Moby

I was a lonely alcoholic, and I desperately wanted to love someone and be loved in return. But every time I tried to get close to another human being I had crippling panic attacks that kept me isolated and alone.

I’d had a few successful years of making music, and sold tens of millions of records, but now my career was sputtering. I couldn’t find love or success, so I tried to buy happiness. Three years earlier I had spent $6 million in cash on a luxury penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It had been my dream home: five stories on the top of an iconic limestone building overlooking Central Park. Having grown up on food stamps and welfare, I’d assumed that moving to a castle in the sky would bring me happiness. But as soon as I moved into my Upper West Side penthouse I was as sad and anxious as I’d been in my small loft on Mott Street.

My father drove into a wall and killed himself. He and my mother had been living in a basement apartment in Harlem with Jamie, their dog, Charlotte, their cat, three rescued lab rats, and me. One night after a bad fight with my mom, my dad got drunk and drove into the base of a bridge on the New Jersey Turnpike at a hundred miles an hour.

For all my life I’d wanted nothing more than to love and be loved. But whenever I found someone to love the panic intervened, screaming at me until I retreated to my solitary world. Some very deep part of my brain was protecting me vigilantly and wanted me to be alone. As soon as I did the panic’s bidding and ended whatever relationship I was in, the panic abated. This tautology of panic had been going on for years now. I held onto the increasingly naive hope that someday I’d meet a perfect, kind woman, and with her I’d finally break the cycle.

After the show I drank champagne and vodka in my dressing room with Ewan McGregor. After a few drinks I decided that he and I should go out and drink more, but that I should be naked. Sandy, my tour manager, urged me, “Moby, at least put on a towel.”

So I went out in downtown Melbourne wearing a towel. No shoes. No clothes. Just a towel. Ewan and I stumbled from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker. At the end of the night we ended up in a subterranean bar filled with Australian celebrities. I’d had ten or fifteen drinks, so I went to the bathroom to pee, and found myself standing at a urinal next to Russell Crowe.

He zipped up his pants, and then pushed me against the wall of the bathroom and started screaming at me. “Uh, we’ve never met,” I tried to say. “Why are you yelling at me?” He never told me, but he kept me pinned against the wall while he shouted and screamed. After a minute he lost interest, cursed a few times, and stumbled out of the bathroom.

I went back to the bar and told Ewan, “Russell Crowe just yelled at me.” “Fuck, mate,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He yells at everyone.”

While the last samples were slowly loading, I walked down the hall to the bathroom. My hallway was filling up with framed gold and platinum records. Before Play I’d never received a single one. And now Play had gone gold or platinum in twenty-five different countries, so more framed awards were arriving every week. I didn’t know what to do with them, so they were stacked on top of each other and leaning against the wall in my long hallway.