It must have been about four in the morning.
I was gearing up to go to bed and talking to Matt, one of my best friends from back in Toronto. He tells me that he was reading an issue of Maxim earlier in the day, and happened to notice a small feature on one Keith Alexander. He’s impressed.
He heard all about Keith from me a few months earlier, back when I was in the early stages of applying for the position I currently hold here at BME. He thinks I’ll get a kick out of it, and I do; in all reality, it’s probably a dumb little sidebar about “Strangeland” or something, but at the same time, as far as I’m concerned, the more people who know Keith’s name, the better.
Keith doing a cutting.
I lie down in bed, and my last thoughts of the night are just that. I smile to myself that Keith is still getting out there, being talked about in all circles by all types of people. I’ll mention this to him tomorrow, and I know he’ll make some snarky comment about Maxim, then probably say something along the lines of, “And don’t lie about it being your friend who was reading it, I know it was you, bitch.”
What I didn’t know — both while talking with Matt and as I was falling asleep — was that this conversation would never actually happen.
What I didn’t know was that Keith Alexander had been dead for several hours.
I woke up a few short hours later and, as I’m prone to do, headed straight for my computer. I hopped on IAM, checked my messages, and saw one that read simply, “Sad day.”
With the London terror attack fresh in my mind, I jump over to CNN, expecting to see the end of the world — but nothing. Then it occurs to me, Of course, BME is under attack again — we’re being shut down for good this time. I go right for Shannon’s page, and that’s where I see it.
Terrible News
2005/07/12 14:26 Long time friend and mentor of many, Keith Alexander died last night in a bike accident. I will post information on the memorial and funeral as appropriate when I have it. In lieu of flowers please consider a donation to the Lance Armstrong Foundation.
Kind of like stepping out of bed and into a bus.
It doesn’t seem real because it can’t be.
I stare at the picture attached to the posting, frozen. This doesn’t make sense.
I say to myself, I have to write about this now. Raw emotion. Gut feelings.
All that bullshit.
What I come to find is that I’m unable to get more than a sentence or two out at a time before closing the window and desperately looking for pictures of him, for things he’d written, for stories that other people were telling.
His friends, we’re all talking, regaling each other with the tales of our favorite encounters with him.
Because the thing is, Keith lived a life worth celebrating. And he made sure of it.
“Keith was more human, and more real, than anyone I had ever met before. He lived his life like he spoke: balls out. It didn’t matter if it was blazing a trail in the world of body modification, touring with Dee Snider, or knocking heads in the corporate boardrooms of Manhattan. Keith was a man like no other. He was able to move fluidly between many different cultures, constantly soaking up information like a sponge, and assimilating it into his own being like it had always been destined to be there.”
To hear�Keith tell it,�he always insisted that he had “more balls than brains.”
When he left school in the ninth grade, he went and worked on Wall Street for four years. He was a musician and producer who played in the seminal metal band Carnivore. He took up piercing and scarification, going on to not only become one of the most respected artists in the world, but also to open arguably the nicest piercing studio that the United States had ever seen. When he joined forces with Dee Snider’s Sick Mother Fuckers, he played in front of crowds of tens of thousands all across the globe. Then, when he had enough of that, he moved into digital communications and technology, and within a year and a half, he was accepting some of the world’s most prestigious advertising awards.
Balls and brains, he had them in spades. But his attitude and his enthusiasm, which he possessed from day one, were unparalleled.
That attitude of, “You tell me I can’t do this? Give me sixty days, and I’ll be better than you.”
“Whenever Keith became the best at something, he’d gracefully tell it to fuck off and start back at the bottom.
When he mastered that, he’d start fresh again.”
KA: “One of those dudes created the Heineken keg-in-a-can, the Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza and sold more basketballs than all other manufacturers combined for an NCAA promotion. Another one brought HMV records to the States and opened the 42nd street store. Another one was the President of EuroRCSG. A huge advertising concern with a client list you wouldn’t believe. And, ummm, me. A body piercer and musician that fell in love with the power of digital communications. Now I’m the Chief Technologist for our agency. Crazy.”
I’ve never written a memorial before. The truth is, aside from distant family, Keith is the first person I’ve ever known who has died. From all the eulogies I’ve heard and the remembrances I’ve read, they’re solemn pieces — dignified, somber reflections on a person’s life and his or her achievements.
Keith would have hated that. He didn’t do things the way he did to have people bow their heads and remember him silently. He was a world-class shit disturber. He pushed people to the edge, as far as they could go, and often even further.
He was opinionated. He was loud. He was an asshole. And we loved him for it.
“Normally when someone dies, everyone talks about how wonderful, sweet and kind they were. For anyone that knew Keith, I mean really knew him, you know that deep down these things were true ... but if he had it his way, he would want to be remembered as a brash, obnoxious asshole that wouldn’t take crap off of anyone. When there was controversy, Keith was the first to talk shit. He was the quintessential devil’s advocate. If Keith didn’t piss you off, well, then he probably didn’t like you. And if he didn’t try to push your buttons, well, then he probably didn’t respect you.”
My first personal encounter with Keith came towards the end of 2004. Through my good fortune, I’d made it to the second round of the internship competition that BME was holding, and had to choose a topic to write a sample article on.
Out of a list of twenty potential articles that Shannon suggested as “application tests” — most of them interviews — the one that immediately caught my eye was an interview with Keith Alexander. I’d never spoken to the man before, but was well aware of both his online presence and his offline achievements. More importantly, having seen him in action in a variety of forums and being familiar with a number of his interviews, I knew he was the subject for me.
More than anyone else on that list, I knew that Keith would force me to put together the best article I was capable of.
With trepidation, I wrote to him and gave him the gist of the situation, and asked if he would submit to an interview.
His response?
“I’d love to help, but I’m not into typing replies. They wind up too short and pithy.
Radio Shack sells cheap mics that attach to a phone.
Figure out a way to record a phone interview.
Best of luck either way.
KA”
I was terrified.
Although relatively certain I’d queered the deal entirely before anything had even happened, I did as he instructed, and I figured I was in the clear. When I told him I had the device set up and ready to go, I expected a simple, “Okay, I can do it [whenever].”
As I’d come to discover, nothing with Keith was ever that easy.
“I’m going to tell you what I tell everyone who requests an interview: Do your homework. I don’t respond well to questions that have been asked and answered a thousand times.
[�]
Why did you choose me to interview?”
And here I thought that I would be the one asking the questions.
Fast-forward a few weeks, and I’m still in the running for the position. And Keith, the asshole, the shit-disturber, the man who could bring an entire IRC channel to the brink of suicide with a few choice words � well, he was being goddamn sweet to me.
I’d get to work at my former job every morning, and there’d be an email or an instant message waiting from him — either words of encouragement, a simple greeting, or oftentimes, some classic Brooklyn ball-breaking.
Whatever it was, the underlying feeling was the same: He wasn’t finished with me just yet.
As the internship process went on and the announcement as to who had been selected drew nearer, his messages shifted from well-meaning optimism to static certainty.
“You’ve got it. It’s yours. Ready to move to Mexico?”
Keith in competition at the Woodstock Tattoo & Body Art Festival.
By this time, my Woody Allen gland was already secreting millennia-old Jewish neuroses throughout my entire body, and having him talk about the whole thing like it was a done deal, well, was a little nerve-wracking.
I’d ask him to please lay off. This was doing nothing for my mental health and well being. Wasn’t there anyone on RAB whose life he could ruin for a few days?
“Look, you’re going to Mexico. My recommendation alone, bitch. Now get packing.”
Well, at least now I had everything to lose.
In the hours before it was announced, he was relentless. In one typically maddening move, he sent me a message with roughly one hundred lines of TICK TOCK TICK TOCK TICK TOCK.
He’d tell me to lighten up, and I’d tell him to fuck off.
We’d have exchanges like this:
KA: What’s brown and sticky?
JG: I hate you so much.
KA: A stick!
When I got the job, he was the first one to congratulate me. As much as he drove me nuts over the few weeks prior, of course it was welcomed. After this, it seemed like he would be there forever, kicking my ass and pushing me further until the day that
I died.
And of course, he was right all along.
He had a tendency to do that.
Somehow, Keith could get away with these things, could get away with being insufferable and infuriating — and somehow leave you craving more.
“He put more into every procedure he performed than any other piercer/artist I know, but this was something special. We both opened ourselves up and shared in the process, cementing the bond that was already forming between us. Keith was focused and precise, but at the same time very caring and reassuring. His technique was impeccable, and his bedside manner comforting. I could not have asked for a better experience.
After the final strike, bathed in an endorphin rush unlike any I had felt before, I stood to thank Keith. He pulled me into a hug, and told me that he loved me. I told him that I loved him, and thanked him for everything that he had done for me. He thanked me, and then slapped me as hard as he could, right across the fresh wound.
That bastard laughed his ass off! And eventually, so did I. Only Keith had the balls to do that to me, and he knew that he could get away with it. Only he could.”
-- Josh (
IAM:obmf)
(discussing a branding Keith performed on the back of his neck.)
Keith behind the counter at Gauntlet NY.
When I arrived in New York for the wake, it was following the single-most horrible traveling day of my life. Buses were missed, flights were delayed — I spent more time in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport that day than any human being should ever have to — and the following afternoon, I was going to be saying goodbye to my friend and mentor, Keith Alexander.
And to be sure, the body, the collection of cells we saw lying in that box, it wasn’t Keith.
In life, there were hardly enough words to describe the man; in death, an empty vessel didn’t even come close.
The mantra of the day was that there was more of Keith in our hearts and our heads than in that casket, and of course it was the truth.
Not everyone who should have been there was, but most everyone who was there absolutely should have been.
To see the assortment of those present, one really understood the breadth and diverse nature of the people that Keith touched. Businesspeople and marketing executives; martial artists and metal-musicians; cyclists and body piercers; members from the BME community; his beautiful girlfriend, Melissa, and of course, his family.
“The wake was yesterday, and I got to be with a big part of the core of Keith’s friends, some IAMers, some not.
The experience that I had yesterday is sacred to me.
I wasn’t surprised by the warmth and ferocity of the love we shared yesterday on the ass-end of Brooklyn. It was incredible. Everyone has their own way of feeling it, and I feel honored to have been able to be a part of everyone’s individual way. I left last night understanding more of Keith through the love of his friends.”
The day after the wake, I spent a lot of the day walking around New York with Sean. He showed me Electric Ladyland studios, and the small closet of a club that Hendrix got his start in decades earlier, and this led to him telling me about the time that he actually managed to get Keith to second-guess his own musical knowledge and tastes. Keith, for God knows what reason, held a strong preference for Eric Clapton’s guitar work over Jimmy Page’s — “He was sloppy!” — and was typically stubborn in deriding the Zeppelin guitarist.
Sean persisted, and Keith caved.
“Fuck! Fine! Make me some mixes, and then we’ll see!”
We spent several hours sitting in Washington Square Park, and no matter what the topic of conversation, it invariably drifted back to Keith.
We got onto the topic of heroes, and I lamented that I was sick and goddamn tired of mine being dead — people like Jeff Buckley, Bill Hicks, and yes, Keith.
Keith had his heroes. People like JFK and Muhammad Ali — people you could put on a pedestal and have few if any qualms about aspiring to be like them. The kind of people that, if you lived a life half as rich as theirs, you could feel like you were doing all right. These were the people Keith looked up to and emulated, and without question, he embodied their spirits. He was cut from their cloth.
He became the sort of man — as his father said — that every father dreams his son will become:
“A man.”
“Keith has shown me so much strength over the years, [and] was so encouraging and amazing when I was out of work last year. Whipped me into shape for interviews. [�] Such a hole he leaves in this existence. Keith LIVED his life — truly LIVED with the passion of 10,000 burning suns.”
There was an interview with Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy after the release of the band’s last album where he commented on the nebulous nature of describing music, saying: “You can’t tell someone a melody. You can’t tell someone a guitar solo.”
This is how I feel trying to write about Keith. Trying to describe his essence in simple words seems inherently disingenuous and incomplete.
But Keith was a strong believer and proponent of digital communications, and seemed to think that establishing a strong online presence would help preserve his memory. On his nootrope.net personal site, he said as much:
“And in a morbid way, a record of my predilections that will hopefully live on after I die, on some server, somewhere. Grandiose? Maybe. Maybe I just have the balls to admit it. Maybe one day, in the year 2201, a relation of mine will see these zeros and ones, and say, ‘Damn, he had fun.’ That is, if we don’t annihilate one and other.“
Keith getting ready for a bike race that he would go on to place dead last in.
KA: “Lap 6 wound down and I hear ‘one more lap’ shouted at me. That spurred me on. Until I hit that fucking hill again. I mashed my way up the hill, asked one of the Marshals ‘did I win?’ and enjoyed her howls of laughter as I hammered the last 2.5 miles to the finish.“
We walked around Manhattan a while longer before settling into a bar for a few hours, and by then I was sold on New York City. I never understood the pride that New Yorkers felt for their home, the way they treated it and spoke about it like it was a person — though I was there for the most god-awful of reasons, the few days I’d spent in the city had me convinced. It was that tough-balls attitude, that rawness, mixed with a fierce kind of love and compassion — and that was Keith.
Keith didn’t rag on people because he didn’t like them; he was just trying to raise the bar. He wanted everybody to be able to compete at his level in all manner of living. Conceited? You bet. But if anybody earned the right to bear that kind of conceit, it was Keith.
He was as full of hope as he was of fire, and he knew there were better ways to live. He led by example, but would still take every opportunity to get personal with people; sometimes they got mad, and sometimes they got really mad — but if they were paying attention, they’d walk away a better person. If they were lucky, they might have even made a friend.
One of the last real conversations I had with Keith took place while rumors were swirling about the fate of BME and its presence in America. In a forum on Shannon’s page, the United States was taking a pretty awful beating from members of IAM — though much of the vitriol was misplaced and ludicrous, few had the tenacity to stand up for the country and what it was truly capable of.
Displaying that fire, that love, that attitude and that hope to the utmost, Keith posted the following:
“I woke up this morning at 5AM. God, it was a beautiful morning. Bright and hot. I got on my bike and pounded out 40 miles before breakfast. Then, I thanked God that I live in the United States.
Because, see, I like to fight. Especially battles that are worth fighting. The Good Fight. Like the battle to recapture the zeitgeist of the Neil Armstrong era. And Muhammad Ali’s time. And Rosa Parks’. Yeah, it sucks here sometimes. Plenty has been, is and will be wrong. But give me something that makes me stronger, any day.
A quick message to the self-haters and the ignorant and knee-jerk hyperbolic do-nothings... suck my dick.”
That is how I will remember Keith. Not as an Internet-bully, and definitely not as a corpse in a box. Rather, as a man so full of heart and soul, of strength of mind and of a hardened will — eternally more than the sum of his parts, plentiful and glorious as they were.
* * *
“Two years here, seven years there, three more over there. Chunks of time, faded memories. New neighborhoods become old stomping grounds, and them I’m gone. Faces I’ll never see again. Hands never to be held again. Tactile sensations that still play with my nerve endings. Scents that tap me on the shoulder in the street. Was that her? Emotions informing dreams. A dull, muted sadness, pushed down, pushed back, pushed away, buried. Lives touched, lives changed, lives lived. Voices I will never hear again. And that breaks my heart. Keep moving.”
-- Keith Alexander, 11/23/63-07/11/05
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- Jordan Ginsberg (iam:snackninja)
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Keith Alexander is the very first person that was ever 
