Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  THEN IT FELL APART

  by Moby

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Preface

  Prologue: New York City (2008)

  SECTION ONE: Extreme Places I Didn’t Know

  1. New York City (1999)

  2. New York City (1965–8)

  3. London, England (1999)

  4. San Francisco, California (1969)

  5. New York City (1999)

  6. Austin, Texas (1999)

  7. Old Saybrook, Connecticut (1971)

  8. Boston, Massachusetts (1999)

  9. Paris, France (1999)

  10. Darien, Connecticut (1972)

  11. Minneapolis, Minnesota (2000)

  12. Somerset, England (2000)

  13. Darien, Connecticut (1972)

  14. New York City (2000)

  15. New York City (2000)

  16. Darien, Connecticut (1973)

  17. New York City (2000)

  SECTION TWO: We Are All Made of Stars

  18. Darien, Connecticut (1973)

  19. San Bernadino County, California (2001)

  20. Stratford, Connecticut (1974)

  21. New York City (2001)

  22. New York City (2001)

  23. Stratford, Connecticut (1975)

  24. Salt Lake City, Utah (2002)

  25. Chester, Connecticut (1976)

  26. Los Angeles, California (2002)

  27. New York City (2002)

  28. Darien, Connecticut (1978)

  29. New York City (2002)

  30. New York City (2002)

  31. Darien, Connecticut (1978)

  32. New York City (2002)

  33. Darien, Connecticut (1979)

  34. New York City (2002)

  SECTION THREE: In My Dreams I’m Dying All the Time

  35. Barcelona, Spain (2002)

  36. Darien, Connecticut (1979)

  37. New York City (2002)

  38. New York City (2003)

  39. Darien, Connecticut (1979)

  40. Upstate New York (2005)

  41. Norwalk, Connecticut (1980)

  42. London, England (2005)

  43. Stamford, Connecticut (1982)

  44. St. Petersburg, Russia (2005)

  45. Darien, Connecticut (1982)

  46. New York City (2006)

  47. Darien, Connecticut (1982)

  48. New York City (2006)

  SECTION FOUR: Then It Fell Apart

  49. Fairfield, Iowa (2006)

  50. Darien, Connecticut (1983)

  51. New York City (2007)

  52. New York City (1983)

  53. New York City (2007)

  54. Darien, Connecticut (1983)

  55. London, England (2007)

  56. Storrs, Connecticut (1983–4)

  57. New York City (2007)

  58. Storrs, Connecticut (1984)

  59. New York City (2008)

  60. Darien, Connecticut (1984)

  61. Miami, Florida (2008)

  62. New York City (2008)

  63. New York City (2008)

  64. Darien, Connecticut (1985)

  65. New York City (2008)

  Plates

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  PREFACE

  In 2016, I published my first memoir, Porcelain, covering my weird life in New York City from 1989 to 1999. After finishing the book, rather than go back to therapy, I kept writing. I worked on material that was a logical follow-up, picking up where the first book left off. But I was also writing a traditional autobiography, which started at birth and ended around the time Porcelain began.

  While in New York in early 2017 I thought, Why not fold the two together? With Then It Fell Apart, that’s what I’ve tried to do. Hopefully, the dysfunction of my childhood provides context for the escalating horrors of my adult life. Oh, the temporal jumping around between chapters was somewhat inspired by Slaughterhouse-Five, but without the genius of Kurt Vonnegut.

  As before, I’ve changed some names and details out of respect for other people, but all the stories in this book actually happened.

  Thanks,

  Moby

  PROLOGUE: NEW YORK CITY (2008)

  I wanted to die. But how?

  It was 5 a.m., and I’d had fifteen drinks, $200 worth of cocaine, and a handful of Vicodin. After I stumbled home at 4 a.m., depressed and alone, I wandered from room to room in my apartment, sobbing and repeating, “I just want to die.”

  I calmed myself and considered my options.

  I could tie a long rope or extension cord to the edge of the rough wooden fence on my roof and drop twenty or thirty feet down the back of the building, most likely breaking my neck. But I knew that sometimes after a long drop the head could become separated from the body. That seemed unnecessarily grisly for the person who found me.

  Or I could get into the pristine white bathtub in my minimalist bathroom with the stainless-steel Kohler faucets and the Calacatta marble floor and cut my wrists and slowly bleed to death.

  Or I could take an entire bottle of Vicodin, which, combined with the vodka and the cocaine and pills already in my system, would probably stop my heart.

  I was still a WASP from Connecticut, and even though I wanted to die I needed to be polite. So before killing myself I would have to remember to unlock my front door and tape a suicide note by the doorknob. That way anyone coming into my apartment would know what to expect and not be too upset.

  Over the last few years my depression had been building, and nights like this were becoming the norm.

  I was a lonely alcoholic, and I desperately wanted to love someone and be loved in return. But every time I tried to get close to another human being I had crippling panic attacks that kept me isolated and alone.

  I’d had a few successful years of making music, and sold tens of millions of records, but now my career was sputtering. I couldn’t find love or success, so I tried to buy happiness. Three years earlier I had spent $6 million in cash on a luxury penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It had been my dream home: five stories on the top of an iconic limestone building overlooking Central Park.

  Having grown up on food stamps and welfare, I’d assumed that moving to a castle in the sky would bring me happiness. But as soon as I moved into my Upper West Side penthouse I was as sad and anxious as I’d been in my small loft on Mott Street.

  I sold the sky castle, moved back downtown, and recommitted myself to debauchery. I put tinfoil over the windows and had weekend-long orgies fueled by alcohol and drugs. But the more I threw myself into degeneracy, the more I ended up filled with self-loathing and loneliness.

  The world of fame and success that gave me meaning and legitimacy was being taken away from me. And now the only respite I found from anxiety and depression was an hour or two each night when I was full of vodka and cocaine, looking for someone lonely and desperate enough to go home with me.

  Recently I’d considered buying a bar and turning the basement into a light-proof apartment, reasoning that if I lived only at night, I’d find happiness. My plan was to sleep in the basement below the bar, wake up at 6 p.m., have dinner, and start drinking and doing cocaine around 10 p.m. I’d stay up until 8 a.m., take a handful of Xanax and Vicodin, and sleep until 6 p.m. I’d spend the rest of my days or years like an anxious, defeated Nosferatu, until my life finally, mercifully ended.

  For decades alcohol and drugs had made me happy. But now I needed more and more alcohol and cocaine to get drunk and high, and my hangovers lasted for days. And when I was hungover, which was almost every day, I couldn’t string sentences together or even remember simple words.

  I’d vaguely considered getting sober, but the impulse n
ever lasted for more than a few days. I’d even gone to some AA meetings, and while I appreciated the chance to look at beautiful alcoholic women covered in tattoos, I’d decided that institutional sobriety didn’t work for me. So I kept drinking, kept buying cocaine, kept trying to stave off hangovers with handfuls of Xanax and Vicodin, and kept wanting to die.

  My daily routine had become rote and tautological: after getting out of bed in the late afternoon I would stumble to my bathroom, step into the shower, and as the hot water poured over me I’d say one word over and over: “Fuck.”

  As in: “Fuck, I’m hungover again.” And: “Fuck, I’m sick.” And: “Fuck, I’m such an idiot.” And: “Fuck, I hate myself.”

  But maybe tomorrow I wouldn’t wake up and say “Fuck” in the shower. Because maybe I would finally be dead.

  Which brought me back to the question of how to end my life. Hanging myself or cutting my wrists seemed too violent. And I’d heard that swallowing pills didn’t always work – sometimes people just vomited them up and ended up alive, but with severe liver and brain damage.

  A few years ago I’d read about elderly people killing themselves by tying plastic bags over their heads and quietly suffocating on their own exhaled CO2. So, considering all of my options, tying a bag over my head seemed like an easy and painless and polite way to kill myself.

  I walked into my kitchen, got on my knees, and found a box of black plastic garbage bags underneath the sink. I took one out of the box and looked around. When I’d bought this apartment in 1995 it had been an empty storage space in a nineteenth-century loft building. But after a year working with a local architect I’d ended up with my first real home. And it had been beautiful, with skylights and tall ceilings, white brick walls, and a kitchen filled with maple cabinets.

  I had made most of my albums here, from the ten million-selling Play to my most recent record, the hundred thousand-selling Last Night.

  I’d fallen in and out of love here. I’d had dinners here with my mother and grandmother, both of them now dead. I’d shown Lou Reed around my studio. I’d even sat on the $8,000 dark-green-and-teak Danish modern couch in my living room and played “‘Heroes’” on acoustic guitar with David Bowie.

  Growing up I’d assumed that if I could release even one small indie record and play shows to a hundred people a night, I would be happy. Now the long, tall wall leading from my front door to the kitchen was covered with hundreds of gold and platinum records, and I was miserable. So after a lifetime of baffling sadness I was declaring defeat.

  I’d built this home. This was where I was going to die.

  I took a belt out of my closet and got into bed.

  I sobbed into my pillow, asking, “Why?”

  I felt like I was asking my dead parents, “What did I do wrong? Why didn’t you love me? Why did you leave me?”

  I put the bag over my head and thought, This is it, my last memory: crying inside a plastic garbage bag. I pulled the belt tight over the bag and lay back, resting my head on my pillow. “I’m sorry, God,” I whispered, and closed my eyes.

  Section One:

  Extreme Places I Didn’t Know

  1

  NEW YORK CITY (1999)

  Play had been out for a week and was poised to fail.

  It was early May, and I was walking up 4th Avenue from my loft on Mott Street to Union Square, past buildings that 150 years earlier had been New York’s fanciest. On my left was the Colonnade, which in the nineteenth century had been a row of townhouses styled to look like the Acropolis, and was now just a few surviving limestone columns, stained gray and black from a century and a half of factory smoke and exhaust.

  I was wearing my usual uniform of old jeans and black sneakers; my small hands were balled in the pockets of my thrift-shop army jacket. The late-afternoon sun stretched down the long crosstown blocks, burnishing the old stone buildings.

  I had worked on Play for the last two years, and it looked like it would be my final album, a flawed and poorly mixed swan song. I was amazed it had been released at all. A year ago I’d lost my record deal with my American label, and even before the release of Play most people in the music business had quietly consigned me to the trash heap of has-beens.

  Losing my record deal didn’t leave me bitter or surprised, because my previous album, Animal Rights, had failed in almost every way that an album could fail. It sold poorly, and received almost exclusively terrible reviews. My former American label, Elektra, was the home of Metallica and other artists who sold millions of albums. Objectively it made perfect sense for them to drop me, as all the evidence indicated that my best years were behind me. In the early 1990s I’d been seen as a techno wunderkind, but as the decade progressed I never lived up to the expectations that led to me being signed to a major record label.

  I was still signed to Mute Records in England – but they had never dropped any of their artists. And a new label in New York, V2, had agreed to release Play, a decision I assumed stemmed from charity or delusion.

  I walked past the former location of the Ritz on 11th Street, where I’d seen Depeche Mode’s first-ever US show in 1982, when I was sixteen years old. After seeing the band with their synthesizers and new-wave haircuts I’d dreamed of someday playing my own solo show to a few thousand people at the Ritz. But now I was thirty-three, my glory days were behind me, and tonight I was going to perform in the basement of a record store for maybe fifty people. I tucked my head down against an unexpectedly cold wind and walked up 4th Avenue in the shadows.

  I’d started working on Play in 1997, writing and recording it on old equipment in my small bedroom studio in my loft on Mott Street. Now that the album was released I realized there was nothing about it that augured success. It was poorly mixed, and when it didn’t feature my own thin voice it used vocals recorded forty or fifty years earlier by long-dead singers like Bessie Jones and Bill Landford. I assumed that Play would soon be forgotten, as 1999 belonged to Britney Spears and Eminem and Limp Bizkit: pop acts who made albums in expensive studios and knew how to write and record songs that sounded huge on the radio.

  Not much had worked out for me in the past few years: my mother had died, I was battling near-constant panic attacks, I was guzzling ten or fifteen drinks a night, and I was running out of money. But today I was happy, as I had been allowed to release one final album.

  After tonight’s show in the basement of the Virgin Megastore in Union Square my band and I were scheduled to do a two-week tour of small venues in North America, and then a two-week tour of small venues in Europe. Playing small shows and waking up hungover in parking lots wasn’t everyone’s idea of glamour, but I was excited to have this one last month on tour. Afterward my career as a professional musician would be over, and I could go back to school or figure out what else I could do with the rest of my life.

  For this short tour I’d put together a small band: Scott, a dark, handsome drummer I’d worked with since 1995; Greta, a tall, tattooed bass player with spiky bleached hair; and on keyboards and turntables, Spinbad, a DJ-comedian with a shaved head and a carefully trimmed goatee. I was going to sing some of the songs, but most of the sampled and female vocals were going to be on tape, as I couldn’t afford to hire a real singer.

  I turned onto 14th Street and walked into the record store, holding a dripping bottle of Poland Spring I’d bought from a pretzel vendor. I took the escalator down to the basement, where my band and crew had already set up our equipment. Even though I barely had a career I still had three managers, and one of them, Marci, was at the bottom of the escalator, badgering the store manager. Marci had exploding curls of red hair, and she was short, fierce, and loyal. The store manager was trying to back away from her.

  “Hi, Marci,” I said.

  “Mo! How are you?”

  “Hungover,” I told her. “When do we go on?”

  “It was supposed to be 5.30, but I think we can push it back to 6?” she said, smiling aggressively at the store manager.


  “Okay,” he conceded. Everyone eventually conceded in the face of Marci’s persistence. “But you guys need to be wrapped up by 6.30.”

  “Is that okay, Moby?” Marci asked.

  “I guess so,” I said with a shrug. I walked over to my band and road crew.

  “Hey, Mo!” said Dan, my lighting designer. “How are you?”

  “Hungover.”

  Dan was a Brit with a tall green Mohawk. We didn’t actually need a lighting designer to play this show under the fluorescent bulbs of a record-store basement, but he had shown up to help carry equipment and lend support. He was hanging out with Steve, a disturbingly tall and attractive sound tech, and J.P., an unfailingly friendly sound man from Manchester who’d started out working with the Happy Mondays.

  My new tour manager, Sandy, walked over. “Everything okay, Moby?” he asked.

  Sandy was British, a bit taller than me, and handsome – with a full head of blond hair that I envied. He’d been a tour manager for successful British indie-rock bands, and I was surprised that he’d been willing to spend a month overseeing my small, unexceptional tour.

  “I’m good, Sandy, how are you?” I asked politely. He was a rock ’n’ roll tour manager who lived on a series of tour buses, but he seemed professional and erudite. I wanted him to think well of me.

  Other than my band and crew, there were only a handful of people in the basement. Some were wandering around the magazine racks, and a few were watching us set up equipment. I walked onto the small stage, picked up my guitar, and started playing “Stairway to Heaven.” The store manager rushed over and remonstrated, “You need to keep it down before you go on.”

  I looked at him and blushed. “Sure thing,” I said, and turned off my guitar.

  This wasn’t glamorous. But it was something. At the end of the Animal Rights tour I’d been playing to twenty-five people a night. If we drew fifty tonight, it would be a 100 percent increase.

  I put down my guitar and wandered around the store, looking at the racks of CDs and cassettes and music magazines and books. I picked up a copy of the UK weekly Melody Maker to see if they’d reviewed Play. They had. They’d given it two stars out of ten, and mostly used the review as an opportunity to malign me personally. My heart sank.