by Moby
I didn’t like San Francisco or all the scary hippies. But I loved standing in the sun with my mom smiling at me and telling me I was magic. “Should I get another pigeon?” I asked.
*
After Golden Gate Park, we went to an arts and crafts festival. Wherever we went, my mom’s friends had the same routine: pile into a Volkswagen, drive somewhere in San Francisco, smoke pot, wander around with other hippies, smoke pot. My mom’s friends didn’t seem to have jobs, although they complained sometimes about not getting enough money from their parents back in Connecticut.
The arts and crafts fair was in a public square surrounded by scraggly trees, with hippies painting, playing guitar, and dancing to drum circles. It was all chaos to me, so I clutched my mom’s leather fringe handbag wherever we went.
In Connecticut my mom had been a short-haired preppy from Darien who smoked pot and listened to Jefferson Airplane records. But since we arrived in San Francisco she’d done everything she could to leave Connecticut behind and fit in with the other hippies. Her blonde hair was now wild and curly. She wore flowing orange batik dresses and faded denim skirts. And even though pot was illegal, she and her friends smoked it openly, the way my grandparents and their friends drank gin and tonics.
“Here you go, Mobes,” my mom said, high and smiling. She leaned down and put a small silver peace pin on my overalls.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a symbol of peace,” Piper said. “Do you like peace?”
I didn’t really know what peace was, but I was happy to have another pin. With my pregnant jumbo-jet pin, I now had two.
*
The next day my mom and her friends decided to drive to the beach to take acid. They found a low-rent day-care center run by hippies, near where we were staying in the Tenderloin. “I’ll be back tonight,” my mom said as she dropped me off. I watched her get into a VW Bug with her friends and drive away.
The day care was in an old Victorian house, with a small patch of dirt out front. The other kids all knew each other – I assumed they were here every day. I found a Tonka truck with three wheels and pushed it around the dirt, picking up pebbles and garbage, hoping my mom would come back soon. I was three years old and scared, and I didn’t know why my mom had left me here alone.
After a few hours I’d made a couple of sandbox friends, but I was still terrified. The day-care workers weren’t nice. They smoked cigarettes and smelled like wine, and they watched sullenly from the porch while the kids played in the dirt.
At naptime we went inside, got our mats, and lay down. I fell asleep, hoping that when I woke up my mom would be there.
Some time later I was jostled awake, not by my mom but by one of the day-care workers. He looked like all the other hippies: faded jeans, an R. Crumb T-shirt, long black hair, a thick beard. He held his finger to his lips, making the universal gesture for “Sssh, be quiet.” He took my hand and led me to a bathroom in the back of the house. We stepped inside and he locked the door, again holding his finger to his lips.
He pulled down his pants and sat on the toilet lid. “Here,” he said, gesturing at his penis, “you can touch it.”
I didn’t know what to do.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You have one too. It’s okay to touch it.” He guided my three-year-old hand to his erect penis. “Now rub it,” he said, and leaned back as I tried to do what he told me.
“You can put your mouth on it too,” he said.
Afterward he took my head in his hands and stared in my eyes. “You did good. But you can’t tell anyone. Do you hear me?” His grip on my head got harder. “Not ever.”
He led me back to my mat, and I lay there, not sleeping, not moving.
*
My mom and her friends collected me in the early evening.
“Hey, Mobes, sorry we’re late,” my mom said, walking up to the porch.
I didn’t know how to say anything, so I stared at the ground.
“Mobes?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“He’s just tired,” one of her friends said. “It’s late. Right, little man?”
I felt heavy, like I was about to start sobbing forever.
They put me in the back of the VW Bug, and we headed back to the house where we were staying. “Did you have fun with your new friends?” Jason asked me.
I couldn’t say anything.
Jason smiled at me. “Don’t worry – we’re going back to the beach tomorrow, so you can see all your friends again.”
5
NEW YORK CITY (1999)
Suddenly, and surprisingly, my failure of an album wasn’t failing.
The four-week tour was over, and I was back home in New York. But something was happening – Play was selling more every week, even though it had been out for over a month. When I released Everything Is Wrong and Animal Rights in 1995 and 1996 they each had their most successful weeks in the seven days after they were released, and then quickly drifted off into obscurity.
But that wasn’t happening now. Play wasn’t disappearing. And, by association, I wasn’t disappearing. In fact, I was looking at myself on the corner of Broadway and Houston Street, and I was over fifty feet tall.
Someone from Calvin Klein had approached me after hearing Play and asked me to be a part of an ad campaign that featured musicians. Kim Gordon and Jon Spencer were doing it, so it didn’t seem like too much of a compromise. Nobody had ever asked me to model clothes before – but now I was looking at myself on a billboard covering the entire face of a building.
The photo shoot took place in a five-thousand-square-foot white-walled loft in Chelsea. The giant space was filled with food and assistants and racks of clothes and klieg lights the size of oil barrels. For my shoot they built a desert set in the corner of the cavernous studio. The wardrobe person put me in dark jeans and a dark denim jacket, making me look like a male prostitute on the outskirts of El Paso.
A few weeks after the photo shoot I was back in New York, walking to my friend Damian’s apartment. The sun had set, but the sky was the dark blue that comes the moment before actual night. It was late June, and the air was the same temperature as my skin. The discount jeans stores and nail salons on Broadway had all closed for the night, so I headed down Greene Street through Soho.
When I first moved to New York in 1989 Soho had been a desolate wilderness without streetlights. There were galleries and artists’ studios, but for the most part the neighborhood felt as empty as an Edward Hopper painting. Now the galleries were being replaced by boutiques, and I had even heard that Chanel and Prada were planning on opening Soho stores.
I walked west on Grand Street and passed Lucky Strike, a restaurant where I’d DJed in 1990; when I worked there I’d literally been paid in spaghetti and salad. I crossed Canal Street into the emptiness of Tribeca, and walked a few blocks to Damian’s studio. Damian, one of my closest friends since the 1980s, had been my roommate when I moved to New York over a decade ago. He was an exceptionally talented painter, but the art world was wary of him, as he was blond and handsome and took pictures with his shirt off. He was also plagued by social anxiety, which made him seem aloof.
When I arrived at his studio he was shirtless and smoking, standing in front of a giant painting of a swimming pool. He put on a polo shirt, turned off the Nine Inch Nails CD he was blasting out, and locked up his studio.
As we walked outdoors the aroma changed from the fresh oil paint in his studio to old pee. A dump truck lumbered by, its thunder amplified in the canyon of tall buildings. I didn’t savor the smell of pee or the sound of dump trucks, but they were part of New York, and I loved New York unconditionally. This was the city of my birth, and it felt safe to me, like a walled medieval town.
We started our night at a party on the rooftop of a tall building in Chelsea. I quickly downed three drinks, and with vodka coursing through my veins I gazed up at the Empire State Building, reflecting on how New York City was a gentle paradox. The surface was brutal, bu
t its core felt soft and nurturing, whispering that it would never disappoint me.
Damian walked to where I was standing at the edge of the roof.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Anthropomorphizing New York.”
“Want to go?”
I finished my fourth drink. “Okay.”
We left the party and went to a new club on Bleecker Street, where I drank more. At 1 a.m. we realized we weren’t going to find anyone to flirt with us, so we headed further south, meeting our friend Fancy at another new bar, on Broome Street.
“You look amazing,” I told Fancy. He was wearing a black three-piece suit and carrying a small briefcase filled with playing cards, dark-blue rayon socks, and a flask of whiskey.
“You look so boring,” he told me. He pressed his hand on my forehead, checking to see if I was ill. “Are you okay?” For years he and I had gone out five nights a week, both of us wearing thrift-shop suits and drinking compulsively. Tonight I was in jeans and a T-shirt, a sartorial disappointment.
At 2 a.m. Damian headed home. Fancy and I had a few more drinks and walked over to Sway. We always tried to end our nights at Sway: it stayed open very late and was filled with people who were as debauched as we were. We were both drunk when we got there, so we ordered beer. Beer didn’t seem like actual alcohol, more like late-night soda for drunks.
When the DJ played an old Smiths record I danced with a beautiful Norwegian woman Fancy had introduced me to. I bought us beers and we found a booth by the corner of the dance floor. “Do you want another drink?” I asked her as we sat down.
“No,” she said, looking at her still-full beer. “I haven’t finished this one.”
“Okay, hold on.” I stumbled to the bar and bought two more beers, just so I’d have enough when last call happened.
We talked about Norway, where I’d been a few times, and then I leaned in to kiss her. “No, sorry, I have a boyfriend,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, suddenly deflating. “Okay.”
The music stopped and the lights came on. Abruptly the bar transformed from a mysterious playground to a brightly lit room filled with blinking alcoholics and drug addicts. “I go find my friends now,” she said, leaving me alone in my booth.
I scanned the room to see if there were any other women I could flirt with, but everybody already seemed to be paired off or leaving. I finished my beer and said good night to Fancy. I’d had twelve drinks, maybe thirteen, and I was solidly drunk.
I walked home through Soho and returned to the corner of Broadway and Houston Street. I looked up at my billboard again, marveling that there was an image of myself five stories high. I hated the nights when I didn’t find anyone to flirt with or validate me – but seeing myself fifty feet tall made me feel better.
The biblical quotation “What does it benefit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?” came unbidden into my head, sounding more like a judgmental cricket than Christ challenging his disciples. I didn’t want to lose my soul, but I liked that Play was selling more than the other albums I’d released. Most likely it wasn’t going to keep selling, I decided, so I wasn’t really in much danger of gaining the world. And anyway, I’d learned years ago that my soul wasn’t worth all that much.
Over the years I’d had a complicated relationship with God. In high school I’d been a punk-rock atheist, and then in the late 1980s I’d become a very serious Christian. By the mid-1990s I had shed my formal Christianity, but I still prayed and thought of myself as a good and spiritual person. And even though I was scrambling to pick up every perk that my small amount of fame had to offer, I still valued the idea that I was a spiritual person, and I believed that materialism and worldliness were not in keeping with my values.
I wanted to do the right thing. But I was sad and lonely, and thought more fame could fix that. Maybe people would see me on a billboard and think that I mattered. Or a woman would read about me in a magazine, and then when I met her she would be more inclined to love me.
I knew that countless people had been damaged and destroyed by fame. But I was sure I could figure out a way to succeed where they had failed – to gain the world and still hold onto my paltry soul.
6
AUSTIN, TEXAS (1999)
“Natalie Portman is where?”
“She’s at the backstage door.”
We had just finished a show in Austin, playing to four hundred and fifty people at a venue that held five hundred. I walked to the backstage door, sure that this was a misunderstanding or a joke, but there was Natalie Portman, patiently waiting. She gazed up at me with black eyes and said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said. As if this were normal, as if we knew each other, as if movie stars randomly showed up after my shows.
I escorted Natalie backstage and got her a bottle of water. I drank a beer, while my band and crew stood around the dressing room, quiet and uncomfortable. We’d never had a movie star backstage before, and none of us knew what to say or do.
“So, did you enjoy the show?” I asked Natalie.
“I loved it!” she said. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt; her dark-brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. “The songs from Play were so great.” Natalie sat on the black leather couch and smiled at me. My heart stuttered.
I was nervous, so I made small talk. “We’re going to New York in a few days,” I said. “For the VMAs.”
She smiled again and looked straight into my eyes. “I’ll be in New York too. Can we meet up?”
This was confusing. I was a bald binge drinker who lived in an apartment that smelled like mildew and old bricks, and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star. But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me.
“Yeah, let’s meet up in New York,” I said, trying to emanate a degree of confidence that I had never in my entire life actually felt.
“Well, I should go,” she said. “Can you walk me to my car?”
*
A week later I was standing on a mezzanine at Lincoln Center, playing records during the commercial breaks at the MTV Video Music Awards. There were a few thousand people inside the theater, watching Britney Spears and Eminem and Backstreet Boys perform and win awards. But I was by myself in the cavernous lobby, with two turntables and a few records I’d brought from home.
That afternoon a publicist from my record company had asked me if I had any clothes that would stand out on camera. The best I could come up with was a gold lamé Elvis suit I’d bought at the Salvation Army a few years earlier. It was five sizes too big and had never been washed, but when I wore it I shone like a radioactive clown.
After the show Natalie appeared on the balcony where my turntables were set up. She was wearing a perfectly fitted beige dress and looked disconcertingly like Audrey Hepburn. “What do you think of my suit?” I asked, smiling nervously.
“It’s interesting,” she said. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m playing a late-night show for Donatella Versace,” I said. “Do you want to go?”
“You’re DJing?”
“No, playing live.”
“Okay,” she said, putting her arm on my frayed gold lamé sleeve and confidently leading me out of Lincoln Center. I was thirty-three and she was twenty, but this was her world. I was comfortable in dive bars and strip clubs and vegan restaurants, but I knew nothing about award shows and red carpets.
Natalie had a limo and a driver and a security guard waiting for her, and before going to the Versace event we headed over to the VMA after-show party at the Hudson hotel. In the limo we awkwardly discussed our favorite vegetarian restaurants, while her six-foot-five security guard tried to make himself inconspicuous. When we arrived at the party we stepped out of her limo – and into a phalanx of flashes and yelling photographers.
“Natalie! Over here! Natalie!”
“Natalie and Moby! Over here!”
The paparazzi knew my name. I’d never been photographed by paparazzi. No one had ever yelled
my name before, unless they were mad at me. I wanted to stand there and soak up the flashes, but Natalie took my hand and led me into the hotel.
I walked to the bar and ordered two vodka and sodas, one for each of us. “Oh, I don’t drink,” she said, scanning the room – which, in turn, was scanning us.
“Do you mind if I drink?”
“Okay.”
A few feet away I saw Joe Perry and Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, both with perfectly styled long hair and bespoke leather rock-star clothes. Joe Perry made eye contact with me. “Hey, are you Moby?” he asked humbly.
“I am, and you’re Joe Perry.”
“Man, I just want to tell you how much I love your album.”
“You do?” Enough people had told me this lately that it no longer surprised me, but it still confused me.
I tried to endear myself to Steven Tyler and told him the story of the first time I kissed someone, when I was eleven years old. For all of seventh grade I’d had a crush on Lizzie Gordon, and at the end of the school year I’d somehow convinced her to listen to records in my bedroom. I wanted to appear sophisticated, so I made us gin and tonics out of my grandparents’ liquor cabinet, even though we were just eleven. I owned only three records, so I put on the first Aerosmith album. When “Dream On” began I leaned over and kissed her. Unfortunately I had never kissed anyone romantically and didn’t know how it was supposed to be done. I kept my mouth closed and kissed her the way people kissed family members at Christmas. The next day she started dating my best friend, Mark Droughtman, because he was cuter than me and knew how to kiss.
I thought that Steven Tyler would find my story charming, but he stared at me blankly and asked, “Are you with Natalie Portman?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“She’s so hot,” he said, and walked away.
I finished my drink and Natalie’s too. We headed out for the Versace party, where I was supposed to perform at midnight. As we left, the paparazzi started screaming again: “Natalie!” “Moby!” “Natalie!”