six MARGARET part 1
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. Rain fell in sharp darts and drove the crowd from a swaying singularity into pathetic clumps and huddles, screens burning 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 had 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. Those weeks on the road only strengthened my new position, standing solo at the center of my own priorities. Nobody got on that tour 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.
©2017 J.R. Schaefers — all rights reserved.