Praise for Porcelain

“A lovingly composed new memoir that tracks his journey from living in an abandoned factory in Connecticut to playing the hottest clubs in New York and Europe . . . Porcelain reads like an intimate medi-tation on the various contradictions Moby has resolved over the course of his fifty years: his Christian faith vs. his hedonistic streak; his hunger for stardom vs. his retiring nature; his respect for ambition vs. his deep ­belief in luck. The book is also a tender ode to a vanished New York City.”

—Mikael Wood, Los Angeles Times

“Rock memoirs rarely live up to expectations, but . . . Porcelain is an exception. It ranks with Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band and a handful of others in recent years as a particularly incisive look at not just a life in music, but at the cultural and social circumstances that helped shape it. It is by turns self-deprecating, hilarious, and moving.”

—Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune

“Moby’s Porcelain is a buoyant coming-of-age story set in the filthy, dangerous New York City of the 1990s that the musician and DJ adored. Funny, bighearted, and raw.”

—Barbara Spindel, San Francisco Chronicle

“A romp of a book. Such outrageous fun.”

—Miranda Sawyer, The Guardian (London)

“As much a portrait of downtown Manhattan in the late ’80s and ’90s as it is an iconoclastic artist’s coming-of-age story, this raucous, candid memoir will fascinate the electronic musician’s many fans.”

—People

“Ten years of Moby’s life, mostly in the decrepit, dangerous, much-loved New York City of the 1990s, a life comically overcrowded, filthy, alcohol-fueled, vegan, unbelievably noisy, full of spit and semen and some sort of Christianity; and often, suddenly, moving. The writing is terrific, enlivened by a bewildered deadpan humor that makes crazy sense of it all. His ancestor Herman Melville would, I think, be simultaneously revolted and proud.”

—Salman Rushdie

“This is one of the funniest and most accessible books you’ll ever read about an erstwhile Christian/alcoholic vegan electronic music maker. Throughout the adventures and misadventures, Danish music festivals and Barbadian disasters, Moby manages to stay wide-eyed, grateful, and amazed, which itself is a real gift to the reader: we feel welcome—or just as out of place as he feels—in the world of rock and raves and clubs. He remakes the music world into the form it should be: nonexclusive, unpretentious, less about division and stratification, and more about radical inclusion. Music shouldn’t exist any other way.”

—Dave Eggers

“Honest, funny, and sometimes raw, Porcelain is an intimate look at a life in motion. It proves that Moby writes like he plays music—with passion and precision and heart.”

—Susan Orlean

PENGUIN BOOKS

PORCELAIN

Moby is a singer-songwriter, musician, DJ, and photographer. He has sold twenty million records worldwide. Born in NYC, he now lives in Los Angeles.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

Published in Penguin Books 2017

Copyright © 2016 by Moby Entertainment, Inc.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Photograph credits appear here.

ISBN 9780143110200 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781594206429 (hardcover)

ISBN: 9780698189171 (ebook)

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

Cover photograph © Matthias Clamer/Corbis Outline

Cover design: Darren Haggar

CONTENTS

PARKING LOT, 1976

THE FUTURE

All the stores at the Dock mall in Stratford, Connecticut, were closed for the night, except for the Fresh-n-Kleen Laundromat. My mom was inside the Laundromat, wearing blue jeans and a brown winter jacket that she’d bought at the Salvation Army for five dollars. She stood at a cracked linoleum counter underneath flickering fluorescent lights, smoking a Winston cigarette and folding clothes. Some of the clothes were ours, and some belonged to our neighbors, who sometimes would pay us to wash and fold their laundry. On this March night the storefronts were dark; the parking lot was empty except for our silver Chevy Vega and one other car. The cold was wet and heavy, and the piles of snow in the corners of the parking lot had turned gray and were melting in the rain.

Every two weeks I’d find myself at the Dock, doing laundry with my mom. I would help her, or just sit on the fiberglass shell chairs in the Laundromat and watch the giant dryers spinning in their fast, lopsided way. My mom had been unemployed for over a year, and her last relationship had ended when her boyfriend tried to stab her to death. Sometimes I would find her crying while she folded the neighbors’ clothes. She would be folding furiously, a cigarette lodged in her mouth, tears falling onto the neighbors’ T-shirts. I was ten years old.

After helping her sort laundry I would usually go outside and walk around the empty parking lot. I would wander behind the mall, past the loading docks and the rusting Dumpsters, and walk down to the ruined dock that gave the mall its name. The dock was black and burned; at some point it had a purpose, but now it just sat stoic and resigned in the dark Housatonic River. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I’d see giant river rats scurrying in and out of holes in the mud.

This night in March 1976 it was too cold and rainy to go exploring, and the Laundromat was choked with cigarette smoke. And sitting next to the washing machines on the cold fiberglass seats, watching my mom smoke and fold and cry, made our poverty seem even more vicious. So I spent the evening in the car, huddled in my wet thrift-store down jacket, playing with the radio. The rain made a steady drumbeat on the roof of the Vega, and I kept spinning the dial back and forth on the AM radio.

I was indiscriminate when it came to music: if it was played on the radio, I loved it. I assumed that the people playing music on the radio knew exactly what they were doing and wouldn’t, under any circumstances, play music that wasn’t perfect. Every week I listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 countdown and memorized the songs that he played. I didn’t have favorites—I loved them all equally and religiously, from the Eagles to ABBA to Bob Seger to Barry White to Paul McCartney and Wings. I just accepted that all music played on the radio was worthy of my complete and undivided worship.

My damp Wrangler blue jeans were sticking to the vinyl seat of our cold car, but I listened happily to whatever was on the radio. It was the age of disco and rock and country rock and prog rock and yacht rock and ballads. Led Zeppelin coexisted benignly with Donna Summer, and Aerosmith lived peacefully with Elton John. Then I heard something new: “Love Hangover,” by Diana Ross. I knew disco music, although I didn’t think of it as being particularly different from the other types of music played on AM radio. But “Love Hangover” was different. The opening was languid—otherworldly and seductive—and it scared me.

Anything related to sex or sensuality terrified me and made me want to go watch Looney Tunes cartoons. Whenever I watched TV with my mom and the characters on Maude or The Love Boat hinted at sex or intimacy I froze and waited silently for the moment to end.

But “Love Hangover” was different. First of all, it was on the radio, so it had to be good. Second of all, it sounded futuristic. I was obsessed with Star Trek and Space: 1999, and had decided that I loved all things futuristic. The future was clean and interesting, and didn’t involve sad parents smoking Winstons in Laundromats. So even though I knew it was about sex, I listened to “Love Hangover” all the way through. It was a futuristic song on the radio, and neither the radio nor the future had ever betrayed me.

I sat watching the blurred lights of the Laundromat through the rain-streaked windshield, gradually accepting that the song made me uncomfortable but that I loved it. It represented a world I didn’t know, the opposite of where I was—and I hated where I was. I hated the poverty, the cigarette smoke, the drug use, the embarrassment, the loneliness. And Diana Ross was promising me that there was a world that wasn’t stained with sadness and resignation. Somewhere there was a world that was sensual and robotic and hypnotic. And clean.

Sitting in my mother’s Chevy Vega, I imagined a gleaming city a lifetime away from the parking lot. I could see people moving confidently through this gleaming city, striding through tall buildings with giant glass windows that looked onto discos and spaceports. As the frenetic disco outro of “Love Hangover” played, I imagined people dancing, all wearing white and looking like robot angels.

The song ended. I turned off the radio. I stepped out of the car into the rain and looked at the parking lot stretching all the way to the river, empty except for melting snow and puddles. Through a plate-glass window, I watched my mom smoking and folding, and somehow I could stand it. There was more to life than this cold, defeated shopping mall. The seed had been planted and was gently encoded somewhere in my DNA. A disco song on AM radio had given me a glimmer of hope: Someday I would leave these dead suburbs and I would find a city where I could enter a womb. A disco womb where people would let me in and let me listen to their futuristic music. I imagined opening the doors to a disco at the top of the tallest building in the world and seeing a thousand people smiling at me and welcoming me inside.

DIRTY MECCA, 1989–1990

1

ONE HUNDRED SQUARE FEET

The roosters finally shut up at seven a.m.

There were four recurring sounds around the abandoned factory where I lived, a mile south of the Stamford train station.

1. Gunshots. The crack dealers would regularly shoot at each other, usually starting after the sun went down.

2. Amplified gospel. Every weekend there were big revival tents set up by the nearby storefront Dominican and Jamaican churches, trying to get the crack dealers to leave the neighborhood.

3. Public Enemy. Or EPMD. Or Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock. Every fifteen minutes, a car would drive by playing “Fight the Power” or “It Takes Two” at toaster-oven-rattling levels.

4. Roosters. Everyone on the street opposite the abandoned factory kept roosters in their backyards. The roosters would start roostering around four thirty a.m., exactly when I was trying to go to bed. I kept an old radio next to my bed and tuned it to a non-station when I needed to sleep. The static just barely masked the dawn staccato stylings of the testosterone-fueled roosters across the street.

I had moved into this abandoned factory two years ago, and I loved it. In the nineteenth century it had been a huge lock factory, comprising twenty or thirty giant brick buildings. Now, in 1989, it was a dark and hulking mass in a neighborhood famous for having the highest murder rate in New England. A decade earlier a real estate developer had bought the whole complex, put up a fence, and hired some security guards to look after it.

A few of the guards made extra money by charging squatters and other random people $50 a month to illicitly live or work in the abandoned factory. I was making about $5,000 a year, so $50 a month for “squatter’s rent” was within my budget. My space was small and sandwiched between a gay-porn production studio and an artist’s loft, but it was all mine: one hundred square feet of abandoned factory where I could live and work as long as the security guards took their $50 and looked the other way.

My walls were built out of discarded plywood that my friend Paul and I found in a Dumpster. Paul and I had gone to Darien High School together, where we had bonded over loving science fiction and being the only poor kids in Darien, Connecticut. The walls of my one-hundred-square-foot loft looked like a brown wooden quilt, and in the summer heat the plywood would smell like the Dumpster where we had found it. My space had a solid, beautiful door that we had rescued from an abandoned house near Route 7 in Norwalk, and the entire floor was covered with thick, beautiful ivory carpeting that I had taken from the garage of a friend’s parents. I hadn’t gotten permission to take the rug, but I told myself that it was fine because I would give it back if they ever noticed it was missing. I had never cleaned the rug, but it remained improbably pristine.

I had a small, brown school desk for my Casio keyboard, my Alesis drum machine and sequencer, my TASCAM four-track mixer, and a terrible Yamaha sampler. I couldn’t afford speakers, so I listened to everything through a pair of Radio Shack headphones. I cooked my meals in a toaster oven and on a single-burner electric hot plate. And I was happy. I loved the crumbling bricks, I loved the olfactory weight of a century of different factory smells, and I loved my huge window that faced south, letting in pale light in the winter and blistering, full-throated sunlight in the summer.

There were approximately one million square feet of space in the factory complex—it was so huge, I had no idea how many other people lived there—and although I took up only one hundred of those square feet myself, I had access to the whole place. I would ride my friend Jamie’s motorcycle up and down the empty factory floors, sometimes playing “motorcycle bowling”: setting up bottles at one end of a factory floor and trying to knock them down with the motorcycle’s wheels. When I was bored, I would go exploring: I’d find old propane canisters, barrels of industrial chemicals, giant rusty wrenches, spools of steel cable, and the occasional dead pigeon.

When friends and family visited me, they were dismayed. My five-year-old cousin Ben, visiting me with my aunt Anne, stood in the doorway to my small space and announced, “This is terrible.” I smelled like a homeless person—because although I had a quasi-residence, I was functionally homeless. I didn’t have running water or a bathroom or heat, but I had free electricity, which is the one utility I needed to make music.

When I needed to pee, I would use an empty water bottle. With no bathroom, I was bathing only once a week—if I visited my mom’s house, or my girlfriend’s dorm, I could use the shower there. I usually stank, but I’d stopped offending myself. I loved everything about my life in the abandoned factory.

Well, not everything. I didn’t love that I’d been working on music for years and was still in a small city forty miles away from New York. I didn’t love that no record label had expressed any interest in my electronic music, or that I had never actually played it for anyone except my girlfriend. But aside from my longing to live and make music in lower Manhattan, the abandoned factory was perfect.

 • • •

Most days I would wake up in my loft bed around noon, make oatmeal on my hot plate, read the Bible, and work on music. When I wanted a break I would ride my skateboard up and down the long, empty hallways of the factory or walk to the local Dominican bodega, where I could buy oats and raisins.

Today, however, I was headed to New York City, my dirty mecca. There were a few ways to get to New York. Sometimes I would ride my old moped to Darien, where my mom lived, and borrow her aging Chevy Chevette. I would drive into the city, following the route that I learned from my grandfather when I was eight years old: he taught me how to get into the city without paying tolls, though it meant driving through the most crime- and drug-ridden parts of New York.

Sometimes I could find someone who was already driving into the city and get a ride with them. But usually I took Metro-North, a commuter train that connected New York to its suburbs. I spent my childhood fleeing Connecticut for Manhattan via Metro-North. My punk-rock friends and I would all put on our best punk-rock T-shirts and go into the city, hoping that real punk rockers would notice us and approve of our Black Flag and Bad Brains shirts. Heading into Grand Central Terminal in the morning, we’d sit next to sleepy white businessmen; coming home at night we’d sit next to the same white businessmen, who were now drunk and exhausted.

If the police were around when I left the factory I would climb out via one of the huge glass-and-steel windows to avoid the scrutiny of the cops. Today there was only a truck rumbling down the road, so I left by the back door, stepping outside and clenching my body against the cold. It wasn’t a dry cold, but a wet cold that made my socks heavy and stabbed my bones. It had snowed three days earlier, covering the ground with a pristine and angelic blanket—quickly ruined by freezing rain. I walked under the gray sky, across the pitted and broken tarmac of the parking lot, picking my way through a maze of puddles. When I got to the chain-link fence, I let myself out through a hole in the corner and headed for the Stamford train station.

Walking to the train station I passed some storefront churches with hand-painted signs, a grocery store with bulletproof Plexiglas and a special on Schlitz malt liquor, the Cavalier Pool Hall, and some shuttered and abandoned buildings. Within a few minutes my hands and feet were already cold. The scattering of locals on the street looked homeless or scared, and they were nonplussed by the badly dressed white kid walking through their neighborhood.

The next train to Grand Central didn’t leave for half an hour, so I stopped at the pool hall to play a game by myself. The room was dark, with a few dim lights over the five pool tables. Even low-wattage lighting couldn’t conceal that the felt on the tables was scarred and burned from decades of cigarettes and spilled drinks. Aside from me there was one other person playing a midday game of pool, and the guy in the back who rented you your cue and rack of balls for $1.50. I often stopped by the pool hall on my way to the train station, even though I was a mediocre pool player. I consoled myself with the knowledge that if I were any good at pool I’d run the table quickly and not be able to play as long. As with so many things, there was utility in avoiding excellence.

The pool hall was always filled with cigarette smoke. That wasn’t surprising—I worked in bars where everyone smoked and went to restaurants where everyone smoked. Even though I was a nonsmoker, and there were only two other human beings inside the pool hall, it seemed normal for the room to be filled with smoke. I never spoke with the other pool players, or the guy handing out cues and racks. I hoped that someday, they would say “How are ya?” or even give me a subtle nod, but they just tolerated me. Apart from me, the only white people around here were suburban kids buying crack and heroin. The irony was that even though I was sober, I was seen as part of the problem: another drug-addicted white kid ruining the neighborhood. Eventually the locals realized that I lived there, and while that didn’t get me any friendly nods, at least it stopped the hostile stares.

I finished my game, hoping that if either of the other guys in the pool hall looked at me, they would think that I was a better player than I actually was. On the rare occasions when I sunk a tricky or satisfyingly loud shot, I would glance up to see if anyone had noticed; they never did. As a scrawny white kid I was an anomaly, but not so interesting that I actually warranted much of anybody’s attention.

I shrugged on my thrift-shop winter coat, which now smelled like cigarette smoke and wet sheep, and trudged the last few hundred yards to the train station. I passed one of the storefront churches; they were having a service inside. I could hear tambourines, an electric organ, and a choir singing. Sometimes on Sundays, when the churches were in full swing, I would stop in and sit in the back. Or when the weather was nice, and all the churches had their doors open, I would walk down the street and it would sound like a beautiful Tower of Babel, with all of the churches filling the street with perfect competing versions of the gospel. Puerto Rican churches were next to Abyssinian churches, right alongside evangelical and Pentecostal congregations, and whatever other brand of church could justify renting a storefront and buying some plastic folding chairs. If I stood listening in the doorway too long I made the congregation uncomfortable, so I usually stood just to the side of the doorway, listening to the Casio organs and raised voices.

When I got on the train I immediately headed for the bathroom; in high school, I had learned that you could avoid paying the $5 fare if you hid there. I was heading to New York City to drop off a DJ mix cassette at a brand-new nightclub. I’d heard about it from my girlfriend Janet; we’d been dating for a few months. Janet had grown up riding horses in Greenwich, Connecticut, but now lived in the Columbia dorms—she was a sophomore at the university—and had an internship at Interview magazine. She looked like Katharine Hepburn circa The Philadelphia Story, but her heroes were the writers at Paper and the Village Voice, and she was obsessed with nightclubs and galleries.

A writer at Interview had told Janet that a new nightclub called Mars was hiring and that if I hurried down I could drop off a mix tape. So in the torn pocket of my wet jacket I had a sixty-minute cassette of my best DJ mixes: hip-hop on one side, house music on the other. I had worked on this tape for days, mixing grooves on my four-track cassette recorder and then overdubbing them with a cappella tracks from obscure hip-hop and disco twelve-inch records. I wanted to look less homeless than I usually did, so under my secondhand jacket I was wearing my coolest nightclub outfit: black turtleneck, black jeans, black dress shoes, all from Goodwill and the Salvation Army.

I sat in the bathroom of the Metro-North train for forty-five minutes, inhaling the smell of pee and disinfectant and studying the artwork my friend Jamie had drawn on the cover of my tape. Was it cool enough? Was it cool at all? Jamie had designed a logo for me, all elaborate graffiti swoops and jagged edges. He was an aspiring graffiti artist but he was also a white kid from Norwalk, Connecticut, who studied accounting at UConn. Would anyone else know that? Maybe the logo was cool. I had no idea.

I had started sending similar mix tapes to a radio promoter in California. I’d seen an ad in a DJ magazine: “Wanted: your mix tapes for NATIONAL radio syndication.” I’d called the number listed and spoken to a surly man in Oakland, with the sound of a crying baby in the background. He told me that he could get my mixes played on the radio, so I’d been sending him thirty-minute hip-hop mixes. I hadn’t received any money for the mixes, nor did he ever tell me if my mixes were being played, but I kept sending the mixes in the hope that someone, somewhere, was listening.

The train pulled into Grand Central; I got out of the bathroom and rushed past the commuters, through the vast space of the station, and into the subway system. Fifteen minutes later, after jumping two subway turnstiles, I was running down Fourteenth Street along the bloody sidewalks of the Meatpacking District. I made it to Mars, breathless with hope and excitement. Mars was a nightclub in an abandoned warehouse, huge and dirty and hulking. A club impresario named Rudolf had rented it with the intention of turning it into the biggest and best nightclub on the planet. Its façade looked out over the West Side Highway, some sex and bondage clubs, and the slate-gray Hudson River. There were no restaurants or bars in the Meatpacking District, but there was a line in front of the club, hundreds of cool New Yorkers hoping to get a job. I stood in line in my black nightclub clothes, hoping that the other people wouldn’t notice that I was, in fact, a small and badly dressed white kid who lived in an abandoned factory in Connecticut.

After an hour of waiting I got to the front of the line. In the foyer of the nightclub there were three people sitting behind a big folding table, handing out paperwork. One of them asked, “What application do you want? Busboy, bartender, security?”

“Um, do you have DJ applications?” I asked.

There was a pause, and then they all laughed. “No, we don’t have DJ applications,” a disconcertingly calm woman behind the table told me. She was a beautiful African-American woman, wearing a long black coat over a weathered New York Dolls T-shirt. “Yuki’s already hired the DJs,” she explained.

“Oh. Well, can I just leave this tape?” I asked. “It’s house music on one side and hip-hop on the other. Maybe you could give it to the person who hires the DJs?”

She looked at me with pity, but she accepted the tape. Then she directed her attention to the person in line behind me. I stood there, frozen. “Okay, thanks,” I said, to no response. “Okay, bye.”

I hurried out and walked to the corner to use the pay phone so I could call Janet. It was broken. I walked to the next pay phone, a block away; it was broken too. It was drizzling, I was cold, the sky was low and dark, and I had just humiliated myself in front of a cool and beautiful woman at what was going to be the best nightclub on the planet. I’d had the temerity to dream that I could be a DJ at Mars. I was a fool. And now I was standing with my feet in a slurry of rain and animal blood, staring at a broken pay phone.

I had a few dollars, so I walked to the health food store on Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. When I had left the factory and rushed into the city I had been full of hope that I would finally be a New York City DJ. And now I was walking through the rain, hunched forward against the cold wind, to buy groceries from hippies. I purchased my soy milk and sprouted bread, jumped the turnstile on the F train, noted that F seemed like an appropriate grade for this trip to NYC, transferred to the Grand Central shuttle at Forty-Second Street, and splurged on a ticket back to Stamford so that I wouldn’t have to sit in the bathroom. On the train I ate my bread and drank my soy milk, sometimes looking through the scratched windows at the South Bronx, sometimes reading a copy of New York Rocker that someone had left on a seat.

The bands in New York Rocker had record deals and played shows. They did interviews. They released records. People took their pictures. People listened to their music. It was everything I dreamed about. I wanted to play music for actual audiences. I wanted to DJ in dark, crowded rooms in New York City. But, in fact, I was a borderline-homeless twenty-three-year-old electronic musician whose only paying work was DJing Mondays at a tiny bar in Port Chester, New York, and every Saturday night at an all-ages club in a church in Greenwich.

When I got off the train in Stamford the rain had picked up, so I rushed back to the factory. I walked down a long hallway to my tiny studio and called Janet. It still amazed me that I had a phone. When I first moved into the factory I had called the phone company to see if I could get a phone. The very next day they sent someone, and five minutes after he arrived, I had a working phone. He didn’t ask me if I was living in the factory illegally; he just laid down some wire and installed a phone jack. As he left I almost asked him what his name was so I could name my firstborn child after him.

“How was it?” Janet asked excitedly. “Did they hire you?”

“Well, there were a lot of people in line looking for work, but I left a tape with one of the women in charge,” I told her.

“Great! How are you feeling?”

“I feel good,” I lied.

We chatted for a few minutes, made plans to go to church together on Sunday, and hung up.

I’d done everything I could to get hired at Mars. I’d rushed to New York City in the rain. I’d left behind a tape decorated with an accounting student’s idea of cool graffiti. Now it was in God’s hands. Well, not the tape. I assumed the tape was in the garbage, or in someone’s answering machine. But the situation was in God’s hands. So I did what I always did: I turned on my studio and worked on music. I made quiet ambient house music until midnight, then I took off my headphones and turned off my equipment. I made some oatmeal and read a battered Star Trek paperback while listening to a Debussy cassette.

Sitting by the window, with the rain beating against my enormous factory windows and the space heaters on full blast, I was happy. I was unwashed and smelly, I lived in an abandoned factory in a crack neighborhood, and it had been an intensely disappointing day, but I was calm and happy. At four a.m., I went to sleep in my tiny loft bed, listening to the rain.

In the morning the rain had stopped, but it was still cold and overcast. I made more oatmeal on my hot plate and then went into my food stash for a few almonds and an orange. Almonds and oranges were luxuries, but the day before had been rough, and I wanted a treat. I was almost out of water, so after breakfast, I walked down the street to the bodega to buy two large plastic bottles of water. Walking back to the factory I noticed the huge mounds of dirt in the empty parking lot: once the beginnings of a construction project, they were now just big mud piles.

When I got back to my studio I saw that I had a message on my answering machine. I hit “play,” the cassette rewound, and I heard the best message anyone had ever heard in the history of phone messages: “Hi, this is Yuki Watanabe calling from nightclub Mars. I’m calling for DJ Moby. I listened to your tape. Call me to see about DJing Mars.”

I froze in place. I played the tape again. And then again.

Someone named Yuki with a thick Japanese accent had listened to my mix tape, and this same person was interested in having me DJ at Mars. I listened to the message once again to make sure it was real. And then again. And for good measure, again.

I picked up the phone, terrified. I had to call this Yuki and somehow convince him to give me a DJ job at Mars. Please. That was all I could say, to him or to God. Please.

I held the phone in my sweaty hand. I dialed the number.

“Hello, this is Yuki Watanabe,” a rumbling voice said slowly.

“Hi, this is DJ Moby,” I said, talking too quickly, “you called me about DJing at Mars?”

“Yes, I listen your tape. It’s very interesting. Can you DJ Friday night?”

“Yes. Yes, I can DJ Friday night.”

“Okay, you play in the basement. Ten p.m. to four a.m. It pays one hundred dollars.”

“Thank you! I’ll see you then.”

“Okay, DJ Moby.”

I hung up and thought about Walker Percy. There’s a scene in his novel The Moviegoer when the protagonist is in a museum after an accident. He has a moment of clarity, and suddenly he sees tiny dust motes floating in the sunlight. My own life had just changed, on a larger scale than I could imagine, and I could see dust motes floating in the winter light that streamed through my oversized windows.

I sat on my carpet, still clutching the phone, my neurons firing like the whirling atoms in a PBS science video. Had this really happened? Was I hallucinating? Were ancient factory fumes corrupting my brain? I listened to the answering machine message again: it was real. I had just been hired to DJ in the basement at the coolest club on the planet.

The world around me evaporated. I no longer saw the abandoned factory, or the phone, or the sky framed by my window. In my mind’s eye I saw the basement at Mars. I imagined a room, painted black, with low ceilings and a perfect sound system. A dark space filled with demonically cool people: I would stand at the elevated DJ booth, playing hip-hop and house music.

I called Janet. She was out, but her answering machine picked up. “Janet, you’ll never believe what just happened,” I blurted out. “Yuki from Mars called. I’m going to be DJing at Mars on Friday night. I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. Call me! I can’t believe it.” I hung up.

I needed to thank God, so I got on my knees on my stolen carpet. “Thank you, God,” I whispered. “Thank you. That’s all, thank you.”

2

VEGAN COOKIES

Someone shot Jamie?” I asked. I was standing in front of the abandoned factory in Stamford on a sunny Friday afternoon, talking to one of the other squatters.

“No, he got stabbed,” the squatter, Pedro, told me. “Someone heard screaming last night and then saw these two guys running down the hall. They looked in Jamie’s room—he was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.”

Pedro was a photographer and a graffiti artist. His graffiti tags were all over the factory complex: in the elevators, on the Dumpsters, on every inch of the loading dock. He always wore an old brown leather motorcycle jacket, and he’d been living at the factory for ten years.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “I saw him yesterday. Look, his motorcycle’s still there.”

Pedro eyed Jamie’s Triumph, sitting between two Dumpsters. “Do you think someone will take it?” he asked.

“I’m surprised it’s still there,” I said.

“Am I stealing it if he’s dead?”

There was a long pause as we both stared at it. Finally, I said, “I think it’s kind of a gray area.”

One of the advantages of living in the factory was that nobody paid attention to what we, as squatters, did. In addition to making electronic music and DJing I was playing drums in a punk-rock band called the Pork Guys and banging on metal cans in an industrial band called Shopwell—when we needed to rehearse, we took our equipment to some empty part of the factory and made as much noise as we wanted. Nobody complained. It was an abandoned factory in a crack neighborhood. As long as we weren’t killing people, we were left alone.

But last month somebody had killed a homeless guy in the parking lot, and now Jamie had been stabbed to death. The other squatters and I weren’t afraid that we’d be hurt; we were afraid that the police would figure out what was going on and that we’d be evicted. People dying in the abandoned factory wasn’t good for our anonymity. “If you leave, where do you think you’ll go?” I asked Pedro.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe Brooklyn? Or the Lower East Side? I have some friends in a squat on Avenue C. But there are rats.”

Most squatters lived in abandoned apartment buildings—and because abandoned apartment buildings had previously been lived in by people, they were usually filled with rats and roaches. The beauty of living in an abandoned factory, apart from one million square feet of unused industrial space, was that there were no rats or roaches.

“And you?” Pedro asked. “Where would you go?”

“I can’t move home,” I said. “So I’d probably move to New York somehow.”

“Can you afford it? Or would you squat?”

“If I DJ more, I could probably pay a hundred fifty dollars a month for rent.”

“That’s a lot,” he said.

“I know, but I need to be in New York.”

“Word. Okay, see you later,” Pedro said. “Don’t get stabbed.”

“Poor Jamie,” I said, giving his Triumph one last look, as if I could say good-bye to Jamie through his motorcycle.

I had to be in Greenwich at four p.m. for Bible study, and after that I was going to the Episcopal church where I DJed on Saturday nights, to hold a microphone for my friend Chris while he shot his student film. If I rode my moped I could get to Greenwich in about thirty minutes. I put on my helmet and headed west, past the pool hall, the storefront churches, and the drug dealers. I drove up to Route 1, passing the old Anthrax Club, where I’d seen Circle Jerks and Agnostic Front and countless other hardcore bands in the early eighties. I then headed west, passing the Villa Bar, where I used to get drunk when I was sixteen.

One time in high school I’d blacked out in the toilets at the Villa. A couple of off-duty cops had peeled me off the bathroom floor, thrown water in my face, and dumped me on the sidewalk. I emerged from my blackout with my friend Kitty shouting my name.

“What?” I said, opening my eyes and drunkenly looking around.

“I thought you were dying, you fuckhead!” she yelled at me.

I considered this. “I want a drink,” I told her.

“You can’t go back in. The cops will beat the shit out of you.”

“But I love cops. Can we go to Port Chester and drink?”

Port Chester was in New York, and the bars there stayed open until four a.m. We got in Kitty’s car and drove to Port Chester, where they served me more liquor. Then I threw up again and blacked out. When I woke up at dawn I was draped over a lounge chair by Kitty’s parents’ pool in New Canaan: sixteen, hungover, and proud.

 • • •

Heading west out of Stamford on my moped I entered one of the wealthiest town in the United States: Greenwich, Connecticut. The check-cashing stores and housing projects in Stamford turned into leafy garden supply centers and mansions hiding behind giant pruned hedges. I arrived at the house where we were having Bible study and parked my moped—a twelve-year-old green Peugeot—between a Porsche Carrera and a Mercedes station wagon. After I took off my helmet I rubbed my head to get the dried foam rubber out of my hair. I’d bought the helmet at the Darien Salvation Army: it had been new in 1975, it didn’t fit, and every time I wore it, I ended up with foam-rubber dandruff.

We were having Bible study at Catherine’s house. Catherine was a shy, sweet junior at Greenwich High School who rode horses and listened to the Cure. Her family had moved to the States from Belgium a few years earlier; her father’s finance company had rented them an eight-bedroom mansion with a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a horse paddock, on six acres in back-country Greenwich. Today I was going to be teaching Bible study in the basement.

For Bible study I wanted to talk about the Sermon on the Plain in Luke. It was almost like Jesus’s greatest hits: “love your enemies,” “judge not lest you be judged,” but also “woe to you who are rich” and “woe to you who are well-fed now.”

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. I wasn’t concerned for their spiritual health. I didn’t want to lovingly guide them into seeing the error of their ways. I just wanted to make them feel bad for having money. I also wanted them to applaud the legitimacy of my teachings, since I had spent hours in my tiny room at the abandoned factory, memorizing Bible passages and figuring out new and interesting ways to use Christianity to make people feel bad about themselves.

I was also an expert at using Christianity to beat the shit out of myself. Three weeks ago I’d decided that my Christianity was inadequate: I felt like a fraud, for I was a Christian but I had a home. Admittedly, my home was a tiny space in an abandoned factory, but it was still home. I had read the teachings of Christ and understood from them that I was supposed to be homeless. Christ wanted me to get rid of my possessions and go out and wander the earth, ministering to people. I felt called. One day I decided to take my faith out of the realm of the cloistered and academic and walk into the world with nothing except for the clothes on my back and my Bible.

I picked up my Bible, left the room, and closed the front door. I held the key up to the lock, and then I stared at the key. I thought, If I put the key in the lock and turn it, I leave and I don’t come back. I commit to a life of wandering and doing my best to help anyone who needs it: the poor, the hungry, the bereft. I leave and I turn my back on home, career, ambition, everything.

The key hovered an inch from my lock. In my mind I could hear the key sliding into the lock and turning. I imagined walking down the hallway, leaving the factory by the back door, going to the pay phone on the corner, and calling my mom. I’d say, “Mom, I need a favor. I’m leaving to wander and minister. Will you sell my stuff and give whatever money you make to the poor?”

But I couldn’t do it. I stood at the door, key still outside the lock, and I prayed, “God, if this is your will, then please give me the strength to do it.” It felt like such a clear calling, but minutes passed and I was still standing at my door. I couldn’t give up the familiar, no matter how humble, for the unknown. I had no guidelines or personal precedent for becoming a mendicant. I put the key back in my pocket, walked back into my room, and sat in the fiberglass school chair that Paul and I had fished out of a Dumpster.

I prayed again. “God, I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I can’t leave everything and go minister. I’m sorry, God.” I felt like a fraud. I knew my calling—to leave, to have no possessions, to minister—and I couldn’t do it. But I still wanted to judge the rich and their soft children.

 • • •

Catherine’s little sister let me in, and I walked down the stairs to the basement of the mansion. There was a red-felt pool table at the bottom of the stairs, and some comfortable couches and chairs arranged in a circle. Seven of the eight Bible-study regulars were there, clean and smiling. They all lived with their parents, sleeping in the same quiet bedrooms they’d known since childhood. The boys wore button-down Brooks Brothers shirts; the girls wore Calvin Klein jeans and Fair Isle sweaters. We sat and one of the girls prayed, “God, thank you for bringing us here and thank you for giving us this place to meet and study. Please guide Moby as he brings us your teaching. Amen.”

“Amen,” we all echoed.

“Okay, let’s open our Bibles to Luke 6:12,” I said. “Tory, do you want to start reading?”

We went around the room, each of us reading a few lines, ending at Luke 7. And I was ready. I still had the smell of the factory in my unwashed clothes. There were specks of foam rubber in my hair from my ancient moped helmet. I was ready to bring the righteous judgment of God down on these soft suburban Christians. I went to bed listening to gunshots; they, I imagined, went to bed to the sound of snoring golden retrievers. Hadn’t we just read “woe to you who are rich”? I felt justified, holy vengeance building up inside me.

Then I looked at a table where Catherine’s mom had put out cookies and lemonade for us. Catherine saw my glance. “Oh, do you want a cookie?” she asked. “My mom went to the health-food store and got vegan cookies for you.”

*