by Moby
I leaned over and kissed Holly. I was straight, but I knew that if you’re in a booth at 3 a.m. drinking champagne with Holly from “Walk on the Wild Side,” you kiss her. And not a chaste peck on the cheek, but an open-mouthed kiss. You can’t kiss Holly the way you would your great-aunt.
David slammed down a shot of tequila and yelled, “Let’s go to the disco!”
“There’s a disco?” I asked.
He took my hand and Christina’s and walked us through the Standard’s kitchen to a door that led to a dark private club, hidden deep within the bowels of the hotel.
As we stepped into the disco the first person I saw was Joe Strummer. I hadn’t seen him since Glastonbury, so I ran up to him and hugged him.
“Joe!” I yelled.
“Moby!” he yelled.
We wrapped our arms around each other and started dancing to a Donna Summer track.
“I love you, Joe!” I yelled drunkenly.
“I love you, Moby!” he yelled back, just as drunkenly.
Christina joined us, followed by David and Holly. We all held onto each other and danced wildly to the looping synths and other-worldly beauty of “I Feel Love.”
We drank more. We danced more. And at 5 a.m., after hugging everyone one last time, Christina and I left the club and went up to my room. My room wasn’t terribly fancy, but on the balcony you could see the dark Pacific Ocean, far in the distance. We opened another bottle of champagne and sat on the balcony’s mid-century chairs, basking in the warm night air and gazing at the endless lights of Los Angeles. The sun started to come up, just a thin rose-colored sliver on the eastern horizon. I put my champagne glass down and kissed Christina.
As the sky turned pink we sat on my balcony kissing, talking, and drinking champagne. LA was usually a loud city of twenty million people, but at dawn it was so quiet I could hear birds.
I was with a smart, beautiful movie star, and I was closing the book on the greatest eighteen months of my life. The realization came to me as slowly and gently as the dawn: this was actually my life.
“Do you think things will calm down now that your tour is over?” Christina asked me.
I smiled and took a slug of champagne from the bottle. “Oh, I hope not.”
Section Two:
We Are All Made of Stars
18
DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1973)
I hated Watergate. I didn’t really know what it was, just that it involved men in suits in Washington, DC, taking up television time that was supposed to be dedicated to cartoons.
It was summer vacation, and I was hot and bored and alone. My friends spent their summers swimming and sailing and playing tennis, or going to their beach houses on Nantucket or Fishers Island. Every morning I turned on the TV, hoping to see Woody Woodpecker or Bugs Bunny or some other cartoon sociopath, and instead got a broadcast of men smoking cigarettes and mumbling in a Senate hearing room somewhere in Washington. TV was my life, and Watergate was stealing it from me.
Luckily the Watergate hearings happened during business hours, so I still had Saturday-morning cartoons, late-afternoon movies on channel 9, and Norman Lear sitcoms like All in the Family at night, while my mom and I silently ate dinner in front of the television.
We had moved out of the garage apartment on Noroton Avenue and were staying with my grandparents until we moved to Stratford, Connecticut, in August. I hadn’t seen our new house in Stratford, and my mom hadn’t told me why we were leaving Darien. One morning a few weeks earlier she’d mentioned it while she made coffee: “Oh, we’re moving to Stratford.”
“Will I go to school there?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, and lit a cigarette.
Now that Watergate had stolen daytime TV from me, I had to find other things to do at my grandparents’ house to fill the long, hot afternoons. My uncle Joseph had given me a musty wooden box filled with his childhood coin collection, so I set it up on my grandmother’s porch and invented a game called “Bank.” I arranged the coins in his collection by place of origin and denomination, and pretended to make loans from one country to another. Greece would loan money to the US, the Ukraine would loan money to Japan, South Korea would loan money to Mexico. I wondered if this was basically what my grandfather did when he went to work on Wall Street.
It passed the time. I sat in a painted wicker chair, pushing coins around on an old card table while bumblebees flew idly into the porch’s screens – but without television I was very bored. Occasionally I’d get up and turn on the TV, hoping that maybe the loves of my life had returned: Droopy Dog, Wile E. Coyote, Heckle and Jeckle. But they hadn’t.
One morning I set up my Matchbox cars so they would jump over piles of coins from the coin collection. My grandmother was at her volunteer job at the Noroton Presbyterian Church, so as usual I was home alone. But sometimes I liked being left alone: I could go through adult things, like closets and bookshelves, without having to explain myself.
Everything about adults was a mystery, from their alcohol and their drugs to their clothes and their books. Most fascinating to me were the objects my mom and my grandparents had stashed in the backs of their closets and forgotten about: old calendars, worn-out shoes, empty bottles of shampoo. I would turn on the fifteen-watt bulb inside a closet and sit there, playing with these discarded things that once had a purpose.
Just as I knocked over a tower of Greek drachmas with a Matchbox car, the doorbell rang. I looked through a window: my mom’s new boyfriend, Pete, was standing on the front step. His black Triumph motorcycle was in the driveway. I opened the door.
“Hi, Pete.”
“Hey, Mobes, is your mom home? I wanted to see if she wanted to go for a ride.”
Pete was wearing a leather jacket, but he was beardless and had shorter hair than my mom’s other boyfriends. They’d been dating for only a month, but he smiled at me and seemed nice, so I liked him.
“No, she’s at work,” I told him. After a long stretch of unemployment my mom had found another secretarial job. She hated being a secretary, but it was the only work she could find.
Pete put on his mirrored sunglasses and looked at me. I could see myself in the lenses. “You want to go for a ride and visit your mom?” he asked.
I thought for a second. I had spent the last six weeks playing with my coins and Matchbox cars – maybe I could leave them alone for a few hours? Plus I’d never been on a motorcycle before.
I nodded eagerly. “Okay.” I hopped on the motorcycle behind Pete. He kick-started the bike, which made a sound louder than anything I’d ever heard. He put the motorcycle in gear, pulled out of the driveway, and zoomed down a suburban road underneath pines and oaks.
“You okay?” he yelled back at me.
My arms were around his waist, my face was pressed into the back of his black motorcycle jacket, and the wind roared in my ears. I’d been on speedboats, and I’d ridden my bicycle really fast downhill, but I’d never felt speed like this. “I’m okay!” I yelled back. It was a hot day, so I was wearing my standard summer gear: shorts, a T-shirt with a frog on it, green flip-flops. The air was like little whips of fire on my skin.
Pete parked at the Baskin-Robbins on Post Road. “Should we get some ice cream?” he asked.
“Yeah!” I said, amazed at what my day had become. Every summer day was the same: wake up, have breakfast, turn on the TV, turn off the TV because of Watergate, play with coins, ride my bike, play with Matchbox cars, wonder what Stratford was going to be like, eat dinner in front of the TV, sleep. But now I was a seven-year-old who rode on the back of motorcycles and went to Baskin-Robbins.
We walked in and I immediately smelled the frozen cardboard and cold sugar. Carvel was my favorite – their ice cream was soft like cake frosting – but Baskin-Robbins was still ice cream, so I had no complaints. “What do you want, Moby?” Pete asked.
“Bubblegum,” I said decisively, standing on tiptoes so I could peer through the glass at the brown cardboard tubs of ice cream.<
br />
“Bubblegum?”
“He means bubblegum ice cream,” explained the bored teenager in the Neil Young and Crazy Horse T-shirt behind the counter. Bubblegum ice cream was an unexpected miracle: it was pink and contained pieces of pink bubblegum. It shouldn’t have existed, but it did. And I loved it.
Pete bought our ice creams and we ate them next to the dumpster behind the store. “You want to go visit your mom?” Pete said, tossing the rest of his cone into the garbage and lighting a cigarette.
“Sure!” I said, hurriedly eating the last bits of my cone and trying not to swallow too much soggy napkin.
Pete kick-started his bike. I could see other people in the parking lot looking at us. I was adjacent to power – a powerful machine and a powerful man. Pete wasn’t clean-cut like my friends’ dads, and he worked at an auto-body shop, not Bear Stearns. But despite the tough exterior, he was kind. My mom liked him, and so did I.
Now and then I fantasized about having a dad and living in a real house. Pete probably wouldn’t be able to buy me new Izod shirts or get us a house on Fishers Island, but of all the men my mom had dated since my dad died, he was one of the only ones I hoped she’d marry.
I clung tightly to Pete’s waist as he pulled out of the parking lot. “Let’s go the long way!” he yelled.
“Okay!” I yelled back. The wind hit my face like a barrage of baby slaps. When Pete accelerated the wind became so fierce it turned my shorts and T-shirt into violent, snapping flags. We headed down Tokeneke Road and through the winding roads near the beach. Trees passed by like we were zooming through a blurry green tunnel.
I moved my leg and immediately felt searing pain that quickly blossomed into spectacular, raging agony. Pete sensed something and pulled over. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t even want Pete to know I was in pain. I didn’t want to screw this day up. But I’d pressed my leg against the exhaust pipe and now I had a bright-red burn, about the size of a fist, blossoming on my small, exposed calf.
“Oh shit,” Pete said, looking horrified. “We need to get you to your mom.”
I nodded, blinking back tears. I’d never even imagined pain like this was possible. I wanted to will it away and return to the bliss of motorcycles and ice cream and tunnels of blurred trees.
We pulled up to my mom’s office. Pete looked panicked. “Mobes, tell your mom I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry.” He pulled the visor down over his helmet and rode away. The roar of his motorcycle faded in my ears, leaving a silence that slowly filled with cicadas and the other grating noises of summer.
I’d never been to my mom’s new office, but she had pointed it out to me after she got the job. The company had a weird, hyphenated name I couldn’t quite remember, just like the other places where my mom had worked as a secretary: Perkin-Bowes, or maybe Pitney-Elmer.
I stepped into the office, which was brightly lit and fully air-conditioned. Phones were ringing and Xerox machines were whirring, and my mom was sitting at the front desk. She was wearing a secondhand beige suit and had pulled her long curly hair back in an attempt to make her look less like a hippie who dated motorcycle gang members.
“Moby?” she said, confused, as I stepped inside and finally started crying.
“I’m sorry, Mom, it was my fault,” I cried. “I burned myself. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
19
SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA (2001)
In my dressing room at an amphitheater in the desert outside LA I was teaching New Order how to play a Joy Division song. “Fuckin’ hell,” Peter Hook said. “We haven’t played this one since Ian was alive.”
I’d organized an outdoor summer tour called Area:One, and for the last six weeks I’d traveled around North America with Outkast, the Roots, New Order, Incubus, and a host of DJs, including Carl Cox and Paul Oakenfold. I was the headliner, but I was also the tour promoter. The idea for a weird twenty-first-century version of the Rolling Thunder Revue, with dance music and hip-hop and rock music, had come to me in a bar at 5 a.m. last February.
The rest of the world had huge music festivals, but Lollapalooza had ended a few years earlier, and apart from a new event called Coachella there weren’t any eclectic music festivals in the US. I explained my idea for a traveling festival to my managers; we then approached a production company that was eager to work with me after the success of Play. We made a list of bands and DJs we wanted on the lineup – and to my surprise the majority said “Yes” when we made offers to them.
For me the strangest thing about Area:One was being on tour with Peter Hook and Stephen Morris and Barney Sumner. I’d grown up loving New Order and Joy Division, so it was disconcerting that my heroes were one of my opening acts. It was also unsettling that I almost thought of them as friends.
A few days before, at our show just outside San Francisco, I’d worked up my nerve and walked into New Order’s dressing room to ask what seemed like a potentially awkward question: “Should we play a Joy Division song together on the last night of the tour?”
The old suburban goth in me expected them to say, “No, Moby, the past is sacrosanct and we shan’t revisit it.” But the members of New Order opened up some cans of Coors Lite and said, “Sure, why not?”
It didn’t take me long to teach them “New Dawn Fades”: not only had they written the song, it had just four chords. After we rehearsed it with an acoustic guitar, Hooky looked at me kindly, like an older brother. “Moby,” he said, “Ian would be proud.”
I smiled and pretended this was a small moment; ostensibly the guys in New Order and I were peers. But growing up in Connecticut I had been almost cripplingly obsessed with Joy Division. My high-school yearbook quote had even been the last lovelorn stanza from “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” I’d spent hours listening to Joy Division cassettes on my Walkman, as I rode my bike around Darien to stare longingly at the houses of the girls I had crushes on. Ian Curtis had died before I discovered the band, but I’d felt more of a connection to him than I did to most of my friends and family members.
I left New Order’s dressing room and walked down the hall. I’d hoped that Christina Ricci was going to come to the show, but so far I hadn’t seen her. We’d tried dating for a few weeks the previous autumn, but it hadn’t worked out due to distance and my panic attacks. Outside my own dressing room I found John Taylor (from Duran Duran) and Charlize Theron, sitting at a plastic picnic table.
I’d known Charlize since the mid-1990s, when she dated a friend of mine, and I’d met John recently. They were both very tall and they looked slightly awkward, like hyper-attractive praying mantises, folded into two of the small plastic chairs next to the picnic table.
“Hi, Charlize. Hi, John,” I said. “Do you want to come inside?”
“Andy Dick’s in there,” Charlize said, picking her words carefully. “It’s not nice.”
I opened the door to my dressing room and looked inside. Andy Dick was perched on a table with his pants down around his ankles, squatting over a vegan end-of-tour cake that my managers had given me. A group of his friends were standing around the table and chanting, “Poop! Poop! Poop!”
“I’m trying!” he yelled, his sweaty blond curls pasted against his head.
“Poop! Poop! Poop!” they shouted.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Andy’s trying to poop on your cake,” my friend Lee said.
Lee and I had grown up together in Connecticut, and he had been one of my first roommates in New York in the late 1980s. He and his wife and some of their friends had flown to LA for the last show of the tour.
“Oh, okay,” I said, only mildly annoyed that now I wouldn’t be able to eat my vegan cake.
I grabbed a beer for myself and some water for Charlize and John, and walked outside, being sure to shut the door behind me.
“So Andy Dick is trying to poop on my cake,” I informed them.
“That’s disgusting,” Charlize said.
“Well, yup.”
*
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I’d never organized a festival before, but Area:One had been a success. The weather had been perfect, the bands and DJs had all gotten along, and every show had sold out. It felt right to end this perfect tour by playing to twenty thousand people in the California desert, as I’d come to love Los Angeles. When I’d first started visiting LA in the early 1990s I’d assumed that I wouldn’t like it. My friends in New York had told me that it was the land of rapacious agents and vapid actors. But the more time I spent in LA, the more I found it to be a welcoming town of mountains, mid-century houses, and sunny vegan restaurants.
At 10 p.m. I walked onstage, starting my set with “Bodyrock” and playing for ninety minutes. Then, before the first encore, I told the crowd, “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I’m going to sing a Joy Division song with Joy Division.” Peter and Barney came onstage. Stephen sat at the drum kit. And Billy Corgan and John Frusciante, who were as obsessed with Joy Division as I was, came onstage and were handed guitars. I counted off – “One, two, three, four” – and we all started playing “New Dawn Fades.”
It was rushed and imperfect – nobody onstage had rehearsed the song more than once. But it was magical because I was singing a Joy Division song with Joy Division. During the second verse I sang as high and loud as I could, similar to a live version I’d heard on a bootleg cassette of a 1978 Joy Division concert. When I finished the verse, Peter Hook looked at me and smiled. He had tears in his eyes.
New Order, Billy Corgan and John Frusciante left the stage and, as I’d done at almost every show since 1995, I finished the show with “Feeling So Real.” I remembered one of the first times I played the song, at a small rave outside Washington, DC. I’d been full of joy and optimism then, as I was now. Unfortunately the optimism I felt in 1995 was followed by losing my American record deal, battling unrelenting panic attacks, going broke, and watching my mother waste away and die from cancer.