by Moby
I’d been told never to get in cars with strangers, but no one had ever said anything about staying out of helicopters. “Of course,” I said to this random person. “When?”
“Tomorrow, 3 p.m. Be at the heliport at 27th Street and the West Side Highway.”
*
The next day I woke up at 2 p.m., had a quick breakfast, and took a taxi to the heliport. Larry met me and escorted me into a small waiting area, where he introduced me to the other people who’d be flying with us to Staten Island. There were three Cirque du Soleil performers, a club promoter I vaguely recognized, two stern older men in dark suits who looked like organized-crime figures, and a former runner-up in the Miss USA pageant.
“We’re taking two helicopters,” Larry told us. “We’ll have dinner in Staten Island at my friend’s house, and then the helicopters will take us back.”
I was happily confused: acrobats and mob bosses taking helicopters to Staten Island, which was only a thirty-minute drive away?
“Does any of this make sense to you?” I asked the former runner-up in the Miss USA pageant.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Oh, my name’s Clarice.”
“Moby,” I said, shaking her hand and feeling like I had an ally during whatever was about to happen.
We flew down the Hudson River. I didn’t want to look at the spot where the Twin Towers had been, but I had to. Seeing their ruins, piles of rubble over a hundred feet tall, brought back the torrent of anger and hopelessness I’d been trying to mute with vodka and ecstasy. I didn’t know if I’d ever wake up and not feel the steel weight of grief on my chest.
Mercifully we pulled away from lower Manhattan and landed a few minutes later on Staten Island, on the lawn of a new mansion next to the Atlantic Ocean. A small man named Steven met us. He was in his late forties, about five foot ten, and was wearing a black suit with no tie. His thinning red hair was combed straight back. “Thank you all for coming,” he said politely, as we stepped out of the wind of the helicopter rotors and the Atlantic Ocean and into his living room, with its floor of gold-veined marble. There were a few butlers holding silver trays and champagne glasses, so I started drinking.
“This is your house?” Clarice asked him.
“Yes,” he said, and grinned. “Would you like a tour?”
“Of course.”
The men who looked like mob bosses left through a side door, but the rest of us walked across the marble floor, our feet echoing in the cavernous space. “Let me tell you a story,” Steven said as we left the living room and came to an entrance hall centered around a giant jade tiger standing on a plinth. He then led us up a marble staircase that looked like it had been imported to Staten Island from an MTV video shoot in antebellum Georgia.
“I always wanted to be a pharmacist,” Steven said, “so I went to pharmacy college in the 1970s. My dad had been a pharmacist in Queens, and I wanted to have a fancy pharmacy in Manhattan on 5th Avenue and sell upscale stuff, like Aramis.” He slowly led us through a warren of bedrooms and sitting rooms, all with panoramic windows facing the Atlantic Ocean. “After I graduated from college, I borrowed some money and opened my pharmacy, but nobody came in. After a couple of months I was sweating, ’cause the guys I borrowed money from were going to take my thumbs if I couldn’t pay them back.”
Clarice and I looked at each other, suddenly understanding why the men we’d flown out with looked like organized-crime bosses.
“So I was scared, and I needed to do something to drum up business. I found some old dolls in the basement of the pharmacy, and a friend of mine who did set design on Broadway put them in the store window and made it look nice.” He interrupted himself. “Oh,” he said, “this is my bedroom.”
Steven opened a door onto a sprawling room with wall-to-wall pink carpeting. The bed was on a podium, looking at a raised jacuzzi that was in front of a wall of glass with a spectacular view of the ocean.
“The jacuzzi’s carpeted,” Clarice whispered to me.
“People started coming to my store,” Steven said, “but only to buy the dolls in the window. After a few days I ran out of dolls and I couldn’t afford to buy more. I went to a garment factory in Queens and paid some ladies to make dolls for me out of old scraps. I put them in the window and people loved them.” He led us to a small sitting room, smiled proudly, and pointed at two dolls sitting on the couch. “And that’s how I helped invent the Cabbage Patch doll.”
We were all stunned into silence. “I sold it to Coleco for a ton of money and started producing movies with my friend Steven Seagal, who lives next door.”
“Is Steven Seagal here?” one of the Cirque performers asked.
“No. He sends his regrets, but he’s in Russia with Putin.”
Clarice and I looked meaningfully at each other. I wasn’t sure whether we were really at a gold-veined marble mansion in Staten Island with the man who’d had a hand in inventing the Cabbage Patch doll, or in the desert overdosing on mescaline.
“And now, let’s eat!” Steven said, leading us down a back staircase to the kitchen, where his mom was making dinner. We all sat at a long table in the kitchen, while servants brought us platters of Italian food that his mom had prepared.
“Hey, did you see the news about the Russian guy they found on the pier?” the club promoter asked, as bowls of salad were replaced with bowls of spaghetti.
“No, what happened?” I asked.
“He was tied to some wood and had a bullet hole in his forehead.”
One of the mob bosses, who hadn’t spoken up to that point, dabbed his mouth with a napkin and said quietly, “He shouldn’t have been on Staten Island.”
“I need to drink more,” I said to Clarice, increasingly sure that we weren’t on mescaline, but not sure we were going to get out alive.
We had dessert, and after digestifs in an oak-paneled library we flew back to Manhattan. “Thank you, Larry,” I said, after we landed. “That was the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“What are you guys doing now?” he asked. “Want to go to a party?”
I was supposed to meet my friends Lee and Dale, so I asked if they could join us.
“Sure!” he said. He gave me the address of a restaurant on Park Avenue and 20th Street, which I texted to them. Larry, Clarice, and I took a taxi across town to the restaurant. Lee and Dale were waiting outside – it was a party for a wealthy real-estate developer and security was strict, so they weren’t allowed in without us.
On Staten Island I’d had three glasses of champagne, three glasses of red wine with dinner, a shot of vodka before dessert, and an Armagnac digestif, so I was well on my way to getting drunk. Lee and Dale had been drinking since the middle of the day, so they were even more liquored up than I was.
“Hey!” I said, once we were inside the party. “This is where I met David Bowie!”
Clarice’s eyes widened. “You met David Bowie?”
“Actually, now he’s my neighbor. We wave at each other from our balconies.”
“What?”
“Come over later and I’ll show you,” I told her.
She smiled inscrutably.
“Dale,” I said, once we had ordered drinks, “tell Clarice about ‘knob touch.’”
“First off, you’re beautiful,” he told her.
“She’s a Miss USA runner-up,” I said, proud of my new friend.
“Okay,” Dale continued, “‘knob touch’ is when you take your penis out of your pants at a party and brush it up against someone.”
“Eww,” Clarice said, grimacing. “And that’s sexy?”
“No, no,” he said seriously, “it’s not sexual, it’s just stupid and funny. You only knob-touch their clothes, and the person you knob-touch can’t know they’ve been knob-touched.”
Clarice turned to me. “Have you done this?”
“No,” I admitted.
The party wasn’t that exciting. It was mainly full of businessmen and real-estate developers, most notabl
y Donald Trump, who was standing a few yards away from us at the bottom of a staircase, talking loudly to some other guests.
“Moby, go knob-touch Donald Trump,” Lee said.
“Really?” I asked. “Should I?”
Donald Trump was a mid-level real-estate developer and tabloid-newspaper staple whose career had recently been resuscitated by a reality-TV show.
“Yeah,” Dale said.
“Yeah,” Clarice said, mischievously.
“Shit,” I said, realizing I now had to knob-touch Donald Trump. I drank a shot of vodka to brace myself, pulled my flaccid penis out of my pants, and casually walked past Trump, trying to brush the edge of his jacket with my penis. Luckily he didn’t seem to notice or even twitch.
I walked back to my friends and ordered another drink. “Did you do it?” Clarice asked.
“I think so. I think I knob-touched Donald Trump.”
After a few more drinks I asked Clarice, “Do you want to come to my house and see David Bowie’s balcony?”
“That’s a pretty good pickup line. Okay.”
We got in a cab and headed down Broadway, stopping at my local deli to buy beer. The afternoon of September 11 it had been filled with people silently stocking up on water and food. Nobody knew the extent of what had happened or how bad it might get. The man standing in line in front of me was covered in gray dust from the towers. His head was bowed and he was crying quietly.
A month later the deli was brightly lit at 1 a.m. and felt almost normal. Clarice and I brought a six-pack of Sierra Nevada up to my roof and I pointed out David Bowie’s balcony across the street. A mile away and to the left of Bowie’s apartment was the gaping hole where the Twin Towers had been.
Clarice took my hand and pointed. “That’s where we were.” I realized she was right – you could see Staten Island through the space where the World Trade Center had been.
“Do you think you’ll stay in New York?” I asked.
She wrinkled her nose. “I think so. And you?”
This was the city of my birth, the city where you could meet a beautiful woman and take her to your roof to look at David Bowie’s apartment, and also the city where strangers took you on helicopter rides to Staten Island and then watched as you surreptitiously knob-touched Donald Trump.
“I don’t know what would ever make me leave,” I said.
23
STRATFORD, CONNECTICUT (1975)
After school my friend Ron and I went to play in the ruins of an abandoned mansion.
Ron was one of my best friends in Stratford. Everyone called him J.J., because he was black and skinny and looked like a younger version of Jimmie Walker, who played J.J. in Good Times. The girls all loved him because he was handsome and tall for a fifth-grader, but he wasn’t interested in girls. He didn’t know he was gay, because none of us knew what gay was. We just knew that he didn’t like girls.
We wandered around the ruins, balancing on the stone foundations and imagining what the rooms looked like before the house burned down.
“When I get rich I’m going to buy this, and this is where I’m going to put the pool table,” Ron said, standing in a weed-covered lot by the crumbling foundations.
I said, “No, when I get rich I’m going to buy this and get married to Francie” – the girl who lived next door, whom I had a huge crush on – “and we’ll live here.” I picked up a chunk of concrete and threw it in the direction of the crumbling fireplace.
After we were done pretending we owned the ruined mansion we ran around in the woods for a while and found some waterlogged porn magazines. I tried to pry the pages apart with a stick, but the magazines were just a soggy mess. We did see some pictures of naked women with black mounds of pubic hair.
“Eww,” Ron said, and turned away. I stared at the pictures, with my heart in my throat. Porn was rare and illicit and usually hidden. But here it was, soggy and damaged and still powerful. I wanted to take the magazine home with me and hide it so I could look at sodden images of breasts and pubic hair whenever I wanted, but Ron wisely told me to leave it where we’d found it.
We walked back to my house. On the way Ron looked down a storm drain for some reason. “There’s five dollars in there!” he yelled.
“What?” Yes, there was a $5 bill sitting at the bottom of the drain.
“How do we get it?” he asked, more excited than I’d ever seen him.
“Let’s lift,” I said. We clutched the wet, slimy metal of the drain. “One, two, three, pull!” I said, but for all our efforts nothing happened.
“Is there another way down there?” Ron asked. We looked around for some other magical sewer entrance nearby, but unsurprisingly there wasn’t one.
“Let’s find a stick,” I suggested. We searched by the side of the road and found a long, thin stick. We put a dollop of mud on the end of it, and I lowered it slowly into the drain. On the first try the bill stuck to the stick. As I pulled it up, Ron grabbed it.
“I have five dollars!” Ron yelled, his eyes wide. We stared at the bill. It was wet and dirty from the sewer mud, but still beautiful. “I’ll give you a dollar, ’cause you helped me get it,” Ron said earnestly.
“That seems fair,” I said, as that seemed a responsible, adult thing to say in the presence of so much money.
I’d held $5 bills before: for my birthday the previous year my grandmother in New Jersey had sent me a card with a new $5 bill in it. But this was even more remarkable: it was money that had been handed to us by the benevolent gods of the storm drain.
“Why did you look in that storm drain?” I asked Ron, happy but confused.
“I don’t know!” he shouted.
We ran back to my house.
“I found five dollars, Betsy!” Ron yelled, as soon as we got inside. (My mom the hippie wanted my friends to call her by her first name.)
“Can we go to Bradlees?” I asked.
Bradlees was the lowest of low-rent department stores. Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s were at the top of the ladder, but we couldn’t afford to shop at either one of them. J. C. Penney’s was a step down, but still too fancy for us. Caldor was the poorer stepchild to J. C. Penney’s, but even it was too aspirational for us. On the very bottom rung of the department-store hierarchy was Bradlees, and that was where we did most of our shopping. Bradlees smelled like fried food and polyester, and it was invariably filled with new immigrants, white-trash families from Connecticut, and crying toddlers in pee-stained shorts.
We got into my mom’s Plymouth and drove the two miles to Bradlees. “I’m giving Moby a dollar,” Ron explained, “because he was there when I found the five dollars.”
My mom smiled. “That’s very nice of you, Ron. What are you going to buy, Moby?”
“‘Convoy,’” I said without a second’s hesitation.
I had heard the song “Convoy” on the radio and fallen in love. It was about trucks and CB radios, and it was the greatest song I’d ever heard. I had no idea what a bear in the air or a Kenworth were, but everything about the world of “Convoy” seemed exotic.
Ron took the $5 bill out of his pocket and showed it to me again. Looking once more at Abraham Lincoln’s face, I said for the twentieth time, “I can’t believe you found five dollars.”
We parked next to a huge pile of melting gray snow. Ron and I ran to the front of Bradlees, yelling for my mom to catch up.
“Come on, Mom!”
“Hurry, Betsy!”
She laughed and followed us across the wet parking lot. We knew Bradlees like it was our second home, so Ron ran off looking for candy and T-shirts, while I walked over to the record section. There were vinyl albums from Elton John and Bob Seger and the Eagles, but I had come for one thing only, and it was there in the singles section: C. W. McCall’s “Convoy.”
I picked it up carefully. Just a simple piece of vinyl in a simple paper sleeve, but it was going to be my first record. I walked back to the front of the store and waited for Ron to show up and give me the d
ollar I needed to buy the seven-inch single.
He soon showed up with a red plastic shopping basket, filled with ten boxes of assorted candy and a bright yellow Good Times T-shirt. He held up the shirt and squealed, “J.J.!”
I would have said, “Dy-no-mite!” but that seemed too obvious, so I just said, “J.J.!” too.
Ron paid for his candy and T-shirt, and then handed me a wrinkled dollar bill. It seemed like a very serious transaction, so I shook his hand and said formally, “Thank you, Ron.”
I then gave the dollar back to the cashier, and she put my “Convoy” single into a small brown paper bag. And now I had a record. A record that I’d heard on the radio. It was mine.
We dropped off Ron at his house, with his candy and his T-shirt. As he walked up to the entrance I rolled down the window and yelled, “I can’t believe you found five dollars!”
When we got home I ran inside and turned on my mom’s stereo, put the plastic 45 rpm spindle in the middle of my copy of “Convoy,” and hit “Start” on the record player. I’d listened to records on this turntable before, but they’d always been my mom’s. This was the first time I had ever played my own record. The tone arm magically knew where to go, lifting over the empty part of the rubber platter and finding the beginning of my record.
There were two seconds of hissing vinyl silence, and then came the military snares that began the record. The verses played, with their dark mix of orchestral arrangements and southern spoken-word, followed by the bright AM-radio choruses. And I was transfixed. It felt like the record was over before it had even started. But I loved my record. I loved it so much I hit “Start” again.
The tone arm lifted, I held my breath during the two seconds of empty-vinyl sound, and then “Convoy” played again. I sat in front of the stereo, still and transfixed. Three minutes and forty-nine seconds later the song ended, so I hit “Start” and listened to it again. I never wanted this to end. And it didn’t have to – I could listen to my record as many times as I wanted. I played it for a fourth time, and a fifth, motionless in front of the turntable.