six MARGARET part 3
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 fell to lowered gazes, 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.
©2017 J.R. Schaefers — all rights reserved.