Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  “Moby,” he said in the distinctive voice I’d heard on “Heroin” and “Pale Blue Eyes” and countless other iconic songs. “How are you?”

  “I’m good.” I paused awkwardly, suddenly aware I was surrounded by alien gods. “Cold.”

  He looked around. “But it’s warm in here.”

  “Moby walked all the way over from his apartment,” David said, joining us.

  “But you live across the street,” Lou said, confused.

  “I know. I’m a big sissy.”

  “You’ve been to Moby’s apartment?” David asked, almost proprietarily.

  “When I was building my studio I went to Moby’s studio to look at the carpentry,” Lou explained.

  My brain had involuntarily compartmentalized itself. One part was having a calm, pleasant conversation with a couple of friends while dinner was being prepared. The other part of it was screaming, Lou Reed and David Bowie know where I live! They’ve been to my house! Fuck! The world is upside down!

  “Oh, Moby,” David said, “have you ever seen a Stylophone?”

  “No. What’s that?”

  “Let me show you.” We left Lou and Laurie and Iman and walked down a long, quiet hallway. I’d been here dozens of times, but I always felt like every inch of the apartment was worthy of reverence. We passed his bedroom (where David Bowie slept) and his bathroom (where David Bowie peed and brushed his teeth) and came to his studio (where David Bowie worked).

  David’s home studio was modest, more of a guest bedroom with some equipment than a sprawling, elaborate place to record music.

  “I’m just finishing the next album,” he told me, “and today I recorded a Stylophone part on a song about Iggy.”

  David held up a small pink cardboard box. I opened it and took out the world’s smallest synthesizer. “You play it with a pen!” he said, beaming. “It might be the best instrument ever invented.”

  I turned it on and dragged the metal stylus across the keys. It sounded broken and scratchy, but surprisingly beautiful.

  “You can get them on eBay, so I’ve been buying them up,” David said.

  “Can I hear the song?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s not mixed.”

  “That’s okay.”

  He inserted a disc into his studio’s CD player, pressed “Play,” and lit a cigarette. The song started slowly and quietly. “It’s called ‘Slip Away,’” David said, smoking. The song progressed and I recognized some references to The Uncle Floyd Show, a strange children’s show I had watched in the early 1980s. The song built, and then built some more, beautiful and vulnerable and full of longing. After four or five minutes it ended and we sat there, David smoking and me wondering if I was allowed to gush like an honest fan.

  “David, it’s beautiful,” I said, sincerely.

  “Thank you.”

  “No, really, it is. And I loved the Uncle Floyd references.”

  “Iggy and I used to get high and watch Uncle Floyd and fall on the floor laughing. It was our favorite.”

  “It’s a beautiful song. Thank you for playing it for me.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette. “Should we go see about dinner?”

  The song had stunned me. It wasn’t ironic or cool. It wasn’t dance-influenced. It wasn’t even particularly modern. But it was one of the most beautiful and vulnerable David Bowie songs I’d ever heard.

  During dinner we kept up a constant stream of chatter – except for Lou, who seemed content to eat and to drink his vodka and soda. We talked about the war in Iraq, about our disdain and contempt for Republicans, about new movies, about the cold, about our new albums, about everything. My vegan food was average, but I didn’t care: I was dining with gods and goddesses on Olympus.

  After dinner we sat in the library, where David told us about an island called Mustique and the man who had founded it, but who at some point had been banned.

  David was happier and more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. He stood up and started pantomiming, imitating this strange, sad man. “You know, I taped a documentary about him and Mustique. Would you like to see it?” David asked.

  “Of course!” Laurie and I said. David found the VHS tape and put it on, providing his own narration and fast-forwarding to the most absurd bits, like the founder of Mustique crawling through the jungle trying to get a glimpse of Princess Anne.

  Laurie and Iman and I were smiling and laughing, but Lou had fallen asleep on the couch. Laurie reached over and carefully took the drink out of his hand, making sure he didn’t spill it on himself.

  The movie ended and Lou woke up with a start, confused for a moment, but then remembering where he was. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Eleven,” I said. “Time for us to go?”

  We all walked down the hall. I mummified myself in my winter gear, while Lou and Laurie donned their jackets, which were not as warm as what I was wearing, but far more stylish.

  “Thank you for a wonderful night,” I said to Iman, giving her a hug and a kiss.

  “Oh, hold on,” David said, and ran down the hall. He came back holding a Stylophone. “Here, you can have this,” he said, handing me a faded pink box adorned with a cartoon of 1960s hipsters dancing to synthesizer music.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I bought five of them on eBay!” He pressed the pink cardboard box into my hands. “You’re the disco king, you take this one.”

  I gave him a quick hug. “Thank you, David. And your new song really is beautiful.”

  He looked a bit uncomfortable but smiled and said, “Thank you, Moby.”

  Lou and Laurie and I rode down in the elevator together, quiet and companionable. “That was so nice,” I said.

  Laurie smiled. “It really was.”

  “What did he give you?” Lou asked.

  “A Stylophone – it’s a strange old synthesizer.” I held it out to him.

  He took the box and studied it earnestly as we walked across the lobby. On eBay this was an antiquated trinket, a relic you could buy for less than $50. But in David Bowie’s hands it was an instrument capable of heartbreaking beauty.

  Lou took it out of its box, and I turned it on for him while Laurie and the doorman watched. The Stylophone made its distinctive, thin sound. Lou looked up at me. Then he looked back at the Stylophone. Dragging the stylus around on the tiny keys, he smiled at the broken music.

  28

  DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1978)

  On the playground of Middlesex Junior High I heard some of the other seventh-graders talking about how their older brothers were trying to buy pot.

  “Oh, I have pot,” I said with a nonchalance I didn’t feel.

  I was weird and small and poor and didn’t have a dad. Scott Dekker, Keith Morgan, and Nigel Draycott were three of the coolest seventh-graders in our school. We had the same homeroom, but I’d never registered on their status radar.

  “No, you don’t,” Scott scoffed.

  “I do. I’ll show you,” I said.

  “Okay, bring some to school tomorrow.”

  I knew where my mom kept her pot: in a black lacquered box on top of the upright piano she’d been given by her grandmother. After school I had a couple of hours before my mom got home from work, so I took a small amount of pot from the plastic bag in her black drug box. Also in the box: rolling papers, a small pipe, a few Quaaludes, and some partially smoked roaches. I got a sandwich bag from the kitchen and put the pot in it, adding a little bit of oregano to make it seem more substantial.

  The next day Scott and Keith and Nigel pulled me into the boys’ bathroom by our homeroom. “Here it is,” I said triumphantly, handing over the illicit plastic bag.

  There was a hush. None of them had ever come into contact with illegal drugs, especially not at 8.30 a.m. in the boys’ bathroom at Middlesex Junior High. “Whoa,” Nigel said, examining the bag reverentially.

  “Okay, Moby, cool,” Keith said, looking at me with something resembling respect. They walked out of the bathroo
m, while I stood next to the blue toilet stalls, breathing in the smell of disinfectant and powdered soap.

  Keith had said I was cool. And all I’d had to do was to give them drugs I’d stolen from my mom.

  *

  After I proved myself to Keith by giving him drugs he invited me to have a sleepover at his house – so long as I brought more drugs. His parents were out of town, he told me, so we were going to drink vodka and do the pot and hash I stole from my mom, along with the pills in his own stash.

  Keith’s other source for drugs was his older sister, who had been institutionalized for schizophrenia. When he visited her at Silver Hills, the local facility for rich people with mental illness and addiction issues, she gave him the antipsychotics she’d been prescribed.

  “Your parents are really gone?” I asked. I’d never had a sleepover with someone whose parents weren’t there. It made me nervous, but I wanted Keith to keep thinking I was cool.

  “They’re in North Carolina, so we can get high!” he said cheerfully.

  Keith’s neighbor, Vicki, was looking after him while his parents were away. She was a cute blonde sophomore at Darien High School. She’d invited a bunch of her older friends to Keith’s house and she was bringing a case of beer she’d stolen from her parents’ garage.

  Vicki, Keith and I watched The Muppet Show before the party started. “I’m going to get so high tonight,” Keith said, during one of the commercial breaks.

  “Me too!” I said. But I was scared.

  I wanted to hang out with the cool kids. I craved their approval and longed for invitations to their houses and boats and country clubs, but almost everything about them scared me. They were relaxed and confident, but they weren’t actually very nice. And none of them liked the things I liked: science fiction, books, animals, Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, the Beatles.

  The doorbell rang and Vicki’s friends started showing up. Someone handed me a joint and I inhaled, making sure not to cough. I’d started smoking pot behind Royle Elementary School at age ten, when I realized that it let me hang out with the older kids. Since then I’d smoked pot enough times to learn how to inhale without coughing.

  The truth was that I hated the way pot made me feel: scared and paranoid. But stealing pot from my mom and smoking it with cool, older kids was my only entrée to their world.

  “Whoa, you’re a pro, little dude,” one of Vicki’s older friends said to me. He was on the tennis team at Darien Country Club and his dad worked in finance, but with his Molly Hatchet T-shirt and his long black hair he looked like an underage roadie for Lynyrd Skynyrd.

  Keith and I made cocktails out of vodka, orange juice, brown sugar, and Dr. Pepper. We used brown sugar instead of white because it seemed more sophisticated. “These are good,” I said, surprised that the alcohol wasn’t making me gag. Some of the alcohol I’d tried before, like beer and whiskey, made me retch. Whereas sweeter drinks, like champagne and crème de menthe, tasted wonderful.

  The night progressed and more older kids in Led Zeppelin and Yes and Rolling Stones T-shirts showed up, contributing pot, beer, and vodka. Keith and I smoked the pot and hash I’d stolen from my mom, drank the vodka he’d stolen from his parents, and took some of the antipsychotics that his sister had given him.

  By midnight everything was spinning and I was having a hard time standing. Vicki was making out with one of her high-school friends. A group of football players in the kitchen were drinking beer and listening to a Jimi Hendrix tape. I walked over to them, slurred, “I’m so high,” and fell down.

  I assumed I’d earned their respect, as I was legitimately fucked up. But through the haze of drugs and alcohol I heard one of them say, almost worried, “If he’s like this now, what’s he going to be like in five years?”

  And I got scared. All of this terrified me. The big kids. The music. The drugs. I realized that I’d intentionally stepped into my mom’s world. I wanted to have friends, and I wanted to wallow in the legitimacy granted by the cool kids in black concert T-shirts, but all this darkness scared me.

  While I was lying on the floor having my epiphany, the lights turned on and the music stopped. I heard a loud, deep, adult voice say, “What the hell is going on?”

  “Oh shit,” one of the football players said.

  It was Vicki’s dad, checking on his daughter’s first overnight babysitting job. “What the hell are you people doing?” he yelled.

  I stood up on the yellow linoleum floor, slowly and unsteadily, like a baby deer.

  Vicki’s dad was wearing khakis and docksiders and a faded blue Izod shirt. He was tall and terrifying, like a clean-cut Viking in suburban clothes.

  “Dad?” Vicki said, suddenly looking scared and young.

  “This is how you repay our trust, young lady?” he bellowed.

  She started crying.

  “Where’s Keith?” he asked. “His parents need to hear about this right now.”

  Vicki’s dad had said the most dreaded word imaginable, even for the coolest kids: “parents.” Teenagers in Darien stole whatever they could get their hands on. They drank and smoked and had sex, all the while hoping that their parents would never find out. Even the toughest fifteen-year-old in a faded Blue Öyster Cult T-shirt was terrified at the prospect of his parents catching him sneaking out of the house with a six-pack of stolen beer.

  “Where’s Keith?” Vicki’s dad asked again. The formerly cool kids in the kitchen were now staring at the kitchen floor, abashed. “You kids get out of here,” Vicki’s dad said, pointing at them. “I’m calling all your parents tomorrow.”

  I followed him as he walked down the thickly carpeted hall. He found Keith passed out on a bed in the guest room, wet from his own urine and vomit.

  “Keith,” he said. “Wake up, Keith.” He shook him. “Keith!” he yelled, slapping him lightly. Keith didn’t respond.

  I watched from a few feet away, terrified. I was thirteen years old, high, and drunk. And I was looking at my new friend, who might be dead.

  “Vicki, call 911,” Vicki’s dad yelled. He saw me standing in the doorway. “Who are you?” he said angrily.

  “I’m Moby,” I said, on the edge of tears, my voice small. He ignored me and went back to Keith.

  “Keith, wake up.”

  He hadn’t woken up, but I had. The fear had washed the drugs and alcohol out of my system, leaving me wide-eyed and terrified. The EMTs arrived, briskly intubated Keith, and put him on a gurney. He wasn’t dead, but he was nonresponsive and possibly in a coma. One of the EMTs asked me, “What did he take?”

  I knew that pot and hash were illegal and I didn’t want to get in any more trouble, so I said, “Vodka and some pills from his sister.”

  After the ambulance took Keith away, Vicki’s dad looked at me and said, “I’m taking you home, mister.” We walked next door and got into his BMW.

  “How old are you, son?” he asked, as we drove down the quiet country streets.

  “Thirteen, sir,” I said, willing myself not to burst into tears.

  “Thirteen,” he said, shaking his head. “Thirteen…” He started to tell me to get my act together, but then shook his head and stopped, driving me the rest of the way in silence.

  We pulled up to my grandparents’ house, where my mom and I had been living since my grandfather died. Vicki’s dad rang the doorbell and banged on the door. After a minute the lights turned on and my mom came to the door in her beige nightgown and green terrycloth robe.

  “Are you this boy’s mother?” he asked, tall and stern.

  “Yes,” my mom said, blinking away sleep. “What happened?”

  “He and his friends were drinking and doing drugs. His friend almost died,” he said, seething. He got back in his car, conveniently not acknowledging that his daughter had organized the party and provided us with most of the alcohol.

  “Mobes, is this true?” my mom asked.

  I finally started crying.

  “Okay,” she said. “Go to bed. We�
�ll talk about it in the morning.”

  She led me to my bedroom and I cried myself to sleep.

  When I woke up in the morning everything seemed clean and quiet and calm. The sun was touching my yellow-and-white striped sheets. I could hear cicadas and a distant lawnmower. I walked into my mom’s room, where she was folding laundry.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said calmly.

  I hesitated, not sure what I should say. I didn’t want to admit that I’d stolen drugs from her black lacquered drug box, so I said, “Some big kids gave us drugs and beer, and then Keith passed out and went to the hospital.”

  She lit a cigarette and looked out the window. “And how do you feel?” she asked.

  I didn’t know how to describe how I felt. I felt like a piece of cloth on a muddy field after a football game. I felt like a dog who had volunteered to be kicked. I felt like a little boy who’d stumbled into a cave filled with demons.

  “I feel terrible,” I said, and started crying again.

  “It’s okay,” my mom said, patting my hair in the sunlight. “It’s okay.”

  29

  NEW YORK CITY (2002)

  In the spring of 1987 I dated Melanie: dark, beautiful, French, and living in Connecticut for a year. As we gradually overcame the language barrier we realized that we didn’t actually have much in common, but I saved up money for a plane ticket and we flew to France and spent the summer together in Paris anyway.

  I was worried the Parisians would know I was American, so at a used clothing store near Notre Dame I bought a striped sweater, an old navy-blue blazer, and secondhand black factory-worker shoes. When I put them on I looked more or less like Marcel Duchamp and the other French surrealists I’d been obsessed with in high school. I wanted so badly to seem Parisian that I tried smoking unfiltered French cigarettes. And I spent hours in a tea salon called L’Ebouillanté – at first to fit in, but then because I loved it. L’Ebouillanté was in a seventeenth-century house in the Marais. I’d sit at a table on the second floor and drink pots of Darjeeling and read Foucault and Rimbaud and send pretentious black-and-white postcards to my friends in Connecticut.