by Moby
The stage lights came up, and David Lynch walked onstage in his trademark black suit and buttoned-up white shirt, smoking a cigarette and smiling at the audience. He was being interviewed by an erudite, Cambridge-educated journalist, but as the interview went further and further down the rabbit hole of insouciant journalistic cleverness, David started shutting down and getting quieter. At one point the journalist asked a long, involved question about David’s creative process, assuming that he’d get an equally long and involved response. When the question was finished David just shook his head, fluttered his hands in the air, and said, “See, creativity is beautiful.”
His words hit me like lightning on a clear day. When I started making music I wasn’t striving for fame; I was responding to the simple magic of music and its ability to make me cry and dance and sing. Growing up, music had given me a comfort and connection that was deeper than anything else I’d ever experienced.
While the journalist kept plying David with clever questions, I thought about what David had said: “Creativity is beautiful.” I was excited that I’d seen the truth, and I was chastened and ashamed that for the last few years I’d been so willing to sacrifice creativity in the pursuit of fame.
After the show Heather and I went backstage to meet David. “HI, HEATHER! HI, MOBY!” he boomed, holding a glass of red wine and smiling like a jolly lawnmower repairman in an undertaker’s suit. I’d never met David, and I was in awe of his work, but he was so genial and unassuming that my nerves disappeared.
“When you said, ‘Creativity is beautiful,’” I said, groping for words, “it just … hit me.”
David smiled broadly and said in his foghorn voice, “THAT’S BECAUSE CREATIVITY IS BEAUTIFUL, MOBY!”
David and I traded email addresses, and a week later he invited me to the “David Lynch Weekend” at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. I had no idea what the Maharishi University of Management was, but I immediately canceled whatever plans I had for that weekend and wrote back, telling him that I’d love to come. I held David in such reverence that if he had asked me to walk to Argentina to make him a cup of coffee, I would have said, “Yes, sir!” and laced up my shoes.
I flew to Iowa on a Friday night and was met at the Cedar Rapids airport by a woman from the Maharishi University of Management. The sky was cold and full of stars, and I was as excited as I’d ever been – I was going to spend the weekend with David Lynch. In his last email he had promised that I’d learn how to meditate.
“Do you meditate?” I eagerly asked the woman who’d picked me up at the airport.
She laughed. “That’s pretty much all we do here.”
She dropped me off at a small hotel on a hill next to a cornfield in Fairfield, Iowa. The woman at the reception desk told me that the buildings in Fairfield were all constructed according to Ayurvedic principles.
“What are Ayurvedic principles?” I asked.
“Well, it’s complicated,” she said. “But basically they all face east.”
I was in my room unpacking my bag when I heard a knock on the door. “Who is it?” I called.
“MOBY! IT’S DAVID!”
I opened the door. David Lynch was standing there, in his black suit and white shirt, holding a tray of food. “I brought soup!” he boomed. I was tongue-tied – I had no idea what to say in an Ayurvedic hotel room to David Lynch. He came in like the world’s happiest bellboy and put my soup on the small table in my room. Then he shook my hand vigorously. “THANKS FOR COMING, MOBY!” he said, his voice comically loud in my small and quiet hotel room.
“So when do I learn to meditate?” I asked.
David laughed. “BOBBY WILL SORT YOU OUT! OKAY! HAVE A GOOD NIGHT, AND DON’T FORGET: ENJOY YOUR SOUP! P.S. MOBY, IT’S VEGAN!”
He retired to his own room across the hall. I took out my BlackBerry and emailed a few friends in New York who loved David Lynch as much as I did: “i’m in iowa. david lynch just brought me soup. the owls are not what they seem.”
*
David had organized concerts on Saturday night and Sunday night, where Donovan, Chrysta Bell, and I would be performing. I was doing acoustic sets, so my friends Laura and Daron had flown in to play with me. Laura was a political activist who sang like Big Mama Thornton; Daron was her husband, a handsome magazine editor who played guitar and harmonica. After I woke up on Saturday morning I called Laura and Daron’s room, and we met in the lobby for a tour of Fairfield.
The woman who’d picked me up at the airport was our tour guide. She drove us around town and told us that Fairfield was the world center for transcendental meditation, but it was also a farming town smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. Laura was originally from Iowa, and she couldn’t believe there was a town in her home state full of farmers and Ayurvedic meditators.
“What do the farmers think of the meditators?” I asked our smiling tour guide.
“At first, in the 1970s, there were some issues,” she said. “But now everyone gets along. Even the mayor’s a meditator now!”
We drove down the main street. A John Deere tractor dealership was next door to an Ayurvedic crystal and incense shop. “It’s so …” I tried to think of the right word.
“Clean?” said Laura, who had come from Bushwick the day before.
“Weird?” said Daron, because it was.
“And calm,” I said. “It’s so calm.”
Our guide told us that there were centers surrounding the town where people meditated twenty-four hours a day. “They meditate for world peace, but you can feel it in town, can’t you?” I wanted to say she was crazy, but she was right. Something was going on here. The molecules in the air seemed to be moving in a less hurried way than they did on the rest of the planet.
We met for lunch with David and Donovan in a white nineteenth-century farmhouse off the town square. I didn’t know if it was the town full of meditators, the clean Iowa air, or the presence of David Lynch, but I felt wonderful. I wanted to be an obsessive fan during lunch and pepper David with Twin Peaks questions: “Who are Bob and Mike?” “Where is the Black Lodge?” “What is garmonbozia?” “What happened to David Bowie and Chet Desmond?” But I stayed calm and asked about the history of Fairfield instead.
“See, the Maharishi needed a place to go in the 1970s, so he bought this old college and moved here with ten thousand of his followers,” David said, in a slightly less booming voice. “And now it’s a magical place that’s going to save the world!”
I had grown up with the seductive darkness of David Lynch, and I was having trouble reconciling Twin Peaks and Lost Highway with this smiling advocate of world peace and Ayurvedic teahouses. But as David had said in an interview I’d read, “You don’t need to be dark to make dark art!”
*
I decided to stay sober for the weekend, as Fairfield was a spiritual place and I had come to learn how to meditate and to spend time with David. When David stepped up to the microphone to introduce the acoustic concert on Saturday night, a member of the audience shouted out, “Give me an idea!”
Without pausing, David said, “A BOWLING BALL FILLED WITH RED ANTS FLOATING IN OUTER SPACE!” Creativity was beautiful.
After performing our acoustic set I was leaving the venue and heading back to my hotel, when a beautiful woman with short, bleached hair approached me. “Hi, I’m Sophie,” she said. “Do you want to get a drink?”
This was my sober, spiritual weekend. But what harm could there be in going out for a drink with a beautiful woman and seeing how people really lived in Fairfield? Plus I wondered if the calm I felt from being in a town full of meditators meant that I’d be able to drink like a normal person. Back in New York I was having fifteen or twenty drinks a night, but I told myself that drinking excessively was my personal choice. I could choose to drink like a normal person, if I wanted to; normal people routinely went out, had one or two beers, and then went back to their hotel rooms.
Sophie took me to one of the only bars in Fairfiel
d, and I ordered each of us a beer. The bar was as clean and normal as the town, and I felt like I could be in any small, progressive college town in the country. I sat down next to Sophie on a vinyl banquette, and people started coming up to me to say that they’d liked my show and to ask what I thought of Fairfield. I was fascinated by these meditators and children of meditators, who were drinking beer and listening to Green Day.
I had a second beer, as that’s what normal people in normal bars did. Then I thought it couldn’t hurt to have a third beer, as it was Saturday night and I wanted to celebrate being in Iowa with David Lynch. Then I had a fourth beer, since there wasn’t really much difference between three beers and four beers. And then someone bought me a shot of tequila. And then another shot of tequila. And then a teenager in a Tool T-shirt asked me, “Do you want to go to a rave?”
I was taken aback. There was a rave? In Fairfield, Iowa? “Yes,” I said, starting to slur my words just a bit. “Yes, I do.”
I got into a car with Sophie and the nineteen-year-old in the Tool shirt and his nineteen-year-old friends. They passed around a joint laced with angel dust, which I politely smoked with them. After thirty minutes of driving through barren fields we reached an abandoned grain warehouse on the outskirts of town. In the warehouse the air was thick with fog and a few hundred kids in oversized shirts were drinking and dancing. As the bass vibrated my ribcage I felt like I had stepped into a time machine and gone back to 1991. I pulled Sophie to me and said, “We’re at a rave! In Iowa!”
A white guy with long dreadlocks came up to me. “Are you Moby?” he asked.
“Yup.”
He hugged me. Then he reached into his pocket and handed me a pill. “Here. It’s E.” Someone else handed me a beer, and I swallowed the pill.
“Can I buy some for my friend?” I asked. I gave him $100 and he handed me three pills. Sophie swallowed her two pills and I washed my second down with a bottle of water.
“You like G?” the young pixie raver who handed me the bottle of water asked me.
“G?”
“GHB – it’s in the water.”
“I don’t know what GHB is,” I said, feeling out of touch.
“You’ll love it!” she said, and danced away into the crowd.
Sophie and I wandered around the warehouse, hugging ravers, and sat down on beanbag chairs in the chillout room as the ecstasy kicked in on top of the beer and tequila and pot and angel dust and GHB I’d taken. The chillout DJ played “Porcelain” as Sophie leaned over and kissed me.
The room felt like warm birds, breathing on us and sustaining us. Amber and yellow lights moved slowly across the wall. I told Sophie I’d had an epiphany: we were both warm-fusion stars and all of us were creating new stars with our emotions.
“We are all made of stars,” she said, smiling at me while wreathed in friendly yellow flames. I’d come to Iowa for sobriety and spirituality and meditation, but I’d found enlightenment while sitting next to a beautiful woman in a beanbag chair at a rave. And all I’d needed for transcendence was alcohol, angel dust, ecstasy, pot, and a water bottle filled with animal tranquilizer.
Sophie went off to get us more drinks, and some ravers came over to talk to me. “Whoa, you’re Moby,” one of them said. “It’s so cool that you’re here.”
I smiled at them. Like Sophie they were moving like slow trees and were softly wreathed in flame.
“Do you want to get high?” he asked.
I didn’t know what he meant, as I was already high. But I smiled and said, “Yes.”
He and his friends led me outside, around the back of the warehouse. I could hear the drum-and-bass coming from inside, but above me the sky was black and filled with stars, while the fields next to the warehouse extended forever into darkness.
“Do you smoke?” one of the ravers asked me.
“Smoke what?”
“Speed,” he said.
I had to think for a second, as my thoughts were slow and enlightened. I remembered that “speed” meant “meth.” I said, “No, I’ve never smoked speed.” He handed me a glass pipe and lit the bowl. I inhaled and promptly felt as though my head had fractured like a calving iceberg.
“It’s laced,” he said.
I exhaled, feeling like my nasal passages were at the center of a slow explosion made out of cold glass. “Laced?” I somehow managed to ask.
“Dusted,” he said.
Oh. I’d just smoked crystal meth that was dusted with PCP. But I felt strong and bright. I’d come to Fairfield for enlightenment, and I’d transcended material existence by smoking meth and angel dust with ravers in a cornfield. I did a few more hits, hugged the ravers, and stumbled back inside.
Sophie came up to me and handed me a beer. “Where were you?” she asked.
At first I couldn’t remember. Where had I been? Outside? I was sure it had been a long time ago. “Looking for you,” I said, not feeling my skin.
We sat down in the beanbags and held hands and kissed and looked at the lights for an hour. Or four. The music stopped. “Oh no,” I said, cold and despairing, “it’s over.”
Sophie smiled.
“Can you come to my hotel?” I asked, suddenly shaking and filled with dread.
“Moby, I live with my fiancé,” she said, sweetly and sadly. I plummeted into darkness.
“But you kissed me?” I said.
“You look so sad,” she said, touching my face.
“Can you break up with him?” I asked desperately. “Right now? You can use my phone. Please don’t leave me.”
“No. I have to go.” She gave me a bittersweet smile and walked away.
The remaining ravers were milling around, looking as lost as I felt. I stumbled outside and saw that somehow it had become daytime. I found my way to the field serving as a parking lot and stopped some kids getting into a minivan. “I’m Moby,” I said, shaking and struggling to make words come out of my mouth. “Can you give me a ride?”
On the road back to town, one of them offered me a joint and said, “Do you want to smoke?” I still hated pot; whenever I smoked it, I felt like I was filling my veins with dirt. But I needed something, so I inhaled.
I’d already had crystal meth, angel dust, GHB, two hits of ecstasy, and well over a dozen drinks, so the pot didn’t make me any more or less high. My neural system was already saturated, so I sat in the back of the minivan, shivering with cold and despair and holding myself.
They dropped me off at my hotel as some of the meditators were sitting down to breakfast. “Moby!” one said brightly, assuming I was coming in from a morning walk. “Join us!”
I felt like a demon with broken teeth, so I smiled and waved, tried to look normal, and went to my room. I lay down on my bed and couldn’t think: my mind was a nest of whirling insects. I turned on my computer, trying to do something to make the time pass, but I couldn’t focus or even make words. I got in the shower and tried to cleanse myself of the alcohol and drugs, but I just stood there, shaking in the water, saying, “What am I doing?” over and over.
I’d brought Xanax and Vicodin to help me sleep, so I took four Xanaxes and four Vicodins, hoping to pry the chemical vice from my head. I lay down in my bed, whimpering quietly, and put on a pair of headphones so I could listen to Bryter Layter by Nick Drake. I felt like my body and brain were both irreparably bruised, but Nick Drake’s voice helped calm me. By the third song, I was asleep.
I heard knocking on my door. Where was I? Oh, Iowa.
I was still wearing my clothes from the night before, and I was confused: when I’d gone to sleep it had been light, and now everything was dark. Was I dead? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think so. Every pore ached and my brain felt like it was floating in a pool of ammonia, but I was alive.
“Who is it?” I asked, the words sounding far away, even though I was saying them.
“Moby, it’s Daron! Are you okay?”
I opened the door. “What time is it?”
“It’s seven,�
� he said. “We’re on at eight.” He looked at me more closely. “Are you high?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head and immediately regretting it. Trying to make normal conversation, I asked, “How was your day?”
Daron told me that they’d gotten Ayurvedic massages, had meditated with a group of people, and had gone for a walk and looked at a herb garden. “What did you do?” he asked.
“I’m just getting up. It was a long night. I went to a rave.”
“They have raves in Iowa?”
“They do.”
We drove to the venue in a minivan. Once we were backstage I sat on a white plastic lawn chair and tried to restart my damaged brain with coffee. Staring at the floor, I suddenly remembered the dream I’d had before I woke up. It had been about Bob, from Twin Peaks. In many ways, Bob was the central character in the show. He was a demon from another dimension called the Black Lodge, although what he was or where he came from were never explained specifically. But in my dream I’d finally figured it out, who and why Bob was, and I needed to tell David.
The theater was full, with a thousand or so people in the audience. We played a couple of songs, and after “Natural Blues” I took the microphone and addressed David, who was in the front row. “Okay, first off, someone needs to teach me to meditate,” I said. The audience laughed, even though I wasn’t kidding. “Also, David, this is important: last night, or today actually, I figured out Bob.”
David and the audience were quiet, staring at me.
“I was passed out on Xanax and Vicodin, sleeping off my hangover, and I dreamed about Bob. Here’s what I learned: he doesn’t want to be bad.”
I looked at David again, searching his reaction for some sign of confirmation. He was smiling, kindly but concerned, as I was babbling about a demon from a TV show he’d made almost twenty years ago. But I’d had what I thought was a huge epiphany and I needed to share it.
“David,” I said, with the zeal of the newly enlightened, “I figured him out. Bob’s bad, archetypally bad. But he doesn’t want to be. That’s who he is, but it hurts him. Being bad hurts him.”