Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  Then Triumph went to interview Eminem, and Eminem punched the puppet. Smigel looked at him in horror. In all his years of doing Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, no one had ever punched his puppet before.

  They cut to a commercial, and Eminem angrily handed me a picture he’d drawn. I looked at the drawing: it was of him strangling me. I had to concede that it was quite good and wondered when he had found the time to draw it. It was a second draft; on the other side of the pink paper there was a rough version of the same drawing, hastily scribbled over.

  The show started up again, and Eminem left his seat to accept an award from Christina Aguilera. As he reached the podium he was clearly agitated. “Yo,” he said, “that little Moby girl threw me out of my zone for a minute.” The crowd started booing, but I didn’t know if they were booing him or me.

  Eminem kept lambasting me – “I will hit a man with glasses,” he promised – and the crowd booed more. I still wasn’t sure who was being booed, me or him. Eminem took his Moonman award and stormed off the stage.

  I was shaken. The realization sank in that I’d just been threatened and embarrassed in front of an audience of millions. All along I’d assumed that Eminem hadn’t really been that upset with me and that someday we’d meet up and have a friendly conversation in which he’d explain that he wasn’t actually a misogynist or homophobe. We’d talk about growing up poor and scared, and maybe even become friends. Instead I was the object of vicious public ire from the biggest and angriest pop star on the planet.

  I was also shaken because I was worried people weren’t on my side. As hard as it was to admit, a lot of the reviews for 18 had been negative. Not just critical of the music, but of me. Some journalists weren’t even bothering to talk about my music anymore; they were just singling me out for ridicule.

  I’d seen the ticket counts for some of the upcoming dates on my tour, and they weren’t great. I’d hoped that 18 and the subsequent tour were going to cement my position in the pantheons of music and fame. But as terrifying as it was to consider, I knew that the album wasn’t doing nearly as well as Play had.

  I walked out of the awards show, feeling the eyes of five thousand audience members on me. On the sidewalk behind Radio City I met up with Julian Casablancas and some of the other members of the Strokes. They were playing a private after-show party, so I rode with them to the loft in Hell’s Kitchen where they were performing. Once there I was escorted backstage, where I drank as much of the Strokes’ vodka as I could.

  I’d wanted to hate the Strokes: they were good-looking and successful, plus they had grown up rich and privileged. But over the past year we had become friends. And I loved their music, with its unsubtle fan-boy appropriation of the Velvet Underground and Hoboken bands like the Feelies and the Bongos.

  They went onstage at midnight. I stood on the side of the stage, drinking from a bottle of champagne and singing along to “Is This It.”

  I’d first met Julian, the Strokes’ singer, a year before, when we had both been getting drunk at a bar in the East Village at 4 a.m. I told him how much I loved “Is This It,” and how it reminded me of hot, drunk summer nights on the Lower East Side. I drunkenly told him that “Is This It” reminded me of the moment when everything in New York City seemed to hold you: the warm, soft August air, the bar full of friendly drunks, and the beautiful woman who’d kindly taken you to her fourth-floor walkup in an old tenement building.

  Julian smiled and hugged me drunkenly, saying, “You get it.”

  As the Strokes started playing a new song, I spotted André from Outkast standing backstage with some friends. We’d toured together in 2001, and I wanted to collaborate with him on my next album. I walked over to him and tried to hug him, but he quickly stepped backward.

  “What’s up, Moby?” he asked.

  “I’m working on some music and I was wondering if you wanted to collaborate on some songs?”

  He shook his head and gave me a quick, sad smile. “Moby,” he said, “you know I like you, but just too many people are hating on you right now.”

  Section Three:

  In My Dreams I’m Dying All the Time

  35

  BARCELONA, SPAIN (2002)

  Through plate-glass windows twenty feet tall I gazed at the Mediterranean Sea, a sparkling blue-gray carpet stretching out to the horizon. I was in Barcelona, on a short break from my European tour for 18, to perform at the European MTV Awards. The luxury hotel where I was staying was crowned with four opulent apartments; my penthouse neighbors were Madonna, Jon Bon Jovi, and P. Diddy.

  To get to our shared penthouse level you had to pass muster with security at the entrance of the hotel, then more security at the first bank of elevators, then armed guards at the private elevator going to the penthouse. After my tour bus dropped me off with my knapsack, I’d ridden up to the penthouse with Madonna’s head of security. “So you know Eddie?” he asked me.

  Madonna’s personal yoga teacher, Eddie, had been one of my best friends in the 1980s. We met while watching John Waters’s Pink Flamingos at a dive bar in St. Mark’s Place. At the time he was a high-school dropout with a ten-inch red Mohawk. Now he was a yoga teacher, teaching Ashtanga to Madonna and Gwyneth, and organizing spirituality workshops with Deepak Chopra.

  In addition to the wall of glass twenty feet tall facing the Mediterranean, my hotel penthouse had a chef’s kitchen, a dining room for ten people, a formal living room with a grand piano, and three bedrooms on a second level that was reached by a wide glass staircase. The MTV Awards were tomorrow, so tonight I was going to have a party in my suite for my band, my crew, and some people from my record company. I was expecting fifteen or twenty people, so my assistant had ordered three cases of beer, a case of champagne, two liters of vodka, a liter of whiskey, and club soda and limes. The hotel staff had come in before I arrived and set everything up on the sideboard in the living room, along with crystal glasses for cocktails and flutes for the champagne.

  I took another elevator to the private rooftop spa, where I received a very quiet $200 massage from an eastern European woman who didn’t speak English. I didn’t like getting massages – they made me feel syrupy and nauseated – but I felt like it was my duty as a rock star to spend money on things that other public figures seemed to like.

  After my massage I had a couple of hours before my guests were supposed to arrive, so I walked down the hall to the other three duplex apartments. I knocked on P. Diddy’s door. A security guard answered. “Hi, I’m Moby,” I said. “Is Sean here?”

  “Hold on,” he said, shutting the door. I stood on the thick gray carpeting and inspected the hallway’s sconces and walnut panels.

  P. Diddy opened his door. “Moby? Come on in.”

  I walked into his suite, which was the mirror image of mine. “We’re neighbors, so I wanted to say hi,” I said.

  “What’s up?”

  I had met P. Diddy a few times over the last year at different clubs and awards shows. I didn’t know him very well, but every time I saw him he was unfailingly nice to me, so I liked him. “I’m having some people over later, if you want to stop by,” I said.

  “Thanks, I’m headed out to dinner with Bono and Jay,” he said. “But you should come to my party later. I rented a villa outside town. It should start around 1 a.m.”

  “Okay, thanks, maybe see you later,” I said, shaking his hand and heading back to the door. “Oh, and let me know if you need to borrow a cup of sugar.”

  He looked at me, considering what I had said, and nodded. “Because we’re neighbors. That’s funny,” he said earnestly.

  I walked further down the hall and knocked on Madonna’s door. It was opened by the head of security I’d ridden in the elevator with.

  “Hi, is Madonna there?” I asked.

  “She’s getting her hair done,” he said. “Can I help you?”

  “Oh, I’m having people over later, if she wants to stop by,” I said.

  “Okay, I’ll tell her. What time?
”

  “Nine?” I said uncertainly, suddenly nervous that I’d done something wrong by having the temerity to invite Madonna to a party. But I’d known her for years, and two years ago she’d given me my third or fourth MTV Award at a ceremony in Sweden.

  “Okay, thanks,” he said, and shut the solid wooden door with a soft thunk.

  I’d never met Jon Bon Jovi, although we had both performed at the Winter Olympics, so I decided not to knock on his door to introduce myself. Instead I wrote him a note on hotel stationery and slipped it under his door: “hi, didn’t want to bother you, but i’m having a little party at 9 pm. your neighbor, moby.”

  Back in my suite I went into the chef’s kitchen and made myself some brown rice, black beans, and steamed broccoli. I took my plate to the living room, along with a Harlan Coben book. Sitting at a burled maple desk, I ate my food and read my book while the sun set over Barcelona.

  *

  Scott, my drummer, and Steve, my sound tech, were the first to arrive, at 9 p.m. “Whoa, this place is insane,” Steve said, walking up to the walls of glass so he could take in the delicate lights of Barcelona and the inky blackness of the Mediterranean Sea.

  After my macrobiotic dinner I’d made myself a couple of very strong vodka and sodas, so I was already kind of drunk. “I used to live in an abandoned factory and pee in a bottle!” I said, gesturing to the wall of windows with my tumbler of vodka.

  “This doesn’t suck,” Scott said respectfully.

  The doorbell rang. I opened it to find Madonna, along with her security guard and a few hangers-on. “Moby, hi!” she said warmly.

  “Hi! Do you want to come in?” I asked, taken aback that Madonna had actually shown up.

  “No, I’m heading out. I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Hi,” I said again, awkwardly. “Will I see you tomorrow?”

  “I’m announcing one of your awards again,” she said. “Well, hopefully.”

  “Fingers crossed,” I said.

  We looked at each other for a second, and then Madonna said, “Have a good night! See you tomorrow.” She turned and padded down the soft gray carpeting to the elevators, trailed by her entourage and expensive perfume that smelled like flowers in a yoga studio.

  I walked back in and made myself another drink. “That was Madonna,” I said.

  “Really?” Scott said.

  “She and Bon Jovi and P. Diddy are my neighbors,” I explained.

  The doorbell rang a few more times. By 9.30, there were fifteen people in my suite, all drinking and staring out the windows. The room could have easily held fifty people or more, and with only fifteen of us it felt desolate, no matter how much we drank.

  My tour manager Sandy had parked himself on a beige leather sofa, but at 10.15 he stood up. “Well, busy day tomorrow,” he said. “I should head back to the poor people’s hotel.”

  “How is it?” I asked.

  “Apart from the rats and the holes in the walls, it’s great.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He smirked. “Yes, I’m kidding. It’s fine.”

  For the 18 tour I’d been staying in hotels by myself. I’d heard that real rock stars stayed in extremely nice hotels, while their band and crew stayed elsewhere, in somewhat less nice hotels. I missed the early days of the Play tour, when we all crammed into Holiday Inns and Motel 6s, sometimes sharing rooms. But I was a rock star, so I felt obligated to stay by myself in $3,000 a night hotel suites.

  The rest of the guests politely agreed with Sandy, finished their drinks, and headed back to their own accommodations. I’d imagined a room full of rock stars and fans and beautiful women, drinking and partying with me until the sun rose over the Mediterranean. But by 10.45 p.m. I was alone in my glass-walled penthouse with a lot of alcohol and empty glasses.

  I made myself another vodka and soda, put Massive Attack’s Protection on the stereo, and went to my laptop to check my email. I had messages from my aunts, my stepfather Richard, and a few friends in New York. I couldn’t focus on any of them; I was too vexed that my sophisticated and sybaritic party hadn’t worked out. I drained the vodka – my eighth or ninth – and stumbled to the bar, where I opened a bottle of champagne.

  I was a rock star in a three-bedroom suite by the Mediterranean Sea. I’d been given a thousand times more of everything than I’d ever dreamed of. I had made over $10 million the year before and my loft in New York had a hallway lined with gold and platinum records. I told myself that it didn’t matter that for one night things hadn’t worked out and I was alone – but I didn’t believe it. “Fuck this,” I said out loud, spilling champagne on the back of the leather couch. “Fuck you,” I said to the air, to my dead mom, to the emptiness. It felt good, so I said “Fuck you” even louder.

  Finding the happiness I’d enjoyed for the past few years was getting harder. I had to drink more to get drunk. I had to sleep with more people to feel validated. I had to be in more magazines to feel like I had meaning and worth.

  I opened another bottle of champagne and walked upstairs. On the glass staircase I tripped and fell. My shins started bleeding; I ignored them.

  I sat on the stairs, took a long drink from the bottle, and started crying. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Growing up I’d known beyond a shadow of a doubt that if the universe gave me success as a musician, I’d be the happiest person who ever lived. And if you added wealth and fame and awards and sex and alcohol, that had to guarantee I would never again be a sad, scared boy from the suburbs. It was basic math.

  But now I was self-pitying and miserable. And scared – because if this wish-fulfillment life wasn’t bringing me happiness, then what would?

  In high school I’d found cold comfort in listening to Joy Division and fantasizing about killing myself. Suicide had always seemed like the Swiss Army knife of dramatic action. By killing myself, I’d:

  – announce to the world that I was miserable;

  – end my life and its baffling sadness;

  – join the ranks of esteemed people, like Ian Curtis and Albert Camus and Ernest Hemingway, who had taken their own lives.

  Distracted by stratospheric success, I hadn’t thought much about killing myself over the last few years. But lately the depression had been whispering to me again.

  I stood up, still crying, and made my way back down the glass stairs to the sideboard. I poured another drink, switching back to vodka. “I should die. I’m alone and I should die,” I said. Once I uttered the words out loud, they made total sense.

  I wondered if my mom would have been proud of me. I remembered playing her a recording of some music I’d made in high school. She sat on the brown foam-rubber sofa that seemed to follow us no matter where we lived, and I put a pair of cheap headphones over her ears. I hit “Play”; she closed her eyes and listened to an early piece of electronic music I’d written. When it was done she opened them wide, smiled at me, and said, “Wow.”

  This was all she’d wanted for me: to spend my life as an artist, making music and seeing the world. Knowing that made me cry harder, because I had everything she’d wanted for me and I’d screwed it up. I had no idea how to be happy. I was a worthless failure.

  I went to the windows, barely staying upright. I wanted to throw myself out, fall 450 feet through the warm air, and land on concrete, dying on impact. I could see through the twenty-foot-tall panes of glass, but I couldn’t open them.

  I went back upstairs, hoping that maybe I could throw myself out of one of the smaller windows in my bedroom. But no, the upstairs windows opened a few inches for air, but not enough for me to squeeze through.

  I lay down on the thick carpet in my master bedroom, sobbing and apologizing to God and my dead mom for being such a disappointment.

  36

  DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1979)

  My mom and I had made a deal. If I worked hard and did my weekly list of chores, she’d raise my allowance to seventy-five cents a week. So, on a Saturday in October, I spent four hour
s raking leaves and putting them in plastic bags, which I lined up by the side of our garage.

  After the death of my grandfather, my grandmother had sold the seven-bedroom house in Darien that they had lived in for decades. With the proceeds she bought a smaller house for herself in nearby Norwalk and a modest house near the Darien train station for my mom and me. We finally had a house of our own, with a proper heating system and a small lawn. Which meant that I had yardwork.

  Raking leaves was my favorite outdoor chore, way better than cutting the lawn with the manual push-mower from 1960 that our neighbor Bill gave us after we moved in. Unless you had a gas mower, cutting the lawn was hot and sweaty and involved running away from wasps and hornets. Raking leaves was civilized; the rake hit the brittle leaves like a snare drum on an old jazz record.

  After I finished raking and bagging, my mom and I drove to a nearby orchard to buy apples and apple cider. Then we stopped at a convenience store so she could buy cigarettes. On the way home, with a Styx song on the radio, I casually said, “Oh, I’m going to a party tonight with Dave and Jim.” It sounded normal, but I’d never been to a nighttime party that wasn’t a birthday or a sleepover. I knew that other ninth-graders had parties, but before tonight I’d never been invited to one.

  And technically I hadn’t been invited to this party – my friends Dave and Jim had overheard someone talking about it in their English class. I’d met Dave and Jim the year before. They both had dads, and they lived in nicer houses than I did, but we were in the same boat socially: we weren’t big enough to play sports and we weren’t computer-savvy enough to hang out with the diminutive geniuses in our school who were writing computer code. So we hung out together, watching TV and riding our Schwinn ten-speeds to Johnny’s Records to ogle records we wanted to buy someday.