Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  “Can we go talk somewhere?” she asked. I took her to the guest bedroom where I’d done crystal meth and had sex with Era. I shut the door and the din of the party disappeared, silenced by my apartment’s stone walls and solid doors. “Do you have any coke?” she asked, much to my surprise.

  “Hold on.” I went back downstairs and got some coke from the girlfriend of one of the mob bosses. After we did a couple of lines Samantha told me why she wasn’t upstate for Christmas. Her husband had disappeared three days ago. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t texted. And when she called the hedge fund where he worked, they told her that he’d been fired a year ago.

  Early yesterday morning, 8 a.m. on Christmas Eve, he’d called. “I can’t come back,” he told her quietly.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in New Jersey, Sam. I’m not coming back.” He told her that he now identified as a woman, was in love with a man in Newark, and was never coming back to her or their children.

  Samantha had grown up on the Upper East Side. She’d gone to Spence and Yale and had married her husband after he finished Harvard Business School. Their married life, although chaste and platonic after the birth of their third child, had been picture-perfect. They’d vacationed in Palm Springs at her parents’ winter home. They’d vacationed on Fishers Island at her parents’ summer home. They’d vacationed in the Hamptons at their own summer home. They did the charity-ball circuit. Their oldest daughter was preparing to be a debutante, just as Samantha had been. And yesterday morning she had learned it had all been a lie: her husband was unemployed and smoking crystal meth at a motel in New Jersey.

  Samantha had held herself together and spent Christmas with her kids at her parents’ Beaux Arts mansion on 74th Street. After her kids had gone to sleep she’d taken a taxi across the park to my apartment. “Did I do anything wrong?” she asked, pleading, looking like a worried child. “Am I still attractive?”

  “You’re gorgeous,” I said, truthfully. She was absurdly beautiful; she could have been Grace Kelly’s sister. Samantha did another line of coke and kissed me.

  I’d had twelve or fourteen drinks, plus a few lines of crystal meth and a few of coke. I was still looking dimly through my eyes, but I felt like my body was inhabited by an eternally hungry fallen angel living in a garbage bag full of alcohol and drugs. We pulled off our clothes and had sex on the bed where a few hours earlier I’d been snorting crystal meth and having sex with Era.

  Afterward we sprawled on the bed silently. I felt like a glowing demon. It was Christmas, and I was high and drunk, lying naked next to a broken goddess. Samantha gathered up her clothes, kissed me gently, and said, “I need to get back to my kids.”

  I put on my clothes, swallowed the last dregs of the bottle of vodka she’d brought, and returned to the party. While Samantha and I had sequestered ourselves, the party had gotten even bigger. Louder. More unhinged. I looked around at the strangers doing drugs in my apartment and was filled with pride at the sweet hell I’d curated.

  As I headed to the kitchen, my friend Genevieve, who’d recently moved to New York from Vienna, blocked my path. Looking around, she said, with horror in her voice, “You are chaos.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders and grinned. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” I told her sincerely.

  “It’s not a compliment,” she said, disgusted, and walked away.

  But it was a compliment. I was proud to be chaos.

  The world was terrible. I was worse.

  In the kitchen I opened another bottle of vodka and pulled a knife out of a butcher’s block. “Jonathan!” I yelled at Jonathan Ames.

  “What?” He looked up from the table where he was sitting with one of the strippers. I threw the knife at him. Lovingly, because I loved Jonathan.

  He screamed and held up his hand. I heard a sharp sound, like a hammer hitting a small nail. The point of the knife had bounced off Jonathan’s Princeton college ring. He looked at me with horror, the blood draining from his face.

  “No, Jonathan, it was nice!” I yelled. “It was ’cause I love you!” I picked up the knife again. He ran away from me, hiding behind Mangina and our elf-ear-wearing friend Reverend Jen. “Okay,” I said, disappointed. “I’ll put the knife away.”

  At midnight Era returned with one of her stripper coworkers. “You’re back!” I yelled, over a Mötley Crüe song. When the ghetto-bass playlist had ended somebody had put on a hair-metal one.

  “Here,” she said, putting a filthy green Santa hat on my head, “I brought you a present.” Taking my hand and that of her stripper friend, she led us into the master bedroom. We lit candles and did more crystal meth and had a threesome, getting glitter and menstrual blood on my California King bed and its 1,020-thread-count Millesimo sheets.

  When we were done I walked out of the bedroom, naked except for the dirty green Santa hat. I wanted to see if the party was still going on and if Jonathan was still mad at me for throwing a knife at him. He shouldn’t be mad, I thought. I was chaos, and why would anyone be mad at chaos? Also, his ring had saved him.

  At the other end of the hallway, at the top of the stairs, was Ruth, a British journalist I’d invited to the party. She was dressed formally and was with her elderly British parents, dressed equally formally. I’d never gone on a date with Ruth, but I had a crush on her. She was erudite and kind and pretty. Apparently she’d read my invitation to a Christmas party at an elegant penthouse on the Upper West Side and assumed that I was hosting, well, a Christmas party at an elegant penthouse on the Upper West Side.

  Instead she’d brought her parents into the second circle of hell, a bacchanal of strippers and drugs and Mafia bosses. And standing under an art deco chandelier there was me, the host and ringmaster, naked except for a soiled Santa hat.

  I screamed, ashamed at my nakedness, and ran back into the bedroom, where Era and her stripper friend were waiting in the darkness, smiling.

  58

  STORRS, CONNECTICUT (1984)

  During my second semester at UConn my friend Drew discovered LSD and started taking it weekly. It was cheap – only $5 a hit – and easy to get. During our first semester together he’d been a clean-cut freshman, trying to decide between poli-sci and history as his major. Now I would see him in the cafeteria, staring quietly at a patch of sunlight as it moved across towers of plates and plastic bins of Frosted Flakes.

  I’d never done acid, but since Drew liked it, I decided to try it. One Tuesday afternoon I sat in his concrete dorm room, gave him $5, swallowed a tab of LSD, and picked up the Moody Blues album Days of Future Passed. For ten or fifteen minutes nothing happened, and I wondered if maybe I had gotten a dud dose. Then the shapes on the album cover slowly started moving. With a big smile, I told Drew, “It’s working.”

  We spent the day wandering around the campus, studying the veins of marble countertops and watching newly sprouted grass poking through the snow, amazed at how this simple, inexpensive drug transformed everything. I felt light and happy; the world was showing me aspects of itself that were normally hidden in plain sight.

  Around 8 p.m. Drew went to visit his girlfriend and I went back to my dorm room, ready for the trip to end. But it didn’t. At midnight I was really ready for the trip to end. But it kept going and I started getting scared – the acid had been fun, but I wanted my old brain back. At 3 a.m. I took a shower, hoping I could wash the acid out of my system, but I was just hyperaware of each individual water droplet as it hit my skin. At 5 a.m. I decided that I was going to feel this way forever. I curled up in the bottom bunk of the bunk bed and fell asleep at dawn.

  A few hours later I woke up, feeling almost normal. I took a deep breath, saw the melting snow outside my window, and something in my brain snapped. I didn’t know whether I was having a flashback or whether I had gone crazy. I waited for my brain to feel normal again, but all day it felt like my mind had been taken away from me and replaced with something hard and foreign. At 10 p.m., at the end
of the longest, strangest day of my life, I crawled back into my bottom bunk, terrified. I hoped that today had just been an awful day-after-taking-LSD experience and that in the morning my brain would go back to the way it had been.

  But I woke up the next morning panicking: my brain was still broken.

  After seven days of this I went to the school psychiatrist. He sat, stoic and professional, with his psychiatrist’s sideburns and mustache, behind an institutional gray metal desk in a beige office. I told him that I’d done acid a week ago and that my brain hadn’t felt right since. I didn’t tell him I was having a panic attack, because I didn’t know what a panic attack was. All I knew was that my brain had changed, and that I was terrified. I just wanted my old brain back.

  The psychiatrist heard the word “acid,” smiled thinly, and assumed I was another college acid casualty having some sort of flashback or LSD-inspired psychotic break. He wrote a prescription for perphenazine, a powerful antipsychotic, and said, “Here you go. This should help.”

  I took it as prescribed – and I felt worse. When I went back to the psychiatrist a week later, I told him that I still felt terrible. He said, “Okay, don’t worry,” and prescribed a stronger dose of perphenazine.

  After another week of taking the medication and struggling through my school routines I had an allergic reaction to the perphenazine. On Friday morning I woke up feeling my usual despair and terror, but as the day went on I started to feel intense tightness and burning in all my muscles. By lunchtime my ligaments felt like they had been turned into scalding wires. And by the end of the day I felt like I was on fire.

  I went to the emergency room at the college hospital, where they sedated me and put me into a metal-framed hospital bed. The next morning I woke up and admitted defeat. I was broken. My brain was broken. And the anti-psychotics had taken my wounded brain and made it worse. I still didn’t know what was wrong with me – I just desperately wanted my old brain back. I dropped out of college, packed up my things, and moved home.

  A few days after I left UConn my mom took me to a psychiatrist in Stamford. After talking with me for an hour, smiling kindly and calmly asking me questions, he diagnosed me. “You have an anxiety disorder,” he said. “It’s a rare and very unpleasant type called ‘plateau panic disorder.’ Basically you’re having panic attacks that don’t ever end.”

  “So it’s not acid flashbacks?”

  “No, it’s not flashbacks, and you definitely don’t need antipsychotics.” He shook his head. “Whoever prescribed you perphenazine should lose his license.”

  I started crying, and apologized to him through my tears.

  “It’s not the first time someone’s cried in my office, Moby.”

  “I just don’t know what to do,” I said. “I want my brain to feel normal again.”

  “It will, Moby. I promise.” He took a deep breath before he continued. “To be honest, I don’t know if what you’re experiencing is from the acid, Moby. You might want to think about therapy. This type of extreme panic usually comes from buried trauma.”

  I’d been calling Jenny every day since I’d woken up with a broken brain. At first she had been incredibly sympathetic, but lately she’d sounded distant and almost annoyed when I reached her. After I got home from the Stamford psychiatrist’s office I took my mom’s phone to the wooden basement stairs for privacy and called her again.

  “I need you,” I told her. “Can you come home this weekend?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Jenny?”

  She sighed and said quietly, “Moby, I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

  “What do you mean?” I felt vertiginous, like I was falling into a mine shaft.

  She started crying. “I wish I could be there for you, but I’m at school. I can’t do this.”

  “Are you breaking up with me?”

  She cried harder. “I think so.”

  I went numb.

  “Moby?” she asked. “Are you there?”

  I still couldn’t speak.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  But I couldn’t.

  “Moby? Talk to me!”

  I managed to say, “I have to go, Jenny,” and hung up the phone.

  I rode my ten-speed bike – the same lime-green Schwinn I’d had since sixth grade – to a rundown local bar by the Noroton Heights train station. I didn’t know where else to go. Since I’d started panicking I’d been drinking every day, as alcohol was the only thing that helped me to calm down. It didn’t put my brain’s synapses and neurons back in their pre-acid configuration, but it gave me a few moments of relief from the pain.

  I showed the bartender my fake ID and ordered a beer. It was 6 p.m. on a Thursday and the bar was empty, aside from a few locals and some sallow-faced businessmen. There was a basketball game on the TV, but no one was watching it. I drank my beer and looked at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

  I looked like a hollow ghost. I’d never been this scared. My brain had snapped almost a month ago, and despite what the nice psychiatrist said, I didn’t know if it would ever get better. I quickly finished my beer and, defeated and despairing, ordered a second.

  My friends were all at exclusive and expensive New England colleges, studying art history and French literature. They were meeting wonderful women, falling in love under oak trees, and thinking about the fascinating adult lives that were waiting for them. And I was an unemployed college dropout living at my mom’s house. I had no career prospects, no money, no girlfriend, and – unless I was drunk – no respite from my unceasing panic attacks.

  I wanted to kill myself. The only thing stopping me was that I didn’t want the panic to win.

  59

  NEW YORK CITY (2008)

  Hillary Clinton was talking to me, but I was too hungover to respond. We were standing on a balcony on the thirtieth floor of the San Remo apartment building on Central Park West. She was in a dark-blue power suit, and her silver-blonde hair was meticulously styled, falling just past her collar. I was swaying on my feet, unshowered and wearing a frayed gray sweater over an old Cramps T-shirt.

  Hillary and I had known each other for a few years and had hosted a few fundraisers together. Every time we met up she asked my opinion on things and made a huge effort to be nice to me, but I never understood why. She had been a successful lawyer, a First Lady, and was currently a US senator. And I was a musician who with each passing year became more and more of an obscure Jeopardy! question.

  Senator Clinton looked earnestly into my eyes as I tried to say something insightful about the state of American politics. I wanted to conceal from her that I was so hungover I could barely think.

  “Oh,” she said, filling my awkward synaptic-glue silence, “do you know Darryl from Run-D.M.C.? He’s coming too.”

  I didn’t tell her about the time in 1989 when I’d been DJing at Mars and had skipped the needle on a record while Darryl had been freestyling – that would have required using multisyllabic words. So, uncertain of my syntax, I managed to say, “Yes, I know him from back in the day.” She gave me a warm smile, shook my hand, and headed back inside to the fundraiser.

  The San Remo was a beautiful art deco building, a few blocks south of my five-level penthouse at the El Dorado – which I’d just sold. I looked up the street at my sky castle, bathed in the last light of sunset, and wondered what had gone wrong. I had planned on living there forever. I’d thought that as I approached the end of my life, I would walk my grandkids down the street to the Museum of Natural History. In my fantasy I would show them the giant blue whale (assuming it hadn’t been replaced by an animatronic robot whale) and tell them about my first trip to the museum in 1968, when I stood underneath the whale and experienced open-mouthed terror and awe. My mother had tried to pull me away, but I couldn’t stop staring at the belly of the giant creature.

  But a week ago I had sold the penthouse to a Texan divorcée who was probably taking her actual grandchildren to go look at the whale. In
addition to selling the sky castle I’d gotten rid of a lot of other things in the past month. I’d sold my sixty-acre upstate compound to a hedge-fund manager. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria had bought some beachfront property I’d acquired in the Dominican Republic. I’d sold a house in Beverly Hills I’d only visited once. And I’d simply given teany to Kelly.

  I’d originally bought these things to find happiness and legitimacy, but one night I’d been at a café in Tribeca, talking with my old friend Ashley, who I originally met at a Bible-study group in Connecticut. I was telling him about the headaches and hassles that came with owning all this far-flung real estate, and he asked a simple question: “Are you happy?”

  I wanted to lie, as I normally did, and say, “Of course I am!” But Ashley had been guileless and honest with me through the years, even when he went through a painful divorce, so I answered truthfully. “No, I’m not happy,” I said, defeated.

  “So why not get rid of these things, if they don’t make you happy?”

  I wanted to explain that I had my houses and businesses to prove to the world that I had worth, and that I was no longer the poor kid from Connecticut who’d imploded with shame every time his mom had used food stamps at the supermarket. But I couldn’t refute Ashley’s simple logic, as I simply wasn’t happy. The next day I called my lawyer and invented an acronym: MIGA, or Make It Go Away.

  Now the only real estate I had was the same loft on Mott Street I’d lived in since the mid-1990s. I’d thought about selling that as well, but it was simple and pretty, it was where I made music, and it didn’t make me anxious. And for now I was still alive and needed a place to sleep. I still wasn’t happy after getting rid of my pointless real-estate portfolio, but I felt lighter, and less like an overcompensating Jay Gatsby.