by Moby
The summer in Paris ended, Melanie and I broke up, and I went back to living in my mom’s house by I-95. I was insufferable, peppering my speech with French phrases I’d picked up over the summer and constantly reminding everyone I knew that I’d spent a few months living in Paris. I also told everyone that I’d had a realization: my new life goal, in addition to making records and being a philosophy professor, was to someday own a small tea shop like L’Ebouillanté.
*
In 1999 I’d been DJing at a small club in Boston, where I met a girl named Kelly. She’d heard Play and liked it, and after my set she brazenly walked up to me and said, “You rock.”
Kelly was my dream girl: smart, blonde, bookish, and compulsively devoted to old new-wave music. She even wore vintage Joy Division and Cure pins on her tweed jacket. We dated sporadically from 1999 to 2001, and two months after 9/11 decided that we should try actually being boyfriend and girlfriend.
One morning after a long night of vodka and MDMA I told her about my old dream of owning a little tea shop. Her eyes lit up. When Kelly and I met she had just finished working in the Clinton White House, but now she was bartending at a tourist restaurant in midtown New York. “I’d love to run a little tea shop,” she said.
We started looking at Lower East Side real estate and soon found a store that had previously been a hair salon. The landlord was desperate to rent to us: after 9/11 all his tenants were either going out of business or fleeing lower Manhattan.
After we signed the rental agreement Kelly and I went on my roof to talk about what we would call our new business. The sun was setting while we brainstormed, so I held my hand up to block the light. Then I choked up and had to stop talking – I realized I could see the sunset only because the Twin Towers were no longer in the way.
“Are you okay?” Kelly asked.
I had broken down crying a few times with Kelly after 9/11, but now some time had passed and I’d gotten better at reining in my emotions. “I’m okay,” I told her, and we resumed our discussion about the tea shop’s name. I wanted to call it “Platypus” – for some reason I had a weird fascination with platypuses, and thought that was a good name for a small tea shop.
But then Kelly said, “What about ‘teany’?”
“‘Teenie’?”
“‘Teany,’” she repeated, frustrated. She went downstairs to get a piece of paper and a pen and wrote “teany.” She handed it over to me. “See? ‘Teany’ because we’re small, we’ll sell tea, and we’re in New York. ‘Teany.’”
I thought for a second, looking for flaws in her creative logic. But no, she was right. It was a great name. “That seems perfect,” I said.
There were a few hurdles in opening teany. One was that neither of us had ever opened or run a business. Another was that neither of us had any restaurant experience, other than being customers.
I was finishing my album 18 and getting ready to do a three-month promo tour, followed by what my managers expected to be a two-year concert tour. So we agreed that I would put up the money and Kelly would learn how to do everything else.
We wanted teany to be modern, but not too modern. Clean, but not sterile. Thoughtful, but not pretentious. On my way to the airport to fly to Singapore, the first stop on the 18 promo tour, I summed up the ethos in a text: “just make it cute :-)”
While I was gone, Kelly sent me menu suggestions and music playlist ideas and dessert possibilities and links to teacup purveyors and pictures of tile samples and fabric swatches and updates on all of the myriad things required to open an adorable two-hundred-square-foot tea shop.
After three months of talking about myself and my new album to strangers I returned to New York and a 90 percent finished pristine little tea shop. I also came back to a girlfriend on the edge of collapse. Kelly had been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, doing everything. I felt some guilt, like a Victorian father who goes off to war and upon his return is handed a well-mannered child by a beleaguered wife in need of institutionalization.
We decided to open teany in May 2002, a week before I was leaving for the 18 concert tour. I invited everyone I knew to the opening party, from Matt Groening to the Strokes to David Bowie to Norah Jones to Jimmy Fallon to Claire Danes to TV on the Radio. On opening night I showed up an hour late to the party, happy and already a bit drunk.
Kelly’s tireless work had paid off: teany looked amazing. The sconces gleamed softly through the plate-glass window, the stainless-steel countertops shone like in an expensive Dutch bistro, and the new white tile was pristine. Everything was perfect.
Except for Kelly, who was exhausted, pale, and one inch away from a nervous breakdown. She took me into our basement office and started crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, cluelessly.
For me the world was my vegan oyster. I was a rock star releasing the much-anticipated follow-up to Play. I was getting ready to play arenas and headline festivals. And my dream from fifteen years earlier had come true: I was now the proud owner of a jewel box of a tea shop.
“I can’t do this,” Kelly said, holding herself and shaking.
“What, teany?”
“No, I love teany. I can’t be just one of the people you’re sleeping with.”
Oh.
Kelly and I were boyfriend and girlfriend, but we had an open, non-monogamous relationship. She dated other people, or so I assumed. And I dated other people, as I well knew. In fact, everyone knew that I dated other people. My promiscuity in lower Manhattan had become a thing of legend. A recent magazine article about me had quoted Richard Johnson, a gossip columnist at the New York Post, as saying, “Moby gets more ass than the toilet seat in a ladies bathroom.” I knew I should feel some shame or remorse about my slutty ways, but I didn’t. I told myself I had no reason to feel guilty about sleeping with other people while being Kelly’s boyfriend, because she and I were in an explicitly open relationship.
“You want to talk about this now?” I asked, baffled and annoyed that she was interrupting my golden years with legitimate concerns.
“I have to,” she said, looking at me with heartbroken eyes.
For years I’d told myself and my friends that what I really wanted was a loving relationship with a wonderful woman. I’d talked endlessly about my fantasy of being married and having children. But now I was at a turning point. Standing in front of me was a wonderful woman who wanted to marry me and have my children. I’d avoided relationships because they gave me panic attacks, but I also realized that I’d been lying to myself: I ultimately wanted fame and debauchery, not domestic bliss.
I was about to travel around the world to play in hockey arenas and football stadiums. I had my own tour bus with a personal bedroom suite. And I’d just hired an assistant, Fabienne, whose primary job was to throw after-show parties for me. I’d met Fabienne in a bar and hired her after we had sex in the backseat of a taxi. I wanted to carpe every single diem as compulsively and degenerately as I could.
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound magnanimous, “out of respect for you, let’s just be friends.” She clenched her jaw, and in that moment I could see the loathing she’d built up for me.
I knew that for the two years we’d been dating she had been in love with me, waiting for us to get married and make New England babies together. She’d watched while I’d circled the globe, every day trying to outdo myself with drunkenness and dissolution. When we met she’d seen me as a sensitive musician from Connecticut who was having a licentious phase. But now she knew that I didn’t want my degeneracy to be a phase. I wanted to kill off the sensitive musician and replace him with a hardened rock star.
In my mind I hadn’t done anything wrong, as I’d never lied to Kelly. I’d never cheated on her – we’d been in an open relationship – and I had been profligate within the letter of the law we’d agreed upon.
“Fine,” she said, and stood there, seething.
“Hey, you did a great job with teany,” I said, trying to mollify
her.
She looked like she wanted to punch me in the face.
“Kelly?” I asked, not so much contrite as afraid of being punched in the face on the opening night of my restaurant.
“We’re done,” she said bitterly, and pushed past me.
I walked up the tenement stairs and heard the sound of our party. Teany held only twenty or thirty people, so the hundreds of people who’d shown up were on the sidewalk and street, drinking our champagne and beer and eating the cookies and crostini that Kelly had made.
I leaned against the iron railing in front of teany and drank a beer with Matt Groening and one of the bosses at my record label. “I wanted to tell you,” the executive said, “18 has shipped gold and platinum in twenty different countries.”
“Congrats, man,” Matt said, shaking my hand with his big bear paw.
Kelly walked by. “Matt,” I said happily, “this is Kelly, who single-handedly opened teany.”
“Great job, Kelly!” he boomed.
Kelly glared at me and then nodded at Matt. “We just broke up,” she told him. “Your friend’s a fucking asshole.”
30
NEW YORK CITY (2002)
For my first interview on Charlie Rose I was still drunk from the night before.
After a day of interviews promoting my new album, 18, I’d gone out drinking with Andy Dick and his gaggle of degenerates. Andy and I weren’t close, and he repeatedly told me he was sober – but he was always up for going out until 5 or 6 a.m. We’d gone to bars and nightclubs until 3.30 a.m., when we were kicked out of a strip club on the West Side Highway for being too loud and unhinged.
We rounded up our expanding posse of strippers and degenerates, took cabs across town, and at 4 a.m. went back to my apartment. Some people I’d never met disappeared into my bathroom to smoke crystal meth, while Andy and some of his friends had an orgy in my tiny bedroom under the stairs.
I was watching this group of strangers ruin my sheets when a tattoo-covered woman with bright-red hair took my hand and led me to the roof. It was a few minutes before dawn; the city was quiet and the dark horizon had an edge of blue. “I have a present for you,” she said, pulling down my pants.
As she took my penis in her mouth I looked down through the skylights and saw some other people I’d never met doing what I assumed was coke on my breakfast table. After I came, she stood up, smiled, and introduced herself: “I’m Liz.”
By 7 a.m. everyone was gone, leaving my apartment covered in drug residue and littered with empty champagne and vodka bottles. I had to leave at 8.30 a.m. for a long day of promo – an interview with Charlie Rose, a bunch of foreign press interviews, a record signing in Times Square, and my first appearance on Saturday Night Live – so I wanted to sleep for an hour. Since my post-orgy sheets looked like they belonged in a badly run Victorian hospital, I lay down on my living-room couch.
I tossed and turned for thirty minutes, and then my alarm went off. I stood in the shower, wondering if I could get through the next eighteen hours without sleep. After putting on a pair of black jeans and a black T-shirt, I walked out of my building and into the limo that was waiting for me. As we sped uptown I smiled at the bright morning sky through the tinted windows and decided that I was simply too happy to be tired.
At the Charlie Rose studio a production assistant asked if she could get me anything. “Coffee, please,” I said. “I haven’t been to sleep and I’m hungover.” That sounded like a more palatable confession than admitting I was still drunk.
She smiled. “It’s okay. We’re all hungover too.”
A different production assistant led me to a dark room lined with TV cameras and escorted me to a black chair. Charlie Rose walked in and sat opposite me in his own black chair. He was a venerated interviewer, but with his bloodshot hound-dog eyes, it seemed to me that he might also have been recovering from the night before.
Charlie asked me about the success of Play, my relationship to Herman Melville, and 9/11. After fifteen minutes our interview ended and I ceded my chair to Paul Auster. Paul was handsome in ways that I assumed made every other straight male writer in Brooklyn jealous. “I love your work,” I said to Paul as I stood up.
“And I love yours,” he replied as he sat down.
I wanted Paul to see my interview and be surprised by my erudition and my charming-but-insincere self-deprecation. I wanted him to be impressed enough to invite me to boozy dinner parties at his Brooklyn brownstone, where I’d join his cadre of hard-drinking, Paris Review-reading friends.
I left the television studio feeling the patina of legitimacy. As I walked out to my limo a delivery guy on a bicycle passed by me. “Yo, Moby!” he yelled, excited.
“Hey!” I yelled back. And then as I sat in the back of my limo I smiled at myself for being a man of the people, magnanimous even to delivery guys.
The limo took me a few blocks to a hotel just off Times Square, where I was whisked by record-label employees to the penthouse. I spent three hours there talking to journalists about my opinions, my creative process, my idiosyncrasies. I wanted to share everything so that the journalists would tell their friends and bosses and readers that I was bright and kind, the best person they’d ever interviewed.
I was like a prostitute: I spent prearranged chunks of time in hotel rooms being intimate with strangers. The difference, I told myself, was that I was motivated by enthusiasm, not money. Well, enthusiasm and a longing to be the most famous person in the world.
After the interview my limo took me to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, where a line of fans were waiting to meet me. The line went from the downstairs signing table, up a long flight of stairs, out the front door, and up 7th Avenue.
I’d always been interested in the nature of God and manifestations of divinity. As security guards whisked me from my limo to a folding table stacked with copies of my record, I wondered if I was actually divine or perhaps coming into my divinity. Maybe I was a new god. A benign god. But a complicated god, with a secular dominion over sweetness and filth. Mercurial, but only if someone kept me from my holy sacraments of sex and alcohol and fame. Maybe I was Bacchus or Baal reincarnated? Any type of divinity seemed fine, even if borrowed from a demon.
The autograph session lasted for ninety minutes. I tried to give everyone who’d waited in line what they were looking for. A signature, a smile, a moment in my presence – small tokens of my blossoming divinity. I hugged a few crying women, even though my security guards asked me not to.
After the signing my security guards cleared a path through the horde and placed me back in my limousine. The driver took me to 30 Rock, where the Saturday Night Live studios were. I’d grown up watching SNL, and now I was walking through the entrance of the towering art deco facade of Rockefeller Plaza, where it was shot.
A new phalanx of security guards brought me to my dressing room. I looked around at the black mini-fridge, the brown sofa, and the white side table, and realized I’d been in this very room before, when I was on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Recognizing a late-night TV show dressing room felt like a confirmation of my fame and legitimacy.
I closed the door to the dressing room – my dressing room – and tried to sleep on the couch. But I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. My synapses were alive; the air around me was alive. Every minute of this day was everything I’d ever wanted, and better than I’d ever thought possible. So I poured myself a cup of coffee, resolving to stay more awake than I’d ever been.
Tonight, after I performed on Saturday Night Live, I’d be even more stratospherically famous than I already was. I vaguely assumed that at some point I’d have enough fame, but I found it hard to imagine that scenario.
My tour manager, Sandy, had arranged for an acoustic guitar to be left in the dressing room. I strummed and sang “We Are All Made of Stars,” which I was going to perform later. Then, sitting alone in my dressing room, I played “Lucky Man,” the 1970 song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. As I played, I thought that maybe
I was the lucky man, with his perfect life. He was royalty, longed for and beloved by the world.
Then I reached the last verse, where the lucky man’s hubris and foolishness destroys him. Suddenly remembering the lyrics, I abruptly stopped playing and put down the guitar. Fame might destroy other people, I thought, but not me. I would be the lucky man who figured out how to avoid the last verse of the song.
31
DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1978)
I’d started masturbating, even though I was sure it was wrong and that I was making God angry. Some hormonal switch had been thrown in my brain, and now every woman I saw was painfully erotic: my English teacher, Jane Pauley on the Today show, every girl in my junior high school. A few weeks earlier it had never crossed my mind to masturbate, but now it was all I could think about.
I was a Protestant Portnoy, masturbating before school, during school, after school, after school again, and before bed. Sometimes for erotic fodder I would think about a woman I’d seen on TV or at school; sometimes I would look at naked women in old copies of National Lampoon that my mom’s friends had left lying around the house.
I had never talked about sex with my mom or anyone, but I’d always known that it was scary and bad. In third grade I’d seen a copy of The Joy of Sex and was frightened by the drawings of furry men doing unspeakable things to slightly less furry women. And whenever I’d seen or heard my mom or her friends having sex it terrified me.
Since I knew that sex was dirty and wrong, I reasoned that pleasuring myself was also dirty and wrong, but I couldn’t stop. After a few weeks of furious masturbating I gave myself friction burns on my penis. I didn’t know that these burns were just the result of rubbing myself raw; instead I believed that God had punished me and given me a terrible STD.