a person like me who drew all the time, would come to ask me to draw something for them that I couldn’t draw. This happened to me again and again. People would come up to me and ask me to draw them birds and giraffes and monkeys and a sun rising above the horizon of a calm ocean setting -- any number of things that I was very bad at drawing. I hadn’t drawn a natural setting and cute little animals well without dedicated effort since high school when I snapped. I now drew abstract art, melting faces, and…
“Could you draw me a woman’s eye?”
I nearly jumped in my seat. I told him I drew eyes all the time; they were probably my most favorite things to draw. I was obsessed with them, having always believed they were the `gateways to the soul'. Ever since high school, I would doodle a few onto a napkin with a black pen whenever I was in a coffee shop.
Then he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket to show me a picture he’d just made of a woman’s eyes. He went on to explain his obsession with eyes and I had to laugh -- finally, I thought, someone else had this strange fixation. In his own way, he echoed my belief that the eyes were the gateways or windows to the soul. He was quick to explain that Tool was big on eyes as well, which I had never really noticed before even though I was pretty addicted to the albums AEnema and Undertow.
Their was something strange and unique about the guy that piqued my interest immediately. He seemed to radiate a familiar energy, if that makes any sense -- and even if it doesn't. We began talking very easily, which is strange with me for the most part. I found that he was very honest and sincere, but had a hard time explaining things and would get upset when he couldn't seem to covey them to his satisfaction. Though this was part of what made what he said so cryptic, I also had the feeling that he was being purposely vague in some respects, perhaps in an attempt to see if I was truly interested in what he thought or was merely putting on a show.
The message I got was that there were things he desperately wanted to talk about, but I still seemed to have to earn some trust before he would elaborate. He was vague when he spoked on how `beliefs are dangerous', how `everything is light’ and made a few veiled references to something called `the Link’. I didn’t fully understand what the terms meant to him at first; all that seemed apparent to me was that these few key things that he said over and over meant a lot to him. More than once during our conversation, Zoe also turned to me and asked, “is seeing believing, or is believing seeing?”
It was a few weeks at least before I saw him again. I had come home to the apartment tired as hell and passed out on my bed. I awoke to a party in the process - another one of Sandra’s spur-of-the-moment get-togethers. People were drinking, music was blasting -- nothing unusual in a college town, doubly not unusual in this apartment. This was part of the reason we had to leave the place by April; due to the large volume of the parties, we weren't able to renew our lease.
I'd escaped the party, as I have the habit of doing, and got wrapped up in a one-on-one conversation. I was talking to this kid, Ralph, who had something he believed may have been an missing time, alien abduction experience when he went camping with his grandfather. He believed in them, though was reluctant to talk about any personal involvement in the phenomenon, but considered them not aliens but extra-dimensional or inter-dimensional beings. I think he basically used this term because he thought it was cooler, because as much as I pressed the subject he would never actually defined what he meant by that term.
Years later, I would come to consider them perhaps extra-dimensional as well as extraterrestrial, but only after I knew what the terms meant. Read the novel Flatland, consider what entities in four or more spatial dimensions would be capable of by `pressing' into three-dimensional reality, read some abduction literature, and you'll at least get an idea of where I'm coming from.
Anyway, him and I were at first in an interesting conversation involving several aspects of conspiracy, alien abduction and other weirdness, but he had redirected the subject to the topic of the recent reintegration of marijuana into his life, and I began loosing interest in the conversation. I was looking from where we were sitting on my bed out through the doorway and into the kitchen when I spotted someone pulling a beer out of the fridge. I looked at this person, confused for a moment as to why he looked so familiar, and then he looked back at me. I suddenly recognized him as Zoe.
He pointed at me, and I pointed at him. With a confused look, he asked me what I was doing here. With an equally confused look, I told him I lived here.
We started talking a bit, and eventually that night led to me showing off my artwork -- or `mental vomit’, as I often call them -- to both Zoe and Ralph. Zoe seemed intrigued. He seemed glued to my emphasis on the eyes and my obsession with the darker aspects of the unconscious. Ralph noted the recurring extraterrestrial theme in my artwork.
One of the pieces I showed to them was an old pastel I’d made way before high school, when everything changed for me -- I don’t recall what it was exactly, but it was a very colorful, nature setting with an animal of some sort. A fish, I think. I tried to provide a sort of excuse for it, I guess, and explained that I was trying to use more colors in my more recent pastels to try and get away from the dark and eerie colors. Zoe said he didn’t think I should, as he liked the way I did my artwork.
He said my use of dark colors and white made it really stand out for him, and said that he would pay me to make him a piece sometime. That's when he explained how he couldn’t see color, and that was why his wardrobe was only composed of black and white. He'd only worn those colors since he had been in grade school, as there had been a few occasions when his color coordination had been way off the mark. I found this odd, and extremely interesting.
I drank a bit, but decided to stick to my coffee instead. Zoe, I and a few others spent some time discussing time travel, multiple universes, and what little we collectively understood regarding the Theory of relativity. I was intrigued by the fact that the stars we see in the sky might not even exist there anymore; they may have burned out millions of years ago. I wondered that if we jumped through a wormhole and ended up in the far reaches of space in super-short time and had strong enough of a telescope, if we could look back on earth and have a chance of seeing life that existed far before human beings had even developed.
Eventually most the people at the party were burnt out, fell asleep or went home. And soon enough, it was just Zoe and I in the living room, sitting on the van seats someone from the previous party had stolen and put in our living room. We talked on higher things as we watched the cigarette smoke form weird patterns against the light that shone in through the windows of our apartment from the rising sun.
It didn't take long for me to realize that Zoe’s mind was very different. Explaining things in words seemed too limiting for him; it was as if he was built for some alternate means of communication. Zoe seemed to truly understand some complex concepts and have some ingenious ideas, but I noticed more and more that he was extremely upset with his apparent inability to hear himself speak or translate to words in his mind or communicate to others what it is he held within him. His annoyance at his inability to do his experiences and ideas justice through the medium of his words was familiar to me, for I’d often felt that when trying to explain my experiences. The crude symbols we call words seemed to suffocate the reality and meaning and murder all hopes of unfettered communication.
Personally, I always thought that this inability of mine to communicate things in simple, verbal terms is what led me to alternate modes of communication, such as art, poetry and writing, and it was behind my appreciation for music. One of my dreams involves becoming the lead singer in a band, where I could combine my artwork, writing, and passion for music -- but alas, I know little guitar, even less piano, and I’ve heard myself sing while I’m along in my car, and its not pretty.
For Zoe, it seemed reversed. He had a deep appreciation for visual art and literature, and music seemed to be his only outlet. He had been involved with it since he was very young. He told me how one of the men his mother was dating had noticed in his youth how he kept his feet moving in beat with the music, explaining, “that kid’s got rhythm.” His mother eventually got him a trumpet, I believe, and his use of instruments evolved from there.
I think that to a great extent, his inability to communicate things verbally gave him an affinity for music, often referred to as the `universal language’, because it allowed him to translate his thoughts, feelings and experiences into some medium that might recreate it for another person.
There was also another reason he seemed drawn to music, however, and this was his strange sense of sound. As Zoe explained it to me, most people usually just focused on certain parts of a song, such as, say, the bass, the rhythm guitar, the drums or the singer. That, or they just heard it all in a jumble. Zoe’s way of hearing music seemed to reconcile these two polar extremes, as well as rise above them, go beyond them. Rather than hearing a song like you and I do, when he heard a song he had the ability to focus on each one of the instruments simultaneously.
Part of the reason he liked Tool so much, he told me, was for just this reason. They did something very special with their music --they took it to a level that no musician has. Indeed, I had noticed myself that there is something very off, very deep and dark and beautiful, something very spiritual about their music. I just picked it up emotionally, he knew a bit more about what was behind it all. Their melodies were extremely elaborate, deeply ingenious electronic symphonies, he told me.
He was always particularly impressed with the drummer, who ceased to hit the drum were it was expected, and arranged bizarre beats around the music. Zoe also mentioned that Keenan was a born native of this area -- he had been born in the nearby town of Ravenna, Ohio, on April 17, 1964 -- and had once gone to the school Zoe himself had attended. His interest seemed to be spread out amongst all members of the band, however.
He kept trying to stress to me that through their music, he felt they had come from the same place he had come from, or been to the same place he had been. He also felt, through my artwork, that I shared this fundamental similarity with him. My artwork was a visual expression of what Zoe was trying to accomplish musically, and what he felt from Tool. He wanted to begin a new movement in music that did with sound what Tool was doing; he referred to it as Toolesque, and stated that this was the kind of band he eventually wanted to play a part in. Zoe said that I could translate my sea of poetry into lyrics that I could sing for such a band, that we could even work together musically, but I couldn’t help but laugh. Me, sing? Perchance to dream.
For Zoe, music seemed to be a two-way street. While it served for him a way to transmit elements of his mind which other modes of communication failed to do justice, he also seemed to be receptive to musical transmissions coming from elsewere, hence, perhaps, his addiction to Tool. It also seems his own music effected him in such a way.
In example, he was once playing the piano at Creg's house -- one of his friends. Creg's younger sister was watching as he got caught up in his music, got lost in it. Zoe suddenly just stopped --he hit a chord, and he froze, as if someone had pushed a pause button. This is what it appeared from her eyes, anyway. From Zoe's eyes, he had completely fallen out of this reality, down some surreal rabbit hole, and smack dab into another one.
My eyebrow raised.
This wasn’t the first time something of that nature had happened to Zoe, he’d told me, and it wouldn’t be the last. It had happened to him as far back as he could remember, and it wasn’t always inspired by music. He had these experiences a lot when he smoked pot, and sometimes they just happened out of nowhere, for no apparent reason at all. He would just zone out, his body would freeze, and he’d `slip away' and go into what seemed to be another place, another world. Zoe accurately described the sensation of being over in that otherworld as being like one was in water; I, too, had noticed this, but had been describing it as being in zero-gravity.
What he saw when he was in the otherworld, as I have consistently called it, were often memories of his childhood. Memories of seeing men coming to his house; men that his mother was seeing behind his father's back. He would often see images, like vivid and life-like hypnogogic and hypnopompic imagery, the meaning of which was lost to him.
He had at least one vivid, weird, recurring dream that confused him as well. He began having it at a young age, and he believed it stopped around age eleven. In the dream, there was a group of entities he called The Village who it doesn’t seem he so much as saw but felt. They had given him a duty of utmost importance: to move some gigantic `Mass’. He repeatedly emphasized the Mass had no specific shape, and that he had to keep focus in order to accomplish his goal, which was to move it `from point-A to point-B.’
Again and again in this recurring dream, which he told me he had about once a year, he would loose focus and loose control of the Mass just as he was about to get to the destination. The Village would become awash with disappointment and exasperation and he would abruptly wake up, frustrated, feeling as if he’d `almost got it’ and had let the Village down. The next year when the dream came he’d have to start all over again. He finally accomplished moving the Mass to the appropriate place at age eleven, and the dreams seemed to stop.
Then there was the number eleven.
The number eleven had a certain significance for Zoe. As either the cause or effect of this, his favorite song on the CD was the song, `jimmy’, which seems to describe a traumatizing event of Maynards when he was young and living in Ohio, under his original name, James Hubert Keenan.
To me, it seems to signify a split in his psyche at that age of eleven, where the part of him that he split off remained that age and got buried in the seas of his memory. The number eleven has since haunted Maynard in synchronicites analogous to the 23 synchronicites that plagued me since high school after making a passing joke that I would die at that age. As I had later discovered sometime afterward, people such as Robert Anton Wilson and William S. Burroughs had synchronicities with 23 as well. Shortly after telling Zoe of this number-synchronicity, he started experiencing it with the number eleven.
There was also another memory Zoe often re-experienced when in the otherworld -- the deepest and strangest of them all, in my opinion. It was a very vivid memory that stuck out in his head. He was on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back, and surrounded by a crowd of people. His neck went to rest on the guiltatine. The blade drops and he sees the visual landscape rolling from the first-person perspective.
I remember standing up after that and looking out of the window of the apartment. I remember cautiously, slowly explaining to Zoe that I had always felt that I was wired up differently, that I was on a different wavelength than the people around me, that there was something different about me that made me feel out of place wherever I went. That even amongst the best of friends, I felt disconnected. That all my life, I had felt something akin to homesickness, and yearned to find or make a place where I belonged. I always felt I waiting for something to happen, and i was scared about the fate of the world.
And it was probably paranoia, but. And I was probably shizophrenic, but.
I told him that the whole of it seemed to be my mind, my psychology: I experienced the world differently. That I had vivid dreams and saw very strange things.
I told him that I had seen what I believed to be aliens throughout my life, and they’d communicated some very disturbing things to me. That I remembered past lives, too. I was a bum. Before that, maybe a black boy. Before that, a priest who held a gun to his head in despair over something, maybe everything. Before that, we're not getting into what I remember.
And I was probably crazy, but.
I had out-of-body experiences where I’d gone to a different place, a place that seems equivalent to the places people call the otherworld or the astral plane, where there were objects that took on the qualities of everyday reality. A place that seemed more real than real. Moreover, I had been repeatedly attacked by some entity down there, who I called Ee, ever since I had first spontaneously fell down that surreal rabbit hole back in 1995, the year all this began.
That night was a weird night. For the first time in my life, I really got the feeling that I wasn’t alone in all of this, that I may not be insane after all, and that there could be a deeper mystery to all this -- and a real explanation and purpose behind it all. It planted a seed in my mind that would blossom a few years later, leading me into the terrors of what I came to believe to be an answer, a realization that made me fear myself and others like me and what would happen in the years to come. For the moment, however, I had the eerie comfort of someone who was actually listening, who actually understood -- someone with whom I shared a fundamental similarity.
Things were about to get a bit weirder, too.
No, really.
I knew Zoe for only a short amount of time, its been about five years or so since I last saw him, but we had an immediate sense of kinship, like we were part of some `secret family', a species of psychology. Since him, I've met a few others and began to recognize, I think, what's behind it -- but he was the first one to really show me that I'm not entirely alone in the world of the weird.
Her, I know she knows who she is, I hope you're reading this.
Back when him and I crossed paths -- perhaps for no other reason than the fact that for a time we were headed in the same direction -- I wasn't so arrogant as I would be two years later when I thought I'd stumbled upon the answer to all this weirdness. With his brief entry into my life, though, the question began to come into greater focus and gain further elaboration.
That evening I was just getting over a cold. I’d come up to the all-night restaurant where Sandra worked as a waitress and I worked as dishboy -- a place that doubled as a hang-out. It may sound pathetic, but it was a place filled with interesting people to watch, and I could sit alone in my booth, feed off of free coffee, smoke a dozen cigarettes and write my heart away in my notebook. That night, my usual coffee was replaced by a mug of hot water, into which I was dipping a tea bag from the box I'd bought from a convienence store on my way there.
I was just getting comfortable when Punk Rock Larry arrived, with some stranger trailing behind him. I tried not to make eye contact, but the smoking section was rather vacant that evening and I quickly came to accept the fact that it was too late to run.
Larry dropped about two dozen cigarettes before me on the table of varying brands, and I just shook my head. This kid, he was a bit of a strange one. He’d officially `quit’ smoking nearly a year ago after an auto accident. While in the hospital, he’d gone a full two weeks without smoking and felt fine, so he threw his pack away and vowed never to smoke again. Then, shortly after he’d began dating Sandra and coming over to our apartment on a regular basis, someone had handed him a cigarette to hold as they went to go do something and, as he later told me, without thinking about it he had taken a drag. Since then he’d been bumming a cigarette from whoever was around every once and awhile -- and every once and awhile came to be more and more often.
He wouldn’t go out and buy himself a pack, no -- he was convinced that this action would make him become a `Smoker’. And he wasn't a smoker, after all, for he’d quit a year ago. He would just do his best to bum the equivalent of two packs from as many people he could on a daly basis.
For the first week or so when he’d come over to the apartment, he kept pushing for me to let him have a cigarette, and I often gave in and let him have one. He promised to pay me back, however, and I made sure to keep pestering him to live up to his promise for I, as is a consistent theme in my life, was always really tight when it came to money and spent more than enough supporting my own addiction.
His method of paying me back, unlike the normal human being, was not to go out and buy the two packs he probably owed me all together. No, as was quite apparent from the pile before me on the table, he instead decided to go around to every other person he knew in a busy evening at the restaurant and ask to bum a cigarette from them, and give me, in the end, the variety pack of stale cigarettes.
Looking up from the pile of cancer sticks to his dumb smile, I shook my head and rolled my eyes at him. He didn't seem to notice. He was too proud of himself for living up to a promise in a around-about way.
Still holding his shit-eating grin, Larry nodded hello to me, sat down, and introduced the stranger with him as Zoe, the drummer in the band that Larry was the guitarist for. I greeted the guy and shook his hand. Zoe looked like a younger, darker, more morose, serious and laid-back version of Tony Danza in a Tool T-shirt.
I turned to Larry and asked him why he didn't just buy me a pack. He told me that was impossible, for buying a pack would make him a smoker. As long as he didn't buy a pack, he assured me, he would never be a smoker. I nodded. I smiled. I told him he was a fucking moron.
We exchanged our usual bitter and sarcastic remarks for a minute or two until Zoe interrupted, pointing to some doodles I'd drawn on the back of my placemat -- an eye. He told me it looked really cool, and his enthusiasm revealed he wasn't just saying this to make me feel good. He meant it.
I suddenly began to wonder if Zoe was one of those people who had a lot of appreciation for art but never drew themselves, and who, upon bumping into a person like me who drew all the time, would come to ask me to draw something for them that I couldn’t draw. This happened to me again and again. People would come up to me and ask me to draw them birds and giraffes and monkeys and a sun rising above the horizon of a calm ocean setting -- any number of things that I was very bad at drawing. I hadn’t drawn a natural setting and cute little animals well without dedicated effort since high school when I snapped. I now drew abstract art, melting faces, and…
“Could you draw me a woman’s eye?”
I nearly jumped in my seat. I told him I drew eyes all the time; they were probably my most favorite things to draw. I was obsessed with them, having always believed they were the `gateways to the soul'. Ever since high school, I would doodle a few onto a napkin with a black pen whenever I was in a coffee shop.
Then he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket to show me a picture he’d just made of a woman’s eyes. He went on to explain his obsession with eyes and I had to laugh -- finally, I thought, someone else had this strange fixation. In his own way, he echoed my belief that the eyes were the gateways or windows to the soul. He was quick to explain that Tool was big on eyes as well, which I had never really noticed before even though I was pretty addicted to the albums AEnema and Undertow.
Their was something strange and unique about the guy that piqued my interest immediately. He seemed to radiate a familiar energy, if that makes any sense -- and even if it doesn't. We began talking very easily, which is strange with me for the most part. I found that he was very honest and sincere, but had a hard time explaining things and would get upset when he couldn't seem to covey them to his satisfaction. Though this was part of what made what he said so cryptic, I also had the feeling that he was being purposely vague in some respects, perhaps in an attempt to see if I was truly interested in what he thought or was merely putting on a show.
The message I got was that there were things he desperately wanted to talk about, but I still seemed to have to earn some trust before he would elaborate. He was vague when he spoked on how `beliefs are dangerous', how `everything is light’ and made a few veiled references to something called `the Link’. I didn’t fully understand what the terms meant to him at first; all that seemed apparent to me was that these few key things that he said over and over meant a lot to him. More than once during our conversation, Zoe also turned to me and asked, “is seeing believing, or is believing seeing?”
It was a few weeks at least before I saw him again. I had come home to the apartment tired as hell and passed out on my bed. I awoke to a party in the process - another one of Sandra’s spur-of-the-moment get-togethers. People were drinking, music was blasting -- nothing unusual in a college town, doubly not unusual in this apartment. This was part of the reason we had to leave the place by April; due to the large volume of the parties, we weren't able to renew our lease.
I'd escaped the party, as I have the habit of doing, and got wrapped up in a one-on-one conversation. I was talking to this kid, Ralph, who had something he believed may have been an missing time, alien abduction experience when he went camping with his grandfather. He believed in them, though was reluctant to talk about any personal involvement in the phenomenon, but considered them not aliens but extra-dimensional or inter-dimensional beings. I think he basically used this term because he thought it was cooler, because as much as I pressed the subject he would never actually defined what he meant by that term.
Years later, I would come to consider them perhaps extra-dimensional as well as extraterrestrial, but only after I knew what the terms meant. Read the novel Flatland, consider what entities in four or more spatial dimensions would be capable of by `pressing' into three-dimensional reality, read some abduction literature, and you'll at least get an idea of where I'm coming from.
Anyway, him and I were at first in an interesting conversation involving several aspects of conspiracy, alien abduction and other weirdness, but he had redirected the subject to the topic of the recent reintegration of marijuana into his life, and I began loosing interest in the conversation. I was looking from where we were sitting on my bed out through the doorway and into the kitchen when I spotted someone pulling a beer out of the fridge. I looked at this person, confused for a moment as to why he looked so familiar, and then he looked back at me. I suddenly recognized him as Zoe.
He pointed at me, and I pointed at him. With a confused look, he asked me what I was doing here. With an equally confused look, I told him I lived here.
We started talking a bit, and eventually that night led to me showing off my artwork -- or `mental vomit’, as I often call them -- to both Zoe and Ralph. Zoe seemed intrigued. He seemed glued to my emphasis on the eyes and my obsession with the darker aspects of the unconscious. Ralph noted the recurring extraterrestrial theme in my artwork.
One of the pieces I showed to them was an old pastel I’d made way before high school, when everything changed for me -- I don’t recall what it was exactly, but it was a very colorful, nature setting with an animal of some sort. A fish, I think. I tried to provide a sort of excuse for it, I guess, and explained that I was trying to use more colors in my more recent pastels to try and get away from the dark and eerie colors. Zoe said he didn’t think I should, as he liked the way I did my artwork.
He said my use of dark colors and white made it really stand out for him, and said that he would pay me to make him a piece sometime. That's when he explained how he couldn’t see color, and that was why his wardrobe was only composed of black and white. He'd only worn those colors since he had been in grade school, as there had been a few occasions when his color coordination had been way off the mark. I found this odd, and extremely interesting.
I drank a bit, but decided to stick to my coffee instead. Zoe, I and a few others spent some time discussing time travel, multiple universes, and what little we collectively understood regarding the Theory of relativity. I was intrigued by the fact that the stars we see in the sky might not even exist there anymore; they may have burned out millions of years ago. I wondered that if we jumped through a wormhole and ended up in the far reaches of space in super-short time and had strong enough of a telescope, if we could look back on earth and have a chance of seeing life that existed far before human beings had even developed.
Eventually most the people at the party were burnt out, fell asleep or went home. And soon enough, it was just Zoe and I in the living room, sitting on the van seats someone from the previous party had stolen and put in our living room. We talked on higher things as we watched the cigarette smoke form weird patterns against the light that shone in through the windows of our apartment from the rising sun.
It didn't take long for me to realize that Zoe’s mind was very different. Explaining things in words seemed too limiting for him; it was as if he was built for some alternate means of communication. Zoe seemed to truly understand some complex concepts and have some ingenious ideas, but I noticed more and more that he was extremely upset with his apparent inability to hear himself speak or translate to words in his mind or communicate to others what it is he held within him. His annoyance at his inability to do his experiences and ideas justice through the medium of his words was familiar to me, for I’d often felt that when trying to explain my experiences. The crude symbols we call words seemed to suffocate the reality and meaning and murder all hopes of unfettered communication.
Personally, I always thought that this inability of mine to communicate things in simple, verbal terms is what led me to alternate modes of communication, such as art, poetry and writing, and it was behind my appreciation for music. One of my dreams involves becoming the lead singer in a band, where I could combine my artwork, writing, and passion for music -- but alas, I know little guitar, even less piano, and I’ve heard myself sing while I’m along in my car, and its not pretty.
For Zoe, it seemed reversed. He had a deep appreciation for visual art and literature, and music seemed to be his only outlet. He had been involved with it since he was very young. He told me how one of the men his mother was dating had noticed in his youth how he kept his feet moving in beat with the music, explaining, “that kid’s got rhythm.” His mother eventually got him a trumpet, I believe, and his use of instruments evolved from there.
I think that to a great extent, his inability to communicate things verbally gave him an affinity for music, often referred to as the `universal language’, because it allowed him to translate his thoughts, feelings and experiences into some medium that might recreate it for another person.
There was also another reason he seemed drawn to music, however, and this was his strange sense of sound. As Zoe explained it to me, most people usually just focused on certain parts of a song, such as, say, the bass, the rhythm guitar, the drums or the singer. That, or they just heard it all in a jumble. Zoe’s way of hearing music seemed to reconcile these two polar extremes, as well as rise above them, go beyond them. Rather than hearing a song like you and I do, when he heard a song he had the ability to focus on each one of the instruments simultaneously.
Part of the reason he liked Tool so much, he told me, was for just this reason. They did something very special with their music --they took it to a level that no musician has. Indeed, I had noticed myself that there is something very off, very deep and dark and beautiful, something very spiritual about their music. I just picked it up emotionally, he knew a bit more about what was behind it all. Their melodies were extremely elaborate, deeply ingenious electronic symphonies, he told me.
He was always particularly impressed with the drummer, who ceased to hit the drum were it was expected, and arranged bizarre beats around the music. Zoe also mentioned that Keenan was a born native of this area -- he had been born in the nearby town of Ravenna, Ohio, on April 17, 1964 -- and had once gone to the school Zoe himself had attended. His interest seemed to be spread out amongst all members of the band, however.
He kept trying to stress to me that through their music, he felt they had come from the same place he had come from, or been to the same place he had been. He also felt, through my artwork, that I shared this fundamental similarity with him. My artwork was a visual expression of what Zoe was trying to accomplish musically, and what he felt from Tool. He wanted to begin a new movement in music that did with sound what Tool was doing; he referred to it as Toolesque, and stated that this was the kind of band he eventually wanted to play a part in. Zoe said that I could translate my sea of poetry into lyrics that I could sing for such a band, that we could even work together musically, but I couldn’t help but laugh. Me, sing? Perchance to dream.
For Zoe, music seemed to be a two-way street. While it served for him a way to transmit elements of his mind which other modes of communication failed to do justice, he also seemed to be receptive to musical transmissions coming from elsewere, hence, perhaps, his addiction to Tool. It also seems his own music effected him in such a way.
In example, he was once playing the piano at Creg's house -- one of his friends. Creg's younger sister was watching as he got caught up in his music, got lost in it. Zoe suddenly just stopped --he hit a chord, and he froze, as if someone had pushed a pause button. This is what it appeared from her eyes, anyway. From Zoe's eyes, he had completely fallen out of this reality, down some surreal rabbit hole, and smack dab into another one.
My eyebrow raised.
This wasn’t the first time something of that nature had happened to Zoe, he’d told me, and it wouldn’t be the last. It had happened to him as far back as he could remember, and it wasn’t always inspired by music. He had these experiences a lot when he smoked pot, and sometimes they just happened out of nowhere, for no apparent reason at all. He would just zone out, his body would freeze, and he’d `slip away' and go into what seemed to be another place, another world. Zoe accurately described the sensation of being over in that otherworld as being like one was in water; I, too, had noticed this, but had been describing it as being in zero-gravity.
What he saw when he was in the otherworld, as I have consistently called it, were often memories of his childhood. Memories of seeing men coming to his house; men that his mother was seeing behind his father's back. He would often see images, like vivid and life-like hypnogogic and hypnopompic imagery, the meaning of which was lost to him.
He had at least one vivid, weird, recurring dream that confused him as well. He began having it at a young age, and he believed it stopped around age eleven. In the dream, there was a group of entities he called The Village who it doesn’t seem he so much as saw but felt. They had given him a duty of utmost importance: to move some gigantic `Mass’. He repeatedly emphasized the Mass had no specific shape, and that he had to keep focus in order to accomplish his goal, which was to move it `from point-A to point-B.’
Again and again in this recurring dream, which he told me he had about once a year, he would loose focus and loose control of the Mass just as he was about to get to the destination. The Village would become awash with disappointment and exasperation and he would abruptly wake up, frustrated, feeling as if he’d `almost got it’ and had let the Village down. The next year when the dream came he’d have to start all over again. He finally accomplished moving the Mass to the appropriate place at age eleven, and the dreams seemed to stop.
Then there was the number eleven.
The number eleven had a certain significance for Zoe. As either the cause or effect of this, his favorite song on the CD was the song, `jimmy’, which seems to describe a traumatizing event of Maynards when he was young and living in Ohio, under his original name, James Hubert Keenan.
To me, it seems to signify a split in his psyche at that age of eleven, where the part of him that he split off remained that age and got buried in the seas of his memory. The number eleven has since haunted Maynard in synchronicites analogous to the 23 synchronicites that plagued me since high school after making a passing joke that I would die at that age. As I had later discovered sometime afterward, people such as Robert Anton Wilson and William S. Burroughs had synchronicities with 23 as well. Shortly after telling Zoe of this number-synchronicity, he started experiencing it with the number eleven.
There was also another memory Zoe often re-experienced when in the otherworld -- the deepest and strangest of them all, in my opinion. It was a very vivid memory that stuck out in his head. He was on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back, and surrounded by a crowd of people. His neck went to rest on the guiltatine. The blade drops and he sees the visual landscape rolling from the first-person perspective.
I remember standing up after that and looking out of the window of the apartment. I remember cautiously, slowly explaining to Zoe that I had always felt that I was wired up differently, that I was on a different wavelength than the people around me, that there was something different about me that made me feel out of place wherever I went. That even amongst the best of friends, I felt disconnected. That all my life, I had felt something akin to homesickness, and yearned to find or make a place where I belonged. I always felt I waiting for something to happen, and i was scared about the fate of the world.
And it was probably paranoia, but. And I was probably shizophrenic, but.
I told him that the whole of it seemed to be my mind, my psychology: I experienced the world differently. That I had vivid dreams and saw very strange things.
I told him that I had seen what I believed to be aliens throughout my life, and they’d communicated some very disturbing things to me. That I remembered past lives, too. I was a bum. Before that, maybe a black boy. Before that, a priest who held a gun to his head in despair over something, maybe everything. Before that, we're not getting into what I remember.
And I was probably crazy, but.
I had out-of-body experiences where I’d gone to a different place, a place that seems equivalent to the places people call the otherworld or the astral plane, where there were objects that took on the qualities of everyday reality. A place that seemed more real than real. Moreover, I had been repeatedly attacked by some entity down there, who I called Ee, ever since I had first spontaneously fell down that surreal rabbit hole back in 1995, the year all this began.
That night was a weird night. For the first time in my life, I really got the feeling that I wasn’t alone in all of this, that I may not be insane after all, and that there could be a deeper mystery to all this -- and a real explanation and purpose behind it all. It planted a seed in my mind that would blossom a few years later, leading me into the terrors of what I came to believe to be an answer, a realization that made me fear myself and others like me and what would happen in the years to come. For the moment, however, I had the eerie comfort of someone who was actually listening, who actually understood -- someone with whom I shared a fundamental similarity.
Things were about to get a bit weirder, too.
