by Moby
My mom and I had meatloaf with egg noodles for dinner, watching CHiPs while we ate. After dinner I had a bowl of chocolate ice cream, and then went upstairs to listen to the radio and get dressed for the party. I listened to WNEW exclusively now, as it was the only New York station that sometimes played new wave and punk rock. They still played classic rock, but every third or fourth song they’d play something fast and new, made by people with short hair.
I wanted to look normal for the party, so I had planned my outfit the day before: a dark-blue polo shirt from Goodwill, Lee jeans from the Norwalk Salvation Army, and a Penguin windbreaker that my grandmother had bought for me at the Darien Community Association Thrift Shop. Tucker the cat and Queenie the dog followed me as I went to the bathroom, where I stood on the edge of the bathtub to look at myself in the mirror over the sink. Tucker and Queenie were kind and loved me unconditionally, but the cool kids who would be attending this party were savages. I knew I’d be ridiculed if any of them figured out that my clothes were all bought secondhand. Leaning in front of the mirror I decided that I looked passably normal. I headed downstairs.
“I’m going out, Mom,” I said, milking the moment for all it was worth, “to this party.”
“Okay, have fun,” she said, turning away from the TV to give me a smile.
“Not sure when I’ll be back!”
“Don’t stay out too late!”
I thought maybe she was kidding. I’d never stayed out late in my life. Sometimes during the summer I’d ride bikes with my friends until it got dark, around 9 p.m. And occasionally I’d watch TV at my friend Rob’s house – he had a color TV and a VCR. But apart from a few sleepovers, including the night when I had watched a friend overdose, I had never been out of the house past ten.
I got on my bike and rode to Dave’s house, a few blocks away. His house was small by Darien standards, but nicer than mine and further away from I-95. His mom answered the door. “Dave and Jim are upstairs in Dave’s room,” she informed me cheerfully.
“Thank you, Mrs. Marden,” I said.
I went upstairs and heard the sound of Elvis Costello coming through Dave’s door. When I opened the door Jim was sitting on the floor, holding the album sleeve of This Year’s Model, looking at it with reverence.
“You have an Elvis Costello record?” I asked incredulously.
“Yeah,” Dave said off-handedly. “I got it in the city.”
Jim and I looked at him, stunned. We each owned a couple of records, but we bought them in Darien, or if we were feeling exotic, Stamford, which was ten minutes away. Even though you could buy Elvis Costello records at Johnny’s, this copy came from New York City. New York City was only forty-five minutes away, but it was the dark land of everything we loved.
Dave, Jim, and I weren’t as embarrassed about listening to new-wave music as we had been six months earlier. The cool kids in school continued to viciously ridicule new wave and punk rock, though, so we still weren’t brave enough to publicly admit that we liked Elvis Costello and the Clash.
I’d heard Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” on WNEW a few times, and loved how it sounded like a basket of energetic bees. And now I was in a suburban bedroom, listening to the same song I’d heard on the radio, but on a record from New York City. I didn’t know what Elvis was saying, or what was being pumped up, but the song was fast and absurdly exciting, and made me want to jump up and down and smash everything in Dave’s room and scream an endless “Fuck you!” to the quiet suburbs.
But I was repressed, and I wanted to be cool, so instead I casually asked, “Whose party are we going to?”
“Cynthia Corsiglia’s,” Dave said, mentioning a girl in my biology class whom I dreamed about and lusted after. Cynthia and I were the same age, but I looked like a child and she looked like an Italian movie star. And we were going to her house. My head filled with visions of her taking me to her room, kissing me, and being my beautiful forever girlfriend.
“Oh, I think I heard about her party,” I said, lying.
Jim and I left our bikes at Dave’s house and walked to the party. I was happy that we were all dressed almost identically, in jeans and sneakers and polo shirts – it confirmed that I had chosen the right outfit. As we were all the same height, the same age, and had the same generic haircut, we could have passed for brothers.
On the way to Cynthia’s house we passed the house where my mom and I lived. I saw light coming from the room where my mom was watching TV. The thought of her watching Hawaii Five-O or The Love Boat by herself made my chest heavy. I wanted to cancel my plans and run inside to make her feel less alone. But I walked away from my house and its one glowing window.
We cut through some backyards and a few minutes later arrived at Cynthia Corsiglia’s house. We stood on the sidewalk, looking at the front door and listening to the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones” playing loudly inside.
“Should we go in?” Jim asked bravely.
“Well,” Dave said, “I just heard about this party.”
None of us had actually been invited. And we clearly were not the kids who could just casually show up, stroll in, and open a beer.
“Should we see if we can look inside?” I suggested.
We quietly snuck around the side of the house and put a metal bucket under a kitchen window. Jim, being the brave one, climbed up and told Dave and me what he saw. “There’s Tom Rand and Chaz Walker, and Muffy Childress and Scooter Borden. They’re drinking beers.”
“Who else?”
“Jen Icahn and Matt Porretta are making out by the back door.”
This was exciting. We were at a party, even if technically we were outside it getting a play-by-play from a friend standing on a bucket. After five minutes we took the bucket to another window. This time Dave climbed up to deliver live commentary.
“Mark Palmer is there, and he’s talking to Cynthia. B.J. and the Bear is on the TV. Bill O’Neill is on the couch with Erin Bunch and Scott McBride. Oh, and Steve Larkin’s there.”
My veins froze. Steve Larkin was my nemesis. I’d never been in a real fight, but in seventh grade he had punched me in the stomach on the playground, and I’d been terrified of him ever since. My sweet visions of going inside and kissing Cynthia Corsiglia were replaced with panicky flashes of being mauled on the driveway by Steve Larkin and his football-playing friends. Trying to sound calm, I said, “Okay, so should we go?”
Dave stepped down from the bucket. We snuck through a neighbor’s yard and back to the street. My sadness about my mom being alone had been swept away by being outside with my friends on a crisp October night. We felt like brave adventurers as we’d been to a party, even if we hadn’t been inside. Cynthia Corsiglia hadn’t fallen in love with me, but I’d been outside her house while she’d been inside. And that was enough.
“Want to go listen to the other side of the Elvis Costello record?” Dave asked.
37
NEW YORK CITY (2002)
When it first opened teany was always busy, but we still somehow lost money. Then a friend who owned a restaurant on Ludlow Street gave me some solid small-business advice: “You can’t spend more than you take in.”
Oh. So that was the solution.
Kelly implemented the new rule of spending less than we took in, and teany started breaking even. This was wonderful – it meant that I didn’t have to close it. Shutting down my tea shop would have been heartbreaking, because teany had become my second home. Every hungover morning I went there for bagels with vegan cream cheese. I had meetings and interviews there during the afternoon, and at night I’d meet friends there and we’d play Scrabble before heading out to get drunk. Plus teany was bright and quiet and clean, unlike the dark tour buses I’d been living on for most of the twenty-first century.
It was the day before Halloween, and I was home on a short break from touring. I was going to a Halloween party later, but first I wanted to stop at teany to have a piece of chocolate cake and to show off my costume. I was dre
ssed up as the keyboard player from Journey, or Loverboy, even though I didn’t actually know what the keyboard player from Journey, or Loverboy, looked like. I was wearing red pants, white shoes, a red sleeveless T-shirt, a long dark wig, wraparound sunglasses, and a red multi-zippered Michael Jackson jacket I’d bought on the street from a homeless man in 1986.
I had called Kelly earlier and told her about my costume. She told me that she was going to wear normal clothes for Halloween; her costume was going to be prosthetic makeup that would make her look like a pig-nosed extra on an old Twilight Zone episode.
Kelly and I had broken up the day that teany opened, and since then had gotten back together and broken up again at least a dozen times. At present we were ostensibly a couple, even though both of us were polygamously dating other people.
I walked up to the entrance of teany as Kelly walked out the door that led to the tiny basement office where we also made soup. “Is that you?” I asked, amazed by her prosthetic porcine makeup.
“Is that you?” she asked, taking in my red clothes and long dark wig. We both laughed.
“How’s teany today?” I asked.
She looked at me and said earnestly, but in a voice slightly muffled by her prosthetic pig nose, “You really need to go inside.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. You’ll see.”
I stepped down past our little patio and walked into teany. Our tea shop was very small. It seated twenty-two people comfortably, and on some Sunday brunches we squeezed in thirty. Even though nobody complained, thirty people in such a tiny space felt claustrophobic and barbaric.
This afternoon we were half full. But when I looked around I saw what Kelly was talking about. Teany had become a place where some of the public figures in the neighborhood liked to hang out, and somehow today they had all shown up at the same time. Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth were at one of the tables. David Bowie and Iman and their toddler daughter were at another table. A few feet away Gus Van Sant was having tea with Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Joaquin Phoenix. Outside, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal were having scones.
Kelly walked up to me. “You see?”
“This is insane,” I said quietly.
I made my rounds and said hello to everyone, with my wig making me feel like a maître d’ in a Terry Gilliam movie. After I was done checking on our bizarre gaggle of celebrities Kelly pulled me aside and asked, “Can we talk?”
“Okay,” I said, suddenly anxious. Hearing “Can we talk?” terrified me, because it usually meant that somebody wanted something from me or that I’d done something bad. Kelly and I walked west on Rivington Street and stopped in front of an old brick building that housed an AIDS clinic.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Kelly said flatly.
“Do what?”
“Be in a non-monogamous relationship with you.”
When we first started dating Kelly and I didn’t talk about whether we were seeing other people. It turned out that we both were. After that we tried being open, dating other people but talking about it with each other, but that made us miserable and jealous. Then, through some convoluted logic, Kelly decided that she was fine being monogamous with me, but that didn’t mean I had to be monogamous with her. So I was allowed to be promiscuous, so long as I told her about the other people I was sleeping with. It was dysfunctional, but for a few months it almost worked.
For our most recent spate of dating we’d gone back to having an open relationship, but had started going to couples therapy together. When I agreed to therapy I assumed that we’d go to a wood-paneled office on the Upper West Side and our therapist would congratulate me on my self-awareness, and then politely tell Kelly that she was crazy. But that wasn’t what happened.
Our first session was a fairly anodyne forty-five minutes of getting to know the therapist. But during our second session I’d been talking about my childhood and how every romantic relationship I had as an adult gave me debilitating panic attacks. The therapist looked at me kindly and said, in his gentle Upper West Side therapist’s voice, “You know, Moby, you might want to consider coming to therapy on your own a few times a week.”
I was stunned: I thought I was the sane one. For years I’d told myself that my crippling panic attacks in the face of emotional intimacy simply meant that I hadn’t been dating the right people. Kelly and I went back to the therapist a few more times, but the sessions became acrimonious, with Kelly yelling and me wanting to run away. Between sessions I was drinking more, taking more ecstasy, and indiscriminately pursuing one-night stands.
And now Kelly had reached her breaking point with us. With me. She stood in front of the AIDS clinic, in her perfect prosthetic Twilight Zone pig nose, and seethed at me. We’d been here many times before. Not in front of the AIDS clinic, but in some version of this argument where she told me that she was tired of me and my panic and my promiscuity. “I’ve put up with this shit for too long,” she said. “I’m done.”
In my red Michael Jackson jacket and long wig, I pleaded, “But monogamy gives me panic attacks.”
“That’s bullshit,” she snapped.
“It’s not, and you know it. I want to be in a relationship, but I panic.”
She stared daggers at me over her flawless prosthetic nose, not saying anything. A nurse wheeled a very sick AIDS patient past us and up the handicapped ramp.
“I’m sorry, Kelly,” I said. “I wish I was different.”
I could tell that after four years of pain, she wanted to scream at me or stab me or put a hand grenade in my pants. But all she said through gritted teeth was “Fuck you,” and then she stormed off down Rivington Street.
We’d broken up countless times, but this felt different. I knew that this time we would not be getting back together in a week and having sex in the teany basement, next to the hot plates where we made soup. This was final. I felt sad, but light. I was free to drink more, free to stop visiting a therapist who tried to get me to look into my panic, free to be alone.
The sun had set. I could feel the hum of New York as the streetlights turned on and the dark city came to life. I hated my panic, but it was my protector. As I walked west on Rivington my panic smiled at me, kindly and cruelly, and wrapped me in its wings.
38
NEW YORK CITY (2003)
The first time I went to Don Hill’s I broke my ankle. It was a grimy single-story rock club in Soho, a block away from the West Side Highway. I first visited the club in 1995, and at the end of the night got up on its stage while drunkenly dancing to “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges, jumping around enthusiastically until I fell off.
A woman from Elektra, my record company at the time, took me home in a cab, with ice wrapped around my grotesquely swollen ankle. I’d returned to Don Hill’s a week later on crutches, and had been a drunken regular there ever since.
Tonight I was at Don Hill’s to see the band Satanicide. Two of my friends had started the group, a fake 1980s hair-metal band, as a joke. But after playing a few shows they realized that their ironic metal band was actually really good. By midnight I’d had six or seven vodka and sodas and was on my way to getting drunk. Phil and Dale, respectively the guitarist and singer of Satanicide, pulled me out of the crowd during their encore and gave me a guitar so I could play “Whole Lotta Love” with them. “Whole Lotta Love” was the perfect cover song for a dive bar at midnight: it was universally loved and easy to play while drunk, as it had only three notes.
By day Phil was a lawyer who lived in Chelsea with his wife and son, and Dale was a successful fashion photographer. But in Satanicide Phil would be topless, wearing tiny silver shorts and a long blond wig, while Dale, with his black eye makeup and long black wig, looked like a menacing extra from Lord of the Rings. During my solo they sprayed me with glitter, and then held a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to my mouth so I could drink and play at the same time.
The set ended and I walked to the bar, strangers
patting me on the back. The woman standing next to me at the bar gave me the look that I’d come to love more than air or friendship: the look that said, “I know who you are and I like you.”
“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked, clichéd but sincere.
“Sure, I’ll have what you’re having.”
We took our drinks to one of the black vinyl banquettes, where I introduced myself.
“I know who you are,” she said coquettishly. Her name was Pam; she was tall and blonde and looked like a Russian flight attendant. After a few minutes of drinking vodka and trying to have a shouted conversation over “Union City Blue” by Blondie, we just started kissing. “Do you want to go back to my house?” she asked. “I live on Sullivan.”
“Of course,” I said. We left through the back door, while a band started playing a heavy-metal version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Her apartment was two blocks away, on the fourth floor of an old tenement on Sullivan Street, and it was the smallest apartment I’d ever been in. There was a diminutive room with a bed and a small chair, a cramped bathroom, and a tiny kitchen that was essentially a closet with a stove.
Pam closed the front door, and with no fanfare we took off our clothes and started having sex on her small bed. Afterward she opened the window by the bed, lit a cigarette, and said, “I’m so glad we did that again.”
Again? I thought we had just met.
Then I remembered: in the late 1990s, when my album Animal Rights was failing, we had gone on two dates and had drunken sex. I felt ashamed for not remembering, but in my defense she was blonde now and had been a brunette then.
Also, I’d been a blackout drunk then. Which, to be fair, I still was now.
The apartment buzzer squawked loudly, interrupting my reverie of amnesiac shame. A few seconds later it squawked again. Then again. And again, sounding like a loud electronic duck. Pam seemed unconcerned.
“Do you want to get that?” I asked.