by Moby
But now, as I screamed joyfully over the top of “Feeling So Real” for tens of thousands of dancing people, I felt redeemed. Play had sold over ten million copies, and I’d gone from being a failure to a legitimate rock star. This world was mine. I was going to hold onto it and never let anyone or anything take it away from me.
When I walked offstage my roadie, Kevin, handed me a cold, expensive bottle of champagne. He smiled and said, “You’ve got a guest.”
Standing by a rack of guitars was Katie, whom I’d been trading emails with since we met a few months earlier in France. She was originally from San Francisco, but was working on her master’s degree in Lyons, where I’d played a show. We’d never kissed, or even held hands, but through our constant emailing I felt like I knew her. Katie looked like a beautiful blonde surfer, even though she’d never been on a surfboard. She’d grown up near the beach in California, but had spent her childhood reading books and staying away from the ocean.
I ran over to her and gave her a sweaty hug. “I flew here to see you!” she said.
“From France?”
Katie laughed. “I don’t like you that much. From San Jose.”
We walked backstage so I could introduce her to my friends. My life was surreal, but I was getting used to it: I was headlining a festival I’d organized, singing a Joy Division song with Joy Division, and being met after the show by a smart, beautiful woman I’d last seen in Europe.
I walked into my dressing room with Katie and said, “Hey, everybody, this is—”
But nobody was paying attention. They were all looking at Andy Dick, who had his pants down around his ankles again. Instead of trying to poop on my cake he was now peeing into a champagne bottle.
“Is that Andy Dick?” Katie asked me.
“Yup,” I said.
Andy noticed me. “Moby!” he said, handing me the bottle he’d been peeing in. “Have some champagne!”
Lee told him, “Andy, it doesn’t work if he sees you pissing in the bottle.”
“Oops,” Andy said. “Do you want some cake?”
20
STRATFORD, CONNECTICUT (1974)
“What’s an orgy?”
I was sitting in the back of my mom’s Plymouth, while she and her friend Russ sat in front, smoking cigarettes and talking. Russ had mentioned something about an “orgy.” I had never heard the word before, so I wanted to know what it meant.
Last August we had moved twenty miles up the Connecticut coast from Darien to Stratford. My mom’s friend Cathy had found our house in Stratford, a run-down three-story clapboard building from the 1930s, and talked my mom and some of her other hippie friends into renting it with her. In December Russ had moved in. He was a tall, thin jewelry designer from Vermont, with a red ponytail that went all the way down to his waist. He made jewelry in our garage and sold drugs out of our kitchen.
Russ snickered and turned to look at me in the backseat. “Little man, an orgy is when a bunch of grown-ups have a really nice party. Maybe when you’re grown up you can have orgies.”
My mom gave him an angry look. “Russ …” she said, warning him.
“What?” He had a broad grin. “You want to have orgies when you’re grown up, right, Mobes?”
“I don’t know,” I said, still not sure what an orgy was.
My mom and Russ had just been at the unemployment office in Bridgeport, picking up their unemployment checks and seeing if there was any work. Russ didn’t really need a job, as he was a drug dealer, but he liked getting his monthly check from the government. My mom, on the other hand, had lost her last secretarial job and desperately needed work.
Before we headed to the grocery store we dropped Russ off at our house. The house was falling apart and smelled like mildew, which is why the rent was cheap. I didn’t like the house, I didn’t like Stratford, and I didn’t like the rotating cast of gang members and hippies who came through our kitchen to buy drugs from Russ. But although my mom liked to talk to me about art and books and spirituality, she never asked me for my opinions on where we lived, and I’d learned to keep them to myself.
Cathy and my mom had gone to Darien High School together, and Cathy had been a preppy debutante before she became a hippie. I’d seen a picture of her from the early 1960s, in her white gown on the steps of the Waldorf-Astoria. Now she had wild, black hair and looked like Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane.
I thought that Russ was Cathy’s boyfriend – he slept in her room most of the time – but I wasn’t sure. A few times I’d seen him sneaking in and out of my mom’s room.
One time I asked my mom about it. She told me, “Oh, Russ is giving me massages to help with my headaches.” I didn’t know that my mom had headaches, but I was glad that Russ was contributing something to the house other than illegal hash and mediocre jewelry.
After dropping off Russ, my mom and I went to Cumberland Farms grocery store. It was February and the sky was dark and low; a light snow had turned into a cold drizzle. We walked through the fluorescent-lit supermarket aisles and filled up our basket: milk, bread, cereal, orange juice, a pack of cigarettes, and a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. We got to the cash register and the bored teenage clerk rang it up. “Nine dollars and twenty cents,” he said.
My mom looked in her wallet and froze, her face turning red with anger and embarrassment. “I only have eight dollars,” she said, her voice tight. “Mobes, we need to put something back.”
She reached for the cigarettes, but I said, “It’s okay, Mom. I’ll put the ravioli and bread back.” I hated that she smoked, but I knew that when she didn’t she was miserable and angry. We needed food, but she needed cigarettes more.
After I returned the items to the shelves she angrily asked the clerk, “Is that enough?”
He rang up the milk, cereal, orange juice, and cigarettes. “Yup,” he said, still indifferent.
In the car my mom lit a cigarette with shaking hands. I knew not to talk to her when she was this angry and ashamed, so I sat in my seat and looked through the rain-streaked windows. I wanted to turn on the radio, but instead I sat as still and quiet as I could.
When we got home she went upstairs. I put the meager supply of groceries away and poured myself a glass of diluted orange juice. When we moved to Stratford we started adding even more water to our milk and orange juice, to make them last longer. The results had tasted strange at first, but now when I had undiluted milk or orange juice at a friend’s house they tasted heavy and syrupy.
I drank my juice in the kitchen while reading an article on The Six Million Dollar Man in the Dynamite magazine my friend Ron had given me. Then I went upstairs to do homework. My new bedroom was slightly bigger than my old one, but it looked about the same, with a single mattress on the floor and a homemade plywood desk by the window. Before we moved to Stratford I had carefully rolled up my Franco Harris and O. J. Simpson posters. When we arrived the first thing I did was hang them on the wall over my bed. Even though they were getting older, I still felt proud every time I looked at them.
This year I was going to Birdseye Elementary School, about a mile from our house. It was very different from Royle Elementary, the school I’d attended from kindergarten through third grade. Royle was clean and well-funded; Birdseye was dirty and falling apart. The Royle student body was exclusively white, while Birdseye’s was 90 percent black and Latino. But after a couple of weeks I made a gaggle of new friends and enjoyed school as much as I ever had. In some ways I was happier, for while none of my new black and Latino friends were as poor as I was, they were almost all struggling and middle class, which meant I felt less shame about using food stamps and wearing secondhand clothes.
I still couldn’t invite most of my new friends to my house, though. Not because we were poor, but because Russ was selling drugs out of the kitchen.
My English homework was to write a report on the state of Oregon, but when I sat down at my desk I realized that I needed to go to the library to consult the encyclopedia. I l
oved libraries, especially in the winter. They were warm, clean, and safe.
Normally I would have walked to the library, as it was only a half-mile away, but it was getting darker outside and the rain had picked up. I walked to my mom’s room to ask for a ride. Before I knocked on her door, I hesitated. I could hear her crying. I foolishly knocked anyway, regretting it even as I did it.
From inside her room, my mom screamed, “What?”
I wanted to run away but I asked my question: “Mom, can I get a ride to the library?”
“Go away!” she yelled, sobbing. “Leave me alone!”
I walked back to my room as quietly as I could. I shut the door and went into my closet to listen to the radio. Whoever lived here before me had put a small bench in there, which I thought was exotic – I had never seen a bench in a closet before. It wasn’t an especially comfortable bench, but I liked sitting in the closet with the door closed and listening to the radio in the dark. The closet smelled like old wood, and being in there reminded me of sitting in the closets in my grandparents’ house.
I turned on the radio my aunts and uncles had given me for my most recent birthday, and I was in luck: Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 was on. I loved Kasem, a deep-voiced radio DJ who was also the voice of Shaggy on Scooby-Doo. He introduced a Cat Stevens song, and I started to calm down. My mom had a Cat Stevens record, and even though he had long hair and a beard, he didn’t seem too scary.
Listening to the radio made me feel a little better, but I was still mad at myself. I felt stupid: I knew better than to ask my mom for something when she was upset. I shouldn’t have bothered her, so her yelling at me was my fault. My job was to keep my mom from getting upset. When she was upset it was the end of the world and I’d failed.
I sat in the dark closet, listening to the radio and wondering when it would be okay for me to go back outside.
21
NEW YORK CITY (2001)
It was my birthday, and it was only 8.50 a.m. So why was my phone ringing?
I had gone out the night before with Bruce Willis and Ben Stiller and gotten drunk at a Fashion Week party. At 3 a.m., before leaving Lot 61, a bar in Chelsea, I considered trying to find someone to come home with me. But I suppressed that impulse and staggered home alone. After spending time with Katie in Los Angeles and realizing how much I liked her, I was thinking about finally working through my panic attacks and trying to have a real relationship. I had booked a car to take me to JFK later in the afternoon: Katie was flying from San Francisco to New York to stay with me for a while, and I wanted to pick her up at the airport.
Katie and I were still getting to know each other through daily emails and phone calls. I was happy – and surprised – that so far I didn’t feel crippled by panic, the way I usually did when I tried to date someone.
The phone eventually stopped ringing. I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. Then it started ringing again. Fuck. It was probably a telemarketer or a wrong number – nobody I knew would call me this early, especially not on my birthday. After five rings it stopped, and I rolled onto my other side.
And then it immediately started ringing again. I wanted to keep ignoring it, but on the off-chance it was an important call I got out of bed, ran across the concrete floor of my loft, and picked up the phone. “Hello?” I said, hungover and expecting to hear a telemarketer asking me to change my long-distance service.
“Moby!” It was Damian, one of my oldest friends, and he was screaming. “Go up on your roof!”
“Damian? What?”
“Go up on your roof!” he repeated, his voice desperate and panicky. “The World Trade Center’s been hit!”
“What?”
“Go up on your roof!”
I was walking up the stairs to my roof, a towel around my waist, when I heard the sound.
I found out later that the first plane had hit the North Tower while I was asleep. At first people assumed it was a horrifying mistake: a plane had gone off course and accidentally flown into the building. And now everyone in lower Manhattan was on their roofs to see what was happening. The sound I heard as I walked up to my roof was made by the thousands of people on the roofs around me gasping, and then screaming, as they saw the second plane approaching the World Trade Center. As I stepped onto the roof I heard the sound as it hit the South Tower.
After the first plane hit there was horror, but still innocence. People assumed what they’d seen was a terrible, terrible accident. When tens of thousands of people on the rooftops saw the second plane hit, however, they wailed not just with sorrow for the dead, but with the realization that what they were seeing was intentional.
My brain shut down, unable to make sense of what was in front of me. This was my roof, with its gray wooden deck and the weather-damaged table where I ate my pancakes and read The New Yorker. There was the outdoor shower I’d never hooked up. There were the small planters where I was trying to grow lavender and peppermint. And there, less than a mile away, were both towers of the World Trade Center, crowned with fire.
I’d seen the Twin Towers dozens of times every day, these calm, stoic sentinels at the base of Manhattan. I remembered visiting my grandfather’s office in the Woolworth Building when the World Trade Center was just a construction site: two huge holes in the bedrock of lower Manhattan. As the towers grew they blocked my grandfather’s windows, and his secretary dryly noted, “There goes my view.”
And now these impossibly huge buildings were on fire.
Skyscrapers weren’t supposed to burn, especially not on cloudless, beautiful days. None of it seemed real. The billowing orange flames looked like special effects. But they weren’t, and thousands of people were dying half a mile away from me.
Damian was still on the phone. “Moby, what’s happening?” he screamed. Then he started sobbing. I’d known Damian since the late 1980s, and I’d never even seen him get choked up. And now he was standing on Church Street in Tribeca, watching bodies falling from the towers and crying uncontrollably into his phone.
The streets below me were full of sirens – the police, the fire department, the National Guard, every emergency vehicle in New York – all headed south to the World Trade Center.
“Damian, I have to find out what’s going on,” I said. He was still crying, and I felt bad leaving him, but I needed to do something, anything. I couldn’t just stand around and helplessly watch Armageddon. “Are you going to be okay, Damian?” I asked, but his phone had gone dead.
I went downstairs, threw on my clothes from the night before, and turned on my TV, radio, and computer. I checked every news site and flipped through all the channels. Everybody was telling me what was happening, but not why or who was responsible. I wanted new information, and I didn’t need CNN to show me images that I could see from my roof.
As I compulsively flicked from channel to channel and site to site I heard a new sound. I had thought the earlier sound, of the plane hitting the South Tower, had been the worst thing I would ever hear in my life. This new sound was louder, deeper, and much worse.
I ran up to my roof and saw just one remaining tower, surrounded by an apocalypse of smoke and dust. Where was the other tower? The tower where I’d taken my grandmother for her birthday lunch the year before she died? The tower that had held thousands of people this morning?
“No,” I said quietly. “No. No.”
I fell silent and watched a plume of ash and smoke rise, billowing into the clear blue sky.
I had no way to process what I was seeing. Hundred-story-tall buildings didn’t collapse on beautiful days. Unimaginable numbers of people didn’t take the subway to work and end up dead. On the rooftops around me nobody was screaming now. They were sobbing, or like me had been struck mute.
I’d had simple hopes for today, my birthday. I’d pick Katie up at the airport, and after dinner at Angelica’s Kitchen we’d go to a few Fashion Week parties. We’d drink vodka and take some ecstasy, and then have sex on my roof.
But
now the world had ended.
I looked at the expanding horror of fire and smoke and dust. How many people had just died? “No,” I kept saying to myself, listening to the screaming sirens and watching the monstrous cloud engulf lower Manhattan.
“No.”
22
NEW YORK CITY (2001)
A month after 9/11 everyone in New York was still grieving. The fires at the World Trade Center were still burning, the streets were still full of police and military, and every fence and empty wall was covered with pictures of the thousands who had died. Most of my friends had settled on drunkenness as the only practical way of processing the unprocessable.
I was going out six or seven nights a week, and had accepted that every night someone – maybe me – was going to start sobbing.
The world had lost its mind, and it looked like the New York I knew and loved had suffered a fatal blow. Stores and restaurants were closing, businesses were going bankrupt, and people were leaving the city in droves. My relationship with Katie had ended before it really started: she didn’t want to move to New York, and I didn’t want to leave the city of my birth. Towering New York, the city that had given me and the world so much, was vulnerable for the first time in its history. I didn’t want to anthropomorphize New York and say that it needed me, but I wasn’t going to leave the city I loved when it was broken.
But I didn’t know how to process my sorrow. I was traumatized, but as I hadn’t lost anyone on 9/11 I didn’t feel like I had the right to grieve fully. So, like many other New Yorkers, I drank more, took more drugs, and went home with anyone who would have me.
One night I’d been at the Mercer hotel bar, getting drunk and hoping someone would take me up to her room, when a man named Larry introduced himself and asked me if I wanted to take a helicopter ride to Staten Island.