by Moby
“Excuse me,” Putin’s daughter said, hurriedly getting up and leaving with her security detail.
“Do you have a pen?” I asked the naked lady standing in front of me.
She smiled and presented me with a Sharpie.
“They have Sharpies in Russia?” I asked.
“Da!” she said, her eyes gleaming like a cat about to kill a garden mole.
“I’ve never signed a pussy before,” I said, unsure of how this was going to work. I’d signed arms, legs, stomachs, breasts, necks, foreheads, hands, feet, drum machines, Bibles, shoes, jackets, cars, and copies of Moby-Dick, but never the area around someone’s genitals. I hoped that she hadn’t been perspiring too much: Sharpies didn’t work well on sweaty skin.
“I told your security that I was prostitute,” she yelled over a Tiësto remix of “We Are All Made of Stars.” “But,” she said as if addressing a dim student, “I’m not prostitute!”
I drew a cartoon character just to the right of her labia and then signed my name. “There,” I said, happy that the Sharpie had worked so well on her skin.
She pulled up her jumpsuit, sat next to me, and poured us both big glasses of vodka. I said, “Do svidaniya.”
She laughed. “Do svidaniya! Is like you’re Russian!”
Do svidaniya and spasibo were the only Russian words I knew, so when I was in Russia I used them a lot.
“Look!” She gestured broadly at the club. “Everyone is watching!”
She was right. I had assumed they’d been surreptitiously looking at Putin’s daughter, but now almost everyone in the club was openly staring at us.
“I like it,” she said, pouring us more vodka. “Do svidaniya!” she said, and we drank.
She leaned over so she could speak directly into my ear. “This autogram on my pussy will make my boyfriend so much jealous,” she said.
“Really?”
“But you know what will make him such more jealous?”
“What?”
She looked at me seriously. “When you fuck me.”
I’d been propositioned before, but never so blatantly – with the exception of one night in Finland, when a tattooed and pierced goth woman had walked up to me and asked, “Do you like Nine Inch Nails? ’Cause I want to fuck you like an animal.” I thought of myself as a libertine, but being in the presence of true degenerates sometimes made me feel like a nervous eight-year-old.
“You have hotel?” she asked casually, pouring herself another drink.
“Da,” I said, smiling awkwardly.
She finished her drink in one swallow, took my hand, and barked some Russian orders at the security guards standing around us. They pushed people out of the way and walked us through the club to the exit. A few people yelled “Moby!” but the guards ignored them. There was no civility in the way the phalanx of security pushed through the club, but even though this was an exclusive club, the well-dressed crowd seemed untroubled by this show of force.
Thirty seconds later we were in the back of another bulletproof Mercedes limousine – mine, I assumed. “Which is yours hotel?” she asked loudly, even though we were now in a soundproofed German limo. I told her, and she issued some Russian commands to the driver and security guard sitting in the front. As we headed out, the car behind us turned on flashing lights and a siren.
“Police?” I asked.
“You are VIP,” she said casually, pronouncing it “vipp,” as if it were a monosyllabic noun and not an acronym. She snapped another order to the driver and the limo filled with music: Billie Holiday.
“Oh, what’s your name?” I asked.
She considered the question, listening to the music. “I’m Billie,” she decided. “Do you want cocaine?”
“No, thank you,” I said, looking through the tinted windows as we sped past Russian pharmacies and supermarkets, closed because it was 5 a.m., but glowing in the light from the unsetting sun. I’d still never done cocaine, and I didn’t think that snorting white powder that had traveled eight thousand miles from South America to Moscow was the best way to be introduced to the drug.
She cut lines on the screen of her flip phone, to a soundtrack of “Summertime” by Billie Holiday. She sang while snorting her coke.
“Summingtime.” Snort.
“And the life goes out easy.” Snort.
“Fish have something.” Snort.
“And gotten of high.” Snort.
Her broken lyrics sounded perfect, and made as little sense to me as being in the back of a bulletproof limo while speeding across Moscow with a police escort at 5 a.m.
We got back to my hotel and walked into my suite. “Wow-a,” she said, taking in the living room and the formal dining room, “you really vipp!” She opened the French windows overlooking Red Square. The sky was robin’s-egg blue and rays of sun were peeking over the Kremlin.
She turned away from the window and once again undid her gold jumpsuit. “Now you fuck me,” she said, stepping out of the jumpsuit.
I took off my clothes. She stood naked in front of me, put her hands on her hips, and said haughtily, “Music.”
I handed her my iPod and a pair of headphones.
“Play me ‘Lift Me Up’ song,” she said, and started singing it to me, as if I needed a reminder of which song she was talking about. I spun the dial on my iPod and found it. She put the headphones on and turned the iPod up as loud as it could go. Then she lay back on the bed and pushed my head between her legs, where my cartoon drawing looked balefully at me.
I’d started drawing my “little idiot” cartoons in the mid-1980s, when I’d been living at my mom’s house and working at Johnny’s Records in Darien. Johnny’s policy was that every bag that left the store had to be drawn on. So my primary responsibility, aside from restocking bongs and Grateful Dead bootlegs, was drawing my “little idiot” alien cartoon on paper bags. Since then my cartoon had appeared on T-shirts and mugs, and music videos like “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?”: a quasi-self-portrait of a slightly sad, nervous little alien.
I remembered a scene toward the end of the David Lynch movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, when Laura Palmer looks at a small framed painting of an angel. By this point in the movie she’s gone down a tragic rabbit hole of addiction and rape. As she looks at the angel it disappears – leaving her alone with her demon, who kills her. I looked at my smudged alien, an inch away from my face, and expected him to disappear like Laura’s angel.
The song ended. “Billie” started it again, brusquely positioned me on top of her, and then pulled me inside her. Her eyes were closed and she was singing loudly to music I couldn’t hear.
After sex I tried to be affectionate, to find some warmth or connection, but she pushed me away. “No,” she said sternly, like she was chastising a bad dog. “For that my boyfriend only.”
She got up, put on her jumpsuit, and walked to the door. “Thank you for fucking me. My boyfriend fuck me so good when he jealous,” she said, and then pulled the door closed behind her and left.
I wanted to go to sleep, but I had to leave for the airport in an hour so I could fly to the Ukraine. Also, I was full of vodka and coffee, and I’d just had sex with a tall she-wolf aristocrat who’d disappeared like a pale vampire before the sun touched her. I felt like an anonymous, dissipated spy.
I went over to the open French windows and looked at the Kremlin. The sky was pink and blue, like a child’s nursery. Red Square, just across the street from me, looked like a fairytale prison.
45
DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1982)
I assumed I’d never lose my virginity. I’d briefly had a girlfriend at the beginning of the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, but we broke up before ever actually having sex. I didn’t just want to be liberated from my virginity, though – I wanted to give it to someone I loved.
For a short-story assignment in English class I’d even written an elaborate fantasy about how I wanted to lose my virginity. The story started with
my perfect new-wave girlfriend. She was Canadian, and she was at Darien High School because her father worked in finance and had been transferred from Toronto to New York. She loved Joy Division and Rimbaud and Star Trek, and in the story we fell perfectly, sweetly in love, amazed that the universe was kind enough to give each of us a soulmate.
Her fictional parents had a cool downtown apartment in Manhattan, and one Saturday in October she and I took the train to New York to buy records and see Echo & the Bunnymen at Danceteria. After the show we walked back to her parents’ cool apartment in the West Village, lost our virginity to each other, and fell asleep in each other’s arms while a New Order cassette played in the background.
My teacher gave me a B–.
*
For a year I’d had an all-consuming crush on Laura Smythe-Stafford. She was blonde and quirky – a self-proclaimed Taoist – and lived with her old-money family in a gated estate by Long Island Sound. We met on a camping trip to Block Island sponsored by Darien High School’s Outdoors Club. I’d pined for her ever since, but she was two years older than me, headed to Cornell in the autumn, and completely uninterested in dating a high-school student. After giving her a poem in which the first letter of each line spelled out her name, I called upon hitherto unknown reserves of bravery and asked her if she liked me. “Well,” she said, stepping on my little new-wave heart, “I think you’re a nice friend.” I wanted us to fall in love and spend the rest of our lives together, but it was clear the feeling wasn’t mutual and she wouldn’t be helping me to get rid of my virginity.
*
It was the middle of August, two weeks before I headed back to Darien High School for my senior year. I’d spent the summer writing songs and poems, rehearsing with Vatican Commandos, and making money cutting lawns with a borrowed gas-powered lawnmower.
My mom had left town for the weekend, and for the first time ever I had the house to myself. While she was gone I planned on pretending that I was an adult, doing grown-up things like listening to loud records and getting drunk at a keg party.
At dusk on Saturday, after a day of playing guitar and listening to Joy Division and writing poetry, I rode my bike to my friend Duncan’s house. Duncan was a year older than me – he was heading off to Bowdoin College in a few weeks – and was a tall, lacrosse-playing athlete who lived next to a country club. Our friendship was based on the fact that he had recently discovered the English Beat and XTC, and my friends and I were the only people he knew who admitted to liking new wave.
When I arrived Duncan was filling a pitcher with vodka, ice, and Tom Collins mix – his parents were out of town too. We hung out in the living room with his older brother, listening to new-wave records and drinking. Whenever I spent time with Duncan I expected him to realize that he didn’t actually want to be my friend. Duncan was tall and handsome and good at sports, whereas my punk-rock friends and I were none of these things. When Duncan hung out with us he seemed like a different species, a human among hobbits. He towered over us, carrying himself with patrician grace and noblesse oblige, while the rest of us squabbled over whether the Dead Kennedys were better than Black Flag.
Duncan had a real girlfriend, and he was going to her house later. So after a couple of new-wave albums and five drinks, I left his parents’ gated estate and rode my bike to my mom’s house, literally on the other side of the train tracks. In an empty house with a stomach full of vodka and sugary Tom Collins mix, I felt like a grown-up. And grown-ups made cocktails.
I put a Birthday Party album on my mom’s stereo and poured myself a vodka and orange juice. Sitting on the Salvation Army couch while listening to Nick Cave bleating about releasing bats, I drank my screwdriver and thought about air-conditioning. All my friends had AC, but we’d never been able to afford it. Usually the heat was a scourge, but right now with the alcohol coursing through my blood it felt like a cloying badge of honor.
I made another drink, adding more vodka this time, and pretended I was in Los Angeles. I’d never been to LA, but I assumed it was hot there. In my fantasy I was still finishing my drink and listening to Nick Cave, but I was getting ready to go to a punk-rock club with John Doe and Exene Cervenka from X. I’d seen pictures of them in their house in east LA, surrounded by weird statues and Mexican candles, and they seemed happy.
I finished my drink and realized I’d never been happier in this house. I was alone, I was drunk, I had my growing collection of fifteen new-wave and punk-rock records to listen to, and I was going to a party. A real party where I’d be allowed inside, rather than skulking around the yard and standing on a box to surreptitiously look through the windows.
After two more screwdrivers I rode my bike to the party and stumbled through the house. In the backyard a band had set up by the pool and was playing a cover of the Doors’ “Break on Through,” while people stood around, drinking Schaefer beer out of clear plastic cups.
I spotted my punk-rock friends – Jim, Dave, John, and Chip – gathered in a corner of the yard, unsure of how to comport themselves at a party full of normal people. We knew how to walk around Lower Manhattan and find obscure punk-rock clubs. We knew how to stage-dive at Black Flag shows and not end up with fractured skulls and broken limbs. But we were clueless when it came to talking to girls and civilians.
I walked over to my friends and grabbed Chip’s beer. I yelled, “I’m drunk!” and downed the beer in one long gulp, like a skinny new-wave version of John Belushi in Animal House. My friend Paul walked over, accompanied by four girls I’d never seen before. I had known Paul since eighth grade, but my friends and I treated him like semi-royalty: he had lived in London and still had faint traces of a British accent. Also, he was taller than us, had baffling self-confidence, and had lost his virginity when he was fifteen.
Three of the girls with Paul were cute and preppy, but one was very tall, very pale, and had bleached hair that was shaved on the sides. Looking at her stopped me in my drunken tracks – I hadn’t expected to find an actual new-wave girl at a backyard party in Darien. I was instantly smitten. “Hi, I’m Moby,” I said, bravely introducing myself to this tall, translucent goddess.
She smiled coyly. “I’m Victoria.”
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked. I’d heard men ask that question on TV.
“No thanks,” she said, still smiling coyly, like a bleached Mona Lisa.
I went back to the keg and got two more cups of beer for myself. The band segued into Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” Some drunk jocks were high-fiving each other and doing chest bumps. I didn’t want them to notice me: I was a scared monkey at their watering hole and I recognized these chest-bumping giants as a mortal threat. I scurried back to my corner of the party and tried to sound confident and adult.
“Where are you from?” I asked Victoria.
“Fairfield,” she said.
“Do you go to high school there?”
“I graduated in June.”
So she was older than I was and taller than I was. And she had perfect new-wave clothes and perfect new-wave hair. I asked her if she’d been to Pogo’s, which was the only hardcore punk-rock club in Connecticut.
“No,” she said. She was laconic and I was running out of questions. “So where do you like to go?” I asked.
“New Haven.”
I was impressed. New Haven had two actual new-wave clubs, but the drinking age was twenty-one, and they carded. Since my friends and I were years away from being twenty-one, we had never even tried to get into these places. One time Echo & the Bunnymen had been playing at one of the new-wave clubs in New Haven, so we parked nearby and hung out on the sidewalk, just so we could eat pizza around people with cool haircuts and black jeans.
Pogo’s, on the other hand, was our little punk-rock paradise. It was a dive bar in a decimated neighborhood in Bridgeport, and they had never once asked us for ID. Since Pogo’s was halfway between New York and Boston, it had become a stopping point for small and medium-sized punk-rock bands. We’d seen Black Fl
ag, Bad Brains, Mission of Burma, and the Misfits there, stage-diving until 10 p.m. and then driving a half-hour home to sleep in our safe beds.
“I’m going to get another beer,” I said, drunkenly stumbling over my words. “D’you want one?” I was pretty sure I was flirting. I’d never felt this confident before, talking to a tall, beautiful, new-wave girl who was clearly out of my league.
At 1 a.m. the party was winding down. After six beers, on top of the five drinks I’d had at Duncan’s and the four I’d had at home, I was very drunk. In a surge of drunken courage, I asked the bravest question I’d ever asked: “Do you and your friends need a place to stay? My mom’s out of town.”
“I’ll ask.”
Victoria huddled with her friends. I swayed, finishing another plastic cup of Schaefer.
“Okay,” she told me.
She was tall and gorgeous and almost invisibly pale. And so quiet. Suddenly I was scared. Why was she coming back to my house? Was she a ghost? Maybe she was going to come to my empty house and steal my soul. I told myself she wasn’t a ghost.
We piled into her friend’s station wagon. I was going to ask if I could put my bike in the back, but I wanted to seem cool and mature. And cool and mature men didn’t ride around town on lime-green Schwinn ten-speeds they’d had since sixth grade.
Back at my house I made myself another vodka and orange juice. Somehow it was hotter than it had been during the day, even though it was after midnight. The windows were open, but the inside of my house was stifling. I tried to turn on lights strategically so these older girls from Fairfield wouldn’t see just how threadbare our secondhand furniture was.
“You guys can stay on the couches?” I asked her friends. And then I looked at Victoria. “And do you want to stay in my room?”
She looked at her friends, nodded, and said quietly, “Okay.” She was so calm, and I was so drunk and scared. I’d never had girls in my house, but now a tall new-wave ghost was holding my hand and walking up our orange-carpeted stairs.