A Tribute to Adam ZiD Aries
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art. - Charles Bukowski
Seven, maybe eight years ago, I brought Adam Aries with me to a house party in Hudson. I must have seen him at Denny’s or Bickford’s. Spontaneous as he was, he hopped right in.
My friends had solicited the services of a stripper whose name I can’t remember, but neither Adam or I had known about the strippers.
I remember Adam sitting outside during the strip-tease and the raunchy acts to follow. I thought it was pretentious at the time. But years later I realized that Adam was right in saying this was disrespectful to women. He was ahead of his time, ahead of his society, ahead of this world even.
“He was relatively balls to the wall,” said Susan Aries, mother of Adam Aries. Last week Adam’s heart stopped as he slept in his Cambridge apartment. He left behind hundreds of broken hearts, hundreds of folks who loved him, and hundreds of stories that testify to the caliber of the man.
Susan said Adam was the oldest of five siblings. “He wasn’t an easy kid, and he broke us in real good.”
“This larger than life human being just didn’t fit in this Ozzie and Harriet family picture, ya know?” At 13 or 14 years old, Adam approached his parents to talk about emancipating himself. Susan and her huband sat at the kitchen table with Adam, and discussing the logistics of getting his own place, realized it wouldn’t be possible at that point.
“I said to him ‘slow down, Adam, slow down. I know you’re ready for an apartment and you’re 13, but slow down.”
“I wonder at this point where I am today: does an individual of Adam’s ilk, realize on a cellular level or something, ‘yup, no I can’t slow down. I don’t have the time you think I have. I’ve gotta dream big. I’ve gotta go big. I’ve gotta do what it is that I have to do and make no exceptions and make no apologies.”
Around that time Adam cam to her carrying a box filled with items from his childhood, religious sundry, et al. “He handed it to me and said ‘here I don’t need this anymore,” Susan said. “That was really difficult as a mother.”
Sitting next to Susan, Adam’s father Robert spoke of his son. “I learned more about him since he died than I knew,” he said. “He did the best that could be done by him. He never accepted failure or second best. If you’re gonna do it you do it right or just get outta the way.”
“He had his own moral code, if you will. If you were simple and unable to do a lot but did what you could, he had all the time and patience and love in the world. But if you intelligent and competent and gifted, and did nothing, he wouldn’t give you the time of day.”
In high school Adam took on the identity of a hardcore punker. For “free dress day” at Bishop Guertin he wore a dress. “If you see him walking down the street, a lot of people would change sides of the road,” Robert said, “because he was so daunting and intimidating. But he was the most gentle soul that out there.”
He drove around in a tattered jalopy, “Loud, Proud, and Punk,” spraypainted onto the side. His mohawk, cocktail of long blonde hair and Elmer’s Glue, was so big that he had to drive with his head out the window.
“My fear was always that what was so extraordinary about him would be too extreme for people to understand.”
But Susan said that at Adam’s wake, which she prefers to call a celebration, “it was evident that so many people not only got it, but they sought it out, they embraced it, they respected it. I had such a good time with Adam’s people.”
With the years she came to appreciate the individual brilliance of her son.
“I always called him my excellent boy,” Susan said. “I don’t know how many mother’s use their child as their measuring stick. But I cannot tell you how many times I’ve thought in my life, ‘should I do this? Or would Adam think this was lame?’”
Susan say Adam never took crap mags into the bathroom. He’d find Russian literature, Kafka, some “heavy duty philosopher” or other. “He was always searching for something to stimulate his brain,” Susan said.
After high school Adam left Nashua to study film at Clark University in Worcester. But after three semesters he realized it wasn’t for him. He wanted to enter the world of body piercing.
“I just said to him ‘well my mommy’s heart would really like you to follow a more linear path. However, I really can’t argue with your logic.”
Adam told his mom he wanted to return to Nashua and take up an apprenticeship with his friend Ryan Ouellette at Precision Body Arts.
“He would come in and he would wrap his arms around you and give you this big hug like you were hugging your brother or your mom,” Ouellette said. “He loved his friends.”
Ouellette is a master of body modification—piercing, microdermals, and scarification—and apprenticed Adam ten years ago at his shop. “I always knew he wanted to pierce,” Ryan said, “but we didn’t really talk about it much at the time cuz it’s one of those things where every teenage kid that’s into piercing wants to be a piercer someday.”
Adam was different.
“He wanted it so bad. I told him I didn’t need a second piercer, but you really want it, and I can tell that you want it, and you’re earning it.”
Adam apprenticed under Ouelette for the next two years, first working on sterilization and cleaning, then piercing six months into the apprenticeship.
At first Ryan said Adam was so nervous. “It was hilarious because he was a really confident kid.… It was actually kind of cute to watch him trying to pierce people and being all like super heavy-breathing and shaky hands and all that.”
Ryan knew it was unfair to hold Adam up to his own standards. But once he backed off he said Adam came into his own.
Adam would accompany Ryan to piercing conferences where he received various certifications. A social locust—for the black bug he had tattooed across his throat—Adam swiftly tied into the body mod industry.
“I was almost wasting his time at that point,” Ouelette said. “I couldn’t really offer him the full-time job that he wanted.”
Ouellette approached Natan Lin, who runs the Boston Tattoo Convention, to see if he knew of any opportunities.
Lin “said he needed a piercer, and Adam totally didn’t want to live in Nashua for the rest of his life, so he totally jumped at it.”
Adam then moved to Boston and began working full time at Darkwave Tattoo in Roxbury. “That’s when he really started to take off, he really came into his own,” Ouellette said. “He got a pretty big following and he was doing some really cool stuff.”
At this point Adam started going by ZiD. He also became part of the body suspension community. Ryan described Adam’s vigor for the art of suspending oneself by hooks that pierce the flesh. “A lot of people would kind of just lay there like a cow from a hook and just drift. He would like, run and jump off the walls and spin around and flip. It was crazy. But it was totally him.”
After a few years Adam outgrew Darkwave and went on to Pino Bros in Cambridge.
At Pino, Adam began experimenting with more obscure forms than the standard lip and nose rings. He began surface piercing, genital piercing, and some scarification as well.
Ouellette said ZiD had approached him to talk about scarification.
“I don’t train anyone in scarification, because it’s a really unique, rare skill.” But Ouellette told Adam to come down for a day where they could discuss deeply the craft of scarification. “It would be this bonding moment for us to hang out a little bit.”
“It was one of those things—we’ll talk about it in a couple of months, we’ll get it going eventually. And it never happened.”
Adam was a long, slender, wiry man, a natural athlete who was a competitive swimmer as a child. “He was athletic without trying to be athletic,” said Paul Aries, 23, now the oldest of four Aries siblings. “But that’s not to say he didn’t try. Every aspect of life. If he was doing something his whole dedication came to it.”
The renaissance lad also acted. In “Macbeth” he played Macbeth, an he took the lead role in “The Nutcracker.” Adam also danced for the Granite State Ballet.
“I couldn’t call him a jack-of-all-trades because he did everything really well,” Paul said. “He was papa duke for a lot different people.”
Paul said Adam was a great big brother growing up, but also when he moved down to Boston.
Aries was also a great lover of animals, member of the National Human Society, and he owned two rescue dogs, Stagger Lee and Chopper Reed, both deaf Boston Terriers. “His mom has them so no worries about their fates now,” wrote Deirdre Doyle, one of Adam’s colleagues at Pino Bros.
I asked Adam’s colleague Dierdre Doyle about ZiD tribute tats.
“So far I have done three locusts like the one on his neck, with another for tomorrow on his brother. But there is talk of many more. Pretty much his whole family wants to get something, and I know all of us here at Pinos plan on getting locusts or something else.”
Adam Aries was what’s known as a freegan, a brand of contemporary hunter/gatherers. Wikipedia defines freeganism as such: “an anti-consumerist lifestyle whereby people employ alternative living strategies based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources.”
If all this wasn’t enough, Adam was also head of security at the Middle East in Cambridge, and was doing audio/visual work under the moniker VDJ ZiD. He spun industrial music and projected videos to go with it.
Reporting on Adam and looking through his pictures, I was reminded of a passage from Charles Bukowski. “To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”
He had a twirled mustache, like some apocalyptic Luigi with the piercings lacing his face. He had silver dollar-sized ear plugs and was tattooed top-to-bottom.
Frank Pino of Pino Bros tattoos said Adam’s wore a superhero outfit. “He was a black belt of his own look.”
“He just seemed like a seasoned veteran to pop culture, to sub culture, everything, to the point where he was refined. It was almost like he wore hipster better and a hipster would have. He wore punk better than a punk would’ve worn it. And he wouldn’t have to try hard. He was a veteran. It was a couple of tours for him already.”
“The kid was a legend, just no one knew yet,” Frank said. “His DJ gig was starting to catch fire. He had everything going man. He was on top of the world.”
How did Adam manage all those things?
“He lived an unreasonable life,” Frank answered. “There was nothing that was gonna take him away from what he set out to do. He just found a way to do it.”
Frank said that being in a professional situation with Adam wasn’t always a treat. “Did I like his tone? No. Did I love what he had to say. Yeah, cuz he was right…. If he said he was gonna do this that and the other thing, this that and the other thing got done every time, every time.”
“His family produced one hell of a kid. The Pinos have a hole in their hearts cuz there’s a missing piece. I can’t let him go. We’re gonna do everything we can to commemorate him and immortalize him at the stop. Until there’s no more air in my lungs I’m gonna talk about that kid. I got a story to tell, and he was definitely a story.”
Lord knows what Adam Aries would have gone on to do in life. But in his 28 years he did more than many would do in ten lifetimes. I wish I’d gotten to know him better. I never got past the abrasive shell of his that everyone describes, and now it’s too late.
In his studio, over the buzz of tattoo guns and electronica, Ryan Oullette spoke of his apprentice cum colleague. “He gave me that hug when he left, and he’s like ‘I love you.’ He meant it. You really take people for granted until they’re gone.”
