Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  A waiter strolling around the balcony on the San Remo offered me some pigs in a blanket on a silver tray. I’d compromised all my other ideals and standards, but I was still a militant vegan, so I politely said, “No, thank you, but could you get me a black coffee and a vodka on the rocks?”

  He looked at me with alcoholic understanding and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Even though I’d had eight hours of chemically curated sleep, I was exhausted. The hangover made my teeth ache like badly rung bells.

  Hillary Clinton left the fundraiser at 9 p.m., but I stayed for another hour, trying to flirt with a woman who worked for the Clinton Foundation and drinking glass after glass of the host’s vodka. At ten I stumbled into a taxi and went downtown to the Highline Ballroom, where some vegans I knew were throwing an animal-rights fundraiser.

  My friend Jesse Malin was performing when I arrived, so I walked onstage, stopped him and his band in the middle of a song, and took the microphone. “If anyone has any drugs,” I said, looking out at five hundred confused faces in the crowd, “just meet me on the side of the stage. Thank you.” I put the microphone back in the mic stand and said “Carry on” to the band, who stared at me with irritation and bewilderment.

  I went to the bar at the side of the stage and ordered a Porkslap beer, while I waited for somebody to show up with drugs. Drinking Porkslap, even though it didn’t contain actual pork, seemed ironic at an animal-rights fundraiser. But I wasn’t drinking it to be ironic; I was drinking it because I’d had only seven or eight vodkas uptown and I wanted to get drunk.

  After a few minutes a twenty-year-old boy in a Phish T-shirt and a light-blue hoodie walked over and cautiously offered me a joint. “A joint?” I said, vexed. “Pot is a seasoning, not a drug.”

  “Sorry,” he said meekly, slipping back into the crowd.

  Had I been rude to him? No, I reasoned, he’d been rude to me by offering me pot when I wanted real drugs. I was outraged. This was New York City, the land of Lou Reed and the New York Dolls, the island where sybarites came to be sybaritic, and nobody had real drugs?

  I walked back onstage, fuming. Debbie Harry was performing and had just finished a song with Lady Bunny and Miss Guy. I took the mic from Lady Bunny and admonished the crowd. “I’m very disappointed with you,” I told them. “You call yourselves New Yorkers, but no one here had drugs for me.” A few people started laughing, and I scolded them. “I’m serious. I wanted drugs and you all let me down. You should be ashamed.”

  I handed the microphone back to Lady Bunny and stalked off the stage. A woman who worked at Angelica’s Kitchen stopped me as I headed for the bar. “That was funny!” she said.

  “I’m not trying to be funny,” I told her. “I want drugs.”

  I went upstairs to the dressing rooms, where I found my friend Aurora smoking pot and drinking beer with some of the musicians who were playing at the fundraiser. Aurora was a burlesque performer who looked like a young Shirley MacLaine. “You look upset, Mo,” she said.

  “I wanted drugs and no one had drugs,” I said, like a petulant seven-year-old, sitting down on a stained Ikea couch and draining my second can of Porkslap.

  “You want coke?” she asked.

  “Why, do you have any?” I said, my eyes brightening.

  “No, but I want coke too.”

  “Okay, let’s go find coke.”

  We asked bartenders, audience members, and the coat-check girl. Nobody had any (or nobody would admit to it). But then I asked some of the old roadies smoking cigarettes behind the stage, “Do any of you have drugs?”

  “Follow me,” a particularly old and grizzled roadie said, putting out his cigarette on a speaker box. Aurora and I followed him to a closet behind the stage. He had stringy gray hair down to the collar of the black T-shirt that covered his beer gut. He escorted us into the closet and closed the door behind us. “So what do you want?” he asked.

  “Just some coke,” I said.

  He pulled a bag of coke out of his pocket. “One hundred dollars.”

  It was a very small bag of cocaine and I assumed it was terrible, as it was being sold to me by a man who looked like he’d spent most of his adult life in prison. But it was cocaine, so I didn’t bargain. I handed him $100, he went back to work, and Aurora and I started doing coke off the back of my BlackBerry.

  The cocaine was, in fact, terrible. It burned through my sinuses like pulverized salt and gravel. But it was cocaine, the most paradoxical drug: it seemed like the best drug when I was doing it late at night, and the worst at eleven the next morning, when I was anxious and grinding my teeth and trying to go to sleep.

  “This coke is awful,” Aurora said, as she finished her third line.

  “I know,” I said, cutting a fourth line on the back of my phone. “It’s awful, disgusting cocaine, and I love it.” I’d started doing cocaine only two years earlier, but I already felt like getting drunk without cocaine was a horrible compromise.

  The roadie came back into the closet. “Moby, I feel bad that I charged you so much,” he said. “Here’s another bag of coke.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “Will you do a line with us?”

  I cut him a line on the back of my phone. “I’ve never done coke off a phone,” he said, leaning down to snort the powder.

  “Phones are clean and smooth – perfect for cocaine,” I opined.

  “You know,” he said, “the last time I saw you was in 1999, at the Virgin Megastore.”

  “You were there?”

  “Yeah, I loaded in the P.A.,” he said. “So how’ve you been?”

  I laughed. And then I laughed harder, even though Aurora and the roadie weren’t laughing.

  What could I say? How had I been? My narcissism, abetted by the cocaine, made me want to spend the next five hours telling him everything: how after playing that show in the basement of a record store I’d sold tens of millions of records, toured the world, dated movie stars, made millions of dollars, and managed to screw everything up – my life, my career, my friendships. I wanted to tell him that not a day went by without me thinking about killing myself, and the final punctuation mark on my failing life and career was this very moment, doing rotgut cocaine in a cramped closet with a roadie.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s been a strange few years.”

  After consuming most of the two bags of coke, Aurora and I left the closet and went to the bar to order more Porkslap. I saw my friend Johnny Dynell and ran over to hug him. Johnny looked like a 1950s Latino pop star and had been Andy Warhol’s favorite DJ in the 1980s. He and his wife, Chi Chi Valenti, had thrown some of the best parties in lower Manhattan, from “Gray Gardens” to “Night of a Thousand Stevies.”

  “Moby!” he said, grinning. “Come with me! You need to meet the hippies!”

  After ten drinks and an equal number of lines my teeth were grinding, my nerves were singing like high-tension power wires, and I was filled with God’s own love and chaos. “I want to meet the hippies,” I said deliberately.

  Johnny took my hand; I took Aurora’s; we walked onto the middle of the dance floor. Another drag-queen band was playing onstage, and on the dance floor a circle of Burning Man hippies were doing interpretive hippie dances. “Hippies!” Johnny yelled, by way of introduction. “Moby!”

  “Moby!” they yelled, and pulled Aurora and me into their dance circle.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “I need a drink.” I ran to the bar and ordered two vodkas, one for me and one for Aurora. Back on the dance floor, I drank my vodka and lurched around with the hippies, while the band played a heavy-metal version of Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts.” I yelled, “I love this song!” The room was spinning and I was surrounded by twenty hippie dervishes who looked like they’d just left an audition for a Broadway revival of Hair.

  I’d gotten past my childhood resentment of hippies; as I’d gotten older I’d decided that most of them were fairly harmless and well-intentioned. The song ended, the band sai
d, “Thank you, good night!” and the hippies and Johnny and Aurora and I all collapsed onto the floor in a heap of human flesh reeking of vodka, cocaine, and patchouli.

  “Do we have more coke?” I asked Aurora.

  She looked in her purse and pulled out a plastic bag with a little bit of white powder at the bottom. “Just a bit,” she said. I took the bag, poured the rest of the cocaine on the back of my phone, and cut myself a line.

  “Moby, you shouldn’t do that in public,” Johnny said, as the Highline’s lights came on. The fundraiser was over and the audience were walking around us on their way to the exits.

  “But I want to,” I said, doing my line and handing the phone to Aurora.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  So I took my phone back and did the rest of the cocaine, while Aurora and Johnny looked around nervously.

  “Uh-oh,” Johnny said, spotting a security guard heading in our direction. He was wearing black from head to toe, and from my vantage point on the floor he looked like an eleven-foot-tall stormtrooper. “I don’t care who the fuck you are, you can’t do that shit in here!” the security guard yelled at me.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” I said magnanimously. “I’m all out of coke, so I won’t do any more.”

  He pointed at the exit. “You and your friends, leave!”

  He was mad, but my veins were singing with vodka, Porkslap beer, and cocaine and I felt nothing but love for everyone, even this angry stormtrooper. “Do you want a hug?” I asked earnestly.

  “Get the fuck out!” he yelled in my face.

  As we headed for the door, one of the hippies said, “Moby, you should come with us on our bus.”

  The hippies led us around the corner to their brightly painted school bus. “Like the Partridge Family,” Aurora said.

  “It’s our Furthur,” one of the hippies said, smiling at the battered vehicle. We piled onto the bus, and one of the hippies started playing records in the makeshift DJ booth at the back. The seats had been removed from the inside of the bus and the ceiling was painted with hieroglyphics and cartoons.

  As we drove up 10th Avenue, the DJ played my song “Go,” and the hippies cheered. “Moby Go!” a British hippie said. “Wicked tune!” The bus stopped for a red light near the Lincoln Tunnel and everyone happily fell over.

  “Where are we going?” Aurora asked.

  “Harlem!” the hippies yelled.

  “Harlem? I was born in Harlem,” I said. Changing the subject, I asked, “Does anyone have any drugs?”

  “Sure, we’ve got pot,” a young Asian hippie said.

  “No, real drugs,” I said, as if I were talking to a child.

  “Only organic drugs,” he said indignantly.

  “Beer?”

  “Just pot.”

  I pouted. Pot was my least favorite drug. Cocaine, vodka, ecstasy, crystal meth, tequila, champagne, cheap beer: they all sped me up and made my synapses fire like manic speedboats. But when I smoked pot I felt like someone had shellacked my brain with glue and molasses. I pulled Aurora aside. “Roar” – her nickname – “they don’t have beer or drugs. I think we need to go.”

  “But the hippies are so cute! Come on, let’s smoke pot with them.” She tried to pass me a joint.

  The bus stopped in front of an abandoned brownstone at 160th Street, near the West Side Highway. I said to the hippies, “Thanks for the ride, but we have to go. I need vodka and real drugs.”

  They looked crestfallen, but hugged us as we said goodbye. It started raining as we walked away from the hippies and their ironically drug-free bus.

  “You were born in Harlem?” Aurora asked.

  “168th Street, near here,” I said. I was still high, but starting to come down. “Can we go see where I was born?” We walked west as the rain picked up.

  I was born in Harlem at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital on September 11, 1965. The only other time I’d been there was in 1997, for a study on panic attacks. I’d agreed to be a part of the study to see if the psychiatrists could help me with my unrelenting panic attacks. The first part of the study involved a ten-page questionnaire about anxiety and lifestyle. I’d answered the questions honestly, except for one: “How many drinks do you have in a month?” I’d lied, checking “40–50.”

  When the doctor reviewed my responses he said, “Forty or fifty drinks a month? You might be an alcoholic.” I didn’t tell him the truth, which was that I was having forty or fifty drinks a week, or somewhere upward of two hundred every month. That was a decade ago; now I was up to around a hundred drinks a week, or four hundred a month.

  At the end of the study the doctor confirmed what I’d been told in 1984: I had a severe plateau panic disorder, which meant that to some extent I was always panicking. I also had episodic spikes of panic, but he told me that because of my disorder, I was never not anxious. “Which might explain your drinking,” he said, clearly worried. “At some point you might want to get help.”

  Aurora and I looked up at the gothic facade of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. It was 1 a.m. on a rainy Tuesday night; the streets around the hospital were wet and empty.

  “You were born here?” she asked.

  “That’s what it says on my birth certificate.”

  “It kind of looks like a prison.”

  As we looked at the hospital I spotted a pair of orange stripper shoes on top of a plastic garbage bin. “Roar, look,” I said in awe. I picked up the shoes. They were bright orange and had shiny silver heels. Even though they’d been in the garbage, they weren’t very dirty. “They’re my spirit animal,” I said, taking off my sneakers and putting on the glittering orange shoes. Tottering around the sidewalk in my glowing orange stripper shoes, I asked, “Should we head downtown and find sex and drugs?”

  Aurora suddenly got serious. “You were born here. What would baby Moby say to you?”

  I stood, wobbling in my high heels, and looked up at the hulking gothic building where I’d been born. The night was young, but I’d already had a dozen drinks and a dozen lines of bad cocaine. The day before I’d had a session with my therapist, Dr. Barry Lubetkin, in which I’d told him that I was getting rid of all my unnecessary property. “Are you going to kill yourself?” he asked me bluntly.

  I was taken aback. “I don’t know. Why?”

  “People sometimes get rid of their stuff before they kill themselves.”

  I knew that therapists had to report you to the police if they thought you were suicidal, so I laughed and said, “Look at me, I’m doing great!” I didn’t want to be institutionalized.

  I looked at Aurora and seriously considered her question. What would baby Moby say to me as I stood on the sidewalk, drunk, high, wearing orange stripper shoes and torn apart by hangovers and depression and panic attacks?

  “I don’t know – ‘Stop hurting me’?”

  60

  DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1984)

  I loved animals. But I also loved eating them.

  When I was growing up our house was full of rescued dogs, rescued cats, rescued mice, rescued gerbils, rescued lizards, and even rescued lab rats. It had also been full of meatloaf, hamburgers, hot dogs, salami, and chicken nuggets. I loved our rescue animals unconditionally, even when they bit me or peed on me. When I was very little my mom had taught me that if a gerbil bit me or a mouse peed on me, it was because they were scared. She explained, “Wouldn’t you be scared being held by a thing with giant teeth that was a few hundred times bigger than you?” I agreed that I would.

  In 1975 I’d been walking past the Darien town dump when somehow a tiny mewing sound cut through the noise of traffic and dump trucks. I walked over to a stained cardboard box, where the tiny mewing was coming from, and opened it. Inside were three dead kittens and one tiny gray one, barely alive, not much bigger than a finger. Someone had poured beer on them, and the barely alive kitten was mewing pitifully and blindly, as his eyes hadn’t opened yet. I picked him up as gently as I could, wrapped him in my T-shirt, and ru
shed home.

  My mom and I took him to the local vet, who examined him and shook his head sadly. “He’s very sick,” the vet said. “In fact, I’m surprised he’s alive. I can give you some medicine for him, but don’t get attached, because he probably won’t survive.” We brought him home and set him up in a clean box that my mom had lined with old T-shirts. We gave him warm milk and medicine, and for some reason that we could never remember we called him Tucker.

  George, my grandmother’s cranky old dachshund, walked over to see what sort of tiny mewing creature was now living in his house. My family had told me that when George had been a puppy he had been friendly, but now that he was elderly, he growled at my mother and me, and barely tolerated my grandmother.

  Cranky George looked at tiny mewing Tucker and lay down next to him. Tucker stopped mewing. A minute later he started making the tiniest little baby-kitten purr. And in that instant old, cranky George became Tucker’s mom. For the next few weeks he didn’t leave Tucker’s side, and Tucker didn’t die.

  As Tucker grew up he followed me around the house, played with me, and met me every day when I came home from school, like the little brother I never had.

  *

  Growing up I’d known only one vegetarian, a girl in my high school, and I thought she was absurd. At one point I was arguing with her about vegetarianism, and she asked me, “If you love animals, how can you eat them?” I didn’t have an answer, but it seemed like a nonsensical question. Everyone ate animals. And as far as I knew, everyone had always eaten animals. Eating animals was woven into the fabric of humanity, like cars or television. So even though I loved animals, generally more than people, I kept on eating them.

  *

  After I dropped out of UConn, Tucker knew something was wrong, and he tried to take care of me as best as he could. But even with his ministrations the first month of being a college dropout was horrible. Every morning I woke up panicking, and the only time my anxiety waned was when I drank beer or vodka. My friends were all off at college, so I didn’t have anyone to hang out with, and I couldn’t get a job because the anxiety was so intense and unceasing.