Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  Constantin’s boat was surprisingly big, with bedrooms, a dining room, and a hot tub near the back. It should have been tacky, but somehow, through the prism of cocaine and ecstasy and vodka, it looked beautiful. “Can I drive?” I asked Constantin, as we stepped onboard.

  “Ha ha, no!” Constantin said. He gestured at the security guard behind the wheel of the boat. “He drive.”

  I tried to adopt a serious tone, which was somewhat undercut by my swaying and slurring. “I grew up on boats,” I told him.

  “Is okay, just party,” he said, putting his arm around me.

  As we headed out, I asked, “How fast does it go?”

  Constantin smiled and lifted his thumb in the air, the universal boat hand sign for “Go faster.” For a big boat it went very fast.

  The soft, pink Miami air blew into my face. I squeezed Yasmin’s hand and she squeezed back. She was part of my dysfunctional family. So was Constantin. All the people on the boat were my children, I decided, and I loved them all. Even outside the club, I felt like God.

  “You know what’s fun?” I asked Constantin. And I jumped over the edge of the speeding boat.

  I hit the water hard, bouncing a few times. And then I just floated, looking up at the baby-blue tropical sky. The world was gentle. The sky was gentle. The water was gentle. My phone was probably ruined. But I smiled into the sky.

  I heard the boat coming back around to me. Constantin and the models were all standing at the rail, looking angry and worried. “I’m okay!” I yelled, and started doing backstroke away from them.

  “Moby!” Constantin yelled. “Get on boat!”

  “No,” I laughed, swimming away from the boat. “Just leave me here!” I wanted to swim, and then float, and then die. I would sink into the sea and finally be gone. “Just let me die,” I said to myself. But when I looked at the boat they all looked so concerned. They were my new family, and I was their new father, and they looked worried. So I swam back to the boat.

  Constantin shook his head. “Man, you fuckin’ crazy.”

  I wasn’t crazy; I just wanted to claim my birthright and die. “No, I’m happy,” I told him.

  My hotel had a dock, so they dropped Yasmin and me off there. We stumbled up the beach to my room, took off our clothes, and got into the shower. “This water feels like oil,” I said, because somehow it did. I dried Yasmin off and she lay down on the bed.

  I knew we weren’t going to have sex: it was too late and I was too ruined. “I want to ask you a question,” Yasmin said as she got under the sheets. She looked at me earnestly. “Do you know Stephen Colbert?” And then she passed out.

  I realized I was going to be hungover soon, so I took my usual end-of-night cocktail of Xanax and Vicodin, lay down next to Yasmin, and closed my eyes.

  The phone next to my bed started ringing. The sun was blazing through the white curtains, I was alone, and I felt like I’d been violated by demons. But I was still alive, which vexed me.

  “Hello,” I croaked into the phone.

  “Mr. Hall,” Sandy said, “your car is here.”

  This confused me, until I remembered that the whole reason I had come to Miami was Matt’s birthday brunch. “Okay, Sandy, thanks,” I said, almost feeling guilty that over the last nine years he had gone from being my tour manager to my nanny. I stood up and discovered that I was still drunk and high enough to be unstable, but sober enough to be in pain.

  I saw a note on my pile of wet clothes. It was from Yasmin and it said, simply, “Bye.”

  I stuffed my clothes and my computer into my backpack and staggered to the lobby. Once again I was stumbling out of a hotel in pain and hoping to die. I didn’t want the glamorous existential dissolution that I’d longed for in the ocean; I just wanted an end to this sickness and agony.

  Sandy was waiting for me in the lobby. “Rough night?” he asked me for the five hundredth time. Or maybe the thousandth time.

  And for the five hundredth time, or maybe the thousandth time, I just shook my head.

  We walked to the limo. Sandy was usually unflappable, but he looked angry. “I’m not sure I can keep doing this, Moby,” he said.

  I understood. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep doing this either. I didn’t feel capable of having a conversation, so I leaned my head against the cold, black leather headrest and closed my eyes. When the limo arrived at the restaurant where Matt was having his birthday brunch, I meekly told Sandy, “I’ll be about an hour.”

  Matt, his beautiful wife, and a few of his friends were sitting at a table outside. There was a soft, salty wind blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean; the restaurant was full of happy people eating pancakes and drinking mimosas on a Sunday morning.

  “Happy birthday,” I said to Matt as I collapsed into a chair. And then I needed to throw up. I tried to run to the bathroom, but I didn’t make it any further than the edge of the restaurant’s deck. I vomited in some potted plants.

  I went back to the table, wiped my mouth, and ordered a screwdriver and a cup of black coffee. “I had a weird night,” I said to Matt and his friends, who smiled nervously at me.

  Matt looked at me. He had been a bottomed-out junkie for years. He’d lost everything to his addiction, including one of his limbs. “I’m worried about you, Moby,” he said.

  62

  NEW YORK CITY (2008)

  My problem wasn’t drinking and drugs, I decided – it was daylight.

  After selling the sky castle on Central Park West I had moved back to the loft on Mott Street I’d had since 1995. I had spent years acquiring more impressive properties, but the Mott Street loft was the only place that had ever felt like home. The problem was that it had a ceiling full of skylights. This made it more beautiful, with sun and shadows playing on my empty white walls, but it made it hard to sleep during the day.

  I was out six nights a week, not going to bed until seven or eight in the morning. In the winter this was fine: I put on an eye mask and stayed in bed until 5 p.m., while people trudged through the cold and dirty snow. But now it was summer, the gray clouds of winter had burned off, and even with a mask on I was fighting the pitiless daylight. As much as I loved my loft, I thought I’d be better off living in a basement apartment with no windows, avoiding seasons and daylight entirely.

  The week before I’d been in the bathroom of a bar on Ludlow Street, doing cocaine with a few best friends I’d just met. When I told them of my plan to live in a basement and never see the sun, one of my new best friends told me that he knew somebody selling a bar in Brooklyn. In fact, he said, he wasn’t just selling the bar – he was selling the whole building. And, he informed me with a cocaine grin, it had a windowless basement.

  The next day I called the owner and took the L train to Bushwick to see the building for myself. A decade earlier Williamsburg had been the new frontier, and Bushwick had been the unknown world at the edge of the map. But the steroidal gentrification of Manhattan had pushed people into the slippery diaspora of the outer boroughs.

  I normally would have taken a limo to check out this bar, but I hadn’t been on the L train in almost twenty years, and I wanted to see how much it had changed. When I moved to New York in 1989 and lived on 14th Street, the filthy L train had been my lifeline. I took it west to go to my studio at Instinct Records on 8th Avenue, and I took it east to visit my friends who had become pioneer homesteaders in the new hipster country of Williamsburg. The last time I’d been on the L train was in 1992, when I took it to a rave deep in Brooklyn. Other than being somewhat cleaner, the L train in 2008 wasn’t much different to how it had been in 1992. But I was.

  Sixteen years ago I’d been bright-eyed, sober, and in love with the nascent rave scene. Now I’d lost most of my friends, I was suicidal, and I was looking to buy a bar where I could drink myself to death. In 1992 I’d assumed that by 2008 I would be married and living in a farmhouse somewhere upstate with a kind, loving wife and lots of kids and dogs. Now all I wanted was to live in a basement and avoid the lig
ht until I died.

  When I’d spoken on the phone with the man who owned the bar he had been forthright about why he was selling his lightless paradise. He was a film producer who had bottomed out on liquor and drugs, and he was selling the bar because he was newly sober – and because after a decade-long coke binge, he was broke.

  I’d considered sobriety, and I was having a harder and harder time avoiding the evidence that the way I was living was destroying me. I’d even made a couple of exploratory trips to AA meetings, but although the war stories I heard were remarkable, I was confident that I wasn’t a real alcoholic. I was, as I told myself and anyone who would listen to me in a bar at 3 a.m., an alcohol enthusiast.

  Alcohol had never failed me. It was inexpensive, ubiquitous, and dependable. If drinking was killing me, that wasn’t the alcohol’s fault but the world’s fault. The world had promised so much, but it had turned out to be cruel and dishonest.

  I got off the L train at the Bushwick stop, walked a few blocks, and met the bar’s current owner. He was smoking a cigarette and was stooped in a defeated posture that I’d seen in people standing outside the handful of AA meetings I’d been to. We shook hands and he unlocked the front door of his bar. “I spent a lot of days in this place …” he said, his voice trailing off.

  The building was a small tenement, with two above-ground stories, a street-level bar, and a basement that was the owner’s former coke den. I wanted to hide my enthusiasm, but I also wanted to buy the bar on the spot. It was hidden away in an industrial neighborhood and sandwiched between warehouses on a street that I knew would be completely empty after 6 p.m. And it felt right. The current owner might have bottomed out here, but he had good taste.

  The upstairs levels were clean and modern; I thought I could even let some of the animal-rights organizations I worked with use them as offices. The street-level bar was simple and tasteful, with an old wooden bar against one wall and custom-made booths on the opposite wall.

  And the basement coke den was perfect. Painted black, it had a DJ booth in one corner, a small bar in another, and overstuffed couches against the windowless walls. It seemed like a place where people could stay for twelve or twenty-four or ninety-six hours, scrubbing their brains of any awareness that the outside world had ever existed.

  “I’m a bad bargainer,” I said, “but I really want to buy your bar.”

  “Well, let’s go talk.” We left his bar and walked to another, Northeast Kingdom. It was full of beautiful hipsters, using their trust funds to live in urban squalor. When I was growing up poor I assumed that rich people wanted nothing more than to look and feel rich. And now the children of affluence were using their parents’ money to look like they’d grown up on welfare.

  I ordered a beer; he got a club soda with a slice of lime. “I’m curious,” he said. “Why do you want to buy my bar?”

  I wanted to tell him about my pretentious and ostensibly lofty reasons. I wanted a place to ride out, as E. M. Cioran had described it, the curse of life. I needed welcoming darkness: teany had been lovely, but too bright; my loft was beautiful, but also too bright. I couldn’t stop thinking about how living in a world without light was going to solve all my problems.

  I even had a name picked out for the bar. I’d call it Slow Dive, but on the neon sign the “v” would be intentionally left dark, or painted over: “Slow Di e.” Everything inside would be dark and soft, like a womb. This would be a rejection of the actual post-womb world that had turned out to be jagged and noisy, demanding and disappointing.

  Instead of unloading my brainpan of issues and garbage on this friendly, newly sober man, I just said, “I think it would be really fun to own a bar.”

  “You know, in the beginning it was really, really fun,” he said, staring at his club soda. “But by the end it got really dark.”

  I didn’t tell him that, for me, darkness was actually a selling point.

  Over the past two decades I’d made money and had success. But I knew I wasn’t a sexy rock star, I was human garbage. I had been born worthless, for why else would my father kill himself and leave me? And I had grown up worthless, for why else would my mother run into the arms of terrible men? The parties and promiscuity and platinum records hadn’t changed the essential facts: I was inadequate and unlovable. And it was time to stop pretending otherwise.

  63

  NEW YORK CITY (2008)

  It was September 11, 2008, and I was forty-three. Birthdays had never been important to me, and for a few years after September 11, 2001, I’d stopped celebrating my birthday altogether. But since it was now seven years since 9/11, I thought it wouldn’t be too distasteful to celebrate turning forty-three.

  I started my birthday night drinking in Brooklyn with my ex-girlfriend Janet and her new boyfriend. Janet and I had met at a Bible-study class in Connecticut in the late 1980s and had dated in 1989, when she was a student at Barnard and I was an aspiring DJ living in an abandoned factory. We had reconnected a few weeks earlier, after running into each other at a coffee shop on Broome Street. She still had long curly hair, and somehow looked as young and pretty as when I first met her.

  After my second beer I awkwardly asked, “How’s your faith, Janet?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know, Mo. How’s yours?”

  “I don’t know either. I still pray, but I don’t know.”

  “Do you still go to church?”

  I laughed. Aside from being a spectator at a couple of AA meetings in church basements, my last time in a church had been for my grandmother’s funeral in 1998. I wanted to talk about balancing the spiritual with the secular, but Janet’s new boyfriend seemed uninterested. Understandably – he was a young hip writer, and no self-respecting erudite hipster in a Brooklyn bar with dark wood beams and trendy exposed lightbulbs wanted to talk about God.

  It made me sad – not that Janet and I couldn’t talk about God, but that I was so unmoored. I’d come to see my early, rigid Christianity as being dogmatic and tribal, but at least it had been something. In 1995, when I accepted that I was no longer a Christian, I moved on to what I thought of as agnostic secularism, embracing the universe’s complexity and impermanence. The problem was that I’d fallen in love with the world, especially the sex and alcohol and fame, and I was heartbroken that it wasn’t proving to be permanent.

  Late at night I paid lip service to the idea that life was as evanescent as a Nietzschean sand painting, but I really wanted the universe to laud me and my existence. The week before I’d been in Los Angeles. As I was leaving my hotel the receptionist asked, “Do you need validation?” She was asking if I wanted the hotel to stamp my valet-parking stub, but for a second I got excited, thinking she was offering to give meaning to my life.

  “Do you want another drink?” Janet’s boyfriend asked me.

  “Of course,” I said.

  *

  I had agreed to DJ a birthday party in a loft around the corner from the bar where we were drinking. Some Virgo acquaintances thought that having one big Virgo birthday party would be fun, and also a good way to get me to DJ for three hundred of their friends for free.

  I plugged in my USB sticks and played some old house-music tracks, even getting a muted cheer from the hipster crowd when I played the “Woodtick” mix of “Go.” It was 2008, which meant that “Go” had been released eighteen years ago. I was old. And drunk. I had another beer and played another house-music record. Suddenly everything seemed flat – the hipsters, the lights, the levity – as if life was just a staged photograph in a bad design magazine. I was sad, but underneath my sadness I was angry and disappointed. I’d been given the kingdom, and I’d squandered it.

  I stopped the house record I was playing. The party cheered, assuming that something big and dramatic was going to happen. But I didn’t want big and dramatic; I wanted quiet and sad. After a few seconds I played “Going to California” by Led Zeppelin. Some of the hipsters cheered, assuming that this was going to segue into a Zeppelin/t
echno mashup. But I just wanted to hear “Going to California” in its entirety. So I closed my eyes and drank my beer while I listened to this delicate, yearning ballad in front of three hundred increasingly confused hipsters. It ended, and the crowd looked at me expectantly. So I played it again.

  Karim, one of the other DJs, came over and tapped me on the shoulder. “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  I smiled at him with tears in my eyes. “Isn’t this song beautiful?” I said.

  He looked at the restive crowd, whose loud loft party had been stopped in its tracks by an old drunk playing Led Zeppelin. “You mind if I play?” he asked.

  “Just let this finish,” I said, putting my hands on the controls to keep him from stopping the plaintive music. As I closed my eyes and listened to Robert Plant sing the last mournful lines I could feel the tears running down my cheeks.

  The song ended. Karim played an LCD Soundsystem song about how great nightlife in New York had been in the 1980s and 1990s, and the crowd cheered. My friend Carrie-Anne tapped me on the shoulder. She was a commercial real-estate agent with short blonde hair who looked like a glamorous newscaster. We had met a few years earlier, when she rented me a commercial space on Elridge Street that I’d wanted to use as an office.

  “Happy birthday?” Carrie-Anne asked.

  I smiled at her sadly. “Wasn’t that song beautiful?” I said.

  “I’m not sure they thought so,” she said, gesturing at the rest of the party.

  “Let’s go,” I said. We walked to the street and got a taxi back to Manhattan.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “The Box.” The Box hadn’t become the egalitarian Weimar-esque mix of downtown performance artists and uptown money that I’d hoped it would be, but as the owner of a minority stake I still went there almost every night. We bypassed the line out front, and once inside I looked around for people I knew.