Then It Fell Apart by Moby

Author:Moby [Moby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571339426
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

37

NEW YORK CITY (2002)

When it first opened teany was always busy, but we still somehow lost money. Then a friend who owned a restaurant on Ludlow Street gave me some solid small-business advice: “You can’t spend more than you take in.”

Oh. So that was the solution.

Kelly implemented the new rule of spending less than we took in, and teany started breaking even. This was wonderful – it meant that I didn’t have to close it. Shutting down my tea shop would have been heartbreaking, because teany had become my second home. Every hungover morning I went there for bagels with vegan cream cheese. I had meetings and interviews there during the afternoon, and at night I’d meet friends there and we’d play Scrabble before heading out to get drunk. Plus teany was bright and quiet and clean, unlike the dark tour buses I’d been living on for most of the twenty-first century.

It was the day before Halloween, and I was home on a short break from touring. I was going to a Halloween party later, but first I wanted to stop at teany to have a piece of chocolate cake and to show off my costume. I was dressed up as the keyboard player from Journey, or Loverboy, even though I didn’t actually know what the keyboard player from Journey, or Loverboy, looked like. I was wearing red pants, white shoes, a red sleeveless T-shirt, a long dark wig, wraparound sunglasses, and a red multi-zippered Michael Jackson jacket I’d bought on the street from a homeless man in 1986.

I had called Kelly earlier and told her about my costume. She told me that she was going to wear normal clothes for Halloween; her costume was going to be prosthetic makeup that would make her look like a pig-nosed extra on an old Twilight Zone episode.

Kelly and I had broken up the day that teany opened, and since then had gotten back together and broken up again at least a dozen times. At present we were ostensibly a couple, even though both of us were polygamously dating other people.

I walked up to the entrance of teany as Kelly walked out the door that led to the tiny basement office where we also made soup. “Is that you?” I asked, amazed by her prosthetic porcine makeup.

“Is that you?” she asked, taking in my red clothes and long dark wig. We both laughed.

“How’s teany today?” I asked.

She looked at me and said earnestly, but in a voice slightly muffled by her prosthetic pig nose, “You really need to go inside.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. You’ll see.”

I stepped down past our little patio and walked into teany. Our tea shop was very small. It seated twenty-two people comfortably, and on some Sunday brunches we squeezed in thirty. Even though nobody complained, thirty people in such a tiny space felt claustrophobic and barbaric.

This afternoon we were half full. But when I looked around I saw what Kelly was talking about. Teany had become a place where some

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