Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  I had wanted The Box to be my debauched, kindhearted home, full of creative performance artists. But tonight it was full of entitled finance workers. Then again, I’d wanted New York City to be my debauched, kindhearted home, and it too was now full of entitled finance workers. I looked at Carrie-Anne and said bitterly, “Fuck this place.”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  I did, but I also wanted a drink. The line at the bar was three deep, but I found a space and tried to squeeze through. A tall young finance worker in a thousand-dollar suit was talking to another tall young finance worker in a thousand-dollar suit, blocking my access to the bar.

  I tapped him on the shoulder politely. “Excuse me, can I get through?”

  He ignored me.

  I tapped him again, increasingly vexed. “Hi, can I get a drink?”

  He looked at me with haughty disdain and said, “Fuck you.” Then he went back to his conversation.

  This was the wrong thing for him to have said. I grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. Losing my cool, I yelled at him, “You come into my bar” – I might have been exaggerating my ownership – “and say, ‘Fuck you’?”

  “Yeah, fuck you,” he said, and pushed me.

  I stumbled backward, my self-pity transmuting into rage. Suddenly I saw him as everything I loathed and feared: the confident finance workers taking over New York; the hipsters with the temerity to be younger and cooler than I was; the terrible men my mom had dated. So I punched him in the face.

  I wasn’t usually a violent person, but I’d been taking kickboxing lessons on and off for the past few years and had (unfortunately) learned how to throw a punch. He crumpled to the ground, people quickly backed away from the barroom violence, and security guards ran over to us. His fellow finance worker tried to attack me, but a guard held him back.

  “Moby, what happened?” the head of security asked me.

  “This yuppie piece of shit attacked me,” I said, somewhat overstating the severity of his assault.

  The security guards picked up the guy I’d punched, who was now yelling, “Fuck you! I’m going to fucking sue you!” He gestured at the security guards. “And you! And everyone here! I’m going to fucking ruin all of you!”

  “Okay, American Psycho, party’s over,” the security chief said. The guards frog-marched the two Wall Streeters out onto the street.

  After they were gone, Carrie-Anne said to me, “Did you really just hit that guy?”

  Suddenly all my anger and bravado deflated like a scared balloon. “Fuck,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it was awesome.”

  “It was?”

  “Kind of.”

  We ordered drinks and looked at the crowd. It was as if the guy I’d punched had been cloned before he got ejected: it was a sea of dudes in thousand-dollar suits talking loudly in the way only confident finance workers could. The same people who’d made me miserable as a child had taken over The Box, and New York City, making me feel small and terrible as an adult.

  I finished my drink. “Let’s go,” I said to Carrie-Anne. We walked up the street to the 205 Club, where my new assistant, Alex, and some of his friends from DFA Records were DJing. I’d gone through a number of assistants in the last few years; they usually quit when they realized their main job responsibilities were making sure I had enough alcohol in my house and coming up with excuses for me when I had to cancel plans due to being hungover.

  Alex and his friends were tall and handsome, and had grown up listening to hip-hop on the Upper West Side. But a few years ago they had discovered old disco, and had ditched hip-hop to become disco evangelists.

  “Disco?” I asked him when he started working for me.

  “Disco!” he answered, as if good-looking twenty-five-year-olds listening to old Sylvester records in 2008 was the most normal thing in the world.

  We reached the entrance of the 205 Club, where Carrie-Anne said, “Happy birthday, Mo, but I have to head home.”

  “Really?”

  “You look so sad,” she said, touching my face. “Yeah, I have to be up at seven. And it’s 2 a.m.”

  I hugged her good night and walked inside the club. I’d had a dozen drinks, and I was unsteady on my feet, but the two-second fistfight at The Box had woken me up. Alex and his DFA friends were DJing in the basement, so I headed downstairs.

  I did a shot of vodka at the bar, and then ordered a vodka and soda. Clutching my drink I walked across the small dance floor and into the DJ booth. “Happy birthday, Moby!” I said, slurring, to the young, cool DJs. Jacques Renault gave me a drunken hug and went back to DJing.

  I finished my vodka and soda, ordered a tequila, and took it upstairs to the quieter lounge. It was brighter there, and with the better lighting I could see that everyone else in the club was young and stylish in ways that I had never been. I drank my tequila, feeling awkward and hoping that someone would recognize me and talk to me. But no one did.

  I ordered another tequila and went back downstairs, where I stood in the back of the DJ booth, hoping some of the DFA crew’s youth and attractiveness would rub off on me. But they were busy DJing and the crowd was too busy adoring them to notice me hovering behind them in the shadows.

  I went back to the bar and ordered another tequila, drank it at once, and ordered another. The bartender eyed me warily. “Dude, are you sure?”

  “It’s my birthday!” I slurred, trying to look happy.

  I took my new drink onto the dance floor and realized that with the twelve drinks I’d had before arriving at the 205 Club, and at least six more in the hour that I’d been here, I was very drunk. I was accustomed to being drunk, but I rarely got to this point: my vision was blurry and I was having a hard time standing.

  I tried dancing with a young, beautiful woman who ignored me. I tried dancing with a different young, beautiful woman, who also ignored me. “It’s my birthday!” I tried to say to her, realizing dimly that I had just yelled a few slurred syllables over the loud house music. Trying as hard as I could to enunciate clearly, I said, “Will you kiss me?”

  “Ew, no,” she said, and turned away.

  I finished my drink – my twentieth? – and fell down. The floor felt good. I lay there for a second with my eyes closed, feeling the kick drum thump through my back. Then some hands pulled me up, aggressively. They were connected to two bouncers, who dragged me to the staircase.

  My assistant Alex ran over to intercede. “Hey, that’s Moby! He’s my boss!”

  The bouncers looked at me like I was drunk garbage. Which I was. “So?” one of them asked.

  “Happy birthday, Alex,” I slurred.

  Alex just stood there, watching helplessly as the bouncers dragged me up the stairs and threw me onto the sidewalk. I wanted to put them in their place and yell, “Don’t you know who I am?” like the self-entitled aging celebrity that I was. But they’d already gone back inside, and I was alone, lying on the sidewalk on Stanton Street.

  With great effort I stood up, realizing again that I was extremely drunk. I was only a few blocks from my apartment, so I stumbled west on Stanton. As I crossed the Bowery I tripped in the middle of the crosswalk, falling down and scraping my hands.

  When I reached my building I decided that I needed to listen to music and write down some new ideas for the record I was working on. I sat on the sidewalk, leaning against the old brick loft building I’d lived in since 1995, and threw up in my lap. I wanted to go inside and clean myself up, but standing up seemed like too much work.

  I lay down on the sidewalk, covered in vomit, and played a Joy Division song on my phone. Ian Curtis started singing, and I started crying. Not the quiet, restrained crying of earlier, when I’d been listening to “Going to California” with my eyes closed, but sobbing.

  I heard people walking by, so I turned my face to the building to keep them from seeing me crying and covered in vomit. I held my phone to my ear and Ian Curtis sang to me from the tiny speaker.

  64
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  DARIEN, CONNECTICUT (1985)

  The ATM wouldn’t let me take out any money because I had only $18 in my savings account.

  Maybe being broke was hereditary. Aside from my grandfather, I didn’t know anyone in my family who hadn’t been poor. I had relatives who’d come across on the Mayflower, but they weren’t the ones who went on to become bankers and governors. Now I was honoring my impoverished hereditary line by being a twenty-year-old adult with $18 to my name. It was cold and starting to rain, so I held a newspaper over my head as I walked across the street from the bank to the Darien train station.

  I had started DJing at The Beat at the end of 1984, when Tom, one of the owners, had given me a DJ slot out of pity – and because I was spending more time at The Beat than any of the actual employees. At first Tom paid me $20 to DJ from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Monday nights, but a few weeks ago he’d given me a promotion. Now I was getting $25 a night, and DJing Wednesdays as well as Mondays. Tom also gave me a key to the bar and offered a quid pro quo: if I cleaned and maintained the sound equipment, he’d let me keep my records in the DJ booth and allow me to practice DJing in the afternoon.

  Port Chester was five stops away on the Metro North train. To avoid paying the $1.25 fare all I had to do was stay away from the conductor, or hide in the bathroom. The local train in the middle of the day felt like a refugee camp, with exhausted maids, gardeners, and barely employed poor white trash like me all hunching our shoulders and hoping that nobody would look at us too closely. Occasionally I’d take the train during rush hour and sit among the rich businessmen commuters who carried themselves erect and loud, spraying the world with their confidence.

  The train pulled into Port Chester and I stepped onto a platform that was as wet and gray as the low sky. I went down the stairs and under the old iron train trestle, walked to The Beat, and let myself in.

  The Beat was a dive bar in a neighborhood of burned-out buildings, empty parking lots, and vacant storefronts. It had a black tin ceiling, chipped tiles on the floor, a long wooden bar on the left side, cigarette-stained paneling on the right, and a smattering of old tables and chairs. When the new owners, Tom and Fred, took it over, the only changes they made were to make a tiny dance floor in the back and to build a plywood DJ booth next to the men’s room. The Beat smelled like cigarettes and a century’s worth of vomit and spilled drinks, but after I dropped out of UConn it became my second home and my refuge.

  The bar held only forty-five people, but the other oddballs and dropouts who hung out there had become my surrogate family. Some of the other regulars were students at SUNY Purchase, an art school a few miles away. But most of them were people who needed a dim refuge from the normal world: musicians who were too shy to play a show, artists who never seemed to finish a painting, and alcoholics and drug addicts who found the outside world too painful.

  Allard, Melissa, Brock, and I had played our first show here two weeks earlier. We’d finally decided on a name, Caeli Train. It had no literal meaning, but to our Connecticut ears it sounded like a vaguely Celtic name that a band on Postcard Records would have. For our show we’d set up our equipment on the tiny dance floor in front of the plywood DJ booth. All four of us wore black, and Melissa and I wore little fishermen caps, as we’d seen pictures of Ian McCulloch and Roddy Frame wearing them. Twenty of our friends came and clapped politely between our delicate alternative-rock songs.

  After we finished playing our show I did my regular Monday-night DJ set. As I played a remix of “Confusion” by New Order I noticed that the small audience was more enthusiastic about my DJing than my indie-rock band.

  In addition to DJing two nights a week at The Beat I was also making $50 a week as the DJ at an all-ages club in Greenwich called The Café. Which left me confused as to why I was so broke, as I was earning $100 per week from DJing. Even though I was giving my mom some money for food and utilities, I should have been able to keep more than $18 in the bank.

  I poured myself a Coke from the soda gun behind the bar and got some rags and cleaning products to wipe down the DJ booth and sound equipment. The rags turned black almost immediately, as the DJ booth was covered in dust, nicotine stains, rat poop, and a disconcerting number of dead cockroaches. After a half-hour of cleaning I took out some of my hip-hop records to practice DJing.

  I still loved my old punk-rock records, and I adored the Smiths and the Chameleons and the other sensitive British groups. But the more I DJed, the more I found myself excited by the hip-hop and dance-music producers who were rushing to create the soundtrack to the future. I tried to share my enthusiasm with my rock friends, playing them new and remarkable twelve-inch singles by Mantronix and Schoolly D and Doug E. Fresh, but they were indifferent.

  I even tried being a Socratic dance-music syllogist, arguing to my friends that since New Order loved dance music, as evidenced by “Confusion” and “Blue Monday,” and we worshiped New Order, shouldn’t we also be open to the music that New Order revered? My entreaties fell on deaf ears, although Melissa did admit in a private moment to liking Schoolly D’s “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?”

  I took out two copies of Run-D.M.C.’s “Sucker M.C.’s” and cued them up on the now-clean Technics 1200 turntables. I’d heard hip-hop DJs on Kiss-FM and WBLS playing two copies of the same record, scratching and cutting back and forth flawlessly, and I wanted to learn to do that. I’d even read an interview with Grandmaster Flash, in which he talked about reading the record “like a clock.” I had no idea what he meant, but I was determined to figure it out.

  I got the two copies of “Sucker M.C.’s” playing at the same tempo and tried to go back and forth between them. I played the instrumental version on the left turntable and tried scratching in the intro to the vocal version on the right turntable. Most of the time it was a rusty train wreck, but now and then it sounded semi-professional. I was proud of my progress; when I had started DJing the year before I couldn’t match the beats when mixing between one record and another, but now I successfully beat-matched almost half the time.

  I kept the instrumental version of “Sucker M.C.’s” playing on the left turntable and put a copy of T La Rock’s “It’s Yours” on the other. It took me a few minutes to change the tempo so that “It’s Yours” matched “Sucker M.C.’s,” but once I had it I played the T La Rock track over the Run-D.M.C. instrumental and it sounded good. I had to keep speeding up and slowing down the T La Rock record with my hand to keep it in time, but when the two tracks synched up they almost sounded like they were being mixed by a real DJ.

  I still couldn’t believe how lucky I was to get a job as a DJ. I’d done so many terrible jobs in high school and since dropping out of UConn – stuffing envelopes in an insurance company, washing dishes in a Macy’s restaurant, selling arts and crafts, caddying – but now I was getting paid $100 a week to play music.

  I pulled out a copy of “Shout” by Tears for Fears, as it was the same tempo as a lot of hip-hop tracks, and played it over the instrumental of “Sucker M.C.’s.” It was a bit odd to combine emotional new wave with electronic hip-hop beats, but somehow it seemed to work. Then I tried out a trick I’d heard a DJ do on Kiss-FM, where he scratched part of the record while it was playing, not even cueing up a particular sound. I hadn’t wanted to try it out when I was working, because it had the potential to go terribly wrong. But I was in a cold and empty bar in the middle of the afternoon, and no one was listening. While “Shout” was spinning, I put my hand on “It’s Like That” and scratched a sixteenth-note pattern with the kick drum. It wasn’t just okay – it sounded good.

  I smiled to myself and looked up. I was happy playing music at 2 p.m. in an empty bar, or even for the twenty or thirty drunks who hung out at The Beat when I DJed. But someday I wanted an audience. It didn’t have to be big – I just wanted someone to notice me.

  65

  NEW YORK CITY (2008)

  After seventeen years of being on the road I finally admitted to myself that I didn’t enjoy to
uring. Not that I could complain to any of my friends with real jobs, as it was hard to elicit sympathy for traveling around the world and being paid to stand onstage and play music.

  In the early 1990s going on tour had been novel, and I had been an enthusiastic evangelist for the nascent rave scene. And then for a few years, after the success of Play and 18, it had been exciting, a perpetual road-trip party with huge concerts, unceasing drunkenness, and almost effortless promiscuity. But lately touring had turned into a routine, one in which I played in smaller venues to smaller audiences who just wanted to hear older songs.

  Even though I didn’t want to tour, I still wanted to play music. So I started playing bass in a bar band with some friends: Aaron, a dreadlocked drummer whose mom had been Led Zeppelin’s publicist; Daron, a handsome, erudite journalist from Massachusetts who played guitar and harmonica; his wife Laura, the creative director of moveon.org, who sang like a lusty demon; and a rotating trio of glamorous backup singers. I had played with Laura and Daron a few times before (for example, at the David Lynch Weekend in Fairfield, Iowa).

  Inspired by Bertolt Brecht and Georges Bataille, we called ourselves the Little Death and did our best to sound like a blues cabaret band playing at a roadhouse in 1945. When we performed we wore old black suits and dresses, looking like gun molls and crooked Bible salesmen from a Flannery O’Connor story.

  Lizzie Grant, whom I’d tried dating a couple of years ago, was one of our original backup singers, but she left the group to pursue her own career as Lana Del Rey. The band started as a lark, just a way for some friends to drink beer in a rehearsal space on Ludlow Street. But after we played a few shows at small bars on the Lower East Side we realized that we were actually good. David Lynch came to some and became a fan, while John Waters gave us a one-line endorsement that we cherished: “You’re like Ike and Tina Turner, minus the beatings.”