Porcelain: A Memoir

by Moby

All I wanted to do was yell at people and tell them they were wrong. But yelling made people hear less.

There’s a word missing from the English language. Maybe it exists in other languages. It describes the unspeakable, incomprehensible panic that comes from standing onstage to play your second-ever solo show in front of thousands of hostile fans who’ve just found out the headliner canceled and then hitting “start” on your sequencer with absolutely no result.

Across the street from my new building some old Italian ladies were sitting on the street in lawn chairs, while potbellied men played dominoes at a folding table behind them. Some guy in a tight white T-shirt had set up a hibachi barbecue on the sidewalk and was cooking sausages. “You live in Goodfellas,” Lee said. “With the Butthole Surfers,” I said.

Then there was this England, the rainy, cold England that was the background for every movie about defeated people waiting to die in public housing estates. This was the country that gave birth to Joy Division. If Ian Curtis had been born in Palo Alto he’d probably be managing a chain of organic coffee shops and married to a yoga teacher. I walked downstairs. Eric was

Walnut did her “walk around in a circle to find the perfect spot on the sidewalk on which to poop” dance. I watched, mildly annoyed, as it was early March, cold, and drizzling, and I was being slowly killed in a soul-destroying relationship.

Before we’d broken up Sarah had told me that I was like a scared, beaten dog who lived under a porch. And I agreed. I wanted to finally move out from under the porch and live in the daylight, but I couldn’t. Under the porch was lonely and dark. But it was familiar, and nothing could really hurt me there. If I came out from under the porch and ran around in the light I would be seen for who I really was: the inadequate eight-year-old boy with food stamps in his pocket. If I enjoyed life or opened up to anyone I would be ridiculed and hurt. Then I’d slink back under the porch, remonstrating with myself for ever leaving in the first place. Better to stay under the porch and be safe than to leave and be hurt.