by Moby
After another thirty minutes we reached the Darien exit – and drove right past it. “Aren’t we going to Grampa’s house?” I asked.
“No, we need to go to the hospital.”
My heart sank. Hospitals smelled wrong, with a veneer of disinfectant over a fog of dying. And I knew that if we were rushing to the hospital, my grandfather’s condition was even worse than my mother had let on.
We pulled into the parking lot, and it started raining. A hot August rain, not cooling the heavy air but thickening it. “Can I just stay in the car?” I asked, hoping to spend an hour playing with the radio, while my mom and our family sat and watched my grandfather die.
“No, Mobes,” my mom said, getting out of the car and lighting a cigarette.
We took the elevator to the third floor. When we walked down the hallway we saw my aunts and uncles crying and holding onto each other. My mom stopped short, her sneakers squeaking on the hospital floor. Almost whispering, she said, “No.”
My aunt Jane and my aunt Anne ran up to my mom, enfolding her. I could see my grandmother, stoically talking to an administrator, making arrangements to have my grandfather’s body brought to the funeral home. And my uncles were watching their wives grieve with my mother.
I looked through the half-open door to my grandfather’s room. He was still there. Lying on the overbleached sheets, he looked like he was sound asleep – but I knew he was dead. I wanted to go in, but I was scared. I’d never seen a dead body before.
I turned and walked away; everyone was absorbed in their own grief, so nobody saw me go. I wandered down the hallway until I found an empty alcove with a few fiberglass chairs and a vending machine making a low hum.
Growing up with a dead father I’d assumed that I had been given enough death for one person, at least until adulthood. But now my grandfather, who had always been there for me, was gone. He was going to miss my birthday on September 11, when I was going to turn eleven, the only time in my life when my age and my birthday would be the same.
Some hospital orderlies walked by me as I sat in my fiberglass chair. I didn’t want them to see me, so I put my face in my hands. I’d grieved for cats and dogs that we’d lost, but I’d never grieved for a person before. When my dad died I was only two. And now I didn’t know what to do.
With my hands over my face I thought about George, my grandfather’s dachshund. My grandfather and grandmother had adopted George the year before. Even though he worked all day, my grandfather made a point of walking him before he went to work at 6 a.m. and when he came home at 6 p.m.
My grandfather was a stoic ex-Marine and ex-college football player, but he softened up around George. When George had been a puppy I had even seen my grandfather playing with him. He didn’t know anyone was watching him, and as he played with George he was lighthearted and sweet, almost goofy.
I thought of George waiting for my grandfather to come home, looking for him and not finding him, and I started crying. I was hiding my face in my hands, but I still felt too exposed. I turned my chair so it faced the wall, pressed my hands tightly against my face, and sobbed.
26
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA (2002)
It was 2 a.m., and I was wearing a spacesuit in a fast-food restaurant with Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges.
We were shooting the video for “We Are All Made of Stars.” The director, Joseph Kahn, thought that it should be a bright, 1980s-inspired look at how Hollywood and fame had damaged people. It was an odd take on a song that had been inspired by quantum mechanics and astrophysics, but I loved the director’s other videos, and I trusted him to make something special.
Over the past two days we’d shot O. J. Simpson’s pal Kato Kaelin in a dive bar, Verne Troyer in a strip club, Dave Navarro in a crack den, Tommy Lee in a brothel, Sean Bean in a rented DeLorean, Corey Feldman in another crack den, and Angelyne, the patron saint of LA, in her pink Mustang convertible.
The nod toward the astrophysics in the song’s title was to have me wearing a decommissioned NASA spacesuit while celebrities lip-synched the lyrics. I’d grown up obsessed with all things involving outer space, and was thrilled on the first day of shooting to put on an actual spacesuit. But after a few minutes of filming I learned that while a spacesuit was perfect for staying alive in a vacuum, it wasn’t very comfy in eighty-degree January sunshine on the corner of Hollywood and Highland.
When the camera rolled my job was to stand still while other people lip-synched the words to my song. Sweat rolled down my back in thick beads, feeling like ants on my skin, but I couldn’t scratch myself because my hands were locked in thick outer-space gloves. Between takes I’d beg to have my helmet removed and to have a production assistant reach into my suit and scratch me.
I’d thought that having Hollywood legend Bob Evans lip-synching my song poolside at his condo was the weirdest moment we’d shot, but being with Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges in a fast-food restaurant was much stranger. And sadder. Everyone else we’d shot for the video had enthusiastically agreed to be in it either because they liked me or because they liked the song. But I’d heard from one of the casting agents that Gary Coleman had agreed to be in the video simply because we were paying him $500.
I tried to make conversation with Gary and Todd while we sat in the fast-food restaurant, but it was hard. Gary was laconic and morose, and I was wearing a spacesuit. A video had recently surfaced of him in his new job as a parking-lot attendant, wearing a small beige uniform and chasing down a car full of kids who’d refused to pay. It was humiliating and heartbreaking.
I wanted to tell him and Todd that I’d grown up watching Diff’rent Strokes and reading interviews with them in borrowed copies of Bananas magazine. But the cameras rolled, they sang their lines, and the video shoot for “We Are All Made of Stars” came to an end. I took off my helmet so I could thank them and say goodbye, but as soon as they were done they quietly slipped out the side door.
Diff’rent Strokes, the show that made Gary and Todd famous, seemed cursed: almost everyone involved with the show had ended up dead or damaged. Dana Plato, who played the bright and charming Kimberly, had become a drug-addicted porn star after the show ended. Eventually she died of an overdose in the desert outside LA.
While not everyone in the video had been destroyed by fame, everyone had certainly been damaged by it. Except for me. I loved fame and I knew that it would never hurt me. Before fame I had been a short, insecure, bald guy from Connecticut. Now I was a platinum-album-selling rock star who lived in hotels and tour buses and had famous friends. Fame had saved me and made me whole.
My cell phone rang as I was in my dressing room, changing out of my spacesuit and back into my jeans and black T-shirt. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered anyway. I heard a burst of loud techno and a woman’s voice yelling, “It’s Jaguar!”
Last night I had gone to the Seventh Veil strip club on La Brea with some friends from the video shoot. Before I left at 2 a.m. I had a long conversation with a stripper named Jaguar. She told me she was a business student from Ohio who was stripping in LA to make money. I had given her my number.
“Moby?” she yelled into her phone.
“Hello?” I yelled back, hoping to be heard over the din of the dance music playing wherever she was.
“Hey! It’s Jaguar! From last night! Can I come see you?”
It was 3 a.m. and I’d been shooting in my spacesuit for twenty-one hours, but all I had to do in the morning was wake up and fly to London. I gave Jaguar my hotel information and took a limo back to the Four Seasons, where I was staying. As I entered the lobby I realized that my two-bedroom hotel suite cost more per night than the entire budget for my first video, “Go,” which we had filmed for $1,500.
I still wanted to see myself as a punk-rocker at heart, somebody who rejected million-dollar videos, limousines, and $2,000 a night hotel suites. But I had just taken a limo to my $2,000 a night hotel suite after shooting a video that had a budget of $950,000. When
I thought of myself as spiritual and temperate I felt good about myself. But thinking of myself as a rock star who stayed in fancy hotel suites and had sex with strippers also made me feel good about myself.
When I considered this paradox I engaged in sophistry, telling myself that I had enlightened neural wiring that enabled me to be in the world, but not of it. The truth was that I clung to anything that made me feel good, and ignored the overwhelming evidence that I was simply a selfish hypocrite.
I took the elevator to my room, shut the door with an expensive thud, turned on the fireplace with a remote control, and sat on the overstuffed couch in the living room of my suite to wait for Jaguar.
Only a few minutes later the doorbell rang. I opened the door and Jaguar walked in, smelling like her job was smoking cigarettes in a perfume factory. Which, since she was a stripper, in some ways it was. She had long bleached-blonde hair and was wearing a thin gray metallic dress. In her stripper shoes she was slightly taller than I was.
“Hi,” I said, by way of a clever intro.
“Do you have anything to drink?” she asked, making a beeline for the minibar. She located a can of Pepsi and a small bottle of Baileys Irish Cream and poured them into a heavy crystal tumbler. She considered the drink, looking worried. Then she rooted around the minibar again and emptied two small bottles of vodka into her Baileys-and-Pepsi.
“Do you have ice?” she asked.
“No, but I can get some.”
I was in one of the fanciest hotels in the world, but when I walked down the hall I discovered that the Four Seasons ice-machine room was identical to the ice-machine rooms in Holiday Inns and Motel 6s. For some reason I’d thought that Four Seasons ice would be fancier.
When I got back to the room with a filled ice bucket Jaguar had already finished her drink and lit a cigarette. “Oh,” I said. “Do you still want ice?”
She held out the crystal tumbler and I filled it with ice. Then she went back to the minibar and made another cocktail: 7 Up, Southern Comfort, and rum. “It’s like a hangover in a glass,” I said.
“Not if I don’t stop drinking,” she said.
I was annoyed that she was smoking in my hotel suite, but I didn’t want to complain – even though she was clearly out of her mind, I still wanted to have sex with her. I leaned in to kiss her, but she pulled away.
“Do you want to do some Special K?” she asked. Special K was a powerful animal tranquilizer, ketamine, that had become a club drug in the early rave years. I’d never tried it and suspected this wasn’t the right time to experiment, since I had to be at the airport in a few hours.
“No, thanks,” I told her.
Jaguar took out a large baggie filled with white powder and started to cut multiple lines on the suite’s glass-topped table. “Oh, I’m not having any,” I reminded her.
“I know,” she said, and kept chopping up the ketamine, dividing it into four lines. She leaned down, snorted the first line, and then asked me, “Are you spiritual?”
“How so?”
“Have you read The Celestine Prophecy?” she asked.
“No,” I said. I knew of the book, but without actually having read it I’d smugly decided that it was facile, self-serving spirituality for dumb people.
“See, I saw you last night at Seventh Veil and I just knew you were spiritual,” she said, leaning down to do the second line of ketamine. “You should read The Celestine Prophecy. It’s amazing. It tells you everything.”
Her phone buzzed and she picked it up.
“I used to teach Bible study,” I said, “but now I tend to be more of an undefined agnostic.”
She was ignoring me, staring intently at the glowing screen of her phone. She got up from the couch and walked to the window, where she talked quietly and furtively for ten seconds. Then she sat down and did the third line of Special K. “That was N——,” she said, naming one of the best-known male models on the planet. She snorted the fourth line, her eyes visibly shimmying in their sockets. “He’s at the Hermitage. I’m going to meet him.”
Before standing up she looked around my suite, trying to figure out whether staying at the Four Seasons and having sex with a rock star was a better option than driving to the Hermitage to have sex with a famous male model. Aside from the living room where Jaguar had done her Special K, my $2,000 suite had a fireplace, two bedrooms, a dining room, and a patio overlooking palm trees and a pool. She walked to the door, deciding on N—— the model over Moby the musician.
I wanted to be annoyed, but spending twenty-one hours in a spacesuit and then being subjected to her five-minute whirlwind of sugary drinks and perfume and cigarettes and ketamine left me feeling like I’d watched a particularly stressful episode of Storm Chasers.
As she walked to the door in her stripper shoes, she stumbled and almost fell. “Are you okay to drive?” I asked.
“What? Ha, what? Oh, sure, I always drive high.”
I was going to remonstrate with her, but she walked away.
“Read The Celestine Prophecy!” she called as she walked down the hotel hallway. “It’s spiritual, like you.”
27
NEW YORK CITY (2002)
I was dressed for a trip to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, even though I was only walking two blocks to David Bowie’s apartment. A brutal cold front had settled over New York City, and to stave off the sub-zero cold I was wrapped in a long gray scarf, a faux-fur-lined jacket, heavy-duty Patagonia gloves, and a black balaclava.
The week before David had been at my apartment to rehearse for a charity event we had agreed to do together. He got off the elevator on the fifth floor, by my front door, held out a coffee for me, and said, “Delivery boy!” He sat down on my couch and placed the deli coffees on the coffee table. I took my guitar out of its case.
“I have an idea,” I said, aware that David Bowie, a demigod, was sitting in my living room and I was talking to him as if we were equals. “What if for the event we played ‘“Heroes”’ on acoustic guitar?”
He smiled kindly and said, “Sure, let’s give it a try.”
I’d practiced playing the chords to “‘Heroes’” the night before, rehearsing by myself on the off-chance that he would agree. I quietly strummed the opening D-major chord. David took a sip of his coffee and started singing.
I was somehow able to focus on playing, even though I was having an out-of-body experience: David Bowie was in my living room, sitting on my couch, singing the most beautiful song ever written. During the second verse his voice rose dramatically and I had to remind my little alcoholic heart to keep beating.
After our thirty-minute rehearsal was over and we’d finished our coffees, David mentioned that he was having dinner at his apartment the following week with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. He smiled and said he’d love for me to join them. “Iman and I can even make you something vegan,” he added.
The first few times I’d gone to David’s building I’d entered under the suspicious squint of the burly doorman at the entrance. But now I’d been to his apartment enough times that the doorman just looked at me and said, “Go on up.”
I got in the elevator to go to the eighth floor and started shedding my winter garments. The elevator door opened, I turned right, and I stood in front of David and Iman’s front door. I’d been to their apartment fifteen or twenty times, but every time I stood here, about to knock, I froze. I was seconds away from crossing the threshold into David Bowie’s apartment, with its long hallways, hypermodern but warm chef’s kitchen, dark wood library, and banks of tall windows looking at the hole in the sky where the Twin Towers had been.
What I could never process was that each time I entered, I was visiting David Bowie as a friend. As a peer. Well, “peer” seemed absurd. Bowie was the greatest musician of the twentieth century, while I was a bald degenerate with an accidental hit record. He was a demigod; I was most likely a fluke.
I knocked and heard footsteps. The door opened and there he was: David Bowie. He was
wearing gray slacks and a black T-shirt, and he smelled like expensive soap. “Look at all of this!” he said, regarding my jacket and gloves and scarf and balaclava. “Are you walking to Canada later?”
“I hate being cold,” I said, stepping inside.
“Here, let me take your things.”
I paused for a tenth of a second, marveling at the wrongness of David Bowie “taking my things.” You didn’t show up in Heaven and hear God say, “Here, let me take your things.”
He stowed my winter gear in their hall closet and we walked into the kitchen, where Iman was cooking and talking to Laurie Anderson.
“Moby!” Iman said, and hugged me.
She looked like sculpted royalty: tall and radiant and poised. But even though she looked like a beautiful alien queen, she was always remarkably down-to-earth, kind, and opinionated. We’d spent election night together in 2000, and as we realized that Florida hadn’t been called for Al Gore, she got into a testy but funny exchange with Dennis Hopper, who, disappointingly, was a Republican.
“Do you know Laurie?” Iman asked.
“Yes. Hi, Laurie,” I said, giving her a polite kiss on the cheek. I saw Laurie often at fundraisers and art openings, and she always looked happy and mischievous underneath her spiky Johnny Rotten hair.
“And you know Lou?” Iman asked.
Lou Reed was wearing a shimmering metallic jacket, holding a drink, and looking at David and Iman’s books.
“Hi, Lou,” I said. He gave me a long, warm hug. I always expected Lou to hate me, as he seemed to hate most people. But for some reason I couldn’t fathom, he seemed to like me.