Angela Death once affectionately called him, “The second most useless bass player in LA after [Van Halen’s] Michael Anthony.”

But she also recalled what bandleader Stevie Washington said after Zeke auditioned for Angry Youth:

“All these funkadelic grooves he’s laying down for the Travelers now didn’t come out of nowhere. I first saw him playing experimental noise with these guys out of Vancouver called Erisian Mystery Cult, kinda like what Sonic Youth was doing on ‘Kill Yr Idols’ only trippier. They were gaining some cred on the West Coast, but they broke up for reasons unknown even to them. 

“So a couple weeks after I jumped to AY, I was hanging out at The Village with [Toxic Shock lead singer] Danni Arroyo — her and I stayed tight, and they were starting to audition new guitarists so I told her I’d listen in — and Zeke rolled up in his ‘77 Econoliner looking like a homeless Tibetan monk or something and silently handed out demo tapes and handwritten business cards to anyone who would take them. I think Danni was the only one there who did, because of course she would. And I’m forever grateful that she did cuz she called me up the next day and said, “Ange, call this guy. I found your bassist.” 

So then we played the tape for Stevie, and he immediately set up an audition. I’ll always remember what he said  after he heard him play too, he was like, “Dude, that was the best bass I’ve ever heard. I don’t know what you’ve got going on under that glove, that’s your business and it’s all good cuz you’ve got this Django Reinhardt thing going and that thumb and index finger make absolute magic. Now, what you’re gonna do for us is completely different. You’re gonna hold up the floor, and you’re gonna carry this lady’s coattails. Oh, and you’re gonna learn to follow this crazy bastard [drummer Cody Dean Howell] all over the place because he can’t keep a beat for sh[bleep]. Can you do that?’ Zeke just nodded. And that’s what he gave us for the whole run: head down, straight forward, ass-kicking bass. Now of course he’s a superstar playing for the Travs, so good for him. Motherf[bleep]er paid his dues.”

Stevie had the mind of a chess player, always thinking several steps ahead. He was looking for a bassist with the humility to trudge through the underworld of LA’s notorious “vomitorium dungeons” (Angela’s words), but also with the technical virtuosity and improvisational spark to play for The Fellow Travelers, the jazz-rock fusion band that rose from the ashes of Angry Youth. 

It was the Travelers’ appearance in the lineup of the Hullabaloo Festival in the summer of 1992 that created the intersection of their story with the travels of young aspiring writer Estelle Perdue and dovetailed into the narrative about the events of UNLESS. But the untold backstory of Angry Youth, the ultrasecretive band that almost made it big, is where the true connection between them is illustrated, and there is no part of that tale more mysterious than the mononym bassist with an unknown past.

“Man, that dude has one hella crazy story. Maybe he’ll tell it to y’all someday. Or maybe not. He might be having too much fun playing with the Travelers now. I don’t think he’s into looking back too much, ya know. He’s always been the classic Silent Observer type. Zero ego, I mean none at all, and not in that bullsh[bleep] affected way when you try to have none. Just a natural seer with nothing else attached, like how you’d imagine a wolf moving through the forest. I think in some ways he was the bond that kept us together. Just like that droning rumble of bass you barely hear because it’s holding up all our wild antics, keeping that floor under every song. No matter what kinda crazy f[bleep]ed-up [bleep] went down at a show, we knew that Zeke was there taking it all in and ready to snap into action without judgment. He was the supreme escape artist, which requires a certain kind of quietude and invisibility that I learned from the road, only he had it without learning, without effort.” — Stevie Washington, lead singer-songwriter of Angry Youth

There really aren’t any spoilers I could give, not in UNLESS anyway. We never learn his origins or ethnicity (Angela called him “some kind of Siberian or Eskimo or something,” and she was close), and we don’t find out why he has only a thumb and index finger on his right hand. He almost never speaks, but isn’t a mute. He might be a non-verbal autistic whose gift is to speak through his instrument, or an ascetic with an internal vow of silence. There is some context for the possibility that his silence is due to an extreme trauma that is healed in the period between Angry Youth and The Fellow Travelers. 

But, as with everything else in UNLESS, there is a meta level to Zeke’s role. For that, we have to turn to the bonus material I wrote for the Deluxe DIY Edition e-book: 

“When I was a lad of no more than 10 or 11, my sister (5 or 6) and I were given a chance to start music lessons. I remember someone coming to the house to sell us on their program and talk about all the options and such. God help us, we weren’t interested. My parents weren’t musicians, and they didn’t seem to place a whole lot of value on music, nor did they have very interesting tastes for a couple of Boomers who came of age in the 60s. The music education department at our school was horrendous (no one ever attempted to show us how to read music for instance; to this day I am completely lost when I look at sheet music). So I had no reason to think I would want the ability to play music to be part of my future. 

Dumbest. Mistake. Of my life. By far.

Specifically, I believe I missed my calling to play the bass guitar. It’s the instrument that stands out the most to me when I hear a standard four-piece rock band play, and, well, there’s a certain personality type that is associated with the instrument that fits me rather perfectly. I’ve long said that if I could trade lives with any rock musician I know, from a simple “omg I want to be him/her” coolness factor, it would be no one you likely know by name: Joe Lally of Fugazi (even autocorrect doesn’t recognize him). 

Yes, the introvert of the band, the silent observer who no one notices while s/he holds up the floor — that’s the quality I know well by temperament and instilled in Angry Youth’s bassist. He was always that way from the start. I don’t even remember if he had a name before I dubbed him in honor of a Seattle punk band I first saw in 1996. He is the only main character who doesn’t speak in the documentary [Edit: he does speak, but just once], and the only mention of his backstory is a teaser from Stevie, describing it as “hella crazy.” 

It is. I know it well. I’ve just never written it. 

Zeke’s story is the one that has gone most untold.”

For most of my life, up until I started writing supplemental material for Birding in the Face of Terror on the website because it felt like part of my job as an author, I could not seem to write directly about myself or my own life. With a couple inspired  exceptions for short durations, I was not good at keeping a journal either (not nearly as good as Estelle), so it wasn’t a matter of having to face an audience with it. I just loathed the thought of writing about myself and couldn’t force myself to do it. I don’t have a solid reason why either. I don’t think i have a lot of buried traumas I’m terrified to face. There’s the already discussed tendency toward depersonalization and existential confusion about who I was, but I would think that would motivate most people to sort it out through autobiography. Not me though — it had the opposite effect if anything.

But I could create characters, and storylines for those characters, and infuse it all with semi-fictional details from my life to tell the story indirectly through a kind of magical realism — that was cake 🤓 So that is what all of my published fiction has been, including and especially UNLESS, which is ultimately a story about that very method of storytelling. 

In the last installment of the Noesta Aqui newsletter, I talked about Sludge O’Toole and how he represents my own present-day influence on this story about events from long ago. Given that, I think we can presume that Zeke is me, silenced for unknown reasons, before the creative process unfolded through writing, and then as a slowly emerging voice as a result of it. He is, like the others, a transformational character even if most of it stays hidden, as is hinted by his demeanor after co-founding The Fellow Travelers with Stevie.

And then there’s a HUGE hint that he isn’t as silent as he seems…but that would be a spoiler. You’ll have to read the book 😁📚

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If you enjoy learning the true story behind an author’s work of fiction, or just glimpsing the inside story of the creative process along with the polished finished product, I strongly recommend the Deluxe DIY Edition of UNLESS! It includes by far the most successful piece of autobiographical writing I’ve managed yet in the bonus section, and the best part is you don’t have to wait for the paperback to come out — just purchase it from the ND Media Bookstore, accept the email that comes to you instantly, download the PDF file that comes with it, and it is yours to read and share at will!