by Moby
Most days after breakfast I put a Joy Division or Echo & the Bunnymen cassette in my Walkman and rode my Schwinn ten-speed to the beach or a local park. There I would sit on a bench, trying to write in my journal, wondering when the panic would abate even a little bit. But day after day the anxiety held my brain in its horrible talons.
I found a bar called The Beat, in Port Chester, New York, twenty minutes from my mom’s house, and started spending most of my nights there. It was a dive bar run by two local artists – and the only place nearby where the DJs played new wave and punk rock. I made some friends there who weren’t at college for a variety of dysfunctional reasons. Allard, a Canadian who looked like Ian McCulloch, lived with his parents in New Canaan, after being kicked out of art school for drawing ears on the walls. “The walls have ears!” he told me the night we met at The Beat. “Get it?” Melissa was a nineteen-year-old new-wave bassist with baby-blue hair who’d left Hampshire College to live in Greenwich and take care of her sick mom. And Brock was a tall stoner from Stamford who’d dropped out of Boston College with the grand ambition of being a drummer.
I befriended a few other lonely suburban misfits at The Beat, but Allard, Melissa, and Brock became my closest friends. Since Melissa played bass, Brock played drums, and Allard looked like Ian McCulloch, we started a band. We were all obsessed with sad, self-pitying music from the north of the UK, so even though we were Connecticut teenagers, we did our best to look and sound like the Smiths and Aztec Camera.
Having friends and playing music helped loosen the grip of the anxiety; by the beginning of the summer I was able to look for a job. I’d seen an interesting ad in the Stamford Advocate help-wanted pages: “Arts & crafts store looking for part-time sales help, creativity a plus.” After filling out an application and being interviewed for a few minutes I was hired at $3.25 an hour to work at Feats of Clay in the Stamford Town Center mall.
The owner of the store, Jimmie, was an old hippie who seemed even more anxious than I did, largely because no one came into Feats of Clay. It was 1984, so people went to the mall to buy bright clothes that would make them look like Molly Ringwald or Eddie Murphy. People wanted Madonna T-shirts, not dusty tribal drums from Rwanda and hand-carved chess pieces from Ecuador. Jimmie paid me under the counter, and I worked three days a week, dusting the handmade things from South America and Africa that nobody wanted to buy.
One day Melissa and Allard came to the mall to have lunch with me at Sbarro, in the mall’s food court. I ordered pizza with sausage and pepperoni, while they ordered pizza with peppers and onions. “Are you trying to lose weight?” I joked. They were both already as skinny as pencils.
“Last night we saw this British animal movie,” Allard said.
“And now we’re vegetarians,” Melissa said.
I paused and waited for the punchline. When it didn’t come, I said, “What?”
“We’re vegetarians,” Allard said again.
“What does that mean?”
It was their first day as vegetarians, so they had to think about how best to answer the question. Melissa shrugged and said, “No more meat, I guess.”
I laughed at them and told them they’d be eating meat again in a week.
After work I borrowed my mom’s Chevette and drove to the Burger King in Norwalk, where I ordered my usual: a Whopper, medium fries, and a chocolate shake. I sat in the parking lot, eating my Whopper, and thought about the question I had been asked in high school: “If you love animals, how can you eat them?” I wanted to sit down with Allard and Melissa and the girl who’d asked me that question and yell at them, “Because everybody eats animals!” But I knew it was a paltry defense.
At UConn I’d planned on being a philosophy major, and before I dropped out I took an introductory philosophy class. The professor, Dr. Fink, told the class about the is–ought fallacy. In short, justifying something just because it had been part of the status quo for a long time was logically indefensible. He’d asked us to think of examples, and we’d come up with slavery, children working in factories, women not being allowed to vote, spraying DDT on vegetables, and lead paint. They were all noxious aspects of history that at one point had been defended with logic that boiled down to “This thing exists, so it should continue to exist, even though we know it’s bad and wrong.”
I finished my Whopper, even though suddenly it wasn’t as delicious as it normally was. I drove back to my mom’s house, where Tucker was waiting for me on the orange-carpeted stairs. I sat down to play with him, moving a pen along the edge of the stairs while he stalked and attacked it.
I loved Tucker. And I knew, to the depths of my being, that I would do anything I could to keep him from pain, or even sadness. I looked at his gray-striped face, as I had thousands and thousands of times. He had two eyes, a central nervous system, an unbelievably rich emotional life, and a profound desire to avoid pain and suffering. And as he wrestled with my pen, I realized that every animal with two eyes and a central nervous system had an unbelievably rich emotional life and a profound desire to avoid pain and suffering.
In that instant I knew that I couldn’t be involved in anything that caused an animal to suffer. I called Allard.
“Hello?”
“Okay, don’t feel smug, but I’m a vegetarian now too.”
61
MIAMI, FLORIDA (2008)
When I first met my friend Matt he was a junkie working at The Beat in Port Chester, New York. Over the decades I’d known him he’d struggled with heroin addiction and homelessness. His addiction got to such a bad place that after shooting up with a dirty needle in his twenties, he had his leg amputated. He’d ignored the infection as it spread, just self-medicating the pain away with heroin. By the time he made it to an emergency room, his leg was so gangrenous that they had to cut it off.
But a few years ago he’d kicked heroin. He met a wonderful woman and was now happy, sober, and married, living in Miami with his wife and three Boston terriers. I’d booked a DJ gig in Miami so I could fly down for the weekend of his fortieth birthday party. I wanted to be there for Matt – I loved him and I was proud of him for beating his addiction and not dying.
My plan was to DJ on Saturday night, get a good night’s sleep at my hotel, and wake up early for Matt’s birthday brunch, before flying back to New York. I was staying by Biscayne Bay, and after I checked in I walked to the hotel’s small beach to jump in the water – where I promptly stepped on a jellyfish. At first it stung a little bit. Then it felt like my foot was being bathed in acid, while somebody held a blowtorch to it. As the pain kept escalating, I hopped around the hot sand, wondering what to do.
I’d read somewhere that peeing on a jellyfish sting helped, but I was on a beach full of glamorous fashionistas, and I couldn’t just start peeing on myself. I hobbled up the beach and went into a bathroom stall, where I held my foot over the toilet and peed on it. It brought the pain down from unbearable to just run-of-the-mill excruciating.
I limped back to my room and alternated between peeing on my foot and washing it in the stylish white-tiled shower. I asked the Internet what to do, and it said that I should get some hydrocortisone cream for my foot. I texted Sandy, my tour manager, who bought some cream at a nearby Rite Aid. I slathered it all over my pulsing, wounded hoof and then planted myself in an Eames chair next to the orange lucite desk in my room, watching CNN to distract myself from the greasy pain.
I was scheduled to DJ at midnight, so at 11 p.m. Sandy and I headed to the venue, my foot slathered in hydrocortisone cream and stuffed into my sneaker. I could barely walk, but I didn’t need to walk or run to DJ. I just needed to be able to stand behind the Pioneer mixer and occasionally wave my hands in the air. I thought that vodka would help with the pain, so backstage I opened the bottle of Stolichnaya that was in my dressing room.
I was scheduled to DJ after Princess Superstar, a friend of mine who had been sober for years. We’d known each other since 2002, when she rapped on one of my songs, but now wh
enever I saw her she made a point of letting me know that I was an alcoholic who needed help. Princess Superstar visited my dressing room, wearing silver shorts and a hot pink shirt, and saw me sitting on a gray metal folding chair, drinking vodka by myself. She looked at me sadly and shook her head.
“I hurt my foot,” I said, by way of explanation.
“Whatever, Mobes,” she said, and went onstage to start DJing.
After three or four drinks, and two Vicodin from the promoter, my foot felt much better, and I thought I might be able to walk without pain. I did a gentle hop and realized that the vodka and pills had actually made the pain disappear completely. I felt smug: if I’d been sober like Princess Superstar, I would have still been hobbling around.
I walked to the stage to watch her DJ and to check out the crowd. In the early 2000s, when I’d performed or DJed in Miami the venues had been large and sold out, with lines of people trying to get in. But now it was 2008, and the club was small and only a third full. A few people were dancing to Princess Superstar’s set, but the room and the crowd felt listless. I went back to the dressing room to sit alone and drink.
“Mo?” Sandy poked his head into the room. “Do you know a Constantin?”
Constantin? I didn’t know any Constantin.
“From eastern Europe?”
Oh. That Constantin. The promoter/mobster who’d unsubtly threatened my life when I’d had the flu during the Animal Rights tour. “He’s here?” I asked tentatively.
Constantin and his coterie of four models, two fellow crime bosses, and two black-suited security guards filed into my tiny dressing room. “Moby!” he boomed. “My good friend!” He gave me a bear hug and introduced me to the models and the eastern European crime bosses. The models smiled, almost shyly, and the crime bosses just nodded their heads. “After you DJ you come out with us! To my club! I own club here!” He reached into his pocket and handed me a bag of cocaine, saying conspiratorially, “For your show.”
“Okay, see you after,” I said, as they trooped out of my dressing room. I’d done cocaine after DJing, but never before. Well, I was in Miami, a city built on cocaine, so why not see what doing coke before DJing was like?
I did a few lines on the back of my BlackBerry and washed them down with a few more shots of vodka. The cocaine made friends with the alcohol and Vicodin in my bloodstream, and I felt great. Electric. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to DJ. The club might be only one-third full, and I was walking around on a swollen, blistered foot, but tonight was going to be amazing.
I did some more cocaine, wondering why it had taken me so many years to do drugs before a DJ gig, and thought about the records I was going to play. This was a golden age for dance music, or so I’d just decided. I did another line and had another shot of vodka.
Every age was a golden age for dance music, I thought, but this was the most gilded. Or gelded. No, not gelded. I did another line of coke and thought about “gilded” and “gelded” – how I loved one, but not the other. I took a moment to savor the way cocaine dripped down the back of my sinuses and into my throat. Some people complained about this, saying it tasted like toxic chemicals, but I loved parsing the different flavors on my tongue. My cokehead palate could taste the cocaine itself, the baby powder, the kerosene, and some other mystery chemicals that had attached themselves to the white powder as it made its way out of South America.
“Time to play,” Sandy said, interrupting my party of one. I marched proudly onto the stage.
Standing next to Princess Superstar, I put my arm around her. “Isn’t this great!” I yelled.
She looked at the mostly empty club and raised her eyebrows. “It’s all yours,” she said dispiritedly, stepping away from the equipment. The night was anemic, but I knew I was going to save it. Constantin and his posse of criminals and models were in a booth near the stage. I heard him yell “Moby!” so I waved to him, deciding that he was my new best friend.
I started my set with a remix of an old Fatboy Slim track and proceeded to play my favorite records of 2008 – Loops of Fury, deadmau5, Miles Dyson – and even some remixes of my older tracks, like “Natural Blues” and “Porcelain.” My foot was greasy but pain-free, so I danced behind my equipment like a crazy person.
“Can you bring the vodka bottle from backstage?” I yelled to Sandy. He fetched it, and I held it high in the air before drinking straight from the bottle. The small crowd cheered, and I felt like Ozzy Osbourne, if he had been playing other people’s records in a small club in Florida.
I wanted to hear Underworld’s “Born Slippy,” one of the most iconic and beautiful dance tracks ever recorded, but I also wanted to do more cocaine. I ducked down behind the DJ booth and did two lines of coke off the back of my phone. After the second I looked up and saw Princess Superstar on the side of the stage. She shook her head in disgust and walked away.
I shrugged, stood up, and played “Born Slippy.” The small crowd cheered, and for a moment the air felt like sunlight. I saw some old ravers hugging each other in front of the DJ booth. I held up my hands, blessing them, blessing all of us. Then I grabbed Sandy and yelled “Ecstasy!” in his ear.
He understood. I wasn’t saying, “This is ecstatic,” I was saying, “Get me some ecstasy.”
He looked like he was going to quit, but then he shook his head, walked offstage, and came back a minute later, saying, “It’s your funeral.” He handed me two pills. I washed them down with vodka.
I segued into “Good Life” by Inner City, and realized I had everything I needed: a central nervous system flooded with alcohol and drugs, and my favorite records played as loud as an exploding 747. As I danced with my eyes closed I could almost hear the chemicals grinding their way through my body. I reflected on how the word “good” was descended from “God.” In many languages, “good morning” was the descendant of “God morning.”
And then I thought, I’m descended from God. Or maybe I was improving on God. Since God gave us the ability to feel transcendent joy, I wasn’t usurping God’s place in the cosmos, I was just taking what He had started and helping it along with alcohol and drugs and deafening techno. Why would God give me a brain that responded so well to alcohol and drugs if I wasn’t meant to bathe it in alcohol and drugs?
No matter what the answer, I realized that I was impermanent. Music was impermanence defined, as it was just air molecules pushed around for a millionth of a second. Then I remembered that I was onstage, DJing in a nightclub, and I opened my eyes. I cued up a remix of “Infinity” by Guru Josh. When its gorgeous instrumental break kicked in and the crowd cheered, I felt something beyond joy. I was having an out-of-body experience, but in my body. The eternal and the divine were revealing themselves through my broken, flawed, dying cells.
I followed up “Infinity” with a new Zodiac Cartel record, and I yelled. In the early rave days I’d screamed and shouted onstage all the time. I’d been sober then; I’d been challenging the void, defining myself by trying to fill the universe’s emptiness with joyful noise. But now I yelled with the void. I was part of the deafening darkness. And I loved it.
My set ended and the next DJ, Wolfram, started playing. “Great set,” he said. I hugged him and told him I loved him.
Constantin was waiting by the backstage area with his entourage of models, criminals, and security guards. “Let’s go!” I yelled. And then, “Do you have more drugs?”
We piled into a stretch limo Constantin had waiting by the exit. Nestled on the backseat among the tall models, hulking eastern European criminals, and oversized security guards, I felt like an adopted baby elf. Somebody put on a generic techno mix and handed me a bottle of vodka. “Great set!” someone was saying to me. I turned to my left: it was Yasmin, one of the models. Her smile was wide and her pupils were dilated.
She understood. She was African American and beautiful, and I instantly wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I took her hand. “I think I love you,” I said. She laughed merrily.
&nbs
p; We got to Constantin’s club, which was dark, generic, and far more crowded than the club where I’d just played. He took us to the VIP room, which was populated with older foreign men and young, skinny models. It was gross, but so was I, and who cared? This was humanity, and humanity was nothing if not beautiful and repulsive.
A waitress appeared with a silver tray covered in cocaine. We all hungrily snorted as much and as quickly as we could – and soon every last flawed, divine granule was in somebody’s nose. The waitress quickly returned with bottles of Russian vodka in buckets of ice. This was the worst place I’d ever been, everything I’d always claimed to hate, and I loved it.
“Did you go to school? I asked Yasmin, the model I’d fallen in love with in the limo, noticeably slurring my words.
“College?” she slurred back.
“Yes.”
“For a little while.” She looked troubled that I might be asking about something serious. “Did you?”
“I was a philosophy major,” I said. She smiled vaguely. “But this” – I gestured at the expensive debauchery surrounding us – “is my dissertation.” As I said it I discovered that “dissertation” was a hard and fun word to say when you were as drunk and high as I was. So I said it again, slurring and stumbling over the sibilance: “Dissertation. Dissertation.” I leaned over to Yasmin and told her, unnecessarily, “I’m drunk.”
Constantin came over and announced, “At dawn we go on my boat!”
“When is that?” I asked, as we might have been in this hermetically sealed VIP room for thirty minutes or three hours.
He looked at his watch. “Ha! Is now!”
We stepped outside. I was surprised to see that it was daytime. I shouldn’t have been, as I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone to sleep when it was still dark outside. As we all got back into Constantin’s limo, I gripped Yasmin’s perfumed hand with my bony fingers.