Porcelain: A Memoir

by Moby

See, I was Christian, but I was also a dick. I was poor, I lived in an abandoned factory, I spent $10 a week on food. So when I read “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied,” I felt smug and justified and favored in the eyes of God. Normally I felt like a subpar Christian, and I worked under the assumption that God was perpetually disappointed in me. I didn’t do enough ministering to the homeless. I still wanted a career as a musician. I still had lustful thoughts. But when it came to poverty, I felt like I’d nailed it. I’d never met anyone as poor as I was now. Even the poor people I’d grown up around had indoor plumbing and walls made of stronger materials than salvaged plywood. So I was smugly going into million-dollar houses in Greenwich to judge the children of the rich and make them feel bad about being born into wealth.

The train started moving again and a few of the club kids on our train started chanting, “New York! New York!” Lee and I and everyone else in the train car joined in, a hundred fifty club kids and ravers and giant chickens all stomping their feet and chanting, “New York! New York!” over the cacophony of competing techno and house tracks.

I’d grown up seeing two different Englands on TV. There was the bucolic England with witty university students floating on slow boats alongside waterborne flower petals on gentle rivers and sunny ponds. 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.

“Do you have your clothes ready?” she asked. “Yup, just give me a minute,” I said. I was going to wear a pair of yellow pants that I’d found at a Salvation Army and a green T-shirt covered in arrows. I thought it looked cool and futuristic, possibly like something Marinetti would’ve worn if he’d been a balding techno musician and not an aspiring fascist.

Touring in 1991 was based on hope, goodwill, and faxes. Everything was communicated by fax: the hotel information, the name of the venue, the flight information. I felt especially professional, because I now had my own fax machine, full of new, curly fax paper.

The club kids in the corner with Keoki looked strung out and terrifying. In 1989 these same club kids had been innocent fashion students in colorful clothes, looking like flowers and pixies. But just three years later they looked like scary monsters, with faces painted white, steel spikes piercing their cheeks, and fake blood smeared around their eyes. They used to take a hit or two of ecstasy when they went out, but now they were smoking crack and shooting heroin. They didn’t really speak very much anymore; they just went out and stood there, expressionless and terrifying and tall in their seven-inch heels.

I wanted to go home and turn on my 909 and my 303 and write something sinewy and dark and laden with reverb for a DJ to play for a basement full of drug-damaged ravers. But when I got back to my apartment my glass of carrot juice was waiting for me, glowing in the sun.

“Are the lights different tonight?” I asked Scotto. “We wanted to make things darker,” he said. “More strobes and less color.” “Okay,” I said, surveying the nightclub. The music sounded sepulchral and the dance floor looked like a primordial soup. The darkness was palpable. “I’m going to play rave records,” I told him. “Okay,” Scotto said, his attention on his lighting board.

I mixed from “Go” into Bizarre Inc.’s “Playing with Knives,” and it fell flat. No euphoria, no exuberance—not even recognition. Just narcotic apathy for yesterday’s DJ playing yesterday’s rave record. Carlos, a.k.a. Soul Slinger, came over to the booth. “Hey, you want to finish early?” he asked. I’d been playing for thirty-five minutes; I was supposed to play for an hour. I couldn’t tell if he was being rude or kind.

Suddenly it all made sense: the monochromatic strobes, the dark and angular music, the drugs. This was their world now. I was politely tolerated, but it was 1993, and I was a sober relic from 1992. Or maybe 1991.

I lifted the glass to my mouth, smelling the beer just an inch away from my nose, and I drank. My first drink after eight years of judgmental sobriety. My friends stopped talking and looked at me. There was a moment of stunned silence, and then they started shouting at me: “What are you doing?” “You’re sober!” “No, Moby!” “You don’t drink!” I held up my hand to stop them, lifted the glass to my mouth again, and finished my pint. I put the glass firmly back on the table, exhaled loudly, and said, “Delicious!” They laughed and applauded. Joey’s boyfriend said, “Moby’s drinking!”—awestruck, as if he had just witnessed a small malignant miracle.

After only one drink my constant awkwardness abated and I felt like my true self. Sobriety was complicated and difficult and sad. Drinking offered salvation and safety. When I drank, the world felt welcoming and simple, and I was happy.

I looked up and imagined the ceiling parting and a sky full of smiling Celtic angels welcoming me back into the fold of drunkenness. “You’re probably an alcoholic,” I imagined these hereditary angels saying, “and this is going to end badly for you at some point, but for now just be drunk and happy.”

As I squatted on the sidewalk at the corner of Bleecker and Lafayette a bike messenger hovered over me. “Yo, what are you doing?” he asked, peering down at me on the sidewalk. “Looking at ants,” I said. He shook his head. “Fucked up,” he said as he sped away down Bleecker.

A single cell in one ant’s eye was more complicated than anything I could even begin to comprehend. So if I knew nothing, then who was I to say who or what God was? I didn’t understand even a single cell in a single ant, yet I’d claimed for years to know which God was the right God and which one was the wrong God, and how we should all worship and behave. I claimed to know who made the universe, why God had made it, and how and when. But in truth, I knew nothing.

“Hi, I’m Annie. Are you a Christian, Moby?” “Um, yes, I’m a Christian,” I said, leaving out the part about my drunkenly dating strippers and dominatrixes and questioning the legitimacy of a belief system that presumptuously purported to comprehensively describe the architect of the entire universe.

“Alexis’s playing was great,” I said. “But maybe we want to use a drum machine instead.” “I completely agree,” Alan said. “This album needs to feel kind of wrong, and the live drums just felt too right.” We agreed. In the time since I’d started working on Animal Rights it was the first time anyone had agreed with me. I wanted to hug Alan and start crying. But I was a grown-up, and I didn’t know how well Alan would respond to a balding vegan crying in a health-food store.

This was all an experiment for me, or so I’d decided. I was a former Bible-study teacher getting drunk with my stripper girlfriend in a casino at one a.m. on a Sunday night. I told myself I was a drunk anthropologist, not a frightened alcoholic with attachment disorder.

I walked through the empty room and stopped at the side entrance to the casino. There were two kids, around four and six, picking up spilled Cheetos off the casino floor and eating them. Squatting next to them was their obese dad, wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey, denim shorts, and sandals. He smiled and winked at me, as if to say, “Kids, am I right?” I thought, God came and took His chosen people a long time ago and this is what’s left. Before heading to heaven with His chosen few, God looked at the Earth and its remaining millions and thought, Well, I could smite the rest of them, but what if I leave them alone for a while and see what happens? Now the chosen ones are in heaven playing cloud croquet and we’re left to watch kids eating Cheetos off the floor of a casino after midnight on a school night.

Pre-release it had received a slew of egregiously bad reviews, and my American record label, Elektra, had stopped returning my managers’ phone calls.

At the party I got drunk and played a short live set, managing to alienate the members of Blur, who for some reason were in the audience, as well as the handful of Elektra employees who’d shown up.

Earlier that day I’d gotten a voice mail message from Axl Rose, who said that he loved Animal Rights and was listening to the song “Alone” on repeat as he drove around LA at three a.m. He even said that he’d be interested in working together. So Trent Reznor and Axl Rose liked Animal Rights. If only they wrote reviews for Spin or the NME.

The tour started and Soundgarden were unfailingly kind and supportive toward me, even if their audience was uninterested in me and the music I was playing. I was playing a very loud, fast punk-rock and heavy-metal set, but in the eyes of most Europeans I was a techno musician, even when I wasn’t playing techno. Night after night I’d play to Soundgarden’s European fans, who sat or stood, dismissive and bored. They were there to see the last Seattle rock gods standing, not a newly bald techno guy who’d decided to make a lo-fi punk-rock record with a drum machine.

Most nights, though, we had a hard time selling even 20 percent of the tickets in what were already tiny venues. In Paris we played a legendary punk-rock club, L’Arapaho. The Damned had played there. The Clash had played there. And then I played there. It held two hundred people and we sold ninety tickets. By the end of my show, over half the ninety people had walked out and there were forty people in the venue.

“Damian, why haven’t you finished your drink?” I demanded. “Unlike you, I’m not an alcoholic,” he said. “I’m not an alcoholic, I’m an alcohol enthusiast,” I said. I was saying that more frequently lately.

I walked through SoHo, thinking about how it was changing. The galleries were leaving, the recording studios were leaving, the artists were leaving. Change in New York was exciting, even when it was awful. Even music was changing: hip-hop was transforming from being a voice of protest to a celebration of bottle service and expensive watches. Cities change, careers end, parents die.

The more I thought about her sadness and disappointment, the more I sobbed into the pillow. That was the unfairness. Not that she’d died relatively young of lung cancer. But that she’d bitterly blamed herself for not creating the life that she’d longed for. That was the tragedy: that she had let her fear and caution keep her from having the life that she’d wanted. The cigarettes and the junk food helped the cancer grow, but deep down I knew that her frustration and sadness had killed her.

Robert Downey Jr. had been my best friend in third grade. We’d bonded because we were both neurotic eight-year-olds, and his parents and my mom were the only adults in Darien who smoked pot.