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His vision was blurred, thanks to a healthy combination of too much vodka and sleepless nights. For a moment he thought about the cops, only to realize that he wasn’t in LA anymore.
“Podunk town,” he muttered as he opened the door to his red Ferrari and thumped himself down on the driver’s seat. A barrage of swear words left his mouth, and Arsen cursed the day he had agreed to this arrangement.
After a year full of scandals, freak incidents, and decadent overindulgence, he thought that this time away from LA would allow him to do what he did best—make music. Instead, he spent his time getting high, getting drunk, and dwelling in the misery of a songwriter’s block. The ideas had stopped coming, the words all but disappeared, and in the ten days that he and the band had been in Montcove, he had barely written a single verse.
To everyone else, Arsen was in a temporary slump. For them, a triple Grammy-winner shouldn’t take long to churn out a whole bunch of new hit songs. Deep inside, however, he knew that this was no random writer’s block. Everything that had happened to him since his band, Insurrection, took off three years ago had been surreal, and it all led up to this point. Everything was at stake in this game, and only he held the dice.
The arrogant wind grew fiercer as his red Ferrari sped down the hill to the town center, swaying harshly to the songs of Frank Sinatra, one of Arsen’s idols. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was going there for; he just wanted to be away from that Villa, from everyone inside it, and most of all, from himself. Or at least the rock star persona that he’d built up over time.
Arsen grabbed a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels that sat on the passenger seat and tried to keep his eyes on the road. The rain blurred his already diminished vision. His mind was sending him warning signals. He should’ve pulled off, parked by the side of the road, and asked Don to come pick him up instead. In the back of his mind, he was aware that he shouldn’t be driving at all. But he was desperate to get away from it all: the drugs, the booze, and the scantily-clad sexpots who routinely threw themselves at him.
In all the extravagance, the band had forgotten why they got together in the first place—to make music. All that mattered to his bandmates now was partying, spending money, and utter decadence. Arsen pulled off the bottle cap with his teeth and took a big swig. He flinched as the liquor hit the back of his throat. A few days’ worth of booze rumbled inside his body, and he amused himself by wondering what his DUI reading would be if he were pulled over.
He instinctively took a sharp right turn and barely missed a slow-driving SUV. Fuck. I hope that’s not the paparazzi, he thought. I gotta get away from this shit. A laugh escaped his lips as he thought about wrecking a paparazzi truck. Especially the truck that belonged to this one paparazzo that he was sick of.
Agitation coupled with frustration was driving him to a point where he felt claustrophobic every time he was in the room with his bandmates. They refused to work hard—or work at all—and as always, he knew that as the lead guitarist and the main songwriter, the onus was once again upon him to come up with a full album’s worth of hit songs.
The record label was pressuring him for new material, and their agent was burning up his ear with his own demands, but Arsen had struggled to come up with anything. His fingers tapped a nervous rhythm on the steering wheel as he thought of the countless deadlines.
Neon lights from the billboards flashed by the corners of his eyes as he took another swig from the bottle. Fuck. His throat burned and he realized that he hadn’t eaten anything all day or maybe for the last couple of days. Who could remember? Time and hunger ceased to matter when you were high all the time.
“And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” Singing along with Sinatra, his voice automatically found the harmony after years of handling backup vocal duties.
I should find a hotel. Sign in under an anonymous name and spend a few days by myself. The plan seemed soun
d to him. Maybe that will finally help me get my groove back. Or maybe I should just check myself into a rehab.
Arsen had thought about that a few times, but then rejected the idea as it would’ve simply created a huge stir in the media and spread panic among the record company executives. As it was, the members of Insurrection had enough public scandals going on at any given time.
Lights flashed into his eyes from a car across the road and he squinted, barely able to see where he was heading. One last sip remained in the bottle and Arsen grabbed it tightly with an intention to finish it in one go.
As he lifted the bottle to his mouth, he saw something zip across the street, maybe a dog or a cat, about twenty yards away from where he was. Arsen brought down his foot heavily on the brakes, and the whiskey bottle went flying from his hand as he hurriedly turned the steering wheel.
The wheels of the car lost traction and Arsen felt was if he were driving on ice. The car veered sharply, there was a big bang, and Arsen felt a sudden impact on his face. Then it all went blank as Arsen Ford, the greatest guitar player of his generation, passed into blackness.
“I’ve lived a life that's full. I've traveled each and every highway,” Sinatra sang to the empty, dark street.
Chapter 48
A little over fifteen hours before…
Half her mind was still lost in last night’s hazy dream. The other half was struggling to make sense of the rapidly spoken words that was the voice on the other end of the phone. The dream had been fantastic, though she struggled to remember the details. But she knew how it felt. Happy. The voice yapping away on the phone, her mother’s in this case, was anything but.
As she always did when talking to her mother, Rory went on autopilot. Give her enough yeses, and she’ll be content. Not happy, of course, because her mother was rarely happy. And almost never when it involved matters concerning her elder daughter. Elder by a whole nine minutes.
“Yes, Mother. I got the dress in one piece.” Rory opened a single eye in response to the sharp sunlight that had invaded through a forgotten gap between two curtains. She hated bright light in the morning.
“Yes, Mother. I will try it on today.”
Her bedroom was comfortable. Not luxurious, but homey. The same drapes, cushions, and soft carpets from when she moved in, still adorned the place. She sneaked out a yawn, stretched her left arm, and took a glance at the hideously pink bridesmaid’s dress that lay listlessly over the chair by the large French window.
“Yes, Mother!” Rory was annoyed at being asked the same question again. How freakin’ dumb does she think I am? she wondered for the millionth time.
She swung her legs off the bed and rubbed her feet softly against the carpet, a habit she had developed as a kid. Her mind constantly looked for an opening to cut short this conversation with her mother. There was no getting up on the right side of the bed when her mother was the one giving the wakeup call. Mary Loughlin—wife, mother, tormentor.
Rory hated what she saw in the tall mirror that stood by the side of her bed. She had no proof other than her own two eyes, but she was pretty sure that she’d put on a few pounds in the last month or so; maybe from too many drinks on vacation. She sucked in her gut, pushed up her chest, and tightened her jaw. A long sigh left her mouth as she realized that this couldn’t have happened at a worse time.
Are starving artists allowed to put on weight? She chuckled to herself, the thought ending as she wondered whether she could even call herself an artist anymore. Artists created pieces of art, through which they made statements of eternal value. She, on the other hand, was designing T-shirts to make ends meet.
