by Moby
Marci walked up to me. “What are you reading, Mo?”
“Melody Maker review.”
“How is it?”
I shrugged and handed her the review. She read it and shook her head. “Well, at least the Spin review was good!” she said with bright and unwarranted optimism.
I gathered my band, walked back onstage, and picked up my guitar. I tapped on the microphone and surveyed the scene. I’d hoped for fifty people to be at our first show, but in the bright store lights I could see only thirty looking down at us from the balcony.
“Hi,” I said cautiously into the mic, “I’m Moby, and this is ‘Natural Blues,’” and we started the first show of the Play tour. I hoped people were watching us play our instruments, and maybe wouldn’t notice that the female vocals were pre-recorded and nobody was actually singing. When the song ended a few people clapped, while the rest of the shoppers went about their business.
We played “Porcelain” and “South Side” and “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?” and “Go” and “Bodyrock,” and then ended with “Feeling So Real.” “Go” and “Feeling So Real” had been European hits, and at various points I’d stood onstage at raves and played them for tens of thousands of people. Now I was in a basement playing them for thirty people who applauded politely while a bunch of commuters looked for Hootie & the Blowfish CDs.
As soon as the show ended the audience dispersed and my band and crew and I started unplugging microphones, packing up the drums, and putting guitars in cases. I smiled. This was my life for the next month, and this was enough.
2
NEW YORK CITY (1965–8)
My father drove into a wall and killed himself.
He and my mother had been living in a basement apartment in Harlem with Jamie, their dog, Charlotte, their cat, three rescued lab rats, and me. One night after a bad fight with my mom, my dad got drunk and drove into the base of a bridge on the New Jersey Turnpike at a hundred miles an hour.
He had grown up in New Jersey, and after college had joined the army as a sharpshooter. He left the army to move to New York City, grew a mustache and let his hair grow long, and became a beatnik. In 1962 he met my mom at Columbia University, where he was getting his master’s degree in chemistry and she was working as a receptionist.
My mom was a short, blonde, twenty-year-old WASP from Connecticut, and together they drank wine and smoked pot and listened to Ornette Coleman records and wandered around New York City and fell in love. They loved each other almost as much as they loved being young in New York City at a time when it seemed like the artists and the intellectuals and the radicals were reinventing the world.
They were married in New Jersey, and years later my mom told me that I was conceived in their basement apartment in Harlem while they listened to A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.
At first their world felt idyllic, but then the banalities interrupted: rent, groceries, animals who needed to go to the vet. After I was born on September 11, 1965, their soundtrack changed from obscure jazz LPs to a newborn crying in his crib. In the rest of the world the revolution was unfolding and revealing itself, but because of me they were in a basement apartment in Harlem, smoking cigarettes and changing diapers.
So they fought. My father, who was already a heavy drinker, drank more. He’d disappear for days on end, leaving my mother broke and alone in a cold apartment with a wailing newborn. One night she threatened to divorce him and take me away. That night he drove into the base of a bridge and died.
After the funeral my mother drove her 1964 Plymouth to Connecticut with Jamie the dog, Charlotte the cat, the rescued lab rats, and me. We moved into a small apartment in an old, gray, Victorian house next to a prison in Danbury. It had a small kitchen lit by a circular fluorescent bulb, a living/dining room with a thrift-shop couch and an old black table, a bedroom where my mom slept, and a small closet where I slept.
In September 1968, after we’d lived in Danbury for a year, my mom asked me what I wanted for my third birthday. Even more than toys what I wanted was to eat Kaboom cereal. I loved sickly sweet Kaboom, so for my birthday dinner she let me have two bowls of it. After my second bowl I begged for a third, but she said no.
I pleaded – but she remembered the last time I’d eaten too much Kaboom and had vomited up cereal pieces and pink milk on the peeling linoleum kitchen floor. When I realized she was cutting me off from my supply of Kaboom I ran crying to my closet. I curled up on my metal-framed camp bed and cried into my pale green blanket.
Earlier that day my mom had given me a plastic kazoo as my birthday present. I thought that after Kaboom my new kazoo was the greatest thing on the planet. All day I’d carried it with me, even bringing it into the bathtub to see if it would make sounds underwater, which it didn’t. So now I put the kazoo in my mouth to see what it would sound like if I cried into it.
I cried loudly into the kazoo, making a buzzing wail, and my mom opened the door to see what I was doing. She started to ask, “What is that sound?” but couldn’t finish the sentence because once she saw me crying into the kazoo, she started laughing. And even though I was still miserable after being denied my third bowl of Kaboom, I started laughing too.
I climbed under the blanket to play my favorite game: There’s a Lump in the Bed. The game involved me crawling under the blankets and my mom saying, “There’s a weird lump in the bed!” She would then push down on me (i.e. the lump). When my mom said, “Is there a weird lump here?” I said from underneath the blanket, speaking through my kazoo, “I’m not a lump, I’m a kazoo!”
I poked my head out of the blanket. She was laughing so hard that she was crying, and had taken off her glasses to wipe her eyes. “Why are you crying?” I asked, still talking through the kazoo.
My mom was pretty, with short blonde hair that got longer and curlier as the 1960s progressed. She’d loved the beatniks. She’d wanted to stay in New York so she could be a painter and hang out with the bohemians in Greenwich Village. But now she was a single mother attending community college and living next to a prison.
Through my kazoo I asked again, “Why are you crying?”
*
A few months later my mother graduated from the local community college with a degree in English literature. She was a widow in Connecticut, but she longed to be with her people: the beatniks, who had moved to San Francisco en masse and become hippies. For her, the East Coast was the land of dead husbands and conservative parents and apartments next door to prisons. California was the land of Jim Morrison and Jefferson Airplane, with droves of young people migrating west to be reborn next to the endless Pacific.
Her graduation present from her parents was a pair of tickets to San Francisco: one for her, one for me. While we stood at the gate at JFK airport, a United Airlines agent asked me if I’d ever flown before.
“No,” I said breathlessly.
“Well, this is for our first-time flyers,” she said, and handed me a big yellow pin with the cartoon image of a grinning and possibly pregnant jumbo jet. We boarded, and I sat in my orange-and-brown middle seat, clutching my new yellow pin. I didn’t have many possessions: my kazoo, a few stuffed animals, some Babar books. But now I had a big yellow pin that proved that I’d been on an airplane.
After we took off the ginger ale was free, so I kept drinking it. When I told my mom for the third time in ninety minutes, “Mom, I need to pee,” she looked annoyed. I had learned that I had two moms: one was happy and calm and laughed with me when I cried into my kazoo; the other was mad at the world and at me.
“Just pee in your seat if you have to go so bad,” she snapped.
I’d never been on an airplane and didn’t know what the protocol was. So I peed in my seat and promptly started crying.
“What!?” My mom turned to me. “Why are you crying?”
“I peed in my seat and it’s wet.”
She sighed and scooped me up. In the bathroom she dried me off and yelled at me, “I didn’t mean to really pee in yo
ur seat!”
“But you said to.”
“I was being facetious,” she said, forgetting that as a three-year-old, I didn’t know what “facetious” meant.
She took me back to our seats and had me sit on a folded blanket. “Is that okay?” she asked. I couldn’t talk without crying again, so I nodded my head.
A flight attendant came over and asked if I wanted to go upstairs to visit the upper deck. Awestruck, I immediately forgot about my wet seat. “There’s upstairs?” I asked.
She took my hand and walked me up the metal spiral stairs to the upper deck, where a few businessmen were standing around a bar, smoking cigarettes and drinking brown liquor. “This little guy has never been on a plane before!” the smiling flight attendant announced.
“I’ve never been on a plane before!” I told the businessmen, to make sure they knew.
“Well, have some peanuts!” one of them said, handing me a packet of airline peanuts. It was silver and blue and looked like the future.
“Can I keep them?”
“Ha! They’re yours, sir!” the businessman said, shaking my tiny hand.
The flight attendant took me downstairs and back to my seat. “Mom,” I said, “the man gave me peanuts.” I held up my airplane peanuts in their shiny wrapper.
“That’s great,” she said, and went back to reading the in-flight magazine.
I opened my fold-down table and played with my giant yellow jumbo-jet pin and the packet of airplane peanuts from the future.
3
LONDON, ENGLAND (1999)
I wouldn’t normally have looked for vegan food in the King’s Cross neighborhood of London, since it was a filthy pit of grease and vice, but I’d finished the soundcheck and I was hungry. I was wearing my daily tour uniform of jeans, a black T-shirt, an old army jacket, and a black New York Yankees cap I had bought at JFK before flying to the UK. Even though it was June, it was cold and raining, and my sneakers were soaked.
The hookers and drug dealers huddled in doorways and underneath bus shelters, smoking cigarettes and staring disconsolately at the wet streets. For most people, King’s Cross would’ve been frightening, but its damp squalor reminded me of Times Square in the 1970s.
A few blocks away from the Scala – the venue where I would be performing in a few hours – I found a vegetarian Indian restaurant. So many things in my life had fallen by the wayside during the 1990s: Christianity, sobriety, fame. But after I became a vegan in 1987 my commitment to veganism had never faltered. I might drink myself to death or even forsake my eternal soul, but I would never do anything that contributed to the suffering of an animal.
I ordered rice and lentils with fried potatoes, and sat on a stool with my styrofoam tray full of greasy food. The restaurant’s window was covered with steam on the inside and streaks of rain on the outside. Through the atmospheric chiaroscuro King’s Cross looked soft, like a Turner painting. I could see shapes and colors through the steam and rain; a few people hurried past the window like windblown flags.
My four-week Play tour was almost over, and it had been more successful than the Animal Rights tour I’d done a few years ago. Almost all the venues we’d played had been half-full – this was progress, even if the venues had been tiny. I was excited for tonight’s show, because afterward Mute (my European record label) were going to throw a party for me in the bar above the club.
I had been drinking almost every night since the tour started, but hadn’t met any women. Every time I drank I hoped I’d meet a beautiful woman who would offer love and validation. But so far on this short tour drinking had delivered only drunkenness.
I knew I would meet someone tonight. How could a musician play a concert in London and then go to a party being thrown for him by his record label and not find someone to kiss at least?
I took my empty tray, still glistening from greasy potatoes, and threw it in the overflowing trash by the door of the restaurant. When I stepped outside the rain had picked up, so I pulled up the hood of my jacket and rushed back to the Scala.
At 10 p.m. we played a seventy-five-minute set for two hundred people, a crowd that half filled the room. During “Next Is the E” I climbed on top of one of the onstage monitors, hoping to strike a rock-star pose, but my sneakers were still damp and I slipped. Luckily the strobes were flashing, and nobody seemed to notice when I fell. The audience clapped politely between songs, and a few people even danced cautiously to some of the older rave tracks, like “Go.”
After the show my band and I changed out of our sweaty black stage T-shirts into our black after-show T-shirts. At the party a few fans came up to me as I was ordering shots of vodka and told me that they’d enjoyed the show and that they loved Play. This surprised me – I didn’t think anyone had heard it. We were performing some songs from the album, but they were slower and more subdued than the older rave songs, so they weren’t going over very well. I’d taken “Porcelain” out of the set; it was so quiet that I could sometimes hear people talking over it while we played.
I drank the free vodka and talked with people from the record company, but by 1 a.m. I was drunk and alone in the bar with the bartender and the janitor. The bartender turned off the Blur cassette he was playing and flicked on the harsh overhead lights. “Sorry, mate,” he said with what seemed like genuine sympathy, “party’s over.” I pulled on my army jacket and stumbled down the stairs, out into the rain.
I drunkenly shuffled down the wet sidewalk, looking at shuttered storefronts and feeling sorry for myself. How badly was I failing as a musician that I couldn’t even find someone to flirt with at my own after-show party?
Waiting to cross the street I saw a delicate blonde prostitute standing in a bus shelter. She was smoking a cigarette and scanning the street through half-closed eyes. She had long, thin, alabaster legs. An off-white raincoat partially covered her short skirt and yellow halter top. Her bleached-blonde hair was cut short, and she had a little pixie nose.
Over the last few years I’d dated a variety of sex workers, although I’d never paid money for sex. But standing in the rain in King’s Cross at 1 a.m. I realized that I could pay this beautiful woman to come back to my hotel room. I was drunk and lonely and wanted to feel another person next to me. Ideally that person would like me and desire me, but I was desperate enough for validation that I would accept being just another customer.
I wanted to talk to her, but as I’d never approached a prostitute I didn’t know what to say. I assumed that if I asked “How much?” she’d look at me suspiciously. Her eyes would be hidden, but when she saw my vulnerability she’d soften. Maybe she would even smile at me. We’d go back to my hotel and we’d sit on my bed talking. We’d share our loneliness, and through our mutual brokenness we’d fall in love. She’d see my flaws and inadequacies and love me in spite of them. I’d hold her on my sagging hotel bed and we’d relax, knowing that we were going to save each other. And finally at dawn we would sleep, safe in each other’s arms.
I stood in a phone booth for several minutes, enjoying my fantasy and trying to summon the nerve to approach her. My biggest fear was that she’d reject me. Rationally I knew that prostitutes didn’t reject people who were going to pay them. But I still feared that when she looked at me, she’d know that I was an impoverished white-trash kid with attachment issues.
I heard someone say my name, “Moby? What are you doing here?”
I snapped out of my reverie. A group of Mute employees were standing next to me. I said, too quickly, “I was just walking back to my hotel.”
They were nonplussed, as I hadn’t been walking. I’d been standing. In the shadows at 1 a.m. in King’s Cross, staring at a prostitute.
The Mute staffers pretended everything was normal, that standing by yourself in the rain in King’s Cross late at night was something that people did. “We’re going to meet some people at the bar of your hotel,” one of them said awkwardly. “Want to come?”
“Sure,” I said, and took one last look
at the beautiful prostitute as she leaned into an idling car.
4
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA (1969)
I caught a pigeon.
My mom and her San Francisco friends had gotten high and gone to Golden Gate Park to have a picnic on the grass. They smoked cigarettes and drank wine on a tie-dyed blanket, while I ran through flocks of pigeons, waving my arms, amazed that I could make them fly. I went back to the blanket, exhausted and exhilarated.
“Hey, go catch us a pigeon, Mobes,” my mother’s friend Jason told me. Jason, like all of my mom’s San Francisco friends, had been a preppy kid in Connecticut in the early 1960s. Now he lived near Haight-Ashbury and had a thin brown beard and hair down to his shoulders.
“Okay,” I said, and walked back to the pigeons. This time I didn’t wave my hands – I just walked up to a stout gray pigeon and picked it up. I returned to Jason and presented the softly cooing bird to him with outstretched arms. “Here,” I said.
“Mobes, let it go,” my mom said gently.
I was confused. Jason had asked me to catch a pigeon. So I caught a pigeon. And now my mom was telling me to let it go. Adults were confusing.
“Okay,” I said, putting the pigeon on the ground. “Bye, pigeon.” The pigeon cocked his head at me and then walked back to the flock to rejoin his friends.
“How did you do that?” Jason asked me.
“I picked it up,” I said, surprised that I had to explain something so simple.
“Betsy, I think he’s magic,” breathed Piper, one of the hippie girlfriends.
My mom smiled at me. “I think you’re right.”