Then It Fell Apart

by Moby

  *

  With the election less than a month away, and Laura and I knowing some of the movers and shakers in progressive politics, we got invited to play a fundraiser for Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in Hudson, New York.

  “Have they heard the lyrics?” I asked. One of our songs had the refrain “I’m a mean, mean woman / I like to argue, fuck, and fight.”

  Daron laughed. “Maybe we could change it to ‘Hug, vote, and snuggle’?”

  The rest of the Little Death were driving upstate to Hudson in a van, but I decided to take Amtrak, as I loved the train ride by the Hudson River. I made a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich at my loft on Mott Street, put it in a paper bag, along with a copy of The New Yorker, and sat on the left side of the train so I could watch the sun set.

  As the train headed further north out of the city the autumn leaves turned brighter and brighter shades of orange, yellow, and red. I hadn’t gone out drinking the night before, so I felt great. I put on a CD I’d burned of some of the music I was working on for my next album, and listened as the last bits of daylight spilled over the mountains on the other side of the Hudson River. There was one song I’d written the week before, “Wait for Me,” that I really liked. It was sad and delicate, built around a lonesome piano arpeggio, and I wanted it to be the lead track on my next album.

  As the train pulled into Hudson station I felt clean and civilized. It was the middle of October, and the cold, clean air smelled like fallen leaves and campfires. We had an hour before the show, so I went to the venue and sat backstage with Kirsten Gillibrand and some other New York Democrats. “How are you feeling about the election?” I asked her.

  “Hopeful?” the senator asked, with the same timorous note that we all had. After two hundred years of white presidents, and eight years of Bush and Cheney, the thought of having a smart, young African American president seemed dream-like but desperately necessary.

  I had worn my suit on the train, but Daron and Aaron changed into their own black southern gothic suits while Laura and the singers put on their Eudora Welty mourning dresses. At 8 p.m. the house lights went down and we got ready to go onstage. “Daron,” I said, before strapping on my bass, “let’s shotgun beers.”

  We laughed and each shotgunned a Bud Lite like the frat boys we never were.

  “Classy,” I said, crushing the cold aluminum can as I burped. I didn’t want to stop drinking just because we were performing, so I brought six beers onstage with me. I loved playing dark rhythm and blues with the Little Death, but I also loved that some of our songs were simple enough for me to play bass and drink beer at the same time.

  By the time we played the last song in our hour-long set I’d had seven beers. I took the mic from Laura. “Everyone has to vote,” I said drunkenly, “because Republicans are fucking subhuman devils and need to be fucking destroyed.”

  I looked over at my new friend, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, hoping she’d smile and applaud my progressive courage and profanity. But she looked horrified, and was hurried out of the venue by her entourage.

  Laura took the microphone. “Sorry, Moby sometimes has alcoholic Tourette’s,” she said.

  I took the mic back. “I’m not an alcoholic,” I said with fake umbrage, “I’m an alcohol enthusiast.”

  We walked offstage, drank the rest of the backstage beer, and then got a ride in a minivan to a local bar. The rest of the band left early to drive back to New York, but the promoter had booked me a room at a local B&B, so I stayed in the bar and did shots of tequila with the locals.

  A band was performing, doing nostalgic cover versions of Hudson Valley classics like “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” and “The Weight.” At midnight I stumbled onstage, borrowed a guitar, and tried to play “Purple Haze” with them. I’d learned the song in ninth grade with my guitar teacher Chris Risola and had played it enough times that even drunk I could get through it without too many mistakes. I did a long, sloppy guitar solo, and after the song I took the lead singer’s microphone. “If anyone has cocaine they can give me or sell me,” I said, repeating my tactic from the Highline Ballroom, “meet me on the side of the stage.”

  As I stepped offstage a bearded guy in a motorcycle jacket nodded at me and led me to the men’s room. “A hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, handing me a small bag of white powder. I knew I was being egregiously overcharged, but it was cocaine, so I thanked him profusely.

  I did the bag by myself in a toilet stall, and left the bathroom feeling like a superhero. I tried to jump back onstage with the band, but I slipped and fell onto a table covered with glasses and beer bottles. I knocked it over and tumbled into a pile of broken glass, but hopped up unscratched. “The liquor gods protected me!” I yelled, my arms triumphantly raised over my head.

  At 5 a.m., after more tequila and more cocaine, a doorman from the bar escorted me to my quaint bed-and-breakfast off the main street. “What a great night!” I shouted outside the little house.

  “Dude, ssshhh,” he said. “This is a small town.”

  “Should I move here?” I asked earnestly.

  “Might be too quiet for you,” he said, and walked away.

  My room had floral wallpaper and a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night on the bedside table. I got into bed and tried to read, but the words kept moving, so I gave up after one or two sentences. The cocaine and beer and tequila were churning through my body like angry fish, so I tossed and turned for a few hours without sleeping.

  By 8 a.m. the alcohol and drugs were leaving my system, and I started to hurt. The light coming through the curtains was pale and nauseating. The sheets were coarse and felt like stiff paper on my skin. I couldn’t sleep, or even get comfortable, so I put on my old black suit, which now smelled like beer and other people’s cigarettes, and walked to the train station.

  I’d been hungover thousands and thousands of times. My hangovers in high school and college had been inconsequential, like soft California coastal fog that dissipated by noon. My hangovers in the late 1990s and early 2000s had seemed charming and even literary: physical connections to alcoholic heroes like Charles Bukowski and John Cheever. But now when I was hungover I felt like I had poisoned my DNA. Hangovers these days felt wrong, and not lower-case “wrong,” like driving a few miles an hour over the speed limit, but upper-case “WRONG,” like feeding gasoline to a newborn.

  At the train station I bought two bottles of water and boarded the Amtrak train to Penn Station. The ride up had been calm and magical, but now I was hungover in my undertaker’s suit, pressing my body against a windowless wall and getting as far away from the light as possible. I tried to distract myself by reading my New Yorker, but I couldn’t follow the words.

  I was so sick and tired. Again. And I’d been sick and tired and hungover most of this last week.

  And the week before that.

  And the month before that.

  And the year before that.

  And the years before that.

  It was unrelenting, a tautological journey of damage and nausea, and whenever I drank I ended up this way. I’d tried cutting back on drinking more times than I could count, but every time I tried to drink like a normal person I ended up where I was now: ill, destroyed, and wanting to die.

  The week before I’d tried to kill myself by tying a plastic bag over my head before going to sleep, but my atavistic survival mechanisms must have kicked in. Although I didn’t remember pulling the bag off my head, it was lying next to my pillow when I woke up.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to keep drinking, so I tried to think of times in my life when I’d been able to drink in moderation, evidence that I could brandish to prove to myself that I wasn’t an alcoholic. And I remembered: one time in 1986 I went to a Christmas party and had only two glasses of champagne.

  I’d been drinking for most of the last thirty-three years, since I was ten years old in 1975, and I could think of only one time that I had been able to drink like a normal human being.

&nbs
p; I wasn’t physically capable of reading, so I took out my CD player and listened to “Wait for Me” again. I’d recorded the demo vocals myself, but I knew at some point I’d have to get a real singer to do them:

  I’m gonna ask you to look away

  I loathe my hands and it hurts to pray

  The life I have isn’t what I’d seen

  The sky’s not blue and the field’s not green

  Wait for me

  I’m gonna ask you to look away

  This broken life I can never save

  I try so hard but I always lack

  Days are gray and the nights are black

  Wait for me

  The song ended and I sat quietly crying.

  *

  The train pulled into New York and I stumbled through the fluorescent horror of Penn Station. Once I got outside I saw that it was a beautiful day: not a cloud in the sky, the October air perfectly warm and cool.

  I took a taxi to my apartment, dropped off my bag, and walked to the only AA meeting I knew of, on 1st Avenue and 1st Street.

  I’d visited this meeting a few times before over the previous year, but each time I’d been convinced that I wasn’t actually an addict. The other people I’d seen at the meeting had been the broken ones. They were the alcoholics whose lives were unmanageable. They were the people who needed this weird, old cult of Bill Wilson.

  I’d always balked at the declaration required to take the first step: that I was an alcoholic and that my life was “unmanageable.” I’d sold twenty million records and had stood onstage in front of millions of people. I’d met heads of state and dated movie stars. I’d collaborated with my heroes and owned penthouses and beachfront property I’d never even seen. So I scoffed: that was unmanageable?

  But I knew other truths: I couldn’t get close to women without having debilitating panic attacks; I couldn’t go out and have fewer than fifteen drinks; most days I was too hungover to get out of bed; and every afternoon when I woke up I was sad that I hadn’t died in my sleep. I finally admitted to myself: that was unmanageable.

  A year ago I’d been at a party and had struck up a conversation with an old, well-known musician who was famously sober. I was hungover and sick, and he was calm and annoyingly healthy.

  “So,” I asked, “you’re in AA?”

  “Twenty years this month. Why, do you think you’re an alcoholic?”

  I paused, holding onto my belief that I was just an alcohol enthusiast.

  “It’s funny,” he told me, “people think that being an alcoholic is about drinking. I mean, it is, but it isn’t.”

  I looked at him, confused. I wanted to say, “Of course being an alcoholic is about drinking. What the fuck are you talking about?”

  He continued, “Before I got sober I was so afraid, and I fucking hated myself. So much. But after I got sober I learned only the first step is about drinking – the others are about dealing with the fear and the brokenness that made me a drunk in the first place. To this day, when I say, ‘I’m an alcoholic,’ I’m saying, ‘Left to my own devices I’m terrified of everything and want to die.’”

  I didn’t know what to say, so he smiled and wrote down his phone number on a napkin.

  “Sorry for rambling on, man. Call me if you ever want to go to a meeting.”

  I was too embarrassed to call him, but I went to some AA meetings on my own. I’d seen people sitting with their heads bowed, unable to look at anything except the floor beneath them. I’d been smug and had pitied them in their brokenness. And now it was October 18, 2008, and I was one of them, sitting in a metal folding chair at an AA meeting and staring at the wooden floor. I wanted to look up, to see who else was in the room, but I was too ashamed.

  Being a spectator at AA meetings had been surprisingly fun – a lot like being a cultural anthropologist. But now I was the person who couldn’t make eye contact, the suicidal addict who didn’t have even one day sober, the sick and broken man who still had beer and vodka and cocaine running through his veins.

  I vainly searched for any shred of evidence that could get me to leave this room, to return to the world of bars and feral promiscuity. But I had nothing except panic and sickness. I had been a rock star. I had been a king. Fame and wealth were supposed to have protected me and given my life meaning. They were supposed to have healed everything. But I’d failed. Fame hadn’t solved my problems, and even my last loves, alcohol and degeneracy, didn’t work anymore.

  I settled into my metal folding chair and thought, I’m done. The tension left me as I sank into my defeat, and I started crying. I raised my hand, still unable to look at the room or meet anyone’s eyes. I didn’t want to say it. But I knew, finally, that it was true.

  “I’m Moby, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  Darien, Connecticut, 1966

  Norwalk, Connecticut, 1968

  Danbury, Connecticut, 1969

  My birthday, Connecticut, 1972

  Vatican Commandos (with John Farnsworth), Darien, Connecticut, 1981

  AWOL (with Paul Johnson and Andrew DeAraujo), basement, Darien, Connecticut, 1983

  Calvin Klein advert, corner of Broadway & Houston, New York City, 1999

  Backstage, Texas, 1999

  Performing in San Francisco

  Self-portrait with some awards, 2002

  Performing with The Little Death, New York City, 2006

  Disco birthday party, New York City, 2007

  El Dorado ‘Sky Castle’, 2006

  The view from one of the five terraces at the El Dorado ‘Sky Castle’ apartment, 2006

  Acting in the vampire movie ‘Suck’, Canada, 2008

  Working on the album Wait For Me, 2008

  About the Author

  Moby was born in Harlem in 1965. He is a singer-songwriter, musician, DJ and photographer. The first volume of his memoirs, Porcelain, was published by Faber in 2016.

  Also by the Author

  Porcelain

  Copyright

  First published in the UK in 2019

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  Published in the USA in 2019

  This ebook edition first published in 2019

  All rights reserved

  © Moby, 2019

  Cover design by Faber

  The right of Moby to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–33942–6