Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  I wheeled my amp over to the back of my mom’s hatchback and levered it up into the car. I wanted to be mature, so I went back inside. “Jim,” I said, standing in the doorway to the TV room, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry I didn’t take my amp last night.”

  “Okay, Moby,” he said dismissively, staring at Bob Barker and not looking at me. I hesitated. I’d hoped he would accept my apology and shake my hand. Or ask me why I was being such a bad friend and terrible band member. Or do something to make me feel like I hadn’t just lost my oldest friend.

  “You still here, Devo?” his older brother, Mike, said. Mike and his pot-smoking friends listened to the Grateful Dead and ridiculed us constantly for being short-haired punk-rockers. For a while they’d called us “gay” and “weirdos,” but after the success of “Whip It” they’d taken to calling us all “Devo,” as shorthand for losers with short hair who didn’t have girlfriends.

  “Okay, see you later, Jim,” I said quietly, and left.

  I went home, unloaded my amp, and called John. He was older and wiser than the rest of us, and I thought maybe he would be willing to talk to me.

  “John?”

  “Oh, hey, Moby.”

  “I guess Jim’s mad at me.”

  “Well, you were a dick last night.”

  “I know.”

  “What’s going on?”

  I paused, because I didn’t know. “I don’t know.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Okay, I should go. I hope we can still be friends.”

  He laughed and hung up.

  The weekend before I’d been in traffic on I-95 and I’d seen a bunch of AA bumper stickers on the car in front of me. They all seemed like clichéd nonsense – “Easy Does It,” “One Day at a Time” – but the last one stuck with me. It read: “Hurt People Hurt People.” At first I couldn’t figure it out, but then I parsed it: “People who have been hurt tend to hurt other people.”

  I was hurting my friends before they could hurt me. They were my friends, but they were people, and I’d learned over and over again in my seventeen years that people weren’t to be trusted. My friends had done nothing wrong, but deep down I knew that they would. And I had to push them away before they hurt me.

  I didn’t want to stay home, so I put a cassette of Heaven Up Here by Echo & the Bunnymen in the car stereo and drove to Long Island Sound to look at the nice houses by the water. Before I got my driver’s license I’d ridden my bike around Darien, listening to sad British music on my Walkman and looking at the gated estates and the Gatsby-esque mansions. Now in my mom’s car I could expand my range, even checking out the gated estates in New Canaan and Greenwich.

  I’d grown up visiting school friends in their big, beautiful homes. Whenever I entered their houses I marveled at the carpets, the golden retrievers, the pools, the tennis courts, the space. But what impressed me the most, no matter the time of year, was the perfectly curated light. In the summer these homes had light that was cheerful and inviting, and in the winter the light was soft and quiet. The houses and apartments I’d lived in with my mom had all been dark. Sometimes that was because we had heavy tapestries hanging over the windows, and sometimes because the windows were small and faced a wall.

  I parked by my favorite mansion on Long Neck Point, a nineteenth-century brick home that looked like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Listening to the last songs on Heaven Up Here, I wondered: What would it have been like to have grown up there? To feel unashamed? To feel safe? The ivy-covered brick walls and leaded windows were perfect barriers, I decided. They kept safety in and shame out.

  The Echo & the Bunnymen album ended. I pushed the clunky “Eject” button in the car stereo to spit out the tape, turned it over to side A, and pushed it back in. My mom’s friend Calvin had given us this tape deck, as we couldn’t afford one ourselves. He’d installed it for us, though he’d never installed a car stereo before. He’d needed some duct tape and folded matchbooks to make it sit right in the purple vinyl dashboard. The dashboard had been red at one point, I assumed, but had faded purple in the sun – which was one of the reasons the Chevette had been so inexpensive when my mom bought it secondhand at a gas station in Norwalk.

  I cranked up “Show of Strength,” the first song on Heaven Up Here, but the speaker in the door started rattling, so I turned it back down. I watched tall clouds gliding through the blue sky over this suburban Monticello and imagined what the world looked like from inside.

  48

  NEW YORK CITY (2006)

  I would have gone almost anywhere in the world to see Donna Summer perform, but I didn’t have to: she was playing a fundraiser at a ballroom in Times Square.

  I invited my friend Fancy to come with me to the charity event where she was performing, for he loved Donna Summer almost as much as I did. As we walked into the gold-and-beige hotel lobby, I realized I’d been in this building before. In the late 1980s my former friend Paul and I had snuck onto the roof to make short, surreal films in which we jumped around naked and waved our flaccid penises at New York City. At the time this had been one of the newest, tallest buildings in Times Square. Now, twenty years later, it seemed like a gaudy relic from the era of Ghostbusters and Eddie Murphy.

  As they seated us at our table in the ballroom I saw that even though the hotel was faded and dumpy, the event was filled with New York royalty: the Bloombergs, the LeFraks, the Trumps, the Kleins, the Sulzbergers. All the New York billionaires had turned out in their best suits to get their pictures taken by Patrick McMullan and to give money to a charity started by Bette Midler to protect New York City’s streams and wetlands.

  “New York has streams?” Fancy asked, looking at the program.

  I loved the idea of protecting wetlands, but I was here to see Donna Summer. I’d grown up with disco in the 1970s, when I just knew it as exciting pop music on AM radio. In the 1980s it died off, but still inspired everyone from New Order to Duran Duran to Kraftwerk. And then in the late 1980s the ghost of disco came back with a fury, giving birth to house music, techno, rave culture, and even a lot of hip-hop. Disco was the crucible in which most modern music had been born, and within the disco pantheon no one had ever reigned higher or more supreme than Donna Summer.

  I’d read a story about Brian Eno discovering Donna Summer’s single “I Feel Love” and bringing it to the studio in Berlin where he and David Bowie were working on Low. He made everyone sit down and listen to the track from start to finish, and presciently announced, “I have heard the sound of the future.” I still played “I Feel Love” during my DJ sets, and thirty years later it still sounded like the future.

  Fancy and I drank vodka. I made small talk with Vogue editor André Leon Talley, while Fancy tried to flirt with Anna Wintour. “Anna,” he said, “you’re a good-looking woman. Are you single?” She smiled politely and introduced Fancy to her boyfriend, Shelby. The harried waiters brought me a sad vegan meal of steamed vegetables and white rice. I ignored it, drinking more vodka instead.

  Bette Midler welcomed everyone, the auction began, and a room full of billionaires competed with each other to see who had the biggest and most turgid financial penis. After 9/11 New Yorkers had been afraid that the global economy had collapsed, or that Wall Street’s pre-eminence had lapsed. But the market came roaring back, and now New York’s billionaires were throwing money around like it was dirty confetti.

  “Dinner for four at Rao’s going once,” the auctioneer said. “Going twice, sold for $100,000.” The audience clapped politely.

  Fancy turned to me. “Someone bought spaghetti for $100,000? Who are these people?”

  “New Yorkers,” I said, trying to get the waiter’s attention so I could order another vodka.

  The auction ended, Bette Midler respectfully introduced Donna Summer, and the queen of disco walked onto the stage. She was wearing an understated black suit, and underneath the purple and yellow stage lights she looked like the president of the world.

  I wen
t to as many elegant Manhattan fundraisers and events as I could, as I was a Faustian running dog who wanted the New York cognoscenti to love and respect me. I wanted to be invited to their gilded apartments and their sprawling estates. When I told them stories about growing up on food stamps they unconsciously leaned back, afraid that my hereditary poverty might infect them.

  I’d spent enough time with the New York billionaires to know that they were miserable. If they were happy, they wouldn’t be drinking themselves to death and spending tens of thousands of dollars a week on pills and mistresses and therapy. I also knew that their wealth was hollow, based on getting rich off the fruits of other people’s labor. But this was their world, and I could see they never doubted their place in it.

  I understood that the men were surrogates for the rich dads I’d grown up intimidated by, and the women were surrogates for the girls in high school who wouldn’t date me, but I still craved their approval. But as Donna Summer took the stage my sycophantic longing to be accepted by Manhattan’s plutocrats disappeared. The billionaires and their bloated friends were ordering drinks and talking loudly, ignoring the disco goddess who was taking the stage a few feet away. I said, “Fuck it,” and ran to the front.

  This was Donna Summer. I wasn’t going to let my desire to be accepted by New York’s anemic monied classes keep me from being as close to the queen of disco as I could. A few more people joined me at the front of the stage, looking around nervously as if to say, “Is this allowed?” But then Donna Summer started singing and we lost our minds.

  I was usually too nervous to dance in public, but I couldn’t help myself. I was hearing “Our Love” and “Bad Girls” and “MacArthur Park” being played live, just a few feet away from me. Some of the less sclerotic gentry joined us, and soon there was a respectable and sweaty disco quorum at the front of the stage. She ended her set with “I Feel Love,” and I forgot that I was in a hotel ballroom. I felt like I was dancing in liquid oxygen at a disco on a space station. She finished singing, said, “Thank you,” and those of us at the front cheered as loudly as we could. We’d just seen Donna Summer perform, and she’d been sublime.

  I walked back to my seat, happy, drunk, and sweaty. One of the event organizers came to the table. “Moby, would you like to meet Donna?” he asked.

  “Yes!” I said, and stood up again. “Fancy, let’s go meet Donna Summer.”

  “Do we look okay?” he asked.

  Fancy was wearing a secondhand black suit with wide lapels and a burgundy tie. I was wearing a strangely cut gray silk Versace suit that Donatella Versace had inexplicably given me a few years before. “We look great,” I said, even though we looked like struggling eastern European pornographers.

  The organizer brought us to a small office next to the ballroom, and Donna Summer came out with her husband. Usually when I met my heroes I tried to stay cool and keep my fandom to myself. But this was Donna Summer, so I gushed, telling her how great her voice sounded and how wonderful the show had been, and how she’d invented techno.

  I’d met other divas, and usually they were imperious and haughty, but Donna was personable and humble. She smiled politely, we chatted, her husband said some nice things about my records, and they left to go upstairs to their hotel room.

  “Fancy, we need to go out,” I said, drunk on vodka and Donna Summer.

  “Where?”

  “Have you ever been to a strip club in Times Square?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I.”

  We turned our backs on the billionaires and left the once-glamorous hotel to look for a strip club in Times Square. It was a cold, rainy Tuesday night, and the streets were empty, apart from damp rats looking for pizza crusts in the piles of wet garbage. Times Square was a thousand times cleaner than it had been in the 1970s and 1980s, but it was still a shithole.

  We spotted the blinking marquee for Crazy Girls, paid our $10, and walked in. I’d assumed that a strip club in Times Square would be bigger or stranger or filthier than other strip clubs in New York. But inside I saw that Crazy Girls was identical to every other strip club in Manhattan, with mirrored walls, stages painted black, grimy upholstered banquettes, and sticky cocktail tables.

  We sat down and ordered vodka. Some of the strippers came over, excited to have customers other than criminals and syphilitic truck drivers on a wet Tuesday night. Fancy put down his drink and checked his phone. “Shit, it’s Penny,” he said. “I have to go.” He stood up and abruptly left.

  I didn’t feel alone – I was already drunk, and there was a room full of strippers and a bar full of alcohol. I was talking to one of the strippers while the DJ played a Ja Rule song, and she surreptitiously handed me a small baggie filled with white powder. “Here,” she said.

  This was cocaine. Or I assumed it was cocaine. My sleazy suit was still damp, and I was by myself in a strip club in Times Square. When, I thought, would there be a better time to try cocaine?

  I’d tried acid and ecstasy and angel dust and opiates, but so far I’d avoided cocaine. It had always scared me: I’d seen so many lives not just ruined by it, but sadly compromised. Heroin addicts died quietly, but cocaine addicts lost their money, talked about themselves endlessly, and made terrible records. But if I’d learned anything from cognitive behavioral therapy, it was that I needed to face my fears, so to conquer my fear of cocaine I took the little bag of drugs to the Crazy Girls men’s room.

  The walls and toilet stalls were painted black, there was a dented condom-and-lube dispenser next to the urinal, and the mirrors were covered in graffiti. I opened the door to the toilet stall and poured some of the powder on my hand between my thumb and my index finger, the way I’d seen other people do it. The only light in the men’s room was a coiled fluorescent bulb in the ceiling. The cold light made the cocaine look synthetic, off-white, and beautifully wrong.

  I snorted. It wasn’t so bad. So I did it again. And again. Until the bag was empty.

  I hadn’t known what to expect, but I didn’t feel that different – just numb and marginally more awake.

  I walked back to my seat, and the stripper said, “Where’s the rest of my coke?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The rest of the bag?”

  I looked at her, suddenly realizing that I wasn’t supposed to have done her entire bag of cocaine. Most of the drugs I’d consumed in my life weren’t shared. You didn’t do part of an ecstasy pill. You didn’t drink part of a vodka and soda. I hadn’t known that a bag of cocaine was communal.

  “You did it all?” she said, astonished and furious.

  “I didn’t know,” I said, scared. “I’ll pay you for it.”

  “Where am I going to get more?!” she screamed, and lunged at me. Some security guards ran over and pulled her off me, while she yelled “Motherfucker!” and rained threats on me.

  After she was dragged off, the manager came over with a vodka and soda and said, “I’m very sorry for that, Moby. Here’s a drink on the house.”

  “Oh, no problem, thank you,” I said politely. Then I realized I needed to go to the bathroom. I started walking toward it until I realized I really needed to go, at which point I jogged across the club. I went back to the stall where I’d done the bag of cocaine, pulled down my shiny Versace trousers, and immediately evacuated everything I’d eaten in the last year.

  As I sat on the filthy toilet the cocaine fully hit me. My eyes rolled, my jaw clenched, and my skin felt like it was covered in dirty electricity. I leaned my head against the graffiti-covered wall, tapping my teeth together and grinding my jaw. And I started laughing. “I used to teach Bible study,” I said out loud to no one, tapping my sweaty bald head against the wall.

  I was by myself in a strip club in Times Square on a Tuesday night, drunk, wearing a hideous shiny suit, and voiding my bowels after doing a bag of street drugs given to me by a furious stripper. I laughed harder. “I used to teach Bible study!” I shouted. Finally, after years of trying, I’d lost m
y soul. And it was funny.

  Someone knocked brusquely on the door of my toilet stall. “Security. You alright in there?”

  I giggled. “I’m good.”

  My eyes were vibrating in my head, but as I sat on the toilet I looked down and noticed the floor. It was old, with black and white tiles that had probably been put down in the 1930s or 1940s. Maybe at one point the floor had been beautiful, but now it was covered in so many layers of accumulated filth it was impossible to tell what it had looked like originally.

  I closed my eyes and laughed harder. For most of my life I’d always felt terrible, inadequate, inferior. But now I knew – I was terrible, inadequate, inferior. My philosophical preening and my spirituality were just a pretense. This shallow, diarrhea-splattered horror was my actual life.

  I was worthless, this was my truth, and the truth had set me free.

  Section Four:

  Then It Fell Apart

  49

  FAIRFIELD, IOWA (2006)

  “HI, MOBY!” David Lynch said in his high, booming voice, making me feel like a junior FBI agent in Twin Peaks. I had loved him ever since seeing Eraserhead in 1981, and now I was meeting him for the first time.

  I was in London to DJ, when Heather Graham invited me to hear David be interviewed onstage at BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television. Heather was a huge movie star, but what impressed me most about her long career was her brief stint as Dale Cooper’s girlfriend in the second season of Twin Peaks. The first time I met her I blurted out, like a fan with no impulse control, “You were Annie on Twin Peaks!”

  Heather picked me up at my hotel, with her hair pulled back, wearing a simple floral dress. Every time I saw her I was reminded that my friend was one of the most beautiful women on the planet. We got to the theater, posed for some pictures for the British paparazzi, and found our seats.