by Moby
In my bedroom I put on a cassette of music I’d taped off the radio, finished my drink, and tried to look urbane and sophisticated. Four years had passed since we’d moved into our house by the train station, and my room hadn’t changed much – except now my walls were covered in new-wave and punk-rock posters I’d scrounged from the dumpsters behind the local record stores. I still had the same floral-sheeted twin mattress I’d had since third grade, resting on the floor next to a plastic Sears fan. Victoria sat on my thin mattress and took off her shoes as a Cure song came on the cassette. “Oh, the Cure,” she said.
“Do you like the Cure?” I asked, trying to find a way to connect with her.
“They’re okay,” she said, retreating back into her shell.
“Should we go to bed?” I asked, not sure what else to ask, or say, or do.
“Okay.”
We got into bed wearing all our clothes, even though it was over ninety degrees. “Should we take off our clothes?” I asked, more out of practicality in the face of oppressive heat than seductive confidence.
Victoria said nothing, but she slid out of her dress and then wriggled out of her underwear. I reached over and touched her skin. My hand moved down and I touched her hip. There was a girl in my bed. There was a naked girl in my bed. I was drunk and on the verge of blacking out, but the presence of this tall naked ghost in my bed woke me up.
I took off my clothes as quickly as I could and leaned over to kiss her. The humid air pressed down on us. Through my open window I could hear the trucks trundling down I-95. A Tears for Fears song came on the cassette and I entered her. She exhaled the quietest and softest “Oh.”
I’d never been with a naked girl. Apart from some passed-out hippies at communes, I’d never seen a naked girl. And now I was inside a naked girl. I was having sex. And then it was over.
I rolled over, sweating from heat, not exertion. We lay next to each other on the mattress as the cassette ended. It had been a thirty-minute cassette I’d stolen from the language lab at Darien High School, with only fifteen minutes on each side. So the whole thing – stepping into my room, putting on a cassette, finishing my drink, and having sex for the first time – had lasted just shy of fifteen minutes.
I noticed everything. The feel of the unwashed sheet on my skin. The late-night suburban pink noise of cicadas and truck traffic. The presence of this tall, thin ghost next to me in bed. We didn’t speak – and then I was awake and the thick sun was coming through my window. Victoria was standing up, looking at me and wearing her dress.
“I fell asleep,” I said.
She stared at me, and then said, “We have to go.”
I got dressed under the sheet, as I was embarrassed for her to see me naked. We walked downstairs to find her friends were awake, sitting on the brown foam-rubber sofa in the TV room.
“Hi,” I said, uncertain of the protocol for this situation. “Did you sleep well?” This was an absurd question: we had no air-conditioning, it was sweltering, and they’d slept on Salvation Army couches that smelled like our rescue animals.
“It was okay,” one of them said, politely lying.
As her friends left, Victoria turned to me and said, “Goodbye, Moby.”
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I was hungover, or maybe still drunk, and I’d just given my virginity to this tall ghost goddess. Was I supposed to hug her or kiss her? I just held the aluminum screen door and said, “Drive safely.” She turned away and got into the station wagon with her friends.
I went inside and collapsed onto the foam-rubber couch. I’d finally lost my virginity, but all I felt was hungover. And hot. It was so hot. It was only 7 a.m., but the sun was pushing into our house like angry syrup. And I had to throw up.
I ran to our downstairs bathroom and threw up into the toilet, realizing that whoever had used the toilet before me hadn’t flushed. I expelled beer and vodka and stomach acid, which mixed in the toilet bowl with toilet paper and someone else’s pee. I lay on the bathroom floor and pressed my face against the cool base of the toilet bowl, feeling like an adult.
46
NEW YORK CITY (2006)
I pointed to the top five levels of the El Dorado, a venerated art deco apartment building towering over Central Park, and said, “That’s my house.”
My date, Lizzie, was confused. “There?” She pointed at the two-towered castle. “Which apartment?”
“The whole top of the south tower.”
She looked at me with disbelief, which was understandable – the towers looked like Batman’s Gotham lair.
We crossed Central Park West and I nervously led Lizzie through the El Dorado lobby. I had spent $7 million in cash to buy and renovate my new apartment, but I still irrationally assumed that the security guards in the lobby would look at me and make me use the service entrance. The lobby was vast and had the quiet echo that came with old money and older marble floors. The walls were paneled in dark oak, with a few burnished frescoes from the 1920s showing the early history of New York City. This was one of the crown jewels of Manhattan architecture: two soaring spires, each one looking like a cross between a castle and a limestone rocket ship.
I’d bought the apartment over a year ago. And tonight, after months and months of renovations, was going to be the first night that I slept there.
We entered the elevator as Adam Clayton from U2 was getting out.
“Adam?” I said, surprised.
“Moby?” he replied, equally surprised.
“You live here?” I asked. I knew that Bono and Alec Baldwin and Ron Howard lived in the El Dorado, but I didn’t know that Adam did.
“I do!” he said brightly.
“I just moved in,” I said. “Or am moving in.”
“Well, I hope I see you around!” he said, and strolled off into the night.
We took the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor, and then walked up a flight of stairs to my front door. “I can’t believe I live here,” I said as I unlocked the ornate metal door. I opened it and flipped a light switch. Lights glowed softly on the first flight of stairs, which were covered in a carpet with a subtle navy-blue fleur-de-lis pattern. We walked up to the living room, which had leaded windows and a marble fireplace. “Do you want a drink?” I asked Lizzie.
“No, I’m sober,” she said. I was surprised, because we’d met the week before in a bar at 3 a.m., and I assumed everyone in a bar at 3 a.m. was as drunk as I was.
Lizzie was from Albany. She had short bleached hair and looked like a beautiful elf. We’d kissed at the bar at 4 a.m., just as the place was closing, and I’d asked her to come home with me. She’d smiled and said no, she wouldn’t go home with me after just meeting me, but she would happily go on a date if I called her and asked her out.
I called her the next day, and we talked for thirty minutes about music and politics and growing up in the suburbs. She was beautiful, smart, and charming; making plans to meet up with her was both what I wanted to do and what my new therapist had told me to do.
My anxiety around dating and intimacy was getting worse. Sometimes it was so bad that I would panic and have to end things with a woman before we even went on a first date.
Two months ago I’d called a psychiatrist to ask about anti-anxiety medications. Over the phone he asked, “Have you ever done cognitive behavioral therapy?”
“No,” I said, annoyed; I just wanted drugs that would fix my broken brain.
“I’ll give you the drugs, but first try CBT, okay?” He gave me the name of a therapist, Dr. Barry Lubetkin.
I’d had bouts of therapy in the past, but this was the first time I’d committed to showing up for appointments consistently. Every time I sat down in Dr. Lubetkin’s office it made me feel like Woody Allen, only balder and more neurotic. After I explained my problem to Dr. Lubetkin – that dating and emotional intimacy gave me debilitating anxiety – he told me that there was only one solution: exposure therapy. Or, more simply: go on dates, get close to people, and don�
��t run away.
“Eventually the anxiety will go away,” he said cheerfully.
“But you have no idea how much it hurts,” I said, pleading.
He looked me in the eye and smiled, kindly. “Bubbeleh, I’ve been a therapist for almost fifty years. Trust me, I know how painful it is.”
I’d started panicking before my date with Lizzie, and wanted to cancel, but I forced myself to be a good CBT patient and met her at a vegan macrobiotic restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue. My anxiety waned during dinner, just as Dr. Lubetkin had said it would. Afterward we walked circuitously through Central Park so I could show her my new home.
“Here, let me show you something,” I said once we were inside, taking her hand and walking her onto the balcony off my living room.
“Oh my God,” she said, putting her hands over her mouth. From my apartment’s balcony, on the thirty-third floor, you could see all of Central Park, 5th Avenue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art – and even the planes in the distance, taking off from LaGuardia and Kennedy airports. It was the lowest of the apartment’s five balconies.
I took her hand to lead her back inside, but she pulled away. “Wait, let me just stay here for a second.” She walked to the edge and looked four hundred feet straight down to Central Park West. “It’s just, I don’t know, like …” she said quietly, almost to herself.
“Like a movie?” I offered.
“Like a movie. But that seems too obvious.”
We walked back inside and up another flight of carpeted stairs to the third level. “This is balcony number two,” I said. This one faced the Hudson River. We could see the last blush of the sunset, fifty miles to the west.
“Unreal.”
“There’s more,” I said, smiling like a proud and arrogant real-estate broker. I led her up an iron spiral staircase to the oak-paneled library, and then out to the wraparound balcony on the fourth level. “Balcony number three,” I said.
“Fuck,” she said. “This shouldn’t exist. Do you need a nanny?”
“Probably,” I said. I walked her up to balcony number four, and then to balcony number five at the very top of the tower – careful not to disturb the falcon who had nested there. “Amazing, right?” I said, tritely.
A soft wind was blowing off the Hudson River. Manhattan, normally loud and vicious, sounded distant and calm. “Can I pitch a tent up here?” Lizzie joked.
During dinner she had told me she was a musician, so I asked, “Will you play me some of your music?”
“Sure. Do you have a piano?”
“Yes, back on the second floor.”
“Floors in an apartment …” She shook her head. “Moby, you know you’re the man.”
“Ha, thanks,” I said.
“No, not like that. You’re a rich WASP from Connecticut and you live in a five-level penthouse. You’re ‘the man,’ as in ‘Stick it to the man.’ As in the person they guillotine in the revolution.”
I didn’t know if she was insulting me, but I decided to take it as a compliment.
We walked back down three flights of stairs to the living room. “I still can’t believe anyone lives here,” she said, looking around the living room, with its nineteenth-century Turkish rug, marble fireplace, and walls of bookshelves. “It’s so … adult.”
“I grew up on welfare,” I said, wanting to clothe myself in both ostentatious wealth and the street cred that came from growing up poor. “And the first place I lived after leaving home was an abandoned factory in a crack neighborhood.”
“And now this.”
“And now this,” I said with habitual but false modesty.
Lizzie sat down at the piano. I hadn’t known what to expect, but her song was haunting. And her voice was dark but strong.
“You’re really good,” I told her when she finished.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling sweetly.
“Do you have a record deal?”
“I’m working with a manager, but you know how it is. Or maybe you don’t,” she said, gesturing at the penthouse.
“So you’d make music under your name? Lizzie Grant?”
“I don’t know. When you say it like that it sounds kind of plain.”
“I think it’s a nice name.” I sat next to her on the piano bench and started kissing her. She kissed me back – but then stopped. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I like you. But I hear you do this with a lot of people.”
I wanted to lie, to tell her that I didn’t, that I was chaste, sane, and ethical. But I said nothing.
“I’d like to see you again,” she said.
“Me too.”
I walked her downstairs to the twenty-ninth floor and kissed her good night at the bank of elevators.
This wasn’t how I imagined the night ending. I’d assumed that we would end up christening my new apartment with vodka and sex. But to my surprise, this was almost nicer. I wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t panicking. Nobody had been compromised, and I felt almost normal. “Good night, Lizzie,” I said, as she stepped onto the elevator. “Thank you for coming to my weird sky castle.”
“Ha. Good night, Moby.”
Back in my apartment I walked up and down the staircases, looking at the way the soft incandescent light glowed on the old marble and the expensive striated fabric on the couches. I stood on the top balcony and looked at Manhattan spread before me. And I waited to feel complete.
My new apartment was perfect. Beyond perfect. I could stand here and look at all of New York City, or go down a few floors to have tea with Bono or Alec Baldwin. Or I could walk across the street and stroll through Central Park. This was all I’d ever wanted growing up: an elegant, luxurious, respectable home. So why did I still feel incomplete?
I walked down and down and down the multiple staircases to the living-room level and sat at the $20,000 Swiss piano that Lizzie had been playing. I took off my shoes, put my bare feet on the Turkish rug, and played a Gymnopédie by Erik Satie. Before moving in I’d told friends and family members that I would grow old in this apartment, and that I’d happily die sitting at this piano. I abruptly stopped playing and walked out to the balcony.
There was all of New York City, twinkling and grand and as beautiful as anything human beings had ever made. And I panicked. I had everything, a million times more than everything, but I wasn’t happy. Spending millions of dollars to buy and renovate this unimpeachably elegant apartment hadn’t fixed anything.
I went into the kitchen and looked for a glass, but they hadn’t been unpacked yet. I poured vodka into a teacup and drank it like water. I poured another cupful and downed it. When I started drinking alcohol in junior high school it made me gag unless I mixed it with soda or juice. But now room-temperature vodka went down as smoothly as a seal on a wet slide. The liquor calmed my panic, just a bit.
The phone rang. My first phone call on the landline in my new apartment.
“Mo! It’s Fancy! We’re going out to Sway, come join us!”
When Lizzie left I’d imagined having a sane, quiet night in my new apartment. Maybe I’d read John Cheever’s journals by the marble fireplace, while drinking chamomile tea and listening to Handel. Instead I had a stomach full of lukewarm vodka and my apartment felt as small and disappointing as I was.
“Okay, Fancy,” I said. “I’m leaving now. See you soon.”
47
DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1982)
The band I started had kicked me out for being a dick.
We’d started off playing Clash and Sex Pistols and Voidoids covers, but over the last year we’d begun writing our own hardcore punk songs: “Hit Squad for God,” “Housewives on Valium,” and my favorite, “Wonder Bread,” a song about white bread killing off entire neighborhoods and then being used as a building material.
Over the last few months I’d canceled Vatican Commandos rehearsals, complained about the music we were playing, and generally been obnoxious to my best friends. I understood why they’d kicked me out. But I didn
’t know why I was being an insufferable dick to my friends.
The straw that broke the punk-rock camel’s back was the Battle of the Bands in the Darien High School cafeteria. Darien was one of the wealthiest towns in the world, but the cafeteria looked like it belonged in a developing-world prison. It was a long room with concrete walls, fluorescent lights, and low ceilings. I’d never been in the DHS cafeteria after dark, and something about bands performing in the space where I normally drank chocolate milk and ate my lunchtime peanut-butter sandwich felt grown-up and thrilling.
I showed up late to the Battle of the Bands, wearing the least punk-rock clothes I could find: bright-blue pants, a yellow sweater vest over a pink T-shirt, and fuzzy slippers. I intentionally played badly, even doing a slow jazz solo during “Hit Squad for God,” one of our fastest songs. And after the show I left my equipment behind, so the other Vatican Commandos had to be my ad hoc roadies and pack up my guitar and amp.
I was doing everything I could to antagonize the other band members. Unsurprisingly, Jim called me the next day and told me that I’d been voted out of the band. He also told me that I needed to come and pick up my equipment or he was going to leave it on the street.
I’d started two other groups in the past year: AWOL, which was my best effort at sounding like Joy Division; and Image, a pop group that I started just so I could spend time with Sarah, a beautiful singer I had a crush on. I liked these other projects, but the band I’d been in the longest was the Vatican Commandos.
I’d known Jim and Chip since eighth grade, and John since tenth grade. We’d discovered punk rock together. We’d gone to New York together to buy records and see Talking Heads and Black Flag shows. For the last two years we’d spent almost all our time together, playing music, talking about music, or talking about playing music. These were my best friends, the only other punk-rock/new-wave kids I knew. And I was pushing them away. And I didn’t know why.
I took my mom’s Chevette and drove to Jim’s house to get my amp. He was watching TV on the couch with his brothers. “Your amp’s in the driveway,” Jim said, not looking up from The Price Is Right.