Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  “It’s my ex-boyfriend,” she said quietly, stubbing her cigarette out in an ashtray. “He’s insane.”

  The buzzing went on and on – and then at last, it stopped. But next I heard feet pounding up the tenement stairs and a fist banging on the door. “Pam!” her ex bellowed as he pounded on the metal door. “Open the fucking door!”

  We lay there, breathing as quietly as possible and saying nothing. Because her apartment was so small, we were lying in a bed only a few feet away from the door. The banging and yelling continued. “Pam! I swear, open the fucking door!”

  “Ssshhh,” Pam whispered to me, as if I needed reminding to be quiet.

  Eventually the shouting became crying. “Pam,” he moaned, “come on, let me in.” A few minutes later he gave up. We heard him walk away, his feet on the worn tiles echoing through the stairwell.

  “That was your ex?” I asked, still whispering even though he had left.

  “Actually,” she said, “he’s not really my ex. He’s still my boyfriend. He’s a cop.”

  Oh. So there was a cop boyfriend, probably waiting outside the building with a gun, furious and ready to kill the person who’d just had drunken sex with his girlfriend.

  “I should call him,” she said. She turned on the light and I looked at the postcoital bed. There was blood everywhere.

  “What happened? Are you okay?” I asked.

  She looked at the sheets. “Oh, sometimes when I have sex I get these burst cysts in my vagina. Or I got my period,” she said with disconcerting calm.

  There was more blood than I’d ever seen in one place. It looked like a cow had just given birth. There was blood on the sheets. On Pam. On me. I was horrified and oddly proud. I used to be a sober Bible-study teacher, and now I was drunk and covered in blood in a small tenement apartment, while a furious cop waited outside so he could shoot me. I felt like the ghost of Charles Bukowski was in the apartment, sitting in the lone chair and telling me, “Well done.”

  Pam got on the phone with her boyfriend. “Hey, I’m not home,” she said. “Okay, baby. I’m coming over … no, don’t come here.” And she hung up.

  I wanted to point out that “I’m not home” and “don’t come here” were inconsistent things to say, but I didn’t think it was my place.

  Pam sat in the chair and looked at me placidly.

  “I guess I should go,” I said, getting out of bed and pulling on my clothes over my wet, bloody body.

  “Walk out by yourself,” she instructed me. “If you see him outside, just ignore him.” She shook my hand like we were saying goodbye after a business lunch meeting over iced tea and chopped salads. “Nice to see you again, Moby.”

  “Nice to see you too.”

  I walked down the fluorescent-lit stairs and out onto Sullivan Street. I looked left and then right: there were no angry cops waiting for me.

  I’d already had a full night of drinking, Led Zeppelin covers, and bloody sex, but it was Friday and it was only 2.30 a.m. I bought a beer in a bodega and drank it as I walked to Lit on 2nd Avenue.

  Lit was one of the last East Village rock clubs. It amazed me that it hadn’t been shut down, as it seemed to be more of a cocaine supermarket than a bar. The only person who didn’t do or sell cocaine at Lit was the owner. And me. For as much as I loved alcohol and ecstasy, I’d still never done cocaine.

  I went to the downstairs bar and ordered two shots of tequila for myself. I quickly drank both of them and listened to the hipster band playing a Pixies cover. I spotted my friend Fancy in one of the booths, so I ordered two more shots of tequila for myself and walked over to him. Fancy and I had been degenerate drinking buddies for the last decade, but I hadn’t seen him much since the success of Play. I told Fancy and his friends the story of my one-night stand, including the furious cop boyfriend, but leaving out that I was still covered in drying blood.

  I ordered more tequila for myself and danced unsteadily as the band played more Pixies covers. After the fourth or fifth Pixies song in a row, I realized through my drunken miasma that they were, in fact, a Pixies cover band, although they did play a few Breeders songs as well.

  At 4 a.m. I saw a few people disappearing through a small, almost hidden black door at the back of the basement. Did Lit have a VIP area I didn’t know about? Or maybe a super-exclusive degenerate room for super-exclusive degenerates? I thought of myself as both a VIP and a super-exclusive degenerate, so I stumbled through the room full of coke-addled hipsters and opened the small door. I was excited to have found another belly within the belly of the beast.

  I stepped inside a tiny, quiet room, with three people hunched over a table. “Hey!” one of them barked at me. “You can’t be in here!”

  I was swaying on my feet; at this point I’d had around sixteen drinks. With slurred umbrage, I said, “Don’t you know who I am?”

  And I stopped cold. I’d never said those words before. And I knew, even through my swaying, drunken fog, that I’d crossed a line. “Don’t you know who I am?” was the clarion call of diminished narcissists everywhere. I felt real fear, for I knew that the moment someone has to ask “Don’t you know who I am?” is the moment when the tide of fame has turned against them.

  A few years earlier I’d been leaving a nightclub that was hosting a party for Wyclef Jean, and the singer from a successful 1980s new-wave band was trying to get in. His face was florid with outrage that he was being denied entrance, and he yelled “Don’t you know who I am?” at the stoic doorman. I shook my head, sadly, and congratulated myself on the fact that I wasn’t a faded celebrity.

  But now I had just said those same sad words.

  The three people in the quiet room looked up at me nonplussed. “I don’t care,” one of them said. “This is an office. We’re counting credit-card receipts.”

  39

  DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1979)

  I had saved up $70 from doing yardwork for some of our neighbors and bought a used electric guitar and an old Fender amp from the classified ads in the back of the Stamford Advocate.

  The year before, I’d started taking guitar lessons. Since it was the late 1970s, the apex of the glorious age of guitar gods, my twenty-one-year-old teacher, Chris Risola, wanted me to become the next Steve Howe or Jimi Hendrix. Chris had long black curly hair and taught guitar in his bedroom at his mom’s house, next door to the fire station. I took lessons from him because he was a great teacher and I wanted to learn to play guitar, but also because his sister was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen and sometimes she would smile at me after my lesson.

  I wanted to be a good student, so I practiced every day on my knockoff Les Paul guitar (manufactured in Asia by the Memphis Guitar Company), playing my scales as fast as I could and even trying to learn Van Halen’s “Eruption.” But I had two dirty secrets that I couldn’t share with my teacher. One was that I didn’t like the complicated guitar music that he loved so much. I knew that Eddie Van Halen and jazz-fusion solos were technically impressive and very hard to play, but they meant nothing to me emotionally. My second secret was my love for new wave and punk rock. I tried to like the complicated music that Chris loved, but when I heard Gary Numan and the Clash on the radio they excited me in ways that Eddie Van Halen and Larry Carlton simply didn’t.

  At the end of one of our lessons I’d tested the waters, asking Chris what he thought of Talking Heads. “Did you see them on Saturday Night Live?” he asked, vexed and shaking his curly hair. “That weird dude’s ‘guitar solo’ was just one fucking note!”

  So I learned my scales and my transposed versions of jazz standards and Bach cantatas and David Gilmour solos. But all I wanted to do was sit in my room and play new-wave and punk-rock songs.

  I had a new friend, Paul, who lived down the street from me. Paul and I were the same age, but he had grown up in England and carried himself like a young Errol Flynn, making him conspicuously out of place in late-1970s suburban Connecticut. One day when I was visiting Paul’s house he told m
e that his older brother Simon had a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. His older brother scared me: he was tall and usually hung out with giant friends who looked like they could effortlessly crush me with their pinkies.

  One day I worked up enough courage and asked Paul if he’d ask Simon if I could borrow Never Mind the Bollocks. Vinyl was precious, and I’d never heard of anyone loaning anyone else an album, but I was desperate to see what it would be like to have a real punk-rock record in my house. I had my mom’s records to listen to – everything from Dvořák to Babatunde Olatunji to CSNY – and my own tiny collection, featuring two David Bowie records, but the only punk music I had was a few songs I’d taped off the radio with my grandfather’s old Dictaphone.

  Paul went into Simon’s room and came back thirty seconds later with Never Mind the Bollocks. “Here you go.” He handed it to me casually, as if loaning someone a bright-pink-and-green-and-yellow punk-rock LP was the most normal thing in the world.

  “Thanks,” I said, holding the album like a glowing totem.

  I took it home, put it on my mom’s turntable, and dropped the needle on “Holidays in the Sun.” It was so angry and confident. And fast. I couldn’t believe I was playing it on the same stereo my mom used to listen to Dave Brubeck and Taj Mahal. I felt like I was looking at pornography in church. And I loved it.

  I listened to the whole Sex Pistols album from start to finish, and then listened to it again. I plugged my $30 guitar into my $40 amp and over the next hour learned to play “God Save the Queen” as best I could. I’d never thought about what I was going to do with the guitar skills I was acquiring. But now I knew: I wanted to start a band.

  *

  I wasn’t the only one who wanted to be in a band. My mom had met some Connecticut musicians in a band called Shakedown Street, and they’d invited her to play piano with them. She said yes, and told them they could rehearse in our living room. The three musicians – Ron, Ted, and Shaun – showed up late on a Wednesday afternoon with a drum kit, a bass guitar, and a bass amp. “Oh,” my mom said to me, “Shaun doesn’t have a guitar and an amp. Can he borrow yours?”

  I looked at Shaun in his dirty corduroys and faded Jerry Garcia Band T-shirt, and wanting to borrow my amp and my guitar to play old country-rock songs with my mom and two other hippies. I didn’t know if he was my mom’s friend or if they were dating, but I wanted to say, “No.” Just straight-up “No,” as in: No, you cannot take my amp and my guitar, my two most prized possessions in the entire world, and sully them with your greasy pot-smoking hippie fingers. I wanted to say “No” as loudly and as many times as I could.

  But I was a musician, and weren’t musicians supposed to be cool and relaxed, even generous? There was no part of me that was actually cool, relaxed, or generous, but I said “Okay” to Shaun and my mom. And then, as a meek codicil, “Just take care of them, okay?”

  I had a math test in the morning, so I went to my room to study. I sat down at my plywood desk, opened my textbook to study, and my mom’s band practice started. They were playing in the living room, which was right below my bedroom. And even though they were playing Grateful Dead-inspired country rock, they were extremely loud.

  My mom had been playing piano since she was five or six years old. She played delicately; I loved listening to her play Bach and Leonard Cohen at the old upright piano her grandmother had given her. But now her unamplified piano was drowned out by Ron the drummer, Ted the bassist, and Shaun the dirty hippie playing my beautiful guitar through my beautiful amp.

  I wanted to be cool, but I started panicking. I needed to study for my test. I wasn’t a great student, but I did okay and I always did my homework. After the first song I went downstairs. Somehow, in the space of one song the living room had filled with cigarette and marijuana smoke.

  “Mom?” I asked, panicking but trying to appear calm. “How long is your band practice going to be?”

  “All night, dude,” Shaun said, peeling out a subpar Jimi Hendrix guitar lick like he was onstage at Monterey Pop and not standing by some aloe plants in a small suburban living room.

  My mom gave Shaun a dirty look and said, “Not too late, Mobes.”

  I went back upstairs and sat down as they started their second song, which was louder than the first. Shaun’s guitar was too loud. No, my guitar was too loud. I couldn’t study because a smelly hippie was befouling the two loves of my life – my guitar and my amp – with old hippie music that I now hated. Up until that moment I’d thought that Talking Heads and the Sex Pistols could coexist with classic rock, but now I wanted to shave my head and tattoo “I’M A PUNK-ROCKER, FUCK YOU, SHAUN!” on my forehead.

  This band of wannabe Jerry Garcias in my living room were the stand-ins for every shitty hippie my mom had ever dated, every entitled stoner who worked in a music store and wouldn’t acknowledge me, every motorcycle gang member who’d ever scared me, and every long-haired kid in school who made me feel smaller than I already was. They were the past, and I wanted to destroy them.

  Mercifully the song ended abruptly. Once it did, I could hear loud, aggressive banging on our front door. I ran to the top of the stairs and looked down.

  One of our neighbors, Bill Sanford, was on our doorstep, livid, drunk, and holding a gun. He started screaming, “You fucking hippies, what are you doing in my neighborhood? It’s a Wednesday night, for God’s sake!” My panic and rage had apparently all been channeled by our elderly, peaceful neighbor. Bill Sanford, usually found in his backyard wearing old madras shorts and drinking a gin and tonic, had turned into the Monster from the Id in Forbidden Planet.

  “I’m sorry, Bill,” my mom said, trying to placate him.

  “I should call the police!” he said, drunkenly waving his gun around.

  Shaun stepped forward. “Dude, just relax, okay?”

  Bill Sanford, normally sad and quiet, retired after forty years of being an accountant for local florists and hardware stores, was so drunk and full of rage that he made a noise somewhere between an eagle and a dachshund. Unable to make real words, he bark-squawked at Shaun and my mom, slammed the door, and stormed off.

  I went back to my room and opened my math book. I wasn’t happy that our drunk neighbor had shown up waving a gun. But at least now it was quiet.

  40

  UPSTATE NEW YORK (2005)

  I was upstate at my gated country estate, trying to meditate. It was a cold Friday afternoon in January, and I was expecting twenty or thirty friends to come up for the weekend. After they arrived we’d make dinner, play some games, start drinking, take drugs, dance in the disco, end up in the spa around 3 a.m., and then hopefully I’d wind up in bed with someone I’d never met before.

  I’d bought the estate in 2002, after seeing it advertised in the back of the New York Times Magazine. The ad was simple but compelling: “12,000 sq. ft. house w/ 2 guest houses, 60 acres, 70 minutes from Manhattan. $1,250,000.” The house was in terrible shape when I bought it, but after eighteen months and over a million dollars in renovations I had a private, gated, sixty-acre compound, tailor-made for huge, decadent parties.

  The main house was a five-level chalet with ten bedrooms. It had a disco, a spa with an eight-person jacuzzi, an elevator, and as it was completely surrounded by hundreds of acres of protected woods and forest, no neighbors. Not having neighbors was important, as I’d installed a huge sound system in the disco, and it was very loud. But I also wanted as much privacy as possible, because a lot of what happened at the parties involved celebrities and illegal drugs. To that end I installed a metal security gate at the bottom of the half-mile-long driveway to prevent surprise visits from the police.

  The property was serving its purpose as a debauched party compound, but I hadn’t bought it just to be a degenerate. I believed that I had depth and spirituality, and I thought that the estate’s sylvan isolation would help foster those qualities. Meditation seemed like it should be part of a spiritual person’s life, and I’d been reading more
and more articles in the Sunday Times about the benefits of meditation. My mom had tried to teach me to meditate when I was six years old, even though I had always quit after a few minutes so I could go play with my Hot Wheels. But today I was going to start my meditation practice, as I was pretty sure I knew the fundamentals: you said “Om” to yourself, and then after a few minutes found enlightenment as the divine secrets of the universe revealed themselves.

  I sat in a vintage Eames chair in my bedroom, positioned next to a long, snow-covered balcony. My house was at the highest point in Putnam County: looking out the wall of windows I could see for fifty miles, all of it white and pristine and beautiful. If ever there was a perfect place to meditate, this was it. I closed my eyes and started saying “Om.”

  After thirty seconds of meditation I started to worry that my assistant hadn’t ordered enough alcohol for the weekend. Fabienne’s usual job was to organize after-show parties on tour, but now that I was taking a short break from touring, her main responsibilities were arranging limos to take me to parties in New York and making sure that my houses were stocked with alcohol. I said “Om” a few more times and then worried: Did we have enough vodka? Would anyone bring ecstasy?

  I decided that I would meditate better if first I made sure we had enough liquor. I walked downstairs and stepped into the liquor pantry. The original owner had built it as a walk-in pantry for food, but I thought it made more sense to stock it with alcohol, so I moved my organic spaghetti, oatmeal, and raisins to cupboards under the sink. I had eight cases of Stolichnaya vodka, ten cases of red wine, ten cases of white wine, ten cases of Veuve Clicquot champagne, sixteen cases of beer, eight cases of club soda, and two cases of tonic water. It was enough alcohol to kill an army, so we were good. I went back upstairs and sat down in the Eames chair. Now that I knew we had enough alcohol, I could calmly meditate.