by Moby
I said “Om.”
Was the hot tub hot enough? I walked downstairs and checked on the spa, lined with white tiles and cedar panels. I’d set the hot tub to 104 degrees, and the LED readout said “104.” People came to my country estate expecting to be naked in the jacuzzi, so now I was sure it was working and that they wouldn’t be disappointed.
I wanted to start meditating again, but I realized that first I needed to check my email to make sure all my guests were coming. I opened my laptop on the dining table I had bought from a failed dot-com. It was twenty-two feet long and made from a single piece of rosewood. Even though the dot-com had spent $75,000 on this massive table, I was able to buy it for my new house for only $10,000.
I had lots of emails from people saying they were coming up from the city, bringing vodka and drugs and food and friends. Okay, now that everything was set for the weekend – alcohol, drugs, friends, hot-tub temperature – I could meditate.
I closed my laptop and returned to my master bedroom, once again taking in the fireplace, the skylights, and the wraparound balcony. My 1,500-square-foot bedroom suite was bigger than the house my mom and I had lived in when I was in high school. And this sixty-acre compound was bigger than my entire neighborhood when I was growing up. A few weeks ago some friends and I had been walking around the woods outside the house and I’d said, with no ironic intent, “I’ve never seen this part of my property before.”
I had money, status, and huge swaths of pristine land. But the increasingly noisy and demanding truth was that unless I was drunk or having sex with a stranger, I wasn’t happy. And although I had decided that I was a spiritual person, I never actually did anything spiritual. I never helped anyone else or put other people’s needs before my own. But I knew I was spiritual. I had to be. Otherwise I was just another entitled, narcissistic public figure.
I closed my eyes once more. If I could meditate, that would prove I was a spiritual person. And maybe I’d find the happiness that was eluding me. I said, “Om.”
I wanted a sandwich. And I was restless. Maybe I’d go for a pre-enlightenment walk around my property and have a sandwich. And then, finally, I’d be ready to meditate.
I put on my boots and my gloves and my heavy coat and my hat and my scarf and stepped outside. Upstate New York in the winter is quiet (especially when you have no neighbors) and profoundly cold. Tonight my friends and I would fill the quiet and cold with alcohol and drugs and Guns N’ Roses and sex. At some point, when we were perfectly drunk and high, we would stand on the balcony at the top of my five-level manor house and stare up at the dark sky. We’d see our breath in the night air and the thousands of stars far above our heads. And we’d yell at the emptiness. The wind would blow and the cold would slap our faces and we’d hurry back inside, shivering and congratulating ourselves on being brave enough to drunkenly yell at the void.
*
I stepped off the front porch and headed to the northeastern part of my property. My contractor had told me I had streams there, and I’d never seen them. After twenty minutes of crunching through the thick frozen snow, I came upon a dead animal. It was big, so I assumed it was a deer, but its body was so mangled I couldn’t be sure. Its head was gone and most of its skin was flayed, revealing viscera and muscles that were frozen and waxy. Something had destroyed this animal, but what? A hunter? A mountain lion?
I looked around, panicking and hearing only my fast breathing. I wanted to leave this dead, skinless creature and these barren woods and go back to my house – which was now so far away that I couldn’t see it. The emptiness of the woods had looked safe and pastoral through my bedroom windows, but now it felt desolate and filled with death.
I hurried back up the hillside, crushing the hard snow under my feet. Had the dead thing in the woods tried to run away from whatever had killed it? What had it thought as it died? What assumptions about its life had been torn from it as it took its last breath? I ran faster, and after ten minutes I got back to the driveway. In the cold shadow of my hulking house I felt calmer.
For most of my life I’d assumed that the universe was empty or supportive. But maybe it was neither. I thought of the Nietzsche quote: “If you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.” Maybe the emptiness wasn’t placid. Maybe the universe had no interest in supporting me.
I went upstairs to the master bathroom, took off my winter clothes, and turned on both of the ceiling-mounted Swiss rain-shower heads in my giant glass shower stall. I felt the torrents of hot water on my skin, while I looked outside through the ceiling-to-floor windows. This felt right. The malevolent cold was outside, and I was conquering the elements by being inside. An inch away was an environment that ripped the skin from animals and cared nothing for what I loved. But I was warm and naked and smug.
Tonight I would fill myself with vodka and spaghetti. I would laugh and yell at the empty sky and find someone to have sex with, while the void waited as it always had, patiently.
41
NORWALK, CONNECTICUT (1980)
The week before high school started I hit the motherlode at the Norwalk Salvation Army. I was shopping for clothes with my mom and I found an almost-new Fred Perry shirt. I fingered the small embroidered laurel-wreath logo, making sure it was real.
I owned two other polo shirts: my grandparents had given me one with a little trophy over the left breast, and I had found one at Goodwill with a little J. C. Penney fox on it. Even though I was a fledgling punk-rocker, it was still one of my dreams to own a new Izod shirt, with the proud little alligator taking up residence over my heart. I also dreamed of having a new pair of Levi’s and an actual pair of Adidas sneakers. They didn’t have to be new, so long as I could go to school and not be ashamed of my clothes.
“Mom, can I get this?” I asked, holding up the Fred Perry shirt. She was looking through the rack of used sweaters and had found two that she liked, which were draped over her left arm. One was brown with gold threads and the other was dark green.
“How much is it?”
I looked at the tag. “$1.50.”
She frowned. “That’s kind of a lot for a shirt. But you really like it?”
“I do,” I said, nervous and hopeful. I really wanted this shirt.
“Okay, let’s get it.”
*
At the end of the summer I took the train to New York City with my friends Jim and Dave to see Talking Heads in Central Park. I was fourteen and had never been in the city without my mom or my grandfather. We walked from Grand Central Station to the skating rink in Central Park and stood in line with over a thousand new-wavers and punk-rockers, staring at the beautiful women with pink hair and the stratospherically cool men with leopard-print pants.
We had expected to see the four members of Talking Heads onstage, but they brought an extra bass player, some percussionists, and African American backing singers. Somewhere around the moment the band played “Life During Wartime,” I realized that we had been converted: we were jumping up and down and sweating, part of the ecstatic, surging crowd of new-wavers.
The night before high school started Jim called me up and told me he was going to cut his hair and wear the $5 Talking Heads shirt he’d bought after the show. I assumed he was trying to sound tough, but after first period I saw him walking in the hallway, his hair clipped short, proudly wearing a black shirt emblazoned with electric blue letters that spelled “TALKING HEADS.” I was in awe, and chastened: I had come to school trying to fit in with my Fred Perry polo shirt and longish late-1970s suburban hair. I was a coward.
By lunchtime Jim had been called “freak” and “homo,” and had been pushed into the lockers by the preppy jocks. I wondered when and if I’d be courageous enough to cut my hair and wear a black T-shirt to school.
Ever since I’d played along to “God Save the Queen” in my living room I’d wanted to start a punk-rock band so I could play covers of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. If Jim could cut his ha
ir, I reasoned, I could start a band. I asked Jim to be the singer. Excited, he agreed immediately.
I knew only one other musician: a drummer named Chip, whose family lived on a cul-de-sac by Long Island Sound. He and his family were Darien middle class, meaning they belonged to one of the less expensive country clubs. I sat next to Chip in my third-period history class, and on the second day of school I asked him if he had a drum set. He said yes, he did.
Then I asked the bigger question, trying to be as relaxed and conversational as possible: “Do you like new wave?”
“Like Talking Heads?” he said. “Yeah, it’s alright.”
That was better than I’d hoped for. “Alright” was more encouraging than what the other kids in high school had to say about new-wave and punk-rock bands. So I went in for the kill: “Do you want to start a band?”
“Sure,” he said, as casually as if I’d asked to borrow a pencil.
I met Jim in the cafeteria for lunch and excitedly told him we had a drummer. He had news too: “Some guy in my English class had ‘The Clash’ written on his notebook,” he said breathlessly. It seemed like too much to ask for, that Darien High School might contain one more person who liked new wave and punk rock.
The next day Jim talked to the kid with “The Clash” scrawled on his notebook and found out five things, four of which were remarkable:
1. His name was John.
2. He liked the Clash and Gary Numan and was, in fact, a new-waver.
3. He’d lived in London with his parents and owned records that he’d bought in England.
4. He was sixteen and had a driver’s license.
5. He not only knew how to play guitar, he owned a guitar and amp.
Jim invited John, Chip, and me over to his house after school so we could all meet. John was a year older than the rest of us, but with his brown hair and small frame he looked like he could be my cousin. We ate cookies and watched TV and talked about bands.
“Do you like the B-52’s?” I asked John.
“Do you like Devo?” Jim asked John.
“Have you heard the Sex Pistols?” Chip asked John.
He answered “Yes” to all our questions, then stumped us with a question of his own: “Have you listened to WNYU?”
We hadn’t. “What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s 89.1 and they have the New Afternoon Show, every day from three to six, and all they play is new wave. They even have a punk-rock show called Noise the Show on Tuesday nights.”
I wanted to run home, lock myself in my room, and glue my face to my radio. The next day after school I went straight home and sat in front of the radio from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., taping everything onto some Radio Shack cassettes I’d stolen from the Darien High School language lab. In those three hours my world expanded like an unfolding gas-station map: for the first time I heard the Damned, Joy Division, Bauhaus, Bad Brains, the Misfits, and Depeche Mode.
A week later it was my birthday. At my request, my family (my mom, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles) got me the first B-52’s album, the first Gang of Four album, and the first Madness album. So when I woke up on the morning of September 11, 1980, I had a fledgling new-wave record collection: three new albums, two David Bowie albums, and a growing pile of stolen thirty-minute cassettes full of music that I’d taped off WNYU.
A few days after that Jim, Chip, and I asked John if he wanted to be in a band with us. He agreed almost before we could finish asking.
Jim’s TV room had become our de facto clubhouse, so over cookies and orange juice we compiled a list of possible band names, while an episode of Gilligan’s Island played in the background:
– The Banned
– UXB
– Dicky Hell and the Redbeats
– SS and the Daryans (we had a particular nemesis at school named Steve Smith: he was tall and blond and looked like a Nazi, so we thought it would be funny to name our band after him)
– The Darien Defamation League
We settled on UXB. We’d learned from PBS that it meant “unexploded bomb,” and it sounded cool and British. I’d started writing punk-rock songs for us to play, and one of them was called “Danger! There’s a UXB,” with the refrain:
Danger! There’s a UXB!
It’s underground where no one can see
I was cautiously proud of my first attempt at punk-rock songwriting.
Jim’s parents said we could rehearse in their basement, so after school on September 23, 1980, we had our first band practice. We didn’t have much equipment: Chip’s drum kit, my guitar and amp, John’s guitar and amp, and an Audio-Visual Club microphone that Jim had stolen and plugged into his stereo. Once all our equipment was turned on and quietly humming, we looked at each other like bashful new-wave Vestal Virgins, as none of us had played music with other people before.
“Should we play a Sex Pistols song?” Chip asked. The Sex Pistols were now his favorite band. He clicked his drumsticks together four times and we played “God Save the Queen.”
The drums were louder than the guitars. We could barely hear the vocals. But it was perfect. Terrible. Perfect. We finished, bursting with shy excitement, unable to meet each other’s eyes. “Let’s play it again?” Jim asked. So we did. And again.
We learned four songs that day: “God Save the Queen,” “I’m So Bored with the USA,” “Anarchy in the U.K.,” and a Voidoids song, “Love Comes in Spurts.” I wanted us to play some of my original songs, but I wasn’t brave enough to let anyone else hear what I had written.
None of us played sports or had girlfriends, so we practiced at Jim’s house as often as his mom would let us. After a month we had an official band meeting in Jim’s kitchen: over Nutter Butter cookies and chocolate milk we decided it was time for our first show. John lived in an eight-bedroom colonial house by the New Canaan border, and next to it was a one-acre field where horses sometimes grazed in the summer. In October we figured that there wouldn’t be any horses around, so we agreed that our first show would be in the field on Sunday.
At noon on Sunday we packed up our equipment in the back of John’s mom’s station wagon. We hit the road, driving five miles from Jim’s house near the beach to John’s house in northern Darien. I looked out the window as we passed Post Corner Pizza, pretending I was an old, jaded musician who’d toured so much that driving two amps, a stereo, and a stolen microphone in the back of a paneled station wagon was a wistful, gentle reverie.
At John’s house we stretched an extension cord from his garage to the middle of the empty field, and arranged our drums and amps in the hay. Once our gear was set up I showed the other band members the shirt I’d made for our first show. After two weeks as UXB we’d changed our name to Vatican Commandos because we thought it was funny. So the night before our first show I’d taken my Fred Perry shirt and written “VATICAN COMMANDOS” on the back with a red Magic Marker. Jim, Chip, and John weren’t impressed, until I told them the marker I used was permanent.
We wanted an audience for our first show, so we’d invited ten of the computer and art nerds we knew at Darien High School. By 3 p.m. no one had shown up, so we played frisbee. By 4 p.m. no one had shown up and the sun was starting to go down, so I asked, “Well, should we just play?”
We started with “God Save the Queen,” and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was playing my first live show and it didn’t sound terrible. We ran through our handful of songs, while Sparky, John’s little terrier, sat in the field where the audience was supposed to be. When we played “Love Comes in Spurts,” I even tried jumping around while playing the guitar, until I felt self-conscious and stopped.
After playing our cover songs we ended with “Space Jam,” which was just us banging on our equipment and making as much noise as possible, while Jim yelled into the microphone. It was too much for Sparky, who left and walked back to the house.
As we were loading the equipment back into the station wagon, Chip said, “Our first show, to an audience of a dog.”<
br />
“A dog who left during the last song,” Jim pointed out.
But we were in a band. And we’d played a concert, even if it was in a horse field with a human audience of no one.
42
LONDON, ENGLAND (2005)
“Every day I want to kill myself.”
I was peeing next to one of the heads of EMI. His company had just bought Mute, my European record label since 1992, but this was the first time I’d heard him speak. I looked at him to see if he had anything to add to what he’d just said.
He had silver hair, he was wearing an expensive lavender suit with sweat stains in the armpits, and he was drunk. I was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a hoodie, and I was just as drunk. He shook his head sadly, zipped up his fly, and said, “Okay, back to the party.”
EMI were throwing me a release party for my album Hotel at a private club in London. The club, paneled in dark wood, felt like a place where prime ministers met British movie stars and aristocrats for cheese and cocktails. EMI were very happy with me and my new album, as Hotel had a huge single, “Lift Me Up,” and the album was the number-one seller in Europe.
But not in America. In the US the album had failed before it was even released. The New York Times write-up, which had sat stubbornly on their home page for the last six days, was the worst review I’d ever received. Whoever the journalist was hated the album, and me, so much that he’d called the album “the end of music.” I tried to focus on the fact that Hotel and “Lift Me Up” were doing well in Europe, but I couldn’t stop masochistically visiting the New York Times website and clicking on the scathing review. It would have been one thing to be viciously attacked in a small music magazine, but knowing that this review was in the Times made me want to find the journalist and either beg him to love me or throw him off the roof of a building.