six MARGARET

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THAT WAS THE LAST NIGHT OF THE BEAUREGARD FESTIVAL NEAR CAEN.  The night the cheese heated up enough to slide completely off Kev's cracker and he halted the band's final encore, fucking ruined my guest solo and announced he was leaving Five Ways.

Then the junkie fool snapped for real and he booted my microKORG into my shins, sucker-punched Tony behind the ear. Charged Brady with his bass guitar held high, a boy-band berserker pushing forty in a hundred-dollar blazer, thousand-dollar sneakers. They went to the boards with a mike stand and Brady's feedback-shrieking Gibson tangled between them.

The audience hive-mind entered a state of supreme disturbance and went promptly into meltdown.

Dirty cotton clouds rolled in off the Channel earlier when Vincent and I wrapped our opening act. The rain fell in sharp darts and drove the crowd from a swaying singularity into pathetic clumps and huddles, screens glowing blue under plastic ponchos when Five Ways took the stage at sunset. Then the rain was coming down like something out of the Bible and the moment Kev flipped out those general-admission animals started throwing shit.

Water bottles tumbled in from the blackness, penetrated the halo of hot lights overhead and they crackled and snapped against the stacks, burst open onstage and popped underfoot when Patrick ran to aid Tony.

Maxim pitched his sticks, jumped from the drum riser and he circled Brady and Kev, penalty-kicking Kev's kidneys and ribs with flawless rhythm and savage follow-through.

Gabe and his security team dropped back from the crowd and they bear-hugged Maxim out of the equation, clamped Kev in a root-mass of tattooed arms and hairy tarantula hands. Brady spun free with a bloody nose, crewneck of his vintage Atari T-shirt pulled ragged down his chest, pink throat sawed raw under his hemp guitar strap.

Brady's heap of dreadlocks now tilted far beyond the jaunty dip I perfected that afternoon before sound check.  I pulled some cotton string over the tip of a purple Sharpie to disguise six inches of sail-repair stitches supporting the whole post-modern mess.

He dodged a salvo of incoming bottles and rolled the back of one hand under his dripping nose. I watched him consider that runny red blaze on his skin in a moment of detached fascination and some weak-sauce reflex buried inside me tried to push its old agenda to the surface. An automated emotional prompt meant to guilt or goad me into feeling something soft for Brady. Trick me into trying to make this mess better by waving a wand, singing a song.

Nope.

No fucking way.

That bitch didn't live here anymore.

Holding borders with Vincent taught me to let empathy die cold at the end of a cut wire. These weeks on the road only strengthened my new position, standing solo at the center of my own priorities. Nobody on this tour got here by putting someone else first.

More bottles fell from the dark at high angles, came whipping end over end spraying fantails of water piss and spit and they flashed and bobbled across the stage, a haul of strange fish dumped on the deck of a trawler in a sea of freaks.

Kev gnashed at fingers and wrists, flutter-kicked his alpaca-fleece Yeezys off his feet as security pinned his limbs. They counted three before lifting him up and he threw his spine into high arches, wailing like a witch on fire.

I watched as they carted Kev away and that's when I saw it for the first time, for real in another human face. The arrival of something immense. Pressurized and toxic. A horrible force folded back over itself in infinite layers made hard, then hammered harder. Heated and beaten to a cruel edge.

Three days later the French magistrate who would rule Kev's overdose a death by misadventure would reference this onstage assault in her summation, citing it as indisputable evidence that Kev hadn't merely unraveled a bit but had in fact cracked. Officially shit his couture tangerine jeans, suspended trading in any social-animal currency and plugged into the cold-blooded circuits glowing deep inside his reptile brain.

A muddy bottle smacked my shoulder, flung from the blubbering mob of Five Ways superfans pressed against the galvanized crowd barrier. This dedicated lunatic fringe of every age and gender identity wore coils of purple-dyed hair entwined with colored extensions, strips of fabric or yarn piled high and twisted to one side in a style the 1990s press had dubbed The Bradybun. Five Ways' reunion tour brought that ridiculous look back like a disease everyone believed science had conquered, a repulsive oddity once found only in the appendix of a medical text.

Gabe saw they were targeting me again and he shook Maxim loose. Came and stood directly in the line of fire with his back to the audience. Held his furry arms out like that giant concrete Jesus in Rio and that's when I heard them chanting, a screaming pack of twenty or thirty little bitches wearing plastic bags over their Bradybuns filming everything with their phones, flipping me the bird and jabbing the air with forked British fuck-you fingers as I packed up and scuttled behind the stacks:

Yo-ko. Yo-ko ...

Gabe tucked my microKORG under one arm and broke a trail through the wild Fellini crush of performers and groupies backstage. I followed him past multiple outbreaks of starfuckers and entourage. Shrank behind his soggy Maltese bulk to duck a couple of cut-and-paste music journalists in motorcycle jackets with seatbelt scuffs.

Maxim's impossibly tall industrially bitchy and flawlessly overdressed girlfriend Ce'Hara came clumping through the mix in muddy Wellies, ruby Louboutins slung over one shoulder like a brace of exotic game from another planet.

She refused to make eye contact and I was thrilled to reciprocate.

All the Five Ways wives and girlfriends ghosted me cold the moment Brady's pregnant partner back in Halifax, along with the rest of the world, read the article in The Mirror that accurately surmised I'd been fucking Brady.

We hooked up for the first time back in Warsaw, the night Brady invited me to join Five Ways onstage to sing "Owen" as an encore. Those debut collaborations became a regular thing but the sex remained a secret until yesterday, when the tabloid journalists who set Kev up and staked out his tour coach with night-vision gear also got shots of me sneaking away from Brady's wagon. By that point I'd taken up smoking again and now everyone knew absolutely fucking everything.

The news broke immediately in pixels and print. Then Five Ways' hardcore PentaFans declared a social-media fatwa on Citizen Samurai.

Like nervous birds, Melanie's texts flocked to my phone in buzzing increments of panic as our online following fell from five to four million. Tumbled to three and then hovered near two until the East Coast woke up to a fetid brunch of bottom-feeding news. Mel stopped texting when we lost a comma and slipped below one million.

Hours before Kev's show-stopping freakout the band's manager Mike flew in to attempt damage control. He brought a stack of tabloids from Heathrow and summoned four-fifths of Five Ways to meet aboard Brady's chrome-whale tour bus for a serious congress over lunch, monitored by the band's lawyer on speakerphone.

Brady boosted me into a bunk up front before the others came. I curled into a ball behind a guitar case and some pillows. Muted my phone, poked it around the corner like a periscope and spied while Mike and the boys plotted Kev's ambush-intervention.

Mike held up a copy of The Mirror.

"This nonsense? It's crippling our comeback and killing the brand," he said.

He slapped the newspapers down in front of Brady.

"Your girl's at home with a baby on the way and you're shackin' up with your supportin' act? And you three. Where the fuck were you muppets while our Kev was turnin' into Tony Montana?"

I pinched and spread to zoom in on Mike's face as he outlined the band's plan of attack. They would write letters loaded heavy with shame, laced with guilt and leveraged over sentiment to create a united front and underwrite a single nuclear demand: If Kev refused to seek treatment, he'd be forced to leave Five Ways.

"I want him seated here, okay? Right where I am now," Mike said. "Pat and Maxy, let's have you two on this side. We'll put Tony and Brady there and I'll park myself at the end. Box him in. Make it tough for him to do a runner before we've had our say, yeah?"

Mike shooed the band from the cramped dinette booth. He grunted, hauled himself from behind the table, struggled to his feet and sighed. Tucked his shirttail into his trousers and asked the boys to consider how the thoughtless actions of two fools had interrupted his Lake District holiday, jeopardized the reunion tour and put the band's collective dick in a bees' nest.

"I follow you boys online," Mike said. "You're all viper-quick to take the piss outa Lily Allen every time she twerps. Chirps? Tweetsncries? I'll agree she puts her foot in it often enough but that ain't bad publicity. The bird's controversial. Controversy sells papers, gets folks clickin' and Googlin' but this type of press? This shit only makes the public hate you. And before you ask me again Patrick I'll say yeah, with this sum of money at stake you are most definitely your brother's fuckin' keeper."

Everyone agreed to return to Brady's coach with letters in hand to confront Kev over a catered dinner at six.

When we were alone Brady pulled the curtains shut and helped me down from my roost. I scooted behind the dinette table and pawed through the tabloids Mike left behind.

My breath bottled up tight inside me when I saw Kev and I had split the front page of The Mirror

On the left, a murky but identifiable frame grab from sneaky cell-phone footage of Kev snorting Si-3-PO off the cracked screen of his own device. At right, a greenish sequence of me kissing Brady in the doorway of his coach. Me hunching to light a cigarette in the rain, fully illuminating my face for the camera and making my nose look massive. A final shot caught me turning to disappear into the night like Bigfoot in a kagool waving goodbye.

Motherfucking technology. You can't lie when millions of megapixels say it was you. It was Kev, sure as shit that was him holding one nostril shut with his thumb, showcasing the stupid tattoos across his knuckles that spelled PIMP. And it was unmistakably me sneaking away from Brady's bus with a lime-green nicotine chakra smoldering in my chin.

The media combined and conflated our stories into a shocking exposé of rock-and-roll excess in the golden age of information and the lethal second coming of Pakistani synthetic super-opiates:

CAUGHT ON CAMERA Kev's Drugs Shame

Love Rat Brady Cheats With "Owen" Hitmaker Mags

An odd effect followed me backstage as I followed Gabe. Audible conversations faded to whispers at five paces. Familiar faces lowered their gaze and turned to cold shoulders when I came near.

I cut the slack from my spine and channeled Melanie. Stuck out my chin and descended further with Gabe into a Middle Earth coven of audio-tech wizards. We pushed through the whipped-mule labor pool of sonic-mercenary road crew and joined a crowd gathered at the load-out watching two French medics dressed in coveralls with reflective stripes examining Brady.

One of them probed his skinned cheekbone, cocked her head to compare different views of his nose. Her Playmobil partner watched Brady's reddened eyes track the movement of a tiny sapphire light gripped in her rubber glove.

Vincent and his clean-and-sober cohort perched on stacked trusses, drummed their heels against the sides of stenciled road cases and they hooted and laughed, excitable primates lounging and strutting among the toppled columns of a ruined temple. Vincent had found his tribe on tour. Returned to the trees as the spiritual leader of this species of Lesser Roadie.

He clapped and made an ugly noise that came from somewhere on the moose-call spectrum. I hadn't heard Vincent's laughter in months and he was belligerent now, bright-eyed and taunting Brady:

"That was absolutely vicious! God damn Brady you move like a cat!"

Brady aimed a beam of pure laser hate over the medic's head at Vincent. She took his chin in her gloved fingers and gently reclaimed his attention, mimed with one Smurf-blue hand for him to lift a white wad of gauze to his nose and when Brady obeyed, a sick starving part of me heated up and burned black with rage.

Where the fuck was this coming from?

More French medics worked alongside security to prep Kev for transport and he howled. Huffed through gritted teeth and kicked like a roped goat as they strapped him to a gurney. He issued detailed threats of tantric-length sexual assault against everyone involved in his restraint. Lamented the birth of his tormentors' ancestors in a formal freestyle curse, wishing fatal car crashes and pediatric cancer on all descendants yet to come.

A thin ruffle of applause rose from our curious assembly as the ambulance flashed its overhead lights and carved tracks through the mud to take Kev wherever you take somebody who goes around the corner like that.

I stole a hooded raincoat, found rubber boots that didn't fit. Stowed my microKORG and buckled the case shut. Went up on my toes to hug Gabe in the tent-covered mud room, thanked him for everything and he said:

"See you in Norwich."

He was wet and sweaty, furnace-warm against my cheek but he would never make it to Norwich. The next time anyone took a good look at my sweet friend Gabe he would be cold to the touch, blue in the face. Flat on his back and done breathing forever alongside Kev and a pair of handsome high-rigger stagehands everyone called the Mario Brothers, all four of them overdosed on Si-3-PO in the back of a utility trailer.

I went out in the rain with my instrument case over my head, a cartoon ant carrying a Kit Kat home from a really shitty picnic. Looked over my shoulder for photographers, ducked between ranks of chattering generators. Held my case tight against my chest and side-stepped through a muddy maze of vandalized portable toilets faced door to door in double rows to prevent entry.

At the heart of this unicursal labyrinth stood a wheelchair-accessible unit damaged by fire, tagged up one side with the name TARDIS.

On the first day of the festival I came creeping around back here looking for a private place to sneak a smoke. The melted front panel of the TARDIS curved inward, a baby-blue plastic wave big enough for me to wriggle sideways and squeeze through the deformed door.

I stepped inside and stretched my arms until my fingertips quivered. Took ten deep breaths of corrupted air and tasted a signature clash of chemical disinfectant and diesel exhaust striped with a high note of human waste warmed by the summer sun. I shut off my phone and for the first time in a long time, I was untraceable. Truly alone.

That night I returned with a roll of trash bags, a canister of chlorine wipes and some scented candles pilfered from Brady's coach.

I sacked the toilet pedestal and trapped the nasty miasma brewing below. Double-bagged the seat to make it safe for sitting, sanitized the handrails and the fold-down baby-changing table. Stashed a few packs of Marlboros and a backup lighter inside the soap-dispenser housing.

Thoughtfully appointed and thoroughly equipped, the TARDIS would serve as a discreet and comfortable hideaway for the duration of the Beauregard Festival.

Pre-scandal I avoided Brady's bus until sundown but it was impossible for me to kill those daylight hours aboard the mildewed six-sleeper trailer I shared with Vincent and two supporting acts, the comedian Dayglo Dave and a Norwegian death-metal band called Sarah Jessica Dracula.

Even if I possessed enough humanity and grace to forgive that creepy panda-faced trio for fouling the bathroom daily with black and white corpse paint, I could never tolerate Vincent and his dried-out disciples comparing triggers, working the steps, chanting affirmations and hatching grand plans to make amends. The whole place reeked like wet dog, old car floormats and discount cigarettes and it was worse than the cots and tents we were offered in Cologne.

We're all walking unique paths through this world, but if yours should ever diverge to present you with a choice between sitting alone in a stifling portable toilet that's been targeted by arson, or hanging out in an air-conditioned trailer while your ex and a half-dozen roadies in recovery debate the individual concept of a Higher Power? Do not hesitate to pick the toilet, fucking trust me.

I lost four long afternoons hiding out in the TARDIS doing Sudoku, tying knots. Texting Melanie and struggling to follow a crash-course curriculum of Zen meditation taught by Dayglo Dave. The road flare that penetrated the TARDIS pulled its white plastic roof downward in a stringy taffy stalactite and burned a shoe-sized hole through the floor, like a corrosive drop of blood in that movie "Alien".

Each day when the sun climbed high enough I stubbed out my postmeridian smoke. Drew dozens of deep breaths, cracked one eye open and tracked a warm spot of light creeping down the wall of the TARDIS.

When that ragged patch of gold flattened out on the changing table I gave it my full focus. Concentrated on the percussive tempo of the generators and did my best to follow Dave's instructions. He suspected everything was getting to me because my filter was way too tight. Said I'd lowered my spirit, degraded its potential as a vessel and now it was a gutter collecting nothing but poison.

Dave coached me to elevate my sacred center. Told me to imagine a frameless scene of short green grass under wide blue skies and visualize my anger as clouds approaching from a distance.

"You just let those clouds come," he said. "Let them come. Allow them to be and let them go."

So I tried, alright? I committed myself to doing some heavy spiritual lifting in the confines of that stinky safe space and I really fucking tried.

The first image I found in my mind's blue sky was a close-up of my hands, broken nails sunk to the quick in bloody skin. Fingers wrapped tight like Turk's head knots around the soapy throats of those Norwegian freaks for clogging the sink and shower with a wig's worth of stray blonde hairs.

There were other times when Dave's simple tips actually worked. I would come up for air like something newborn to find I'd lost track of two hours and my blaze of light had crawled off the changing table, floated to the far side of the filthy toilet floor.

Those were the days when I saw the lotus unfold, open up and show its slip just a little bit, and I walked away from the TARDIS feeling a hint of the serenity Dave described. Those moments made me less of a doubter. A little more of a believer and if you were there? If you'd been me? Then you'd know for sure, and I wouldn't have to say this shit out loud, and none of it would sound like the snake oil wellness bullshit Gwyneth Paltrow sells by the pound, okay?

Okay.

A crackling canopy of fireworks smeared sulfur color across the wet sky, signaling the end of the Beauregard Festival. I shoved myself through the slick concavity and entered the TARDIS for the last time. Dragged my microKORG through the gap in the door behind me and threw it on the changing table. Lit my vanilla candle and sat down to cry under the boiling roar of the rain.

After a painful period of personal accounting and critical self-review I slowly

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