by Moby
One of the line items in the renovation budget had been the cost of taking brand-new wallpaper and distressing it so that it looked faded and old. I’d noticed that downtown developers were doing everything they could to make new buildings look like they’d been around for a hundred years. The Bowery hotel had just opened further up the street; it looked like a repurposed twenty-story garment factory from 1905. The truth was that four years ago, it had been a two-story gas station.
The host brought us to a table by the stage. We ordered $35 cocktails; even though I was an investor I still had to pay for drinks. “Um, what the hell?” my divorcée companion asked, looking at the stage, where an albino performer was fellating himself while a dwarf lip-synched to a Britney Spears song. The hedge-fund managers at the tables around us were cheering, thrilled to be in the presence of downtown art.
“It’s the end of the world,” I said calmly, finishing my drink.
We ordered more drinks and watched the rest of the show: topless choreography to a Tom Jones song; a burlesque performer having sex with a statue of Jesus; a lounge singer doing backflips while wearing a silver thong and singing “Stairway to Heaven”; and finally my old friend Murray Hill, an old-school drag-king comedian who mercilessly insulted the audience while they laughed and spent more money.
“Well, that was … uh,” my date said.
“You’re right,” I agreed.
We went upstairs to a curtained booth with one of The Box’s other investors and some of his movie-star friends. When I fell in love with New York nightlife in the early 1980s, clubs had been full of artists, writers, and musicians – people who were broke and broken. Now it cost between $2,000 and $5,000 to rent one of these upstairs booths at The Box for the night. For that money you got a place to sit for a few hours and a bottle of champagne. This was the end of an age in New York, or maybe the beginning of a new one, in which buying art had been deemed a creative act.
A burlesque dancer from Nevada I’d met on the opening night of The Box came into our booth, sat between my new friend and me, and put her hands on our legs. She had short red hair and rhinestones glued to her face; in her frilled brown leotard she looked like she’d stepped out of an 1890 vaudeville house. Someone had politely left a few hundred dollars’ worth of coke on the table, and we all dove in like Cajuns at a crawfish dinner.
When the coke disappeared the dancer said to us, “You should take me home with you.” It was only 3.30 a.m., but we left, stumbling down the narrow stairs and stepping out into the cold and quiet of Chrystie Street.
“Let’s go to my house,” the divorcée said. “My kids are with my husband in Bedford and I’m all alone.” She lived in one of the legendary co-ops on Park Avenue, and the doorman let us in without batting an eye. I assumed that as an Upper East Side doorman he’d seen everything, and three drunks weaving through the lobby was nothing new.
We took the elevator to her apartment, and the dancer gasped as we stepped into a marble foyer large enough to raise elephants in.
“Let me show you around,” the drunk divorcée said. She walked us through a walnut-paneled library, a formal living room with a grand piano, a full gym, and a restaurant-sized kitchen.
“I didn’t know apartments like this existed,” the dancer said, running her fingers along the marble in the master bathroom. “Can I live here?” She pulled us both onto the king-sized Hästens bed and we peeled off each other’s clothes until we were all in our underwear.
These women were beautiful, and they wanted to have a threesome with me. But it felt rote, as if we were playing scripted parts: the debauched musician, the Park Avenue lady drinking away her sorrow, and the wide-eyed burlesque dancer from a small town outside Reno experiencing all that life in the big city had to offer.
There had been a time in my life when nothing would have been more exciting than a no-strings-attached threesome, but this just felt obligatory. The divorcée was putting up a brave and cynical front, but her eyes were full of sadness. And the dancer seemed far more excited by her proximity to wealth and fame than to the divorcée and me, two lonely and aging people.
Suddenly, even though I’d had five or ten lines of coke at The Box, I was very tired. I just wanted to rest, and the divorcée’s bed was extremely comfortable. Apart from the sound of the divorcée and the dancer kissing, the bedroom was as quiet as a monastic library. So I closed my eyes.
I was startled awake by the sound of snoring. My snoring. The divorcée and the dancer looked at me, affronted. They were granting me a threesome, the highlight of every red-blooded man’s life. And out of age, sadness, and defeat I’d fallen asleep.
54
DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1983)
I had a girlfriend. And then I didn’t.
I met Meredith at the Darien High School spring dance, when I begged the DJ to play “Blue Monday” by New Order. By the end of the song Meredith and I were the only ones dancing. She was going to Dartmouth in the fall, had strawberry blonde hair, and reminded me of Molly Ringwald. We started dating right after graduation; in July, only a few weeks later, we broke up.
I hadn’t had sex since losing my virginity the year before to Victoria the new-wave ghost. I was headed to UConn in September, and as an almost-college student I assumed that having a girlfriend would mean having some sort of sex life. But in the three and a half weeks that Meredith and I dated we’d gone to the movies and gotten pizza, but only held hands and kissed a few times. So I was melancholy about being single, but cautiously thrilled by the possibility that someday I would have sex again.
The weekend after the Fourth of July I ran into my friend Paul at Johnny’s Records, and he told me about a party that night near the Ox Ridge Hunt Club. “Come on, we’re single, it’s summer, let’s get drunk and make out with girls,” he said, as if describing a rudimentary and easily understood theorem.
Paul said he would pick me up at eight, so at seven I put on an Ultravox cassette and got ready. I’d recently come to love Ultravox and the New Romantics, even though my punk-rock friends ridiculed me for liking “gay synth-pop.” I still loved Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, but Ultravox and OMD and the other New Romantics made beautiful music, wore old suits, and sang about Europe and broken hearts.
Most of my favorite synth bands were from Europe, so I’d started taking black-and-white self-portraits with a tripod and a timer at old churches and cemeteries. I used weathered stone crosses and moss-covered angels as my backdrops and did my best to make it look like I was in Germany or Scotland, or anywhere other than suburban Connecticut.
I’d never left the US, and I doubted that I’d ever be able to afford to go to Europe. But I knew that if someday I made it to England or Germany, I’d feel at home, since I’d spent so much time listening to sad European songs and fantasizing about gray skies over old cathedrals.
*
Tonight’s party was at a 1920s estate near the border of New Canaan. The main house was brick, and in the back was a tennis court, a pool, and a guest house; in the front was an arched brick porte cochère.
At the beginning of senior year I’d made a new friend, Luke, whose dad worked for Shell Oil and had just been transferred from Houston to New York. Luke’s new home also had a porte cochère, so the first time I visited his house I asked, “Can I leave my bike under the porte cochère?”
“The what?” he asked, in his thick Texas accent.
“Porte cochère?”
“How the hell do you know what it’s called?” Luke asked, baffled by both the large stone canopy outside his front door and the French term for it.
I had grown up on food stamps and welfare, but I was still a Connecticut WASP. Expressions like “porte cochère” and “dressage” and “paddle tennis” were encoded in my hereditary lexicon.
Tonight’s party was outside. We walked through the porte cochère and around the side of the house. Sixty high-school students were standing around the pool, so Paul and I filled plastic cups with beer and stood
near them.
Looking around the party I realized I’d known most of these people since kindergarten or first grade. For the last twelve years I’d felt shunned and ridiculed by them – first for being poor, and then for wearing punk-rock T-shirts to school. I assumed most of them would go to Ivy League schools, graduate, move back to Darien, marry their high-school sweethearts, and step respectfully into their parents’ J. Press shoes.
Paul went in search of a bathroom. While I drank my beer and stood awkwardly, Kyle Lapham walked over to me. Kyle – blond, six feet tall – was a lacrosse star who was headed to Duke in the fall. We’d been in preschool together, but hadn’t spoken to each other since we were five years old. “Moby,” he said, already sounding like the corporate lawyer he would probably become in a few years, “you probably don’t like me very much. But I wanted to tell you that I know you’ve had a hard time in Darien and I really respect you.”
“Thanks, Kyle,” I said, truly taken aback. “I didn’t even think you knew who I was.”
He gave me a very grown-up, appraising look. “Moby, you know we’re all intimidated by you and your friends,” he said.
“Intimidated?”
“None of us have the courage to do what you’re doing. I just wanted to let you know that I respect you.”
Was Kyle making fun of me? Was he going to walk back over to his gang of tall boys and beautiful girls and say, “Ha, he fell for it! What a buffoon!”? I gave him an appraising look of my own. He was serious. And for a moment, at least, he’d challenged one of the foundations of my self-loathing.
“Thanks, Kyle,” I said, sincerely. “That means a lot to me.” We shook hands and he walked away.
A mix tape was playing in the pool house, segueing from Steely Dan to the Kinks to the Grateful Dead. Paul and I walked over to the stereo to see if we could put on the Police or the English Beat, the only two groups making new music that the preppy kids of Darien seemed to like.
As we flipped through our host’s records, Lauren, a girl I’d known from my creative writing class, came into the pool house. She looked like a taller Audrey Hepburn, and had always seemed kind and bookish. “Hi, Moby, what are you doing?”
“Trying to change the music.”
We went outside and talked, while Paul put a copy of Special Beat Service on the turntable. Lauren told me she was going to Europe for the rest of the summer, and then off to Yale in the fall. Which contrasted with my plans to watch TV and sneak in and out of New York on the train, before I headed to the University of Connecticut in September.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked.
“Of course.”
She laughed nervously. “I feel silly now, but I’ve always thought you were cute.”
I was confused. The foundation of my worldview had always been that in the world’s eyes, and in actual fact, I was poor, loathsome, and unattractive. First Kyle, present and future captain of the universe, told me that he respected me. Now beautiful bookish Lauren said that she thought I was cute?
“Really?” I said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was nervous? I guess? And I heard you had a girlfriend?”
“No, she and I broke up.”
“Really?” she said, smiling shyly.
“Really,” I said, smiling shyly.
“Do you want another beer?” I asked, even though we were both holding full plastic cups of Rheingold.
We went back to the guest house to sit on the brown corduroy couch. Someone had changed the music on the stereo to Neil Young. I didn’t like most of the classic rock that got played on the radio, but I liked Neil Young. I never told my friends this, as he had long hair and looked like the hippies that punk-rockers were supposed to hate.
Lauren asked me what I was going to study at school.
“Philosophy, I think.”
“Why philosophy?”
No one had ever asked me that before. “It sounds silly,” I warned her. “I want to know what’s really going on in the universe. Who we are and why we do what we do.”
“Isn’t that religion and anthropology?”
“Okay, I’ll be a philosophy and religion and anthropology major. I’ll graduate in fifty years and never have to get a job.”
She smiled at me. And even though I wasn’t drunk, I kissed her. She kissed me back, her mouth tasting like beer and strawberry lip gloss. After a few minutes of kissing I felt a surge of confidence. I reached my hand up under her shirt and touched her bare breast. I expected her to slap my hand away or tell me to stop, but she moaned softly into my ear.
The Neil Young album ended. Our drunk host came into the pool house to change the record. “Don’t mind me, lovebirds,” he said, full of beer and bonhomie. He put on the new David Bowie album, Let’s Dance.
I hadn’t loved Let’s Dance at first. It didn’t have the otherworldly atmosphere of “Heroes” and Low, or the dark mutant pop of Lodger and Scary Monsters. But the more I heard it, the more I liked it. When the song “Let’s Dance” came on I stopped kissing Lauren and asked her, “Can we lie here and just listen?”
“Let’s Dance” was a pop song, but underneath the Top 40 patina it had such longing and sadness. I’d heard it on the radio a few times, but lying on the couch with Lauren’s head on my chest I suddenly felt how desperate and romantic it was.
I was leaving Darien, my weird home. Sometimes I’d loathed this strange, hyper-affluent suburban town, but it was as familiar to me as breakfast. Even though being poor in a town of fifteen thousand millionaires had made me feel inadequate, I had to admit that Darien had also been a perfect little incubator. It was safe, but it was less than an hour from New York City. It was boring, but all my teachers had been progressive academics, encouraging me to write poetry and read Dostoyevsky and Arthur Miller. I never would have admitted it to my cool punk-rock friends, but I had an odd, soft love for Darien, and was grateful to have grown up here. But now I was leaving.
I was going to college in the fall, where I would become an adult. That could mean more nights like this one, where I kissed someone I liked, and got kissed back. Maybe I’d go to college and find my soulmate, someone who would be the embodiment of every romantic David Bowie and Cure song I’d ever fallen in love with.
“Let’s Dance” ended. Lauren and I stayed in each other’s arms, propped up by the giant brown pillows on the couch. Ultimately I longed to live in New York and make music and play concerts and teach philosophy and write books, but right now this warmth, this safety, this connection was all I wanted.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Perfect,” she said, sighing like pale summer moonlight.
55
LONDON, ENGLAND (2007)
I held my hand up in front of my face, but I couldn’t see my fingers. I reached into the total blackness and felt fabric over my head, and remembered: I was on my tour bus.
The night before we’d played a festival somewhere in France. After a long drive and a ferry ride across the English Channel, we’d ended up in a basement parking garage underneath Wembley Stadium in London. Tour buses were designed to be dark, but usually a few low-wattage lights were kept on. I’d never woken up in total darkness before.
I fumbled for my BlackBerry, and with the light of the screen found my way to the stairs. The bus was a double-decker, with twelve bunks and a big lounge on the upper level; the lower level housed a bathroom, a kitchen, and a smaller lounge. I made my way out of the bus and followed the signs through the parking garage to our windowless production office, where Sandy had set up his laptop on a folding table.
More curious than rancorous, I asked, “Sandy, why weren’t the lights on in the bus?”
He looked up from his computer and considered the question. “Shit, I didn’t know you were still on it. The generator broke, so some guys took it to get fixed.”
“Is it daytime?” I asked. My BlackBerry thought it was 2 p.m., but since waking up I’d been
in the lightless bus, the underground parking garage, the concrete warren of tunnels backstage at Wembley, and the windowless production office.
“Don’t ask me,” Sandy said. “I think there’s daylight somewhere.”
Sandy and I had been touring together steadily for almost ten years. When we first started touring together he’d been reserved but smiling and good-natured, even when we missed flights and our equipment caught on fire. But over the last couple of years, as our touring became more alcoholic and drug-fueled, he’d been looking increasingly worn and tired. “Do you have a schedule for tonight?” I asked.
He handed me a piece of paper. On top it read: “MOBY / WEMBLEY STADIUM.” I’d played Wembley Arena before – twice – but this was my first time playing Wembley Stadium. Wembley Arena held fifteen thousand people, and I’d sold it out in 2000 and 2002, after releasing Play and 18. The first Wembley Arena show had crystallized the strange and wonderful rise of Play. Afterward we’d had a party for a few hundred people backstage. British movie and TV stars had begged to be invited, Peter Hook from New Order had DJed, and I’d stayed up until 8 a.m., drinking and dancing and basking in the strange perfection of sudden fame.
Tonight: Wembley Stadium. Wembley Stadium held ninety thousand people. The biggest rock stars in history had headlined there: Queen, Guns N’ Roses, the Rolling Stones. Tonight, for the first time, I would stand where Freddie Mercury and Mick Jagger had stood. But I didn’t expect it to feel like much of a triumph – we were being paid to play a thirty-minute corporate set for a few hundred Nike employees and some marathon runners.