by Moby
“They’re so annoying,” Natalie said as we got into her limo.
“Oh, I know,” I said, lying. I loved the paparazzi – they knew my name.
We arrived at Donatella Versace’s party, where there were even more paparazzi than at the official VMA after-party. This time they yelled my name as often as Natalie’s. I’d only had two drinks, but I felt like I’d swallowed a distillery full of joy. I was hand in hand with Natalie Portman; I’d chatted with Aerosmith; paparazzi were shouting for me.
Growing up as a left-wing punk-rocker I had always decried celebrity culture. I’d revered people like Ian MacKaye, of Minor Threat and Fugazi, who had deliberately eschewed fame. Now I found that my own burgeoning fame was like warm amber, encasing me with a sense of worth I’d never felt before. I knew that cool celebrities were supposed to be confident and unaffected by fame, but every drop of attention I received felt like water on a desiccated sponge. My normal existence was flat and filled with doubt, while this new life was magical. And it all sprang from Play, a weird little album that I thought was going to be a failure.
I found my band in an office that had been turned into a dressing room, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, and walked onstage in front of Donatella Versace and fifteen hundred of her best friends. A few songs into the set, as we were playing “Honey,” I looked at the side of the stage. Natalie was there, dancing with Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow. In unison they raised their hands and smiled and cheered. For me.
I wanted to stop the show and patiently explain to the movie stars and the beautiful people that they’d made a mistake. They were celebrating me, but I was a nothing. I was a kid from Connecticut who wore secondhand clothes in the front seat of his mom’s car while she cried and tried to figure out where she could borrow money to buy groceries. I was a depressed teenager whose first band had played a show in a suburban backyard to an audience of zero people and one dog. My brief moment of rave fame had come and gone in the early 1990s. Now it was 1999 and I was an insecure has-been, a wilting house plant of a human being. But we kept playing, and the celebrities kept dancing and cheering.
Somehow a door had opened into this glowing, golden world, and Natalie and Gwyneth and Madonna and David Letterman and Elton John were holding it open, smiling and telling me they loved me.
If nineteen-year-old me – the punk-rock philosophy major – could have seen what was going on, he would have been disgusted by my obsequious running-dog pursuit of fame. “Really?” he would have asked. “You’re buying into this celebrity bullshit? Don’t you know it’s all a facile celebration of commerce and mediocrity?”
And I would have said, “But look, there’s Natalie Portman, and she’s being nice to me.”
7
OLD SAYBROOK, CONNECTICUT (1971)
My mom inched through the traffic on I-95, smoking one cigarette after another. We’d left Darien forty-five minutes ago, and I’d spent the first thirty minutes of the trip checking out every station on the FM radio. My mom’s Plymouth was in the shop, so she’d borrowed a Fiat from a friend of hers. The Fiat had FM radio and air-conditioning, and I’d never been in a car with either.
“Can I turn on the air-conditioning?” I asked.
“No, the air-conditioning wastes gas,” my mom said, exhaling smoke.
I returned to the FM radio. I didn’t know any of the songs, but sitting on the Fiat’s fabric seats and turning the knobs I felt like a king. I spun the dial past a rock station.
“Oh, wait, leave it there,” my mom said.
“What’s this song?”
“Big Brother and the Holding Company.”
My mom sang along with Janis Joplin and tapped her fingers on the brown leather steering wheel, her white cigarette looking like a tiny baton. I cracked open my window so I could get some fresh air.
We were driving to her friend Janet’s house in Old Saybrook. Janet and my mom had grown up together, and in the late 1960s had become hippies. Now, in this new decade, neither they nor their friends called themselves hippies. I heard them refer to themselves as seekers, travelers, and freaks. But I still thought of them as hippies.
I’d never talked about what happened to me in San Francisco. I only remembered it because I was still afraid of any man with long hair and a beard.
The freeway traffic cleared up after Bridgeport, and we sped along until we arrived in Old Saybrook. I wished I could spend the weekend in the Fiat: it was clean and new and felt safe, while I had been to Janet’s dirty old house enough times to be scared of it.
Janet’s house was a one-bedroom cottage near the end of a dirt road. The front room had tapestries on the walls, and an old couch covered in thin blankets. Behind that was a kitchen the size of a closet, which led to her bedroom: a porch with thick plastic stapled over the screens. The driveway was just a patch of dirt and gravel. We pulled onto it and parked the Fiat. My mom opened the trunk and produced her overnight bag and a shopping bag with three jugs of dandelion wine that one of her back-to-the-land friends had made for her.
The front door opened and Janet appeared, smiling and high, with long curly hair and flowing purple and yellow robes. “Betsy!” she called, coughing out pot smoke.
“Janet!” my mom said, smiling. “You furry old freak!”
They hugged. Janet handed my mom a joint in a roach clip with a long feather dangling from it.
I followed them inside and looked around Janet’s living room. Next to the tapestries on the walls she had taped pictures of Wavy Gravy and Abbie Hoffman and Krishnamurti. Her coffee table was a wooden ship’s door on concrete blocks, holding an impressive collection of half-empty bottles of wine and homemade ceramic ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.
I’d seen pictures of my mom and Janet when they were younger. Janet had been a horse-riding prep-school girl from Greenwich. Her dad was a senior vice president at Bear Stearns. Then she traded in Izod shirts and khakis for tie-dye and buckskin jackets. Now she sat on her couch with my mom, passing a joint back and forth.
“I brought Tarot cards,” my mom said. “We can read each other’s fortunes.”
“Far out,” Janet said, wheezing slightly as she exhaled pot smoke. “Far out.”
“Mom, I’m going outside, okay?” I asked.
“Okay,” my mom said in a strained voice, speaking without exhaling so the pot smoke would stay in her lungs.
I went through Janet’s backyard to get to an old cemetery behind her house. Cemeteries didn’t scare me, even though I’d heard that dead people could take your soul if you opened your mouth when you yawned. Whenever I walked through cemeteries I just made sure to yawn with my mouth closed.
I wandered from grave to grave, reading the epitaphs. My uncle Dave did charcoal rubbings of grisly epitaphs, so I wanted to find a good one and tell him about it. He had a really scary one in his art studio that told the story of a man who’d killed his wife and child, and then, after walking into town, shot himself. Disappointingly, most of the epitaphs in the cemetery behind Janet’s house were fairly banal: “Rebecca Waltham, beloved mother and wife”; “Thomas Goodkind, rest his soul.”
Behind a moss-covered statue of a winged angel I found some wild strawberries. They were hard and not particularly sweet, but I ate a few, as I’d never seen wild strawberries before. I gave up on looking for grisly epitaphs and sat at the feet of the angel, trying to chew on the hard berries while I thought about my grandfather.
Last summer I’d been walking in Darien with my grandfather when he spotted wild raspberries growing by an old barn. We’d eaten handfuls of the fruit and brought the rest back to my grandmother. “She can make jam out of these,” my grandfather told me. That seemed like magic: someone I knew could turn raspberries into jam.
There was a tall tree behind the winged angel, so I climbed it, thinking maybe I could see Long Island Sound from the top. I clambered up as high as I could go, my hands getting covered with pine tar, and looked south. Over the water, great shafts of sunlight were
cutting through the clouds. And in the distance, I could see Long Island. I stayed at the top of the tree for thirty minutes, watching the light dance on the gray water, taking in the quiet beauty and the calm grandeur. Plus I had nothing else to do.
When the light dimmed and the air got colder I climbed down. I was brave enough for a graveyard on an overcast day, but not at night. I walked along an old stone wall, looking for bugs. I turned over some rocks and saw millipedes and potato bugs, and got back to Janet’s house just as night fell.
Janet and my mom and two of Janet’s friends were sitting around the makeshift coffee table, flipping over Tarot cards. Their eyes were glassy and they all had sloppy grins from the pot and the dandelion wine. Charlie, a friend of Janet’s, was busy pushing pot around on the cover of Déjà Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. My mom and her friends spent a lot of time using gatefold album sleeves to help separate hemp seeds from the leaves.
“Hey, Mobes!” Janet said, her voice wet. “Where’d you go?”
“Oh, I just walked around,” I said, not surprised that nobody seemed to have noticed that I’d been gone for three hours. On these weekends my mom would smoke pot with her friends, and I’d disappear. There were never any kids around, and never any toys, so I’d learned to explore and make up games for myself. Sometimes I’d reenact TV commercials in the woods, and sometimes I’d just wander along streambeds until I found frogs.
“There’s soup in the kitchen, if you’re hungry,” my mom said. I went into the kitchen and fixed myself some soup with bread and butter. There was a small table in the kitchen, so I ate my dinner there and read a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog, a hippie bible that I saw in all the houses of my mom’s friends. I didn’t know what anything in the catalog actually was, but it was something to look at while I ate.
Charlie came in and poured himself a glass of vodka from a bottle above the stove. He looked like all of my mom’s male hippie friends: long hair, sideburns, dirty jeans, and an old jacket. “Hey, kid,” he said.
“Hi,” I said, hoping he’d leave me alone so I could eat and read in peace.
“You’re reading? How old are you?”
“Almost five and a half.”
“Aren’t you small for five?”
I wanted to say, “I’m small because I’m a kid. Plus you’re scaring me. Will you leave me alone, please?” But instead I said, “Five and a half. I don’t know.”
He nodded and sauntered back into the living room, where someone had just put on a Richie Havens album. My mom and her friends listened to music constantly, and I had become proficient in telling the difference between Donovan, the Doors, and Richie Havens. I liked the calm songs, but the louder ones scared me.
I finished my soup and bread and went to the freezer to see if I could find ice cream. Janet might have been an anti-materialistic seeker who rejected Western society and its phony values, but her freezer was full of ice cream. I made myself a bowl of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream and poured a glass of orange juice. I’d paged through all of The Whole Earth Catalog, so I read The Farmer’s Almanac instead. It was boring and adult, but I had nothing else to read.
There were other books in the living room, but I didn’t want to go in there. When my mom and her friends got drunk and high they stopped being adults. When my mom got high, which was almost every day, she stopped being my mom. She hid her pot-smoking from her parents, but was open about it with everyone else in her life.
I finished my ice cream and put the dish in the sink. It was time for bed, but I didn’t know where I was going to sleep. I reluctantly walked back into the living room, which was cloudy from all the smoke. Janet was on the couch, kissing a hippie with extremely long hair. My mom and Charlie were sitting very close to each other, reading each other’s Tarot cards. “Mom, where should I sleep?” I asked.
“Oh, you can sleep anywhere,” she said, and turned back to Charlie.
I couldn’t sleep in Janet’s bed, because that was Janet’s bed. And I couldn’t sleep on the couch – Janet and the hippie were making out there. I couldn’t sleep in the Fiat because it was too cold. I took a pillow and an Indian blanket from the edge of the couch and climbed underneath the coffee table. There wasn’t much space, but as Charlie said, I was small for a five-year-old.
I looked up at the wooden slab a few inches from my face and pretended I was in a coffin. Was this what people in the cemetery did after they died? Did they stare at the wood a few inches above their face?
The Richie Havens record ended. After a while I fell asleep.
*
At dawn I woke up and crawled out from under the coffee table. It was cold and the air smelled like cigarettes and damp wool. Two people were curled up on the couch. I could tell they were naked: a bare shoulder and a foot were sticking out from underneath a pile of blankets. I assumed it was Janet, but it mostly looked like naked skin and curly hippie hair.
In Janet’s bedroom Charlie was lying on top of the blankets, naked. He was snoring, and I could see my mom next to him.
I knew that none of them were going to be waking up soon, so I quietly made myself a bowl of ice cream for breakfast. The house smelled strange and I didn’t want to have to talk to any of the hungover hippies if they woke up, so I got the keys from my mom’s purse and took my ice cream to the borrowed Fiat.
I sat on the clean fabric seats to eat my breakfast and turned on the radio and found a station where the newscaster sounded like my grandfather.
8
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS (1999)
I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop panicking.
I’d had an amazing night with Natalie in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at 3 a.m. had returned to my hotel room. I was leaving for the airport in a few hours to fly to the UK, but I was sweaty and wide-eyed with fear, and couldn’t sleep.
Whenever I tried to date someone seriously the panic showed up: sleeplessness, muscle tightness, sweating, and galloping, unrelenting thoughts. Before I dropped out of college in 1984 I’d been in relationships for months at a time without problems. But now I usually started panicking after a first date.
I was highly strung, and I stressed out about other things – work, housing, money – but nothing triggered my panic attacks more than getting close to a woman I cared about. I understood the hereditary utility for any species in learning how to panic in the face of real threats, like lions or fire, but I was baffled as to why I panicked in the face of affection and warmth.
For all my life I’d wanted nothing more than to love and be loved. But whenever I found someone to love the panic intervened, screaming at me until I retreated to my solitary world. Some very deep part of my brain was protecting me vigilantly and wanted me to be alone. As soon as I did the panic’s bidding and ended whatever relationship I was in, the panic abated.
This tautology of panic had been going on for years now. I held onto the increasingly naive hope that someday I’d meet a perfect, kind woman, and with her I’d finally break the cycle.
*
Earlier in the night we’d played an outdoor show for a Boston radio station. Our small four-week tour had turned into a five-month one, and there were even plans to follow our upcoming European concerts with shows in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Then 1999 would be over and the strange success of Play would come to a close.
After tonight’s show I’d changed out of my sweaty clothes in the dressing room with my band and crew. “Not sure what you losers are doing now, but I’m going on a date,” I announced.
“With a human?” asked Dan.
“Yup,” I said, trying to restrain a smug grin.
“No,” Steve declared, realizing where I was going.
“Yup,” I said, smiling wider.
“Natalie?” Scott asked.
“Yup,” I said, walking to the door.
I left the dressing room to a mournful backstage chorus of “Fuck you.”
I took a taxi to Cambridge to meet Natalie. We h
eld hands and wandered around Harvard, kissing under the centuries-old oak trees. At midnight she brought me to her dorm room and we lay down next to each other on her small bed. After she fell asleep I carefully extracted myself from her arms and took a taxi back to my hotel. And I started panicking.
I tried to assuage the panic with logic, telling myself that it was unwarranted, as I’d only been on a few dates with Natalie. But the panic was unmollified. It wanted one thing: for me to be alone. When I was single I was safe, according to the deep, broken neural mechanism that harbored the panic.
On some level I understood that my brain was trying to protect me, but unfortunately it categorized emotional intimacy in the same synaptic bunker as fleeing a burning building or being chased by a bear.
The sun was rising over Logan airport, so I got out of bed. I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror: bald, skinny, exhausted, sad.
One night, years earlier, after another relationship failed because of panic, my frustration and anger boiled over until I started punching myself in the face. I hit myself once. Then again. Then again, very hard, making myself fall backward onto the floor. For a second it felt good and even justified – I had punched myself in my worthless face. Then I was scared, because I didn’t know if I was sane. Sane people generally didn’t punch themselves in the face until they fell down. And sane people didn’t find themselves panicking in hotel rooms because they’d gone on a few pleasant dates with a kind, beautiful, vegetarian movie star.
I had an hour before I had to go to the airport, and I knew from experience that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, so I found a pen and some hotel stationery to write about my panic, and maybe understand it better. I wrote: “why am i panicking? 1. i’m scared.”
And that was all I could think of. I knew there was more. The panic had its own origin story, but it was hidden from me. I crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash.