Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  He laughed, and said, “Why, thank you. You’re lovely too.”

  Our champagne bottle arrived as the DJ played a Buzzcocks song. Bono and I got up and started dancing to “Paradise.”

  “Oh irony,” Bono said, smiling at me. Bono and I had both been principled punk-rockers in our youth. He had possibly held onto more of his principles than I had, but I understood exactly what he meant. The irony was as potent as the alcohol: two former punk-rock kids drinking $300 bottles of champagne in the belly of the beast and singing along to an old punk-rock song called “Paradise.”

  At 5 a.m. the owners emptied out the club, but they let ten or fifteen of us stay in the back with new bottles of champagne. I poured Lauren another glass. “The exquisite corpse drinks the new wine,” I told her, slurring the ‘s’s.

  “What?” she asked. I was about to explain the origins of surrealist automatic writing, but my synapses were too busy enjoying the alcohol and drugs that I had flooded them with.

  “You know,” Bono said to me as the sun started poking through the heavy curtains, “I really loved that Animal Rights album.”

  “Really?” I said. I was having a hard time seeing Bono. My eyes had taken on a drug-fueled life of their own. “Wow. No one loved Animal Rights.”

  “Well, I loved it. And I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  Lauren leaned in. “Can we go back to my house?” she whispered in my ear.

  “You have a house?” I asked, my eyes spinning like tiny drug-fueled carousels.

  “Well, my apartment.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  As we got up, Bono said, “Take care of this man, Lauren.”

  We walked through the empty bar and stepped out into dawn on Spring Street. We took a cab to Lauren’s midtown apartment. As we got in the freight elevator, she warned me, “I have a big dog.”

  “I love big dogs!” I said, too loudly, my voice echoing off the metal walls of the elevator. She just smiled.

  When she opened her door a hundred-pound Rottweiler galloped out to meet us. I squatted in front of him and he jumped on me, knocking me to the floor. He licked my face enthusiastically. “He hates people,” I said, rolling around in the hallway with the dog.

  Lauren laughed. “He’s not bright, but he’s sweet.”

  “Ha, like me! What’s his name?”

  “Bocce.”

  “Baci, like kiss?”

  “No, Bocce, like ball.”

  Lauren held the door open, and Bocce and I ran around her apartment. He and I were playing tug-of-war with an old piece of saliva-soaked rope when Lauren said, “Okay, Bocce, I have to take this nice man to bed now.”

  “Where does Bocce sleep?” I asked.

  “Usually in bed, but tonight he’ll sleep on the floor.”

  “I’m sorry, Bocce,” I said, sincerely, looking into his eyes. “Please forgive me.”

  Lauren closed her curtains – black, light-proof – and we took off our clothes in the dark. We got into bed and had sweet sex, fueled by champagne and ecstasy, while Bocce snored and snuffled on the floor. Afterward, Lauren said, “Do you want some Xanax? It’ll help you sleep after the E.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ve never had Xanax.”

  “I take mine with Vicodin – do you want some?”

  “Sure.”

  She handed me an orange pill and a white pill. I washed them down with warm champagne from a bottle she had on her bedside table. “Now close your eyes,” she said. So I did.

  When I opened them it was twelve hours later: 9 p.m. The Xanax and Vicodin had done their job. Bocce was still snoring, as was Lauren. I fumbled for a light, and discovered that I had spent the night in a black four-poster bed. Looped over the post closest to me were a few dozen tour laminates and backstage passes, mainly from hard-rock and heavy-metal bands. I flicked through them: Monster Magnet, Soundgarden, Jane’s Addiction.

  Lauren woke up. “Good morning,” she said sweetly.

  “It’s 9 p.m.”

  “Like I said, good morning.”

  “Monster Magnet?” I asked, holding up the band’s laminate.

  “Oh, you found my collection.”

  I laughed. “So I’m not special?”

  She smiled sweetly and pulled me close to her. “Oh, honey, you’re special.”

  16

  DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1973)

  I was about to get hit. My mom had never hit me before, but she’d never been this mad at me before.

  We were standing on the cracked driveway outside our garage apartment and her hand was raised. “That was twenty dollars!” she was yelling. “You almost lost twenty dollars!”

  Her hand hovered, and wavered, and she lowered it. “I told myself I’d never hit you,” she said to me and to herself, “so I won’t hit you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

  She grabbed my shoulders. “But never, ever do that again. That’s twenty dollars! That’s our food money for the month.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, scared and trying not to cry.

  We had been out running errands. When we parked I had grabbed her purse from the front seat of our Plymouth and somehow let two $10 bills fall into the patchy snow on the driveway. When my mom couldn’t find the $20 in her purse she frantically searched our small apartment, looking for the money. After fifteen minutes she went back to the car and found the two $10 bills sitting by the passenger door, already damp from the wet snow. Her relief at finding the money became anger, her face flushed red, and she raised her hand. But she didn’t hit me.

  We walked back into the house and she lit a cigarette. Her fingers trembled – not from the cold, but from the fear of possibly losing $20. My mom had lost her secretarial job a month ago, right before Christmas, and she hadn’t found a new one. We were broke, and could only pay for rent and food with money she borrowed from my grandparents.

  Late on Sunday nights, when I was supposed to be asleep, I’d hear her on the phone with her parents: “Mom, I think I need to borrow some money.”

  My grandmother would ask about work.

  “I know. I’m looking every day, Mom,” she’d say. “There just aren’t any jobs.”

  *

  We walked into the kitchen and she put the damp bills on the counter to dry out. The old gas heater had gone out, so she lit it with a wooden kitchen match. Its grill turned orange when it warmed up, and it was the only source of heat in the house. After it warmed up the kitchen we’d keep the doors to our bedrooms open and hope that the heat would circulate there. Sometimes when it was really cold our cats, Pakka and Racer, would sleep on the heater all day long.

  I sat down at our black kitchen table to do my spelling and math homework. I liked doing homework, but it made me anxious, as I always assumed I was making mistakes. I had a desk in my bedroom: the plywood desk my grandfather had built for my mom when she was in school. The desk still had “I HATE JENNY WILLIAMS!!” carved into it from when my mom was a junior at Darien High School. But I didn’t work at my desk during the winter because my bedroom was too cold.

  As my mom smoked another cigarette and put away the groceries, she calmed down. “Oh, Pike is coming over later to watch TV,” she told me.

  I liked Pike. My mom had dated a few different men, and Pike was my favorite. Like some of her other boyfriends, he was in a motorcycle gang and had a leather jacket, but unlike some of the others, he had a job and was nice to me. I didn’t know why my mom kept dating motorcycle gang members, but in 1970s suburban Connecticut they might have been the only men she met who didn’t work on Wall Street.

  *

  “Can I watch M*A*S*H?” I asked my mom after dinner. It was eight o’clock, which was usually my bedtime. But M*A*S*H was on at eight, and I loved M*A*S*H.

  We were in the storage room, where we kept our couch and our small black-and-white TV. It was the coldest room in the house, as it was upstairs and far away from the gas heater in the kitchen. My mom and Pike
were underneath a blanket on our brown foam-rubber couch, while I was curled up with the cats on a big stuffed secondhand armchair.

  “Okay, you can stay up for M*A*S*H,” my mom said, smiling at me. She and Pike were high.

  “You’ve got good taste, Mobes,” a heavy-lidded Pike said.

  “I like M*A*S*H,” I said.

  “Who’s your favorite?” he asked.

  I considered. “I think Hawkeye. But I like Colonel Blake too. Oh, and Radar.”

  M*A*S*H started and we stopped talking. It was an understood rule: don’t talk when the TV is on, except during the commercials. We would loudly ridicule the commercials, especially the low-budget ones with local salesmen in bad polyester suits, but as soon as the show started everyone knew to be quiet. My placid grandmother, who never raised her voice and spent her days volunteering at the Noroton Presbyterian Church, would bark “Shut up!” with the faintest trace of her old Scottish accent if you dared talk during her favorite show, 60 Minutes.

  I basked in the black-and-white glow, while Pike and my mom smoked pot. Luckily M*A*S*H was on channel 2, which came in pretty clearly. We had a wire coat hanger as an antenna, and it worked well for channels 2 and 7. Channels 4 and 5 were okay if you moved the hanger, but 9 and 11 barely came in. At the far end of the dial, channel 13 was just a sea of fog and snow.

  When M*A*S*H ended I said good night and went downstairs to brush my teeth. I got into bed under a pile of blankets and looked up at my O. J. Simpson and Franco Harris posters. My grandparents had given me the posters for Christmas, and I felt so proud and normal when I looked at them. They were new, and they were the same posters my friends had in their bedrooms. If I squinted when I looked at them, I could pretend that I lived in a normal house. I wanted to make my bedroom look nicer, but so far I just had my mom’s old plywood desk, my two posters, and a single mattress on the floor. I turned the light off and fell asleep. And I dreamed.

  I had a recurring dream where I was in an old Victorian house that sat under a gray sky in a field of sunflowers. There were other people in the house, but I was the only one who knew that one of the hallways led to a different, darker dimension. In this other dimension there was an entity that could kill me, so when I stepped into it I had to be quiet so that he wouldn’t know that I was there. I could feel the presence of this being, but I was safe as long as he didn’t see or hear me.

  In the dream I stepped out of the shadow dimension and back into a field of tall sunflowers. A little boy ran by me, screaming and on fire. He was half in our dimension and half in the other – and in the other dimension he was being destroyed by the entity. I knew that if I stumbled into the other dimension, I’d end up torn to pieces like him.

  I woke up sweating and shaking with fear. I got out of bed and ran upstairs: I needed to tell my mom that I’d had my nightmare again.

  There was a candle burning low in my mom’s room and the air smelled like pot smoke. “Mom, I had a terrible dream,” I said.

  My mom and Pike were having sex. “Go back to bed!” my mom yelled.

  I froze. I was scared of everything. I was scared of my dark room and the terrible dream, and I was scared of this dark room where my mom and Pike were having sex.

  “Moby! Go back to bed!” my mom yelled again.

  I reluctantly went downstairs. Pakka, the orange tabby we’d rescued a year ago, was on my bed, purring and waiting for me. Racer, the smaller calico we’d rescued a few months later, came into the room, stretched, and lay down next to Pakka.

  I shut the door and got into bed with the cats, who curled up next to me. With my door shut the room would get cold, and I’d wake up shivering in the morning. But with the door shut I knew the cats wouldn’t leave me.

  17

  NEW YORK CITY (2000)

  I had finally learned the hierarchical taxonomy of limousines.

  Back in 1995 I’d gone on tour as the opening act for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Flaming Lips. We’d played a few European arenas big enough for the headlining Chili Peppers to drive their limos into the venue and get out right next to the stage. I’d never seen such a thing – it seemed like the absurd and awe-inspiring height of rock-star decadence.

  And now, almost every night, I was being chauffeured and dropped backstage in different limos in different parts of the world: prom-night stretch limos in the Midwest, black-window captain-of-industry limos in New York, armor-plated limos in South America, compact Mercedes limos in Germany and eastern Europe. The elegant Mercedes limos were my favorite, as they made me feel like a jaded CIA agent or the president of a discreet Swiss bank.

  The tour for Play, which was originally supposed to be four weeks long, was now entering its eighteenth month. We were doing what Barry, one of my three managers, called “a victory lap,” going to cities we’d already visited multiple times, but now playing cavernous arenas instead of small clubs.

  I loved being famous, so I was doing as many print and TV and radio interviews as I could. A recurring question from journalists was about Herman Melville being an ancestor of mine. I’d spent so much time talking about Moby-Dick that I felt like a scholar, even though I’d never actually finished the book. I’d decided that the novel was an allegory wherein Moby Dick (the whale) represented the vast and unknowable forces of the universe, while Captain Ahab represented fearful, petty humans, trying to conquer that which was unconquerable, and being destroyed in the process. I would invariably finish my Moby-Dick answer by glibly saying, “Of course, I’d much rather be named after the vast and unknowable forces of nature than Captain Ahab.” I never admitted that the only foundation for my hermeneutics was heredity.

  And now I’d found rock stardom, my own domesticated pet white whale. But my little whale wasn’t destroying me; instead, it smiled at me while I rode happily on its back, more like a friendly pony than a malevolent force of nature. I decided that it was my karma to have a benign relationship with fame, my own Moby Dick, and not end up lashed to the whale with harpoons and knotted rope.

  We finished our European “victory lap” with a sold-out show at Wembley Arena in London, and then flew to New York to play three sold-out shows at the Hammerstein Ballroom. After the last concert John Lydon, David Bowie, and Kyle MacLachlan came backstage. I’d grown up obsessed with the music of John Lydon and David Bowie, and Kyle MacLachlan had been Special Agent Dale Cooper, the star of Twin Peaks.

  John Lydon and his wife humbly thanked me for the tickets. Kyle MacLachlan graciously thanked me for the show. And David Bowie asked me when I was free to get coffee in our neighborhood. Sharing bottled water and polite conversation with three of my heroes was staggering, but it felt wrong. I was supposed to be a teenage fan in the suburbs, a supplicant worshiping my heroes from afar. I was supposed to be reading interviews with John Lydon and David Bowie in British music magazines, and videotaping Twin Peaks to watch in somebody’s basement rec room. But I now lived in a world where I casually pretended to be the equal of my heroes. My hope was that if I pretended long enough, I might at some point stop feeling like an impostor.

  After New York I flew to Los Angeles for the final show of the victory lap: a concert at the Greek Theater. The Greek wasn’t huge – it held only five thousand people – but it was one of the most beautiful outdoor venues in the world, and it seemed like a perfect way to bring the curtain down on a bafflingly long and wonderful tour. The tickets for the Greek show sold out in less than a day, so my managers raised the possibility of moving to a bigger venue. But I wanted to finish the tour with one night in an iconic Los Angeles venue surrounded by pine trees.

  At the Greek we ran through the songs from Play and a bunch of my older rave tracks. At one point, while we were playing “Porcelain,” I looked in the front row and made eye contact with Christina Ricci, who was singing along. I’d met her a few times in New York, saying hello in bars, but we’d never been close.

  After the show Christina came backstage. Everything about her was beautiful. With her pe
rfectly straight, short black hair she looked like a voluptuous Louise Brooks, come to life in the twenty-first century. I offered her champagne, and as I was uncorking the bottle Morrissey walked in. With his trademark swoosh of dark hair he looked like a glamorous Mexican film star. I’d never met him, and I was immediately nervous in his presence, as I’d been a huge fan of the Smiths and his solo albums.

  Often when I met my heroes I was stumped. I wanted to be a fan and gush and tell them how much I loved their work. But I also wanted to be cool, and so would pretend to be unfazed by meeting them. I didn’t know what to say to Morrissey, so I offered him champagne. He declined, brusquely asked me to consider producing his next album, and after a polite handshake left.

  “Was that Morrissey?” I asked Christina after the door closed.

  She laughed. “I think it was.”

  After two bottles of champagne Christina and I got into my black stretch movie-star limo and went bar-hopping in Hollywood. When the bars closed at 2 a.m. we headed west, meeting up with photographer David LaChapelle at the Standard hotel, where I was staying. The hotel bar was still serving alcohol, so we crowded into a vinyl booth with David and his coterie of degenerates and beautiful freaks. Being around him always felt like stepping into an early John Waters movie.

  “Moby,” David said, “meet Holly.”

  “Hi,” I said, smiling drunkenly at a blonde and aging – but still beautiful – drag queen.

  “Moby,” David said, as if explaining a profound truth to a simpleton, “this is Holly from ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’”

  “Oh,” I said, taken aback. “Can I kiss you?”

  “Of course, darling,” she said, in a hoarse rasp reminiscent of Marianne Faithfull.