Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  She smiled at me. “Of course, Moby. Help yourself.”

  “Why are you so polite?” one of Scudder’s brothers blurted. “It’s weird.”

  “I think it’s nice,” she said. “Clearly your mother has raised you well.”

  I wanted to say, “I’m not polite, Mrs. Baldwin – I’m terrified.” I wanted to stay here and to pretend that I belonged. Being polite seemed like the safest route to not being thrown out.

  I filled a glass with Coke and small slices of ice that came from the front of the refrigerator. I took a sip. The bubbles hit my nose and smelled like roses and fruit.

  11

  MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA (2000)

  “Play is number one in the UK!”

  I was wearing a yellow rain slicker and talking to my European manager, Eric, on a pay phone outside a drugstore in Minneapolis.

  Eric lived in London. Once Play had started doing well I called him at the same time every Sunday to find out what my UK chart position was. As Play had been number three in the charts the previous week, I was eager to find out its new position. I couldn’t believe what Eric had told me, so I asked again, “Really?”

  “Really!” he yelled into the phone from six thousand miles away. “You’re number one!”

  I was in Minneapolis, opening up for the band Bush on an “MTV Campus Invasion” tour. The tour had been strange: Bush’s alt-rock fans weren’t always keen to hear electronic music played by me and my motley band (a drummer, a bass player, and a DJ). The audiences weren’t necessarily hostile, but they did seem confused. Even though Play was selling well I hadn’t received any royalty checks, and I still couldn’t afford to hire a real singer. Without a female singer half of the songs in our setlist required vocal samples on tape. So when we played “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?” and “Natural Blues,” the microphone in the center of the stage stood there, lonely and unused.

  Play had been released ten months ago and had gone from selling three thousand copies a week worldwide to a hundred thousand copies a week worldwide. It was now one of the best-selling records in the world, and a top-ten record in over twenty countries. Eric had told me that in the past two months, Play had sold more than all of my previous albums combined.

  “Plus ‘Southside’ is number one at modern-rock radio, and Spin wants you to be on the cover,” Eric reminded me over the phone. “Isn’t that good?”

  I agreed – that was good.

  I couldn’t admit it to anyone, but I loved talking to the press and seeing myself in magazines. I knew that cool musicians didn’t care about press attention, or at least they were good at pretending they didn’t. But I cared. Whenever I was at home in New York I had a Friday ritual of going to the Soho News store on the corner of Prince Street and Lafayette and looking for myself in their well-stocked racks of magazines. Each time I saw my name or picture in print I felt like I had been legitimized.

  The more attention I got, the more I wanted. The more I got of everything, the more I wanted. I wanted more touring and more press and more alcohol and more invitations to celebrity parties and more one-night stands. My life was perfect, and I wanted it to go on exactly as it was.

  I still prayed every morning, and sometimes I even cautiously asked for God’s will to be done. But I really only wanted God’s will to be done if God’s will involved me being famous.

  For a few weeks I had tried to be Natalie’s boyfriend, but it hadn’t worked out. I thought that I was going to have to tell her that my panic was too egregious for me to be in a real relationship, but one night on the phone she informed me that she’d met somebody else. She’d assumed that I’d be sad or angry, but I was relieved that I’d never have to tell her how damaged I was.

  Since then I’d fallen hard for two other women, and would have been happy to be in a monogamous relationship with either of them – except that even making plans to go on a second date made me panic. So I’d given up trying to date seriously, and had embraced being a promiscuous drunk on tour. It wasn’t the most spiritually or ethically sound behavior, but at least I wasn’t panicking.

  Even though we’d been broken up for a while, Natalie and I were still friends. A month ago, when I had been on tour in Australia, she’d come to my show in Melbourne and had brought along the cast of the Star Wars prequels. In the middle of the show I looked at the side of the stage: Natalie was dancing with Ewan McGregor and the actors who played Jar Jar Binks and young Darth Vader.

  Darth Vader dancing with Obi-Wan, I thought, as I yelled out the chorus for “Bodyrock.”

  After the show I drank champagne and vodka in my dressing room with Ewan McGregor. After a few drinks I decided that he and I should go out and drink more, but that I should be naked. Sandy, my tour manager, urged me, “Moby, at least put on a towel.”

  So I went out in downtown Melbourne wearing a towel. No shoes. No clothes. Just a towel.

  Ewan and I stumbled from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker. At the end of the night we ended up in a subterranean bar filled with Australian celebrities. I’d had ten or fifteen drinks, so I went to the bathroom to pee, and found myself standing at a urinal next to Russell Crowe. He zipped up his pants, and then pushed me against the wall of the bathroom and started screaming at me.

  “Uh, we’ve never met,” I tried to say. “Why are you yelling at me?”

  He never told me, but he kept me pinned against the wall while he shouted and screamed. After a minute he lost interest, cursed a few times, and stumbled out of the bathroom.

  I went back to the bar and told Ewan, “Russell Crowe just yelled at me.”

  “Fuck, mate,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He yells at everyone.”

  *

  I hung up the pay phone in Minneapolis and stood in the rain, trying to comprehend what Eric had told me: I had a number-one album in the UK. England was where the rave scene had started. It was where the Clash had started. It was the land of Joy Division and Monty Python and Bertrand Russell and William Blake and John Lydon.

  I’d grown up obsessed with the UK, and for a few weeks in high school I’d even tried to pass myself off as British. I imitated the accents I’d heard on Fawlty Towers and Monty Python’s Flying Circus and told people that I was related to Terry Hall, the singer in the Specials. It didn’t work out – my accent made me sound like a subpar Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. And most of the people in my high school had known me since kindergarten and were confused as to why I was suddenly pretending to be British.

  I had a few hours before showtime, so I walked back to the Holiday Inn to make dinner in the bathroom of my hotel room. I’d bought groceries the day before at a health-food store in Wisconsin. Now I took some tofu pups out of their package and put them in a plastic bag in the sink. I then filled the sink with hot water to let the pups warm up. After a few minutes the water cooled off, so I drained the sink and filled it with hot water again. After ten minutes I had tofu pups that were as warm as a lawn on a summer day.

  I didn’t have a knife, so I used the subscription card from a copy of In Minneapolis magazine to spread mustard on two pieces of bread. I put my tofu pups and bread on a hand towel, and ate them while watching an old episode of The Simpsons and drinking day-old carrot juice.

  There was nothing glamorous about dinner in a Holiday Inn across the street from a bus station, but I had a number-one album in the UK, which made lukewarm Holiday Inn tofu pups the most wonderful meal I’d ever eaten.

  12

  SOMERSET, ENGLAND (2000)

  Before I started playing them in the early 1990s, the only festival I’d ever attended was the 1974 Westport Connecticut Clam Bake. It was a small seafood and music festival: bluegrass bands played on a plywood stage while a few hundred people sat on the grass, drinking beer and eating clams. My mom was dating a banjo player in one of the bluegrass bands, and he let me sit on the side of the stage while his band, the Nutmeg Riders, played a medley of Earl Scruggs songs.

  But now I was performin
g “Porcelain” and watching a sunset brush the sky with pastel streaks, while a hundred thousand people sang along. I was at Glastonbury, the biggest festival in the UK, and arguably the biggest and most iconic festival in the world. And when “Porcelain” ended the crowd cheered: not just typical festival applause, but an overwhelming roar that sounded like love.

  I’d played Glastonbury once before, in 1997, doing an afternoon set in a muddy tent for a thousand soggy ravers. This year, however, Glastonbury was warm and dry and overflowing with joy. Before our show I’d walked over to a campsite run by Joe Strummer from the Clash and Bez from the Happy Mondays. I’d loved the Clash in high school; Joe Strummer was, along with Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, and David Bowie, one of my few living musical heroes. Joe and Bez gave me some poitín – homemade liquor that they had brewed in somebody’s kitchen – and then we danced to dancehall reggae, playing on a boombox sitting on a bale of hay.

  Now Joe was standing at the side of the stage with Liam Gallagher, dancing and singing along with the unfathomably large crowd in front of me. I’d assumed that Liam would hate me and my music, but the few times I’d met him he had been surprisingly friendly. One time at a festival in France he’d even paid me his highest compliment, snapping his fingers and saying “Tune, mate” while listening to “Natural Blues.”

  The sun finally sank beneath the horizon as we ended our set with “Feeling So Real.” The air was soft. The light was soft. And even though the sun was gone the clouds were still pink and gray and baby blue.

  After the show my band and crew and Joe and Bez and some new friends we’d made backstage all came back to my generic but large hotel suite, a few minutes away from the festival. Joe’s boombox came with us; someone put on a drum-and-bass CD, while the table in my living room was quickly covered with hash and vodka bottles and lines of cocaine. The air in my suite soon became hazy from cigarettes and hash.

  One of Joe’s friends offered me a line. Cocaine had always scared me – it seemed like the drug that people did right before their careers ended. I politely said, “No, thank you.”

  “No worries, mate,” he said, and snorted a line the size of my pinkie. “More for me.”

  Ecstasy didn’t scare me, so I took a few pills and washed them down with vodka. When someone put on a hip-hop mix CD I found myself dancing to a Jay-Z track with Becks, an Irish publicist who worked for one of the bigger music magazines. We started touching each other’s faces and kissing, so before the song ended I took her hand and led her into my bedroom.

  With every month that Play sold more and I appeared on more magazine covers, it became easier and easier for me to be promiscuous. I’d spent years going out and drinking enough to work up the courage to talk to women I found attractive. I was still drinking just as much, but now more often than not the women were approaching me.

  To keep myself from feeling creepy and ethically compromised I told myself I was looking for love – but since my crippling panic attacks kept me from having actual relationships, I kept looking for love in the arms of whoever was charitable enough to be with me for a night. Tonight that was Becks from Ireland.

  Usually Irish women were reserved, but once I closed the door to my bedroom Becks undid her shirt and stepped out of her pants. She was roughly my height, with short blonde hair and a sprinkling of freckles on her nose. We had both taken ecstasy earlier; her pupils were as wide as planets. “Do you fancy me?” she asked, standing naked in front of me.

  “Of course,” I said, pulling off my own clothes. “I think you’re beautiful.”

  We fell onto my bed and started having sex.

  The door to my suite opened and Scott, my drummer, walked in. “Moby, do you—” he said, and stopped when he saw Becks and me in bed together.

  “Go away, Scott,” I said.

  “Go away, Scott,” Becks echoed.

  “Sorry!” Scott said, and drunkenly backed out of the room.

  I looked at Becks, naked and beautiful underneath me. “Hold on,” I told her. I got out of bed and ripped a mirror off a wall. It wasn’t a Herculean feat of strength, as it was a cheap mirror held to the wall with a few drywall screws.

  I got back in bed and positioned the mirror, and we resumed having sex. “Having sex with you looked so beautiful,” I told her. “I wanted you to see what I saw.”

  “Oh, that’s amazing,” she said, looking at our bodies reflected in the mirror.

  We spent the next few hours having sex and looking into each other’s eyes, and by the time we were done it was late and most of the people at the party had left. Someone in the living room put on London Calling, but Joe Strummer, who apparently was still there, yelled, “Oh, fuck no!”

  Becks and I wrapped ourselves in the stiff polyester bedspread and spooned. My head was spinning from vodka and ecstasy and sex, not to mention a hundred thousand people showering me with love and approval at Glastonbury earlier. Through the door I could hear the David Bowie ballad “Wild Is the Wind.”

  I sat up and said to Becks, “Come with me.”

  We put on fluffy bathrobes, and I walked her out to the living room. The party had dwindled to four people, including Pablo, my new percussionist.

  While the remaining party stragglers drank the last of the vodka and snorted the last of the coke, I took Becks’s hand and we slow-danced to “Wild Is the Wind.”

  A few years earlier I’d drunkenly sung this song to a woman in a hotel parking lot in Germany, but hearing David Bowie singing it was much better. The song ended and the four degenerates in my hotel suite clapped. I looked at Becks. As she stood in the smoke-filled living room, surrounded by empty vodka bottles and beer cans and cocaine detritus, she had tears on her cheeks.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That was beautiful. I’ve never slow-danced with anyone before.”

  “Really?” I walked her back to the bedroom. “I love slow dancing. I even collect slow-dancing songs.”

  “What?” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Yup.” I paused, not sure if I should reveal my most shameful secret. “Even Celine Dion.”

  Becks looked at me, smiling but concerned. “Celine Dion?”

  “A few years ago my friend Fancy and I had a party where we played nothing but slow-dance songs. Everyone got drunk and slow-danced and made out on the dance floor. The highlight was a room full of hipsters drunkenly singing ‘My Heart Will Go On.’”

  We lay back down in bed and wrapped ourselves in the bedspread again. The sun was up now, shining through the inadequate curtains.

  “Excluding Celine Dion, what was your favorite slow-dance song?” she asked.

  “‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ by the Flamingos,” I said without hesitation. “The best romantic slow-dance song ever written.”

  We quietly held each other. She said, “I can’t believe I had sex with someone who likes Celine Dion.”

  I laughed. “Okay, I lied. I made the whole thing up.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t. But have you heard ‘My Heart Will Go On’ recently? It’s really good.”

  “You should stop now.”

  “Okay, you’re right.”

  I lay there, smiling and spooning beautiful Becks. As I was falling asleep I heard “Golden Years” playing in the other room.

  “Can I tell you something?” I asked.

  “Please,” she said, sleepily.

  “David Bowie’s my neighbor.”

  “What?” Becks asked, suddenly awake.

  “He moved in across the street from me. We’re going to be best friends.”

  She touched my face, looked in my eyes, and asked, “Who are you?”

  Through the door I heard Bowie singing that these were my golden years, and that I was going to remain unscathed. All I wanted, with every cell in my body, was for him to be right.

  13

  DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1972)

  Furman, my mom’s new boyfriend, was getting high with my mom before takin
g me to the Indian Guides Labor Day pancake breakfast.

  I’d joined the Indian Guides the year before, in first grade, along with all my friends. It was the first step toward becoming a Cub Scout, and my friends and I very much wanted to be Cub Scouts.

  The Indian Guides didn’t do very much. In May we had marched in a Memorial Day parade wearing headdresses and feathers, and once a month we met in someone’s living room to eat spaghetti and listen to different dads talk to us about camping and tying knots.

  Today’s pancake breakfast was at my friend Jeff’s house. His dad, like all of my friends’ dads, worked on Wall Street, had gone to an Ivy League school, played golf, and did his best to look like it was 1952 and that the 1960s had never happened.

  Furman looked like the 1960s had never ended. He was six foot two, had black hair down to the middle of his back, and a full black beard. For the Indian Guides’ pancake breakfast he had decided to wear leather pants and a fringe vest over his hairy naked chest.

  I wanted my grandfather to take me. He was thirty years older than my friends’ dads, but he worked on Wall Street and looked like a clean-shaven army colonel. But when my mom told me that Furman was taking me to the pancake breakfast I said nothing. When my mom made up her mind about something I knew not to question it. Both of us were happier when I did what she said.

  Before we left, Furman and my mom smoked pot in her bedroom, while I played on the staircase with my Matchbox cars. I knew to be quiet and patient when grown-ups were drunk and high, and grown-ups were always drunk and high.

  The weekend before, Furman had taken me and my mom on his friend’s boat to one of the little islands off the coast of Connecticut, in Long Island Sound. Furman was in a Connecticut motorcycle gang, the Charter Oaks, and the borrowed boat was full of bearded gang members. When we got to the island I left the adults and wandered off to play by myself. After an hour of walking around and exploring the ruins of an old house at the center of the island I was hungry and bored and I wanted to go home. I worked up my courage, walked into the middle of the bearded gang members, and asked my mom and Furman when we could leave.