Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  I wanted breakfast, so I went back to the bus and ate cereal and soy milk by the light of my phone. Then I thought about what I was going to do for the next few hours; we were going on at 7 p.m., and I had nothing scheduled until then. I considered going outside to see whether this early September day in England was sunny or not, but I was still hungover, so sleeping until showtime seemed more appealing. Bunks on tour buses are called “coffins,” as they’re small, dark, and cold. Curled up under a blanket in my bunk, I had a simple thought: Maybe someday I’ll fall asleep in my coffin and not wake up. Comforted by that idea, I fell asleep.

  At 7 p.m. we got onstage and played our thirty-minute corporate set in the rain. I was being paid well, but standing under a dark-gray sky in front of 89,000 empty, wet plastic seats was grim, even if it was Wembley Stadium. After we played the last song in our short set I said an overly loud “Thank you!” The nine hundred people who’d been getting steadily soaked clapped desultorily and hurried to the exits.

  A few people from the record company and some friends of my British crew had come to the show. Afterward they came backstage to get drunk: even though we had played to approximately 1 percent of the stadium’s capacity, it was still Wembley Stadium. After my seventh or eighth drink I tried to pretend that being onstage at Wembley Stadium had been a big deal. “Freddie Mercury and Axl Rose played on that stage!” I told Dan, my lighting director.

  “Slightly bigger crowds,” he noted dryly.

  At midnight Sandy came to me and said, “Mo, we have to get going.” We were booked at a dance festival near Manchester the following night, and the bus driver wanted to drive overnight to avoid traffic.

  “Hey!” I said to the twelve people still hanging out backstage. “Come with us to Manchester!”

  They were hesitant, until one of our road crew chimed in, saying, “We have drugs!”

  I shepherded seven men and five women onto the bus. Gary, our laconic German driver, looked up from the magazine he was reading, rolled his eyes, and started the bus. I wanted to feel like a rock star, so I put on Physical Graffiti, while my guitar tech chopped up lines of coke on the downstairs lounge table. We rolled out of the parking garage and got on the motorway to Manchester.

  Before the show I’d looked at my BlackBerry and seen an email from my aunt Jane, with my stepfather Richard and my aunt Anne cc’d. It was short, saying simply, “Hi, Mobes, just hoping you’re doing okay.”

  I sent back a nonplussed response: “i’m good, why, what’s up?”

  As we got on the motorway I saw on my BlackBerry that my aunt had responded, but I was drinking vodka, listening to Led Zeppelin, and flirting with the women who’d joined us on the road trip to Manchester, so I ignored her email. We burned through a few bags of cocaine, and at 3 a.m. I went upstairs with a bottle of vodka and two of the women from the record company. We went into the upstairs lounge, and I put on Felt Mountain by Goldfrapp.

  “Oh no, not this,” one of the women said.

  “You don’t like Goldfrapp?” I asked, my drunken mouth tripping over the hard consonants in “Goldfrapp.”

  “I love Goldfrapp, but it’s like fucking work,” she said.

  I put on a Massive Attack CD instead, and the three of us started taking off our clothes. One of the women pulled out a bag of ecstasy pills and gave one to each of us.

  I told myself that even if I was selling fewer records and playing for smaller crowds, I could still find moments of happiness, so long as I had the trappings of rock stardom: the sex, the drugs, the double-decker tour buses, the hotel suites. Maybe I couldn’t revive my fading career, but I could use the money I’d made to make sure that I had enough drugs and alcohol on hand so that someone would always want to hang out with me and pretend it was still 2000.

  As the ecstasy kicked in on top of the vodka and the cocaine, we had sex. And somewhere around the time the sun came up, shining wanly as we sped past a field of English cows, I passed out.

  *

  I woke up alone, in the parking lot of the Lowry hotel in Manchester. The women were gone, the bus was cold, and I felt like gray death. There were empty vodka bottles on the floor next to some used condoms. And something smelled terrible.

  I looked down at my naked body. There was shit on my legs and on my stomach. Either I had engaged in messy anal sex that I didn’t remember, or somebody – possibly me, possibly one of the women – had shat the couch we’d had sex on. It smelled like an open sewer, and I had to fight the urge to vomit.

  I pulled on my clothes, even though my legs and stomach were covered in drying shit. I had to get to my hotel room as quickly as possible so I could clean myself off and throw up. I stopped at the front desk and asked for my key. The bright-eyed receptionist handed it to me and said, “See you tonight at the festival!”

  I tried to smile, but I felt like a corpse.

  I took the stairs to the third floor – I didn’t want to be caught in an elevator while smelling of shit. Once I was safely in my room I ran to the bathroom and threw up in and around the toilet. After emptying my stomach I got two bottles of water and one of grapefruit juice. I drank them in the shower while I scrubbed the shit out of my leg and stomach hair.

  After ten minutes of scrubbing I still felt like I’d been poisoned, because, well, I had been. But I was clean. When I stepped out of the shower I still smelled shit. Oh. My clothes. I wanted to burn them or throw them out the window, but instead I took a plastic laundry bag, scooped them up, and dropped them in the garbage.

  I took out my BlackBerry and, sitting naked on the bathroom floor, sent an email to Sandy: “too hungover, cancel any interviews today. also i need new clothes, can you get me jeans and t-shirt from gap?”

  Looking at my other emails, I scrolled back to my aunt’s reply from the night before. She had written: “Oh, Mobes, we thought you knew. Today’s the tenth anniversary of your mom’s death. We hope you’re okay.”

  56

  STORRS, CONNECTICUT (1983–4)

  I’d spent my first semester at the University of Connecticut looking for the perfect college girlfriend, without any success. UConn was a university of twenty-five thousand people, so there were smart, beautiful women everywhere. But either they weren’t interested in me or I was too shy to talk to any of them. So I studied hard and read Kant and Bertrand Russell and made friends with the few punk-rockers I met on campus.

  One of my new punk-rock friends, Bethany, lived near me in southern Connecticut, and at the end of the semester she invited me to a dinner party her college-professor parents were throwing over Christmas break. Most of the guests were her parents’ fellow academics, but Bethany was allowed to invite two friends: me and her high-school friend Jenny.

  We sat down for dinner at a big dining table and drank red wine and ate pasta and spinach salad. “So, Moby,” a professor at Manhattan College asked me, “you’re a freshman at UConn? Do you know what you want to major in?”

  “I think I’m going to be a philosophy major,” I said.

  The academics laughed, without malice. “So you want to get rich?” Bethany’s dad asked, chuckling at his own joke.

  “You do know that there isn’t a less practical major than philosophy, right?” an NYU professor asked me, looking concerned.

  “I could write books and teach?” I suggested sheepishly, to which they laughed again and shouted, in unison, “No!”

  I smiled across the table at Jenny. She smiled back, and my heart stuttered. Jenny was blonde and wore black glasses, and looked like an intellectual Danish movie star. After dinner, with red-wine courage, I asked if she wanted to go to the movies the following night. She smiled and said, “Okay.”

  I picked Jenny up at her parents’ elegant Tudor mansion in Greenwich. We’d decided to see The Big Chill, and tried to cram in a lifetime of conversation during the drive to the movie theater. I learned that she wanted to major in creative writing and teach and write fiction, and that she loved the Cocteau Twins. As Jenny talked I kep
t stealing glances at her. She had a relaxed beauty that made me want to wake up next to her and watch her eyes move under her eyelids while she slept, a beauty that made me think of faded sweatshirts and making babies while dogs slept in front of the fireplace. As the first preview started, for Ghostbusters, I thought that maybe I’d found my person.

  For the next two weeks we saw each other as much as we could, going to movies and bookstores, and sometimes just kissing in front of the fireplace in her parents’ living room after her mom and dad had gone to sleep. After Christmas break, when she went back to Connecticut College and I returned to UConn, we wrote letters or talked on the phone every day.

  I’d ended up at UConn because it was a state school – the only college I could afford. It was a perfectly fine place, but I’d had my heart set on going to Kenyon College in Ohio. The admissions board at Kenyon had even sent me a personalized letter asking me to attend, but the cost of going to Kenyon was something my mom and I couldn’t consider, as we were still on welfare and food stamps.

  Jenny went to Connecticut College, which sounded like a state school but was actually small, private, and very expensive. It was in New London, about an hour away from the UConn campus in Storrs. Since neither one of us had a car, one weekend in early February she took the bus to visit me.

  I got to the bus stop half an hour before she arrived, and waited with flowers and a forty-five-minute mix tape that I’d made for her, named “Under Blue Moon (I Saw You),” after an Echo & the Bunnymen lyric:

  SIDE A

  “Going Underground,” the Jam

  “Messages,” Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

  “The Killing Moon,” Echo & the Bunnymen

  “Academy Fight Song,” Mission of Burma

  “Heaven,” Talking Heads

  SIDE B

  “‘Heroes,’” David Bowie

  “Any Second Now (Voices),” Depeche Mode

  “Vienna,” Ultravox

  “Ceremony,” New Order

  “Atmosphere,” Joy Division

  Jenny stepped off the bus, brushed a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes, and smiled at me. I hugged her and took her bag. We walked back to my dorm, making our way through the empty frozen fields that surrounded UConn.

  My roommate had gone to his parents’ house in Newtown for the weekend, so we had my tiny dorm room to ourselves. Normally I slept in the lower bunk, but I’d moved the bunk-bed frame out of the room and put the mattresses on the floor so that Jenny and I could sleep next to each other. I also spent a few hours before Jenny arrived cleaning up our filthy room. For forty-eight hours this was going to be our home, and I wanted her to be happy. Maybe in thirty years she and I would be telling this story to our kids: on our first real weekend together we slept on thin mattresses in a dorm room with a linoleum floor and concrete walls painted light green.

  UConn didn’t have a beautiful campus, but I still wanted to show Jenny where I lived and went to school. After we dropped off her bag and had sex on the makeshift bed, I showed her the library, the buildings where I had my philosophy and anthropology classes, and then the dining hall, where we had dinner with my friends.

  “Look at him!” Bethany said during dinner.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You can’t stop smiling.”

  Jenny blushed. But it was true.

  I knew that what I felt for Jenny was at least partly irrational – I had known her for only a month. But we’d communicated every day, and I knew her creative, brilliant mind. And she was so beautiful I couldn’t stop looking at her. I couldn’t imagine any reason not to spend the rest of my life with her.

  After dinner we went to see a band play at one of the less offensive frat houses, and then danced to the new-wave DJ who played after the band finished. The DJ played the long remix of “Temptation” by New Order, and Jenny danced with her eyes closed, singing along. My girlfriend knew all the words to “Temptation.” That was it. I didn’t need any more evidence. She was my person.

  Later, as we lay in bed, falling asleep, I wondered what our children would be like. Jenny was descended from David Hume and I was descended from Herman Melville, so I assumed our kids would be really smart and really WASPy. I let myself fantasize about the future: we’d finish college and then move to Boston, or maybe New York, get our master’s degrees and then our doctorates. We’d live in a big city for a while, but then move to a college town, where we’d write books and be professors and make little progressive babies. I’d work on music in my spare time, but eventually spend more of it playing classical music, ideally at a piano by a leaded glass window. I’d play Bach and Debussy, while Jenny read Walker Percy books in a window seat as snow fell outside.

  And we’d get old together. When she found her first gray hair I would remind her that she would always be beautiful to me. Our children would give us grandchildren. And when we were eighty or ninety we’d have all our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids over for Christmas at our big house in some college town in Massachusetts. There’d be a fire in the fireplace, a tall Christmas tree, and a room filled with dogs, babies, kids, and adults. While our happy offspring were unwrapping Christmas presents, I’d look at her and say, from the bottom of my heart, “I’m still in love with you, Jenny.”

  It all seemed so nice and so possible. Jenny stirred in her sleep and mumbled something unintelligible. Smiling, I held her tightly while she slept.

  57

  NEW YORK CITY (2007)

  The Island of Misfit Toys is the place in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special where the broken and unwanted toys go: a toy gun that shoots jelly, a train with square wheels. My mother and my grandparents were dead, and I didn’t want to travel for Christmas, so I decided to host an “Island of Misfit Toys” holiday party at my sky castle on Central Park West.

  I woke up early on December 25, at 10 a.m., and went for a walk through Central Park. I loved Christmas in New York, the only day of the year when the city slowed down to something approaching calm. I could see the limestone buildings on 5th Avenue and Central Park West through the leafless trees in the park, and the only sound I heard came from my shoes crunching on the fallen leaves and the dry winter grass.

  I hiked up to Belvedere Castle and gazed across the park at my five-level sky castle. It hadn’t fixed any of my problems, but nevertheless it was staggeringly beautiful. I walked back home to tidy before the guests started arriving.

  At 2.30 p.m. I cued up a Johnny Mathis Christmas album on my iPod and looked around my apartment. It had turned bitterly cold outside, but the sun was shining through my leaded windows and I’d lit a cheery fire in the antique marble fireplace. Like an envoy from the past, Johnny Mathis sang “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” I looked at the pine boughs and holly leaves I’d put on the fireplace mantle, and I had to agree with Johnny: my apartment looked a lot like Christmas. It even smelled like Christmas because I had a pot of hot cider (with cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice) simmering on the stove.

  At 3 p.m. a steady flow of friends and family started arriving, so I opened a few bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne. At dusk we all went onto the west balconies of my apartment to watch the Christmas sun set over the Hudson River. I felt civilized in my sky castle, drinking champagne with other sophisticated New Yorkers as the sun peacefully vanished.

  I hated the idea of anyone spending Christmas in New York alone, so I’d sent my “Island of Misfit Toys” invitation to everyone I knew who might not have plans. After the sun went down my apartment started filling up. Jonathan Ames, who had just signed a deal to produce Bored to Death with Jason Schwartzman, showed up with his extended posse of degenerate art stars; some eastern European organized-crime figures I’d met on tour came by with presents and cocaine; a few musicians I knew dropped by; and Era, a stripper I’d met recently, showed up with some other strippers and a few drug dealers.

  By 7 p.m. all five levels of my apartment were full. My refined daytime guests had pol
itely left, and as the drugs came out the earlier veneer of Upper West Side sophistication was stripped away from the party. Era took me by the hand and led me into one of the guest bedrooms, bringing a bottle of champagne and some crystal meth with her. She had grown up preppy in Westport, Connecticut, but now had jet-black hair, was covered with tattoos, and did naked performance art when she wasn’t stripping.

  We drank the bottle of champagne, inhaled the crystal meth, talked about childhood Christmases in Connecticut, and had meth-fueled sex on the guest bed. Era had to go to work at a strip club in the financial district – strippers can make a lot of money working on Christmas – so after we had sex, she hastily got dressed and headed downtown.

  While Era and I had been in the guest bedroom, my party guests had chewed the meat of civilization off the bone. Someone had turned off my Johnny Mathis playlist, replacing him with a ghetto-bass DJ mix from the early 1990s. The mob bosses had invited more strippers and other organized criminals, all of whom were snorting lines on the small table where I normally kept the chess set my uncle gave me for my tenth birthday. And my friend Mangina, who was an amputee, was in the kitchen mixing cocktails in the top of his prosthetic leg. When he saw me, he yelled, “We’re doing stump shots!”

  I moved on from champagne and crystal meth to vodka and cocaine, because, well, it was Christmas.

  My respectable friend Samantha came up the stairs, crying and clutching a bottle of vodka. “What’s wrong?” I asked, pleased that the crystal meth and cocaine were keeping me from slurring my words. “Why aren’t you upstate?”

  Samantha was a tall blonde Park Avenue doyenne who had a hedge fund-managing husband and three perfect blonde private-school daughters. She and I had met the year before at a fundraiser for the Museum of Natural History; I’d invited her to my Christmas party, even though I assumed she was spending the holiday in Westchester with her family. She looked around at the mobsters, the strippers, and the throng of downtown degenerates filling my apartment, dancing to L’Trimm’s “Cars with the Boom.”