Porcelain by Moby

Author:Moby [Moby]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780571321506
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-05-30T22:00:00+00:00

26

PLYWOOD DANCE FLOOR

I was drinking organic carrot juice, eating a bowl of oatmeal, and reading the New Yorker. Because of jet lag after my last trip to Europe I’d woken up at five a.m., put on some old sweat clothes, and gone to the gym. Now it was eight a.m. and I felt clean and civilized, eating breakfast at the yellow kitchen table I’d found a month ago in a Dumpster in front of my building. The dappled sun was coming through the giant trees at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral and filling my loft.

Outside, people were shouting; I thought I heard my name, so I went to the window. Twenty wide-eyed ravers were standing on the sidewalk, chanting, “Moby! Moby!” I opened the window, leaning on the old stone windowsill. Ani, a DJ whose name was a pun for taking ecstasy, yelled, “Moby! You’re up!”

“I’ve been up since five,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“We’re going to an after-hours on Fourth Street! Come with us!”

I looked at my bowl of oatmeal and my glass of carrot juice. “Okay!” I shouted. “I’ll be right down!”

“Where are you coming from?” I asked Ani a few minutes later as we walked up Mott Street.

“NASA, Shelter,” he said, referring to a weekly club night that DB and Scotto had started recently. “At eight a.m. Soul Slinger’s DJing an after-hours in a loft on Fourth Street.”

We crossed Houston and got to Bleecker. It was a jewel box of an autumn morning: the sky was cloudless and the sun was warm. The other ravers shuffled alongside us, their pupils wide and their jaws clenching. They were all in their giant raver pants and Liquid Sky T-shirts. The raver pants kept getting bigger and bigger; most of the ravers now wore jeans that would have comfortably fit a three-hundred-pound man. Some of the ravers wore their jeans low, like hip-hop gangbangers, but most of them wore belts, making their billowing jeans look like cotillion dresses. None of the ravers were talking, just wandering next to each other like a laconic tribe on narcotics.

We walked up the Bowery, past CBGB. “Have you ever seen a show at CB’s?” I asked Jason Jinx. He had grown up in the New Jersey suburbs and had been a hip-hop DJ before discovering the rave scene a few years earlier.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Have you?”

“Hundreds,” I said. “The best show I ever saw there was Bad Brains in 1982. HR, the lead singer, was doing backflips off the stage.” Nineteen eighty-two was ten years ago, and ten years ago Jason had been nine years old. He looked at me suspiciously, doing math in his head and trying to figure out if I was old.

“Did you ever go to any of the hardcore matinees at CB’s?” I asked Ani. He had grown up in the city; his parents were art dealers who lived in a five-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side.

“No, my brother went,” he said. “I was too young.”

“Too young for a CB’s matinee? Most of the kids there are fifteen.

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