by Moby
I had never prayed before, but I got on my knees and made a deal with the Almighty: “God, if you can take away this terrible STD, I will stop masturbating.” A few days later my friction burns healed and I gave God the credit. He had healed me, so now I had to keep up my end of the bargain.
The first thing I did to make God happy was to take the old copies of National Lampoon into the woods and burn them while I prayed. I thought that the smell of burning cartoon porn would be pleasing unto the Lord. Then I found the Bible I’d been given in sixth grade, covered in thin red vinyl and signed by our golf-playing Presbyterian minister, and started reading it whenever I wanted to jerk off.
It worked – for an entire day. But three and a half billion years of evolution was too much for thirteen-year-old me, and after twenty-four hours of abstinence I started masturbating again. And feeling terrible guilt, and then masturbating some more.
Even though I was back to compulsive masturbation, I tried to pray and spend more time reading the Bible, as a way of keeping God from getting angry and giving me another STD. Genesis was interesting, and even Exodus held my attention. But when I got to Leviticus and the endless chapters on obscure Hebrew law, I got bored and had to go masturbate.
I didn’t know what else to do: I’d burned my cartoon pornography; I’d tried reading the Bible; I’d prayed as best as I knew how. But I couldn’t stop masturbating five or six times a day.
I knew that some of the kids in my English class were Christians, so one day I went to their lunch table to talk to them. The thirteen-and fourteen-year-old Christians looked like the other preppy kids in Darien, except they didn’t wear black concert T-shirts and gave the impression that they took several showers a day, most likely while wearing bathing suits. I asked them if there were any Christian youth groups they could recommend, and their eyes lit up. Apparently this was every Christian’s dream: to be approached by a filthy heathen who bathed only once a day and to be asked about Jesus.
I didn’t talk about masturbation because nobody ever talked about it. I only knew the word “masturbation” because I’d read about it in a Boy Scout handbook. The chapter on sex clearly stated that only bad people masturbated, and God wanted us to wait until we were married before having sex. This had been my secular junior-high-school Leviticus: codified Boy Scout law stating clearly that I was gross and that God was mad at me.
The smiling Christians at the lunch table told me about a Christian youth group at Noroton Presbyterian Church every Monday night. “I was baptized there!” I exclaimed. “That’s my church!” I felt both kismet and the guiding hand of John Calvin.
“So you’re already saved?” one of the girls asked me.
I didn’t know what she meant, but I wanted to be agreeable, so I smiled and said, “Yes!”
On Monday night I rode my green ten-speed Schwinn to Noroton Presbyterian Church. Even though I wasn’t much of a Christian, I’d spent a lot of time at the church because my grandmother helped put out their weekly newsletter. The Youth Shack, located behind the church, had been an old barn until a year before, when the new youth minister enlisted volunteers to fix it up and paint it. When the fixing and painting were finished he hung a small hand-lettered “YOUTH SHACK” sign by the front door.
The youth minister, who looked more like a twenty-two-year-old tennis coach than a saver of souls, welcomed me inside and led me to a table where twenty or so other kids were putting spaghetti and iceberg-lettuce salad onto paper plates. I immediately knew that coming to this Christian youth group had been a good idea: I loved spaghetti and they had full bottles of Italian salad dressing for the lettuce.
I saw some cute girls from school, girls with glowing skin and streaks of sun in their straight blonde hair. I’d never spoken to any of them, even though I’d known some of them since kindergarten. But here in the Youth Shack they smiled and welcomed me. All these years I’d wanted these beautiful girls to notice me, and it turned out all I had to do was pretend to be a Christian.
We ate our spaghetti, had some ice cream, and played some Christian games. The Christian games were a lot like regular games – freeze tag, duck duck goose – but as they took place on church property they were Christian. After the games we sat down to listen to the youth minister talk about Jesus.
I’d always assumed I was a Christian. I’d been baptized in the church, and everyone I knew – apart from (1) my uncle and his Jewish family, and (2) a black Muslim my mom dated for a month – was Christian. But I’d never read anything about Jesus and I’d never heard anyone talk about Jesus. I was just a Christian because I was white and lived in Connecticut.
Now, as I sat between two cute girls from my school and tried to ignore my growing erection, this youth minister told me that Jesus Christ was my friend and He loved me. I raised my hand and asked, “But what if we do things that Jesus doesn’t like?”
He smiled at me. “Then Jesus forgives you.”
What? I couldn’t understand how being forgiven for doing bad things was part of the same religion I’d been reading about in the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament seemed more like an angry mayor than a forgiving friend. But if the youth minister, who had clearly been to college, told me that I was forgiven, then who was I to doubt him?
After the talk we held hands and prayed. The youth minister asked us, “Do you accept Jesus as your lord and savior?”
Filled with spaghetti and ice cream, my head spinning from a Monday night spent with cute girls from school, and elated by the knowledge that I was forgiven for masturbating, I happily said, “I do.”
I rode home and put my bike next to the old push-mower in the garage. After brushing my teeth I said good night to my mom, who was smoking on the couch while she watched Maude.
My guilt was gone and I felt free. I still knew that sex and masturbation were dirty and wrong, but I believed what the youth minister had told me: I had already been forgiven. I got into bed and masturbated, while thinking about the cute Christian girls from the Youth Shack.
32
NEW YORK CITY (2002)
Even though Kelly and I had been making each other miserable on and off for three years, we cautiously tried to date again. A few days before the US tour for 18 began we made plans for a picnic in East River Park.
I went to teany to pick up Kelly and her new dog, Pineapple, a happy little rescue who was possibly a cross between a Chihuahua and a golden retriever. Carrying sandwiches, cake, and a thermos of peach iced tea, we walked to the park with Pineapple. As usual the East River Park was empty, apart from some senior citizens fishing in the river and a group of older Puerto Rican men riding elaborately decorated bicycles.
For the first two years after I met Kelly I’d felt like I could do no wrong in her eyes. But now that she’d been repeatedly subjected to my drunkenness and promiscuity, it was as if I could do nothing right. I wondered if one of the reasons she wanted to keep dating me was so she’d have lots of opportunities to let me know how much she’d come to dislike me.
A friend of mine who was studying to be a therapist asked me why I wanted to be in a relationship with someone who appeared to loathe me. Without hesitation, I said, “Because I can’t leave.”
“She’s not your mom,” my friend said, adopting his new professional voice. “Have you considered therapy?”
Kelly and I set up our picnic on a patch of grass near some statues of seals. It was a perfect spring day: a salty breeze wafted in from the East River, while the sun shone through the bright green leaves of trees that somehow had figured a way to stay alive in the traffic exhaust of the FDR Drive. Pineapple was delighted to be with people who cared about her, if not each other. It was such a beautiful day that Kelly even seemed less angry at me than she usually did.
We ate our vegan pan bagnia and drank peach iced tea, and while we shared a slice of peanut butter chocolate cake Kelly gently said, “I think you might be an alcoholic, Moby.”
I gave her the same lighthearted response
I had given for years to worried friends and family members: “I’m not an alcoholic, I’m an alcohol enthusiast.”
Kelly’s tender facade disappeared and she said, “Okay, then stay sober for a month.”
I panicked. A month without alcohol? Why would I, of my own free will, spend a month without alcohol – my best friend, lover, godhead, and muse? Plus I was going on tour. Even though Kelly and I were dating again, we still weren’t monogamous. Touring meant vodka and ecstasy and promiscuity. I didn’t want to stop drinking. But I also didn’t want to admit to Kelly, or myself, how terrified I was at the thought of going a month without alcohol. So I said, combatively, “Fine. I’ll stay sober for a month.”
*
The first week of being sober on tour was hard, but it gave me something novel to talk about. “I’m sober!” I would crow smugly to whichever gaggle of drunks I was with that night.
After twelve days of my sobriety experiment I had a night off in Dallas, so I went to see Tommy Lee from Mötley Crüe play a solo show. After the concert I went backstage to say hi to Tommy and a few people in his road crew who used to work for me. Tommy was dripping wet after a long show, but gave me a bear hug, anointing me with his sacramental rock-star sweat.
I was getting ready to leave the venue and head back to my hotel, where I would read a Greg Iles book and get a sober night’s sleep, when Vinnie Paul and Dimebag Darrell from Pantera came backstage with a bunch of their Hells Angels friends.
I’d never met Pantera, but I loved their records. The first time Kelly had visited me, in 1999, I’d put on The Great Southern Trendkill while I was making dinner. She liked Belle and Sebastian and Fairport Convention, and was baffled that I would put on a Pantera album while adding organic basil to a vegan spaghetti sauce. When Phil Anselmo screamed the incredibly hostile first line, she looked at me and asked, “You like this?”
“I love Pantera!” I said, adding fusilli to the boiling water.
She ran to the CD player, ejected the disc, and put on a Smiths album instead.
And now I was meeting Pantera, my speed-metal heroes. Darrell and Vinnie and their friends were all big, all bearded, and all wearing black leather pants and jackets. They looked like the people you’d see behind a bar in Alabama before you got killed for believing in climate change.
“Moby!” Darrell yelled. “We need to get you on our video!”
Someone pointed a video camera at Darrell, Vinnie, Tommy Lee, and me, and we started singing “We Are All Made of Stars.” I’d seen the legendary Pantera home movies. They were debased and remarkable. I swelled with pride that I might be included in the next one. A six-foot-eight Hells Angel with a red beard opened a bottle of Crown Royal and pushed it into my hands.
What was I going to say to him? “See, my girlfriend Kelly thinks I have a problem with alcohol, so out of respect to her I’m trying to have a month of abstinence.”
Instead I took the bottle and gulped down the whiskey. “I guess I’m not sober anymore,” I said as I gave the bottle back to the giant Hells Angel.
He looked surprisingly concerned. “You’re sober?” he rumbled.
“For two weeks.”
He laughed and passed the bottle back. “Fuck! Drink up, my man!”
After we drained the bottle of Crown Royal, Vince yelled, “Y’all need to come to the Clubhouse!”
I’d heard of the Clubhouse, Pantera’s strip club on the outskirts of Dallas, so I immediately accepted his invitation. In the mid-1990s, when I started going to strip clubs with my friend Damian, I’d felt guilt and shame. “Who are these women?” I’d wondered. “And am I a bad person for supporting this?” But my guilt abated when I realized that some of the strippers would actually date me and be nice to me.
We drove to the Clubhouse and entered like demonic royalty. Pantera were Texas gods and this was their strip club. Tommy Lee was perpetually enshrined near the top of the depraved rock-star pantheon. Then there was me, the group’s little demon imp. With our coterie of Hells Angels I felt like I was part of a dark army.
We sat at the center of the club and were soon surrounded by strippers and bottles of vodka and whiskey. A thin stripper with short blonde hair sat next to me and looked at me shyly. “Hi, I’m Cassie,” she said, shaking my hand. She was wearing a small silver bikini bottom and no top.
“Hi, Cassie, I’m Moby,” I said.
“Look, I know you’re partyin’, but I wanted to say your music helped me get through some really rough times.” Her face softened and her eyes misted over.
“Thank you,” I said, holding her hand and feeling a fragile connection, even though Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” was playing.
The six-foot-eight Hells Angel with the red beard sat down between us and handed me a bottle of Ketel One vodka. “Hey!” he yelled. “Moby’s sober!”
I drank straight from the bottle, the way a marathon runner would drink from a bottle of water. “Not anymore!” I yelled, feeling the vodka burning my throat and filling my stomach with soft fire. Everyone cheered.
“Fuckin’ Moby!” Darrell yelled. “We should start a band.”
“Seriously,” Tommy said, balancing one stripper on each knee. “We should. It would blow people’s minds.”
Starting a band with Darrell and Vince and Tommy Lee sounded like the best idea I or anyone had ever had. Ever. My own fame gave me a veneer of rock stardom, but starting a band with actual depraved rock gods would give me a strong metal carapace. We’d go on tour and stay drunk and be the most feared and immoral rock stars on the planet. “I’m in,” I said. “What are we called?”
“The Sober Fucks,” Darrell said. We laughed and drank to the Sober Fucks.
Two strippers sat next to me and started making out with each other. I looked around for Cassie, but she had disappeared. One of the strippers turned to me, kissed me with her wide open mouth, and said, “Man, I’m takin’ you home tonight.”
The other stripper took a long drink from an open bottle of vodka and said, “Well, honey, you need help bangin’ him, you just let me know.”
33
DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1979)
The best thing about my junior high school was the library. And the best thing about the library was the subscription to Rolling Stone. I couldn’t afford my own copy of the magazine, but every two weeks the librarians – who liked me because I liked books and was polite – would hold the new issue of Rolling Stone for me to pore over before the older kids stole it.
Rolling Stone was filled with long and fairly tedious articles about establishment rock bands like the Kinks and the Rolling Stones and the Who, but sometimes they deigned to slip in small pieces about new-wave and punk-rock bands. After hearing some Clash and Elvis Costello songs on the radio and seeing Sid Vicious perform “My Way” on Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, I’d decided that I liked new wave and punk rock. I had to keep this burgeoning love to myself: the cool kids in school had collectively decided that any new music made by musicians with short hair was “weird” or “gay.” If a song by Gary Numan or Talking Heads came on the radio in the lunchroom, the cool kids in their Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin T-shirts would chant “Turn it off!” until the song ended or the station was changed.
In elementary school I’d learned from other kids that David Bowie was especially “weird” and “gay,” even though I didn’t actually know what “gay” was at the time. When my mom bought Changesonebowie as one of her Columbia Record Club twelve-for-a-penny albums, I fell in love with it, but knew I could only ever listen to it in private.
In the last issue of Rolling Stone before my summer vacation, Greil Marcus reviewed Bowie’s new album, Lodger. The review was ambiguous, but the way he described the album made me long to own it. My personal record collection was small: my “Convoy” seven-inch, the first Aerosmith album (a birthday gift from the year before), and the blue-cover Beatles greatest hits album (a Christmas present). I didn’t own any new-wave or punk-rock records, but I did have a partial recording of
“I Fought the Law” by the Clash, which I’d taped off the radio with my grandfather’s old Dictaphone.
I didn’t have anything else to do in my summer vacation, so I decided my primary goal for the next three months would be to make enough money to buy Lodger.
The day before ninth grade ended I was sitting in biology class next to my lab partner, Matt. He was talking to one of his friends about a boat party he was throwing, when he caught me looking at him expectantly. “Oh, I’m having a party,” he said offhandedly. “You can come, if you want.”
We were lab partners, but we weren’t friends. Matt was cool and I was not. I’d had a moment of being quasi-cool in seventh grade, when I gave stolen drugs to Keith and his stoner friends. But after Keith was hospitalized my quasi-cool status was rescinded. Now that I’d weaseled an invite to Matt’s boat party, I had two goals for the summer: earn enough money to buy Lodger, and re-ingratiate myself with the cool kids.
For two weeks before Matt’s party I planned what I was going to wear and how I was going to act. If I wore the right clothes and stood the right way and kept my burgeoning love for new wave to myself, I would get invited to more cool-kid parties. I hoped that I might even end up with a girlfriend – although I realized that was probably too absurdly aspirational.
I mainly owned secondhand clothes, but my grandmother had given me a new striped Izod rugby shirt for Christmas. I decided it looked like something Matt and his friends would wear on a boat. The day before the party I put on the rugby shirt and my Wrangler jeans and stood in front of the mirror in my mom’s bedroom, practicing how I would stand at the party.
I tried standing with my hands in my pockets. That was okay, but I didn’t think it looked cool enough. Then I tried standing with my hands at my sides, which looked fine but felt uncomfortable. Ultimately I decided that I’d stand around all day with my arms folded over my chest. When I folded my arms and pressed my forearms together really hard, it almost looked like I had muscles.