by Moby
After the twentieth listen I knew I had taken things to an absurd length, but each time I played it I felt like I was in the presence of magic. So I hit “Start” and listened again. And again. After the thirtieth or fortieth listen, my mom yelled, “Dinner’s ready, Mobes!” and I finally stopped listening to “Convoy.”
“You love your record?” my mom asked, while she spooned spaghetti onto my plate.
“It’s so good,” I said, still in a trance after spending two hours listening to the same song over and over.
We ate spaghetti, while the cats slept on the kitchen floor. After dinner, as we were doing the dishes, my mom said, “Oh, Kip’s coming over later.”
I didn’t like Kip. My mom had met him at the gas station in Bridgeport where he worked and where she bought cheap gas. He had long black hair and smelled like motor oil, and he always looked at me like I was a stray dog who was in the way. My mom had dated other guys who worked in gas stations and auto-body shops, but they all seemed like they’d made the effort to bathe before coming to our house. Also, if Kip was coming over, it meant that he and my mom would be in the living room and I wouldn’t be able to listen to my record.
“Okay, I’ll go do homework in my room,” I said. I consoled myself with the knowledge that I’d be able to listen to “Convoy” the next day.
*
In the morning I came downstairs for breakfast. My mom was sitting at the kitchen table, clutching a cup of coffee and looking pale. She was never happy in the morning, but she seemed particularly upset. I never asked if she was okay; I just tried to be quiet, because I didn’t want to make things worse. But this time she asked me, “Mobes, are you okay?”
I stopped spooning sugar onto my Cheerios. “What do you mean?”
“Are you okay? After last night?”
I was confused. “What do you mean?”
She stared at me, growing upset. “After what happened last night?”
Now I was extremely confused. “What happened?”
“You really don’t remember?”
I stood by the refrigerator. Time slowed and the light from the old glass ceiling fixture felt soft and distant. I had no idea what she was talking about, but when I tried to remember the night before my brain got foggy. “No, I don’t know,” I said. “After I did my homework I went to sleep.”
She lit a cigarette and looked me in the eye. “After you went to sleep Kip came over. We started fighting, do you remember?”
“No,” I said. “I was asleep.”
“He was screaming because I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. You know, be his girlfriend anymore.” I was relieved because I didn’t like Kip, but I was also worried because my mom tended to be at her saddest when she didn’t have a boyfriend. “But then he stopped screaming and he grabbed a big knife and said, ‘Is it going to be you or me? One of us has to die.’” She took a drag from her cigarette and collected herself. “He came after me with the knife. That was when you appeared.”
“I what?”
“You appeared. You were standing there. But we didn’t hear you come into the kitchen. You just showed up. Kip dropped the knife and ran out the door.”
“Was I asleep?”
“No, you were awake. But you didn’t talk. When Kip left you went back to your room.”
I’d never not remembered something, but I didn’t remember this, even though it happened just a few hours earlier. My first thought was, No, I was still in bed, but that was impossible. But in that moment I knew that somehow I had been in bed, but I’d also been in the kitchen. Remembering felt like moonlight through Kleenex, but I felt like this had happened before: being in two places, being asleep but being able to see other places. I didn’t know how, but I knew. I also knew that to say “I was in both places” would have sounded crazy.
So I just said, “I guess I was sleepwalking?”
My mom’s face softened and tears welled in her eyes. “You saved my life, Mobes.”
24
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH (2002)
“You’ll be on after Kiss,” the production manager said, consulting his clipboard, “and before Bon Jovi.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“I guess so,” he said blandly, and walked away.
I was in Salt Lake City to perform at the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics. The lineup made no sense to me, but was wonderful in its own absurd way. In addition to Kiss, Bon Jovi, and me, the performers included Willie Nelson, Earth, Wind & Fire, Christina Aguilera, and Donny and Marie Osmond. The closing ceremony was in a stadium that held fifty thousand people, and I had been told that the Olympic organizers were expecting a global TV audience of over a billion people.
These were the first Olympics after 9/11, so when I landed at Salt Lake City airport it looked like a sterile Mormon war zone. Soldiers clad head to toe in black body armor, wielding massive black automatic weapons, were planted between Starbucks and Cinnabon. In Salt Lake City itself the same black RoboCop soldiers were on almost every street corner. The crowning touch to these apocalyptic Olympics: Vice President Dick Cheney was going to be in the audience while I played.
“If you want to meet the vice president, we could maybe arrange it,” my liaison told me in the car ride from the airport into town.
“No thanks,” I said. I was polite enough not to say that as far as I was concerned, Dick Cheney was an architect of evil, the devil’s henchman. He’d run Halliburton, a company that had made billions of dollars from oil and munitions, and as vice president he was the embodiment of everything that was wrong with the Bush administration and the Republican Party.
In a perfect world I’d meet him face to face and be courageous enough to ask him how it felt to profit from war after he had dodged the draft himself. At which point the Secret Service would put a bag over my head and send me to Guantanamo Bay. It was probably best to stay in my dressing room, eat vegan bagels with peanut butter and jelly, and confine my opinions to posts on MySpace and Friendster.
After going over my set with the orchestra conductor and the leader of the fifty-person choir I would be playing with, I walked into the backstage green room to get a cup of tea. Willie Nelson was there in an American-flag bandana and denim jacket, joking with Jon Bon Jovi, who looked like a male model moonlighting as a rock star. Gene Simmons, who was in full makeup, was talking to one of the members of Earth, Wind & Fire, towering over him because of his platform boots. Christina Aguilera, with a giant mane of hair that made her look like the singer from Twisted Sister, was looking for the bathroom. And Donnie and Marie stood around, looking clean and Mormon and smiling at nobody in particular.
The logistics of the show were complicated: some of the performers were actually going to be playing on the ice in the middle of the stadium, while Olympic athletes skated around them. I was glad not to be on the ice: even though I’d grown up in Connecticut, I’d never learned to skate.
*
The lights in the stadium went down, fifty thousand people cheered, and the orchestra played the celebratory and plaintive Olympics theme music.
The Olympics made me sad because the majority of people competing would end up losing. Whenever I watched the Olympics I tried to be happy for the winners, but I was always aware of the specter of failure. The thought of anyone spending their life preparing for one particular competition and then losing in front of a global audience seemed almost too depressing for words.
Earth, Wind & Fire played on their ice stage, while skaters swarmed around them. They were followed by Willie Nelson, then Kiss. And then it was my turn.
Before my song started I smiled at the one-hundred-and-fifty-person orchestra and the fifty-strong choir, all dressed head to toe in white and all freezing cold. I heard my name announced to Dick Cheney and a billion other people, played “We Are All Made of Stars,” and three minutes later my performance was done.
As the announcer boomed out Bon Jovi’s name to the vice president
and a global television audience, harried security guards rushed me offstage and into a golf cart. They drove me to a second stage, where the rest of my band were waiting: we were going to play three songs once the main televised portion of the ceremony ended.
“It’s not as big as the main broadcast, but it’ll still go to a few hundred million people,” the broadcast coordinator told me contritely. Only a few hundred million people.
My roadie Kevin put a guitar over my shoulder. “That was weird,” he said drily. “Were you cold?”
“No,” I said, realizing that I should have been, since the temperature was below zero.
Overhead there was a fusillade of fireworks and then a deafening rumble. Directly above us were two giant dinosaur heads, each the size of a school bus. Their giant mechanical mouths started moving and Donnie and Marie’s voices filled the stadium. They were doing a comedy routine. As dinosaurs.
Even though we had only thirty seconds before we went live, I motioned Kevin over to me. I asked him, “This isn’t real, is it?”
He shrugged and said, “Nope.”
The comedy routine ended, Kevin scurried off the stage, and the giant dinosaurs with the voices of Donnie and Marie said, “Here’s Moby!”
I’d grown up watching The Osmonds cartoon show. I’d also grown up listening to Willie Nelson, Kiss, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Tonight I felt like I was in a reality show written by Proust and Hunter S. Thompson. I played “Bodyrock” and “Natural Blues,” and during our last song a few thousand white balloons cascaded down the tiers of the stadium. When we hit the final note the sky erupted with even bigger fireworks. Donny Dinosaur and Marie Dinosaur said, “Let’s give it up for Moby!” And then they introduced Christina Aguilera.
I walked offstage, down a long concrete tunnel and directly into a minivan waiting to take me back to my hotel. This was the strangest part of touring: standing onstage in front of huge crowds of screaming people, and then moments later being in a quiet vehicle or dressing room.
To fill the silence I asked the driver to turn on the radio – but some Toby Keith song about 9/11 was playing, so I quickly asked him to turn it off. He left me at the hotel where I was staying, and I went to the lobby bar looking for debauchery.
Soft jazz was playing on the stereo and a few tourists covered with Olympic paraphernalia were drinking state-mandated light beer, but the bar was almost as quiet as the minivan. After playing for a billion people I wanted a full-tilt rock-star night. I wanted to drink and take drugs and end up in a bed full of naked Olympic athletes and beautiful TV presenters. But it seemed like for the duration of the Olympics any degeneracy had been shipped out of the city, possibly to Halliburton-themed detention centers in the desert.
I had to be up the next morning at 5.30 a.m. for a 7 a.m. flight to LA, so I gave up my degenerate dreams and went to my room, where, tediously and responsibly, I went to sleep.
*
The Olympic organizers had chartered two private planes for the musicians who played at the closing ceremony: one heading to Teterboro airport in New Jersey and one to Van Nuys airport near Los Angeles. I was going to shoot the music video for “We Are All Made of Stars” in LA, so I got on the westbound plane with Kiss, Willie Nelson, and Earth, Wind & Fire. I shuffled quietly onto the plane, sat down, and fell asleep before the plane took off.
I woke up as we were landing, blinking and rubbing the grit from my eyes. Theoretically this was glamorous, sharing a huge private plane with some of the most iconic musicians on the planet after playing a show for one-fifth of the population of the planet. But the most famous musicians in the world were napping, drinking coffee, or playing Tetris on their phones.
After we taxied to the gate I got my backpack from the overhead compartment and stepped into the aisle with the other musicians. I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around. Gene Simmons was standing behind me; even without his platform boots he dwarfed me. I’d never met him, but he looked at me as if we knew each other well.
“Moby,” he said, staring into my eyes, “you are a powerful and attractive man.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Oh, huh, I wouldn’t say that.”
He just nodded and said, “Hmm,” as we walked off the plane under a cloudless LA sky.
25
CHESTER, CONNECTICUT (1976)
I was swallowing pebbles.
It was my third day at summer camp, and I hated it and wanted to go home.
On my first day, after my mom dropped me off, I tried politely asking the counselors if they’d let me leave.
On the second day I’d lied, saying that my grandfather was dying (which was true) and that after his multiple strokes I was the only person who could understand him (which wasn’t). I even used the term “intracerebral hemorrhage” in an effort to impress the head counselor, but it hadn’t worked and he hadn’t let me leave.
On the third day I tried throwing myself down a flight of stairs, like the boy in The Tin Drum, but only got a small bruise on my shoulder after rolling down a few steps. After this failed attempt at self-harm I went back to my cabin and wrote a letter to my mom, begging her to pick me up and bring me home. Before sending it I sprinkled tap water on the ink so it would blur and she’d think I was crying uncontrollably while writing it.
Now it was the morning of day four, and I was in the woods swallowing pebbles, hoping that would make me sick enough to be sent home. I’d thought that swallowing pebbles was going to be challenging, but they were small and smooth and went down like hard vitamins.
My mom had sent me to camp for two weeks while she moved us out of our house in Stratford and back into my grandparents’ house in Darien. My grandfather had suffered a series of strokes (intracerebral hemorrhages) earlier in the year and now he was nonresponsive.
I’d gone to see him in his hospital room before being dropped off at camp. Holding his hand, I said “Grampa” over and over. But his eyes stayed shut while he slowly breathed in and out. After each labored exhalation there was a terrible pause – a silence that, every time, sounded like the end of his life. And then the core of his still-functioning brain stem would tenaciously keep him alive and his chest would slowly rise.
As I grew up in the middle of hippie chaos my grandfather had been my stable hero – everything my mom’s boyfriends weren’t. He had short hair and a job. He smelled like gin and tonics and barbershop aftershave. He took me to my first (and only) Yankees game. And he let me drive his riding lawnmower, even when I was so small that my feet didn’t reach the pedals.
Sometimes I would sit in the back of his closet, just to feel closer to him and the things that smelled like him. Just touching the old wool overcoat he wore to the train station in the winter made me feel safe. And now he was dying. Or, practically speaking, dead. Nonresponsive. All his strength and stability were gone.
*
I hadn’t been involved in the choice of Camp Hazen. One day my mom announced she was sending me to camp; two weeks later she dropped me off.
Camp Hazen was a generic YMCA camp somewhere in eastern Connecticut. The cabins, made out of old wood, smelled like damp cotton sleeping bags and Eisenhower-era dust. The lake was warm and had the same thick tea color as every other lake in New England during the summer. The humid air was filled with gnats and biting black flies. It was a normal, unremarkable New England sleepaway camp. And I loathed it.
After lying to the counselors and sending letters home and throwing myself down stairs and swallowing five pebbles but not getting sick, I accepted that I was stuck at Camp Hazen for two whole weeks. So, like any inmate, I endured. I canoed. I ran. I made a lumpy ceramic ashtray for my grandfather. And I told people that I wasn’t a girl.
Camp Hazen was a boys’ camp, but a rumor was flying around that they had started letting girls attend – and that I was the first. In between making misshapen ashtrays and trying to hurt myself, I kept explaining to the other campers that I was, despite my shoulder-length hair, a boy. (My mom th
e hippie hadn’t cut my hair in a year.)
After two weeks of bucolic incarceration the bright morning of my liberation arrived. At 8 a.m., after our last breakfast of eggs, bacon, and Hawaiian Punch, I sat on a bench in front of the dining hall, looking for my mom’s car with the orange public-radio sticker on the front bumper.
By 10 a.m. most of the parents had come and most of the campers were gone. “Do you want to come inside, Moby?” one of the counselors asked.
I wanted to say, “I’m sure that deep down you and this camp are okay but for some inexplicable reason I hate this place with every fiber of my being and by association I hate you and right now the only meaning I have in my shitty little life is waiting for my mom to drive through the gate in her used car to take me away from this prison.”
What I actually said was, “No, thank you.” And I waited meekly, sitting next to my secondhand red sleeping bag and an old suitcase my mom had used when she went to college in the early 1960s.
At 11 a.m. she arrived in our rusting car. I leaped up and started waving, even though she was only a dozen yards away. As soon as she pulled up I threw my sleeping bag and suitcase in the back and jumped into the passenger seat. We drove away, and as we passed through the front gate I rolled down the window, stuck my head out, and yelled, “I’m free!”
My mom laughed, but I could tell she was distracted. Before getting on I-95 we stopped at a diner to get lunch. “Mobes,” my mom said, as I was eating a tower of pancakes, “Grampa isn’t doing well.”
“I know,” I said, confused as to why my mom was reminding me of this.
“No,” she said, tears coming to her eyes, “he’s gotten worse.”
What could possibly be worse than having multiple cerebral hemorrhages and being nonresponsive in a hospital bed?
We finished breakfast and drove west on I-95. We passed Stratford, which surprised me for a moment – I had forgotten that I didn’t live there anymore, and that the whole reason I’d been sent to camp was so that my mom could move us back to my grandparents’ house in Darien. I was upset about my grandfather being sick, but I was secretly happy that I was moving back to Darien to live in my grandparents’ normal house and to see my old friends.