by Moby
The day of the party I put on my outfit, practiced standing in front of the mirror one last time, and rode my green Schwinn to Matt’s family’s private dock. It was a shiny new dock, made out of aluminum – but nobody was there.
I walked out to the end of the dock, smelling the brackish salt water and blinking against the sun reflecting off the aluminum. I squinted: in the distance I could see a few boats and some people who looked like Matt and his friends, waterskiing. I almost waved to get their attention, but then I realized it was easier to get on my bike, ride home, and watch TV.
*
A week later my friend Rob called to tell me that Wee Burn Country Club, the most expensive and exclusive country club in Darien, was hiring caddies. Rob didn’t need to work – his dad was a senior vice president at Exxon – but he knew I was looking for a job. (Rob and I had become friends over a shared secret love of science-fiction books like A Wrinkle in Time and Dune.) Caddying sounded promising, even though I’d never held a golf club and didn’t know anything about golf.
I needed a job if I wanted to buy Lodger. My mom gave me fifty cents a week to mow the lawn and do chores around the house, but at that rate it would take me almost three months to buy a new album. And I couldn’t get a real job because I was only thirteen. Rob told me, however, that you didn’t need to be sixteen to be a caddy.
As soon as I hung up the phone on Rob I rode my bike to Wee Burn and parked it by the caddy shack, a crumbling wooden shed next to the staff parking lot and out of sight of the members. I knocked on the door and heard a muffled “What?”
I opened the door. Inside it was as hot as a southern prison. A very round man in a blue golf shirt looked up from behind a battered desk. He was sweating profusely. “Yeah?” he said.
“I’d like to fill out an application for caddying?” I said uncertainly.
He looked me over. “You ever caddy?”
“No,” I admitted.
“You know how to golf?”
“No,” I said again.
He rolled his eyes. “Okay. Get one of the caddies to show you around and wait. If we need a caddy, I’ll get you.”
By the side of the shack a group of caddies were seated around a table, playing cards. They were all high-school kids, sixteen and seventeen years old. Working up my courage I interrupted the game as meekly as possible: “The guy asked me to ask someone to show me around?”
A couple of the kids looked at me, then back at their cards.
“Tom,” one of the card players said, without even looking up, “your turn.”
“Shit,” said a blond caddy. He threw down his cards and stood up. He was wearing brand-new Adidas sneakers. “Okay, this way,” he said, walking away. I ran to catch up with him.
“You ever caddy?” Tom asked.
“No.”
“You play golf? Your dad play golf?”
“No,” I said. “My dad’s dead.”
He stopped and looked at me with something approaching sympathy. “Oh. Sorry. Well, you put your name here,” he said, pointing at a piece of paper on a clipboard. “When it’s your turn you’ll get called.”
He walked over to a small putting green and picked up an old bag of golf clubs. “Here, put this on,” he said, handing me the bag. I stumbled a little bit under the weight, but hoisted it over my shoulder. “So it’s not complicated,” Tom said. “You carry the bag and you give the douchebags a club. You’re little, so they’ll give you the old fuckers. They walk slow, don’t have as many clubs, and tip for shit.” He paused. “Why are you doing this?”
“I need a job so I can buy records,” I said, leaving out that I actually needed only one record, David Bowie’s Lodger.
“You can’t cut lawns?”
“We don’t have a mower.”
I could see him doing some quick calculations. I didn’t have a father and I needed a job to buy records, but my family didn’t have a lawnmower. So I was poor.
He finally smiled at me. “Okay, I’ll help you figure this out,” he said. I almost started crying with gratitude.
I didn’t get called to caddy that day, but I showed up the next day, put my name on the sheet, and sat with the other caddies playing Hearts, the only card game they played. All the other caddies went out a few times a day, but I just sat around playing Hearts and drinking lukewarm tap water out of a plastic cup.
I returned for a third day, and around noon the round man in the office came out and read my name off the sheet. “Moby?”
“That’s me,” I said.
“Okay, you and Phil get these next two.”
Phil and I stood up. Phil was the smallest of the caddies, except for me. We walked around the corner and met our golfers, a married couple in their eighties wearing head-to-toe white golf clothes. We picked up their bags and followed them.
“Phil, can you let me know what I should do?” I asked as we approached the first tee.
“Hand them clubs, try not to pass out or kill them,” he said under his breath.
I walked behind the wife as she and her husband slowly made their way around the course. By the ninth hole I had sweated through my shirt. Younger, faster golfers passed us by, their caddies smirking at Phil and me as we stood with our geriatrics. When we finally reached the eighteenth hole, after four and a half hours, I was covered in perspiration and mosquito bites. “Thank you, young man,” the elderly woman said to me. “Here’s something for you.” She handed me four quarters.
When I got back to the caddy shack the other caddies started applauding. “You got the Wilsons,” Tom said, looking up from a hand of Hearts. “They are the slowest. The cheapest. The worst golfers you’ll ever get.”
But I had a dollar in my pocket, so I was 20 percent of the way to Lodger.
The next day I went out with the Wilsons again, and this time the wife gave me $1.50. “I remember you from yesterday,” she said as she counted out six quarters.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, after carrying her golf bag for almost five hours. Now I was 50 percent of the way toward buying Lodger.
The next day was rainy and only a few caddies showed up. By 2 p.m. I was all alone in the caddy shack. The round man emerged from his office. “Moby,” he said, “I’m sending you out with Mr. Landon. Don’t fuck it up – he’s a real golfer.”
Mr. Landon looked like all the dads I met in Darien. He was tall and seemed like he’d be more comfortable commanding troops than walking around a golf course in yellow slacks. He handed me his bag of clubs, which weighed about twice as much as Mrs. Wilson’s, and we headed out. We walked in the drizzle, our feet squishing in the grass. He asked for clubs, I handed him clubs.
At the eighth hole he asked whether I thought he should play a wood or an iron to get off the fairway and onto the green. “An iron?” I said, not sure which clubs did what.
He nodded and I handed him his club. He hit the ball, sending it onto the green. “Good call,” he said, granting me a small smile.
After his round Mr. Landon gave me $5 as a tip. An entire $5 bill. I thanked him, went straight to the caddy shack, got my bike, and rode in the rain to Johnny’s Records.
Johnny’s had started as a head shop in the early 1970s, selling drug paraphernalia to the bored children of rich parents, but a few years ago Johnny had started selling records alongside the bongs and the rolling papers. I walked in, headed for the “B” rack, and there it was: David Bowie’s Lodger for $4.99. I looked at the other David Bowie records. Changesonebowie for $5.99. A Ziggy Stardust picture disc from Japan for $12.99. And a cutout of “Heroes” for $2.99. With the money I’d made from caddying, and some of the allowance money I’d saved, I had almost $10. I realized I could buy both Lodger and “Heroes”. I didn’t know what “Heroes” was, but it was David Bowie and it was only $2.99, so it had to be good.
I brought my records to the front desk. Johnny and my mom had been friends in high school. He snarled at most of his customers but he was always kind to me, even when I browsed
through his records without buying anything. “You know this is a Mexican pressing?” Johnny asked, gesturing at the copy of “Heroes”.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The vinyl’s really thin,” he explained.
I would be playing it on my mom’s twenty-year-old record player with one small speaker, so I didn’t think thin vinyl was going to matter. And it was $2.99. Plus it was a record. In a cardboard sleeve with a picture of David Bowie on the front. It was precious, even if it was thin.
I had a twenty-five-minute bike ride home in the drizzle. The whole way I cradled my records in my right arm. By the time I got home the brown paper bag was dissolving in the rain, but the records were safely shrink-wrapped.
I unwrapped the plastic and took out my new David Bowie albums. First I listened to Lodger. The music made no sense to me, but I loved it anyway. My favorite song on the album was “Look Back in Anger,” which felt grand and beautiful.
I was sitting in front of my mom’s record player in the living room of our small house by the freeway. We had a sofa from the Salvation Army and a chair covered with a tapestry my mom had found at a garage sale. The rain stopped while I was listening to the album and sunlight leaked tepidly through the windows. My cat, Tucker, was asleep on the floor next to me, and our new puppy Queenie was lying on the couch. But listening to “Look Back in Anger” made me feel like I was flying with huge, sad angels in a faraway place, possibly with mountains.
A musician my mom had dated a few years ago had left a guitar at our house when they broke up. And recently I’d started taking guitar lessons with Chris Risola, a teacher who my mom had met one day when she was at the Stop & Shop. He was teaching me chords and scales and some basic music theory, but I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever be able to play a song like “Look Back in Anger,” which hurtled along like a Japanese train.
After listening to Lodger I put on “Heroes”. At first it sounded menacing and illicit, like I was peering into an adult world. Listening to “Joe the Lion,” I closed my eyes. Gone was our Connecticut living room with musty furniture and sleeping animals. With the sweet absence of light I was in a dark bar with unspeakably sad people. “Joe the Lion” was subterranean music, made by thin, pale people who lived in subway tunnels.
Then “‘Heroes’” came on. I’d heard this once before, late at night on the New York classic-rock radio station WNEW. I didn’t even know what instruments made these sounds. Guitars? Synthesizers? Growing up obsessed with science fiction I’d thought that the future was going to be sterile and safe. “‘Heroes’” sounded like a different future, full of beauty and regret. It was sad and calm, like an abandoned space station.
I read the lyrics about eking out small, quotidian victories, and it all made sense. The world would always defeat us. Cruelty would always win. But for a brief moment we could find love and a quiet happiness. “‘Heroes’” ended and I moved the record needle so I could listen to it again. It ended again and I listened to it again. This was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard. Why was “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” on the radio twenty times a day, but this perfect song was relegated to cheap vinyl?
Eventually I turned the album over to hear side two. Aside from “The Secret Life of Arabia,” it was all quiet music, without drums and vocals, like music from a late-night science-fiction film. I didn’t understand – I’d never heard of almost an entire side of an album that didn’t have words or drums. But David Bowie was my new favorite, and I figured he knew what he was doing. He was an alien-lizard musician from London, England; he’d made multiple albums and had been on the radio and TV. So if I didn’t understand this non-song “ambient” music, it was clearly my fault.
My only job was to listen to side two of “Heroes” until it made sense.
34
NEW YORK CITY (2002)
“So why does Eminem hate you so much?”
Every interview I did involved some version of this question. Having been raised by progressives and a steady diet of Norman Lear TV shows, I had learned at an early age that bigotry and discrimination were antiquated and wrong. The 1960s and 1970s had their shortcomings, but at least they’d given lip service to tolerance and inclusion.
In the early 1990s Bill Clinton was elected president, alternative rock exploded, and Nirvana and R.E.M. and other modern rock icons reaffirmed what we all knew: racism was wrong; anti-Semitism was wrong; misogyny was wrong; homophobia was wrong.
Then something strange happened. In the late 1990s musicians started unapologetically glorifying misogyny and homophobia in their lyrics and videos. I believed we were trying to leave bigotry in the past, but too many musicians were singing and rapping about abusing women and gay people. Being the product of hippies, Norman Lear, and Sesame Street, I spoke up. I assumed all the other musicians who’d been raised by progressive families would also object, but I was wrong. I quickly realized that in speaking up against homophobia and misogyny, I was largely alone.
I criticized some of Eminem’s lyrics, even though it was clear that he was talented. I even got the sense that his misogyny and homophobia were, to some extent, poses. But I also understood that his fan base of junior-high-school students didn’t understand the nuances in his songs. They just knew that their platinum-album-selling hero was rapping about hurting women and gay people.
In early 2001 I was doing an interview at the MTV studio in Times Square. I sat down in their familiar black cushioned chair, while the familiar sound person clipped a lavalier microphone onto my jacket. For the hundredth or maybe five hundredth time I was asked, “Why does Eminem hate you so much?”
People were increasingly accusing me of being a compromised sellout, which I was, but in the deep recesses of my heart part of me was still a punk-rocker who admired the Situationists. So I said, jokingly and provocatively, “I don’t know – maybe Eminem’s gay and he has a crush on me.”
Which I soon discovered was the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a brush fire. Eminem saw the interview, was incensed, and for his “Without Me” video dressed up like me and had me violently thrashed. Then he shot me in effigy onstage every night of his tour.
At first I thought it was funny. I was even a little flattered that this huge pop star was so obsessed with me. I had been clear in other interviews that Eminem wasn’t the only, or worst, misogynist or homophobe. Countless musicians and rappers seemed to be outdoing each other in their expressions of bigotry. I had even heard of homophobia in the dance community, which baffled me, since house music was born and nurtured in gay clubs.
On a tour stop in Detroit I did an interview with a local journalist in an Ethiopian restaurant. We were mopping up our spicy food with spongy Ethiopian bread when he asked the inevitable question: “Why do you have a beef with Eminem and Kid Rock and those guys?”
I swallowed. “Because bigotry is dangerous and bad. How would people feel if, instead of denigrating women and gay people, Eminem and Kid Rock and all the nu-metal guys were espousing violence toward blacks and Jews? How is it that some bigotry is accepted by MTV and the record companies, and other bigotry is hateful? Shouldn’t all bigotry be condemned?”
He paused and said, “Yeah, but a lot of women are bitches.”
I was stunned. This was a journalist, a writer, a supposedly erudite member of the fourth estate. “What?”
“You know, these guys deal with a lot of gold-diggers and bitches.”
Now I was horrified. “And that justifies misogyny?”
I wanted the world to be as progressive and inclusive as the world I’d grown up watching on TV. It was clear back then: Archie Bunker was a loathsome old bigot and he represented a world we were leaving behind. And now the Archie Bunkers of the early twenty-first century were programming radio stations and selling millions of records. And bigotry wasn’t simply a matter of aesthetics and mores, it was behind the worst atrocities in human history. Genocide is just bigotry on an industrial scale.
*
The day before the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards I received a phone call from Robert Smigel. He was a troubled writer and comedian, most famous as the voice of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. I’d been interviewed by Triumph a few times, and even though he’d been scathing toward me, I admired Robert’s comedic genius.
Robert had an idea: in the middle of the show he would have MTV put me in a seat behind Eminem and his posse and then have Triumph come out and insult us both. I happily agreed.
The day of the show I arrived early and spent an hour on the red carpet talking about myself. I loved talking about myself and got very cranky if I didn’t have enough time to do every interview with every journalist and TV host on the red carpet. An MTV intern escorted me to my first seat, in between Ludacris and Justin Timberlake. I won an award for the “We Are All Made of Stars” video and was then reseated, behind Eminem and in front of Jack and Meg White.
Eminem turned around to glare at me. As I looked into his eyes I realized this wasn’t a joke for him. He truly seemed to hate me. I’d been offended by his lyrics, but deep down I’d assumed that we were two public figures having an overly dramatized show-biz feud. He looked at me and said quietly, “You’re dead.”
I felt vulnerable: even though we were surrounded by thousands of people in the middle of Radio City Music Hall, he was with his posse of very large, very angry men, while I was alone.
I was also confused. Apart from the misogyny and homophobia, I felt a strange kinship with Eminem. We’d both grown up in grinding suburban poverty. We both had complicated single moms. We’d both found refuge in music. And neither one of us was very tall.
Robert Smigel came over with his dog puppet on his hand, trailed by a mobile camera crew. He interviewed me in the voice of Triumph, gleefully insulting me in front of millions of people. “I wouldn’t let you hump my leg,” he said. I laughed because, well, it was funny.