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That was the night a freelance representative of ISIS came calling to square accounts after those joyless fucks declared one of Dayglo Dave’s balloon animals was an extreme act of blasphemy.

I was in town fetching tires for Aliz’s food truck when she texted to tell me Kev was leaving France, going home tits-up on his rock-and-roll shield. The dread of imminent unemployment multiplied as I juggled four secondhand retreads onto a bus bound for the festival grounds and sat down to check Five Ways’ social media.

The surviving band members posted throwback photos and emotional tributes.

Brady strung solemn emojis under a shot of Kev crowd-surfing at Wembley and tagged it #irreplaceable. Patrick was #gutted. Tony offered #prayers. The last time they shared a stage Maxim was hoofing it young and funk like Savion Glover, kicking the living skittles out of Kev but now Max wanted the world to know his dear brother Kev was a #legend.

I wasn’t eager to spend the rest of the summer festival season chasing shows across Europe stir-frying noodles alongside Aliz in her tiny truck. She was brilliant, pretty enough to take a bullet for but we lacked the critical chemistry it takes to make something last long-term in a small space. Aliz was also painfully high-maintenance, even by former Soviet Bloc standards. Losing my status and income as a supporting act for Five Ways would start our final countdown ticking quick.

Margaret and I were slow-roasting on the same spit after her liaison with Brady decimated Citizen Samurai’s online following. The YouTube ad revenue from our “Owen” video was dwindling, likely to dry up completely along with our per-diem payments if Five Ways broke up and cancelled the reunion tour. I’d be cashed out for shows played to date and there wouldn’t be much left to live on after paying for travel home to the States. What was I going to do then? Knock on Carl’s door and beg to move back into his basement?

Worry and doubt stacked up like cold stone cairns ready to collapse and crash through the weakest points of my positive frame of mind. An unknown Next threatened my comfortable predictable Now and I felt suddenly nostalgic for the familiar formula of failure, the simple ingredients of self-defeat.

I wanted a big fat drink. A sloppy specimen broad enough to balk a steeplechase mount, deep enough to hand-wash a king-size set of bedsheets. I burned the last of my phone’s battery reaching out to Kristof Flex, my brother in recovery.

Flex helped me get my shit wired right back in Warsaw after I reacted poorly to credible rumors that Margaret and Brady were playing house. I ran moonshine-wild with some Turkish roadies and woke before dawn between the tires of the tour drivers’ sleeper coach, head-first in the dirt like a shoeless wicked witch attempting suicide by mobile home.

I crawled from the darkness and vomited my insides raw under a fading fingernail moon. That’s when I saw Kristof Flex for the first time, facing East in his green lawn chair brewing coffee in a dented kettle on a camp stove.

Flex unfolded a spare chair and waved for me to post up beside him. He put a cup of coffee in my shaky hands and we sat in silence as the horizon bloomed pink, then burned red.

My hands were steady by the time Flex refilled my cup and asked me why I drank.

That kind of question would normally be my cue to crack dumb jokes, make desperate attempts to tailor the shame I deserved to wear after a complete stranger watched me emerge from beneath a bus and barf on all fours in the mashed brown grass.

But I didn’t read any judgment coming from Flex so I gave him an honest answer.

I told him I adored being drunk. I loved every mile of that ride, the excitement of warming my mad mechanisms for action. I woke each morning looking forward to the whole fucking process, the feeling of rolling away from a dead stop and starting a wildfire with a single spark. Getting up to speed and watching the light bend behind my rapid path of travel.

I waited for Flex to spring a trap, pounce on the back of my naked admission with a practiced pitch to join a culty brand of religion, maybe a recommendation to rub some crystals or read “The Secret” but he didn’t go there.

Flex was a rare figure, a wise guide, someone far greater than a friend. He was probably the only person on this planet who never heard anything but honest truth fall out of my mouth. I trusted him completely and I’ll chalk that up to our shared preference for black coffee.

If I met Flex in a corporate coffeehouse and he ordered a sundae-cup abomination of sprinkles whipped cream and caramel, something with a name that sounded like the punchline to an Italian knock-knock joke, I never would have opened up enough to speak plainly about my alcoholism. Up to that point in time and forever after, the best people I met in my life were straight shooters who took their coffee black.

So we talked. I don’t want to get into the specifics of our conversation but when the kettle and my eyes were dry Flex took my empty cup and he asked me:

"Do I have your confidence? To make demonstration."

I agreed.

Flex waved for me to stand and I followed him aboard the drivers’ coach.

I sat in the squeaky vinyl dinette while Flex rummaged through cabinets, dug through drawers and placed a peculiar accumulation of items on the table. A piece of paper, a pen. Twelve inches of string, a three-minute Boggle timer and a bottle of vodka. He wiped a short glass clean on the tail of his T-shirt and charged it with a tall shot.

Flex squeezed into the dinette and tied a knot at one end of the string.

"This represents the first time ever you are distressed about drinking," he said.

He made a second knot in the middle.

"Here is the pain you say you feel today."

Flex draped the string over his upturned palm and offered it to me like it was something I dropped, something he found and was returning to me knowing it was delicate, extremely private and entirely mine.

He touched the segment between the knots.

"How many days like this morning?" he asked.

I shrugged, knowing I’d need a team of mathematicians and a case of Adderall to calculate anything approaching a ballpark figure.

"Estimate," Flex said. "Best guest for one year. Ten knots?"

More, I said. Like ten a month for too many years, lots of knots. Enough to make a sweater for a fat man.

Flex smiled, pinched the string and dangled it from its untied end.

"Structure of time is not simple," he said. "Time defies confinement to linear limits. Man can’t accept complex truth of time so he invents past and future. Easy concepts to consume. Small bites with no bones."

He shook the Boggle timer like a tiny maraca.

"Hourglass calendar and clock? Inadequate tools. These are toys, accurate only to measure how much people misunderstand time."

Flex carefully plucked the knots loose as he continued.

"Past does not exist Vincent. Past is myth you create to memorize pain. This eats like parasite and your spirit becomes life support for artificial catalog of negative things."

Flex wove the string in a serpentine between his fingers. The low morning sun shone through the dinette window revealing a parallel stack of shiny scars climbing the inside of his tattooed forearm, like a child’s steady growth measured against a door jamb in pink and tan slashes. Newer wounds disappeared beneath his T-shirt sleeve, a chilling chart marking the development of something well-fed and sinister that matured into a proper fucking monster.

I startled when Flex rapped the tabletop with one chunky knuckle.

"This moment? Good or bad this is gone forever," he said.

He rapped the table again.

"And this moment is gone, so one second? Lost same as one century. Gravity cannot age, this is invisible, intangible. So are grief, pain and shame. These can’t exist if you deny them life in your memory."

Flex smoothed the string into a loop on the table between us, pinned the ends under one fingertip and twisted it over itself to form a figure eight.

"Future is not coming tomorrow, next Friday, next year," he said. "Future always happens now, endless Now, this is capital N. Every second, for all directions you can have unlimited potential. Incalculable possibility for infinite change."

He prodded the string into a spiral around the glass of vodka.

"You agree to understand this reality of the Now?" he asked.

I nodded. Flex pointed a finger at his temple.

"Science is most valuable foundation," he said.

He pressed his palm flat over his heart. White scars embossed his fingers and knuckles in a dense basket-weave pattern.

"Human species is also spiritual," he continued. "Religion is commercial and corrupt, I don’t recommend but personal ritual can be healthy habit for calibration and release. Exercise. Yoga, meditation. Today you see my ritual. I make coffee, welcome the sun. Very simple, I see dark becomes light and I make new commitment to engage the Now. Inventory positive things, discard negative. I promise every day I will not harm someone in word or deed."

Flex wrapped the string around my wrist three times and tied it tight.

"Vincent, you are free to abandon your myth of past any time. On tour this is difficult. Rock and roll eats alive many people and the show goes on but remember this, okay? You don’t have to be tortured to be good."

My brain rocked in my skull as those words sank in like water reaching the seed of something dormant and dry.

"Holy shit, I want that tattooed on my back in Latin. Did you say that?"

"No," Flex said, "Winona Ryder says. Interview in Rolling Stone."

He pushed the paper, pen and Boggle timer in front of me. He pointed to the glass of vodka.

"This can be your last," he said. "Measure three minutes and you choose, another drink? More pain you carry like stones? Or maybe you don’t touch this bottle, you choose to breathe new air, be new man. Mark the paper, again three minutes and you choose. Twenty marks, twenty times is one hour of new Now. Then come outside and tell me who you are."

Flex scooted out of the dinette booth.

"Don’t wait for the sun to begin new destiny. Now is always new, yes? Now never ends."

He left me alone on the coach. I shot the vodka, flipped the plastic timer and watched three minutes’ worth of white sand trickle into the beginning of my brand-new Now.

My mayday call from the bus went straight to Flex’s voicemail, a sure sign he was busy working behind the wheel staging rigs and rolling stock as the festival packed up to travel. I texted 9-1-1 and tugged at the grimy string looped around my wrist, nervously tracing its infinite circuit with one twitchy fingertip.

When the bus pulled off Route d’Ouistreham and hushed to a stop I hustled my tires out the back door two at a time and found the festival entrance blocked by a grim cordon of French municipal and national police. I was frisked and shoved aside to a holding area where handlers brought dogs around to sniff me, my tires and other members of the tour who were denied entry.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Aliz called with an update from inside the lockdown. She was huddled in segregation with other vendors while the authorities verified work visas, ran background checks and searched every bus, truck, trash can and trailer. Her warm voice couldn’t cover the cold note of fear I heard when she told me they were confiscating passports, something I thought happened only in movies and unstable countries.

As an E.U. citizen Aliz had no reason to sweat deportation, but she grew up in Hungary when it was a Soviet satellite. The few times she spoke about her family led me to suspect she was raised by people who knew what it meant to lie awake wondering if an offhand comment to a nosy neighbor might lead to a knock at the door in the dead of night. My battery ran out before I could pass on my favorite capitalist mantra and tell Aliz not to worry.

It was dark and our travel prep day was shot square in the ass when the police and investigators finally departed. That odd uncertain feeling still trotted back and forth inside my chest like something big pacing in a very small cage. I wanted to touch base with Flex, learn some new trick to turn that discomfort loose. I hoped the task of replacing Aliz’s tires would keep me busy and out of trouble, engage me fully in the safety of Now.

I promised free vegan food to a few recruits who helped me jockey the tires over the last muddy mile to Aliz’s truck. Scores of vendors were already on the road and the festival landscape had shifted significantly since I left the grounds that morning. I was lost, unable to orient myself in a soggy no-man’s land, leading three hungry roadies bent over like Donkey Kong rolling barrels in the dark.

Stela’s Sarajevo Dream truck was open for a final night of business. She never planned to follow the U.K. leg of the tour and she was making a killing selling the last of her Bosnian ćevapi to all the people who’d starved during the lockdown. Stela and Aliz supported each other as neighbors in the food-truck pod, breaking big bills and sharing supplies if one of them ran low.

The smell of ćevapi broke my muddy helpers on the spot. They refused to wait for free vegan food so we stacked the tires, I gave them the last of my Euros and they hopped in line. I poked my head into the back of the truck to shout at Stela.

"What did you move here for?" I asked. "You’re the only vendor left, they have to come to you."

Stela looked up from a marble-white mat of diced onions steaming on the grill. She turned the sizzling layer, wiped her hands on her apron and stepped outside to meet me. Her expression was troubled and unfamiliar.

"This is always my location," she said. "Do you speak to Aliz?"

"We were talking during the lockdown but my phone died," I said.  "My charger is on her truck."

Stela smoothed her apron, crossed her arms.

"So you can’t know," she said. "Police check everybody, vehicle registration and criminal record. They arrest Aliz and take her truck. She is wanted by Interpol and the truck is stolen."

"Aliz?"

Stella huffed.

"I don’t believe this is her name," she said. "Bitch has my best knife, stainless skewers, my big pan, my mandoline. Now these are fucking gone man, I can’t even."

Someone on the truck shouted for Stela.

"I have customers," she said. "Then I go home. There’s no other information but if you like we can speak tomorrow. You have my number. Goodbye Vincent."

Stela got back on the grill.

Light shining out the back door of Sarajevo Dream revealed the patch of ground where Aliz’s crippled rig once stood. Two deep gouges in the mud ended abruptly where it was winched onto a flatbed, Yeti footprints vanishing in Himalaya snow.

The blended scent of sausage spice and onions amplified my hunger beyond anything Maslow could imagine living without. My ability to reason shut down completely. I turned in wobbly circles like a Cracker Jack compass and wandered off on a best-guess vector to find my bunk in Trailer Town.

Dayglo Dave was in the lounge watching “The Great British Bake Off”. The guy spoke more languages than I could name and he knew everybody involved with the tour. Aliz’s arrest was already old news. Dave heard they took her in for falsifying documents in furtherance of human trafficking.

"Unconfirmed," he said, "but that’s the word. It takes something pretty serious to earn a Red Notice from Interpol."

Dave got off the couch to help me find my spare charger cord in the knee-deep heap the cops dumped on the trailer floor. I didn’t see any of Margaret’s belongings in the mix.

"She came back for her things a few hours ago," Dave explained. "She was pretty shook up, I guess the cops raided Brady’s coach while they were asleep. They-"

Dave’s speech halted. He took a sheepish half-step backward and stared at his feet as if he’d just walked onto white carpet with dirty shoes.

"I’m sorry, man, he said. I didn’t ... I didn’t mean to bring that up."

"It’s cool," I said. "You were the one who let me know, you know? When they first got together. Nobody else was going to break the news, so that ... that hurt but it helped. I’ve moved on. We’re good."

Dave smiled, looked me in the eye and offered a classic handshake. He wasn’t one of those assholes who reaches back like John Elway throwing deep, cracks palms and finishes with a ridiculous bro-hug. A handshake from Dayglo Dave felt like the final formality in a million-dollar deal between two gentlemen.

Dave’s phone buzzed on the coffee table. He flipped it open, sighed and zipped it into his flashy fanny pack.

"I know you quit drinking and I don’t want to undermine that," he said. "But you still get high, right?"

The fluttering upset I’d carried inside me all day left my chest like doves bursting from a tricky magician’s tuxedo coat.

"I’d lick a psychedelic toad’s asshole raw to escape my own thoughts right now," I said. "It’s been that kind of day. Do you have anything to eat?"

Thirty minutes later we were full of Pot Noodle, stoned and immobilized on the couch watching some hot baking drama. Noel Fielding smiled and offered encouragement as a panicked contestant fumbled with a pastry bag, racing against the clock to fill a tray with squatty wads of profiterole dough.

I asked Dave how the cops and their clever dogs managed to overlook his marijuana supply.

"I never stash in a location that has any connection to me," Dave said. "I put magnets in Ziploc bags and hide them under trailers and generators. Sometimes I bury stuff like pirate treasure. Depends on the physical environment, the political climate."

"You’re fuckin’ crafty," I said.

I picked an armload of clothing from the mound on the floor, got cozy in front of the coffee table and lost myself in the soothing Zen of watching TV, folding clothes and stowing them in my seabag Tetris-tight.

"Don’t break your back packing," Dave said. "The drivers told me there’s no way in hell we’re leaving tomorrow. They’re always the first to know what’s happening even if they don’t really know what’s going on, you know what I mean?"

"No," I said. "What do you mean?"

"If we were rolling out tomorrow those guys wouldn’t be in town getting hammered right now. Everybody else is free to leave but the Five Ways road show is stuck here while the police investigate those overdoses. If Kev was the only casualty nobody would care, that video of him doing lines pretty much like, foretold his destiny to die as a statistic, but four bodies? That got everyone’s attention.  They’re not done sniffing around yet."

Something digital peeped in Dave’s pocket. He pulled out a slick black smartphone and thumbed through something that made him shake his head.

"Fuck me," he said. "Everyone’s a critic."

"Are you still getting static for that balloon thing?" I asked.

"Non-stop," he said.

Dave worked for years as a professional clown. Obscene balloon animals were the highlight of his act and my favorite bit was the one he did about the lonely farmer with erectile dysfunction and his prize-winning bull.

The night before Kev crashed and burned Dave got his balloons out of order. Instead of having a giant penis, the bull’s horns were ridiculously out of proportion. He played with the mistake and improvised the huge horns into rabbit ears. Then he coiled them into a turban and called the animal Moohammed. Dave cringed, popped the balloons and started over.

I was standing fifty feet away and there were no boos or outrage when he did that bit. Nobody shouted for blood and when he finished all I heard was applause. The lights came up, Margaret and I opened our set with “Daisy Breaker” and we took the crowd from warm to hot, just like we did every night.

Of course somebody was filming Dave’s act and they put that clip on YouTube. And if the world’s exposure to that moment was strictly limited to the few seconds of audio and video depicting only what actually took place, I don’t think the situation would have escalated the way it did.

But it fucking did. Someone tweeted about the YouTube video. The Associated Press spun that tweet into a story and things went to another level. The article stated Dave made a racist and offensive joke but that wasn’t accurate. The man made a pun - a bad one, three syllables long. The headline alone was far greater than the sum of anything Dave actually said or did but now he was taking a global beating on social media. People were sending beheading videos, doxing his family and making death threats.

Dave’s prediction was correct. Our travel day was a no-go. It rained the next morning and we woke up late, promptly got high and watched TV like a couple of suburban burnouts while shadows stretched across the floor.

It was dark when Flex finally got in touch. He’d been leading his crew of drivers in a non-stop relay taking equipment across the Channel. Whether or not the tour would continue, those assets had to go back to Great Britain. Dave was right. The drivers knew everything.

Dayglo Dave packed another bowl and we resumed our Sunday bake-off marathon. Nothing helps a troubled mind abandon worry and achieve an insensate idle state like a comfortable couch, British television and too much THC. I nodded off in the lounge and slept without dreaming.

Early Monday morning I awoke feeling dull and dehydrated, sweltering on the couch and twisted up tight inside my clothing. Someone outside was shouting, beating the side of the trailer like a fucking drum. Dave staggered naked into the lounge and threw the door open to find Fibby the roadie moving from unit to unit, banging on every tin-can home in Trailer Town.

"Fibby," Dave whined. "What the fuck?"

"Tour’s back on," Fibby said. "Bus leaves in fifteen minutes. Wax your mustache and find some trousers, time to PUFO."

At last we had our marching orders. Pack Up and Fuck Off indeed.

Dave and I blazed up, tilted our heads back and hung a hazy layer of blue smoke under the stained trailer ceiling. Entered a waking dream state suitable for an eight-hour road trip to Norwich and abandoned our aluminum ship.

We boarded the coach and sat in the back. Dave deleted another round of hate mail, snorted and showed me a special announcement on Five Ways’ Twitter. Though grieving, the band were determined to honor Kev’s memory by enlisting a rotating lineup of guest bass players and moving ahead with the tour. Five Ways pledged a cut of ticket sales to fund substance-abuse treatment and mental-health programs in Wimbledon, Kev’s birthplace of record. A separate link steered fans to a site selling colored rubber bracelets to support #soundsofstrength, a music scholarship for disadvantaged kids in Kev’s adopted hometown of Peckham.

"Unbelievable," Dave said. "He’s been dead for two days but Kev’s still getting paid, making that paper. Baller from beyond the grave."

He pulled his sweatshirt hood over his head and dropped into a deep road coma in the window seat beside me.

I turned on my phone and found a storm of alerts from Citizen Samurai’s social-media feed, a roughly one-to-one ratio of congratulation and protest in response to Margaret and Brady’s wedding.

TMZ ran a picture of the bride and groom descending a marble staircase into a foreground filled with fans and paparazzi. Brady looked like a lunatic at large with his shaved head, wide eyes confronting a firing line of flashing phones and cameras. An inset image showcased a close-up of Margaret’s giant new ring.

The expression on her face formed the perfect center of that moment. Her smile was a source of light and I wondered how I ignored Margaret’s beauty for so long, failed to see it from five feet away while we performed on stage in front of thousands of people night after night.

In that moment I was grateful to be too dull upstairs, too chemically dead inside for any feelings to take root someplace real. I swiped away the image of the happy couple, shut my phone off and fell asleep before the numbness faded and the reality of riding in a bus underneath the English Channel started working on my nerves.

Margaret’s ring appeared larger, looked even more expensive when I saw it flashing on her hand during sound check at Earlham Park. A weekend lost playing Cheech and Chong with Dayglo Dave left my vocals flat, my timing spotty. I struggled to stay in tune while we got our levels set and when we were done Margaret asked if I was hungry.

I said I was. She invited me to dine with her in Five Ways’ catering tent. It was the longest conversation we’d had outside a sound check since the tour began.

Margaret loaded a plate with fruit and salad. I sat down with cold cuts and crab legs. Brady and the band were held hostage under bright lights, huddled against a backdrop in the corner of the catering tent, twisting their commemorative rubber bracelets and answering the same five or six questions for an endless lineup of journalists.

The Five Ways reunion tour was no longer fueled by the novelty or nostalgia of its members traveling through time from the late ’90s to the middle of the ’20s to play the band’s greatest hits in their early forties. Now it was all about rebranding. Scraping the roadkill corpse of Kev’s wasted life and shallow career from the fast lane of fact and fluffing it up, scrubbing it clean. Posing it to fit within the chalk outline of a tragic genius who flew too close to the sun.

Turns out Brady was tight with John Hassall from The Libertines.  John agreed to come over from Denmark as the band’s first special guest and I watched from the wings at sound check earlier that day as he effortlessly filled Kev’s expensive shoes.

Margaret sat with her back to the press conference. Her eyes darted from mine as I tried to read her mood. I avoided looking at her ring and quietly cracked my crab while Brady and the boys explained the duty they felt to protect the public from drug abuse by carrying on with Kev Fest.

Two hours later I stood beside Margaret backstage waiting for Dayglo Dave to bring us on. He left the balloon animals out of his act, sat on a stool and worked the crowd with nothing but his savage stand-up:

I’m grateful to have this summer gig, I’m trying to get over some stuff, we recently lost my father... oh, yeah, thank you, that’s nice, thanks. It’s hard to talk about. Dad was a sex addict and that’s ultimately what killed him. He was kinky. Very kinky, and it cost him his life. He was whipped to death by a dominatrix with OCD, she kept losing count and starting over. Very sad.

Margaret put a #soundsofstrength bracelet in my hand. I turned it inside-out and pulled it over my left wrist. Margaret smiled. Shook her head and gave me the finger.

I borrowed a Sharpie from a guitar tech, wrote #KEVFEST on the purple rubber and curled my fingers under my chin. Looked off into the distance like I was modeling an expensive watch and I held that stupid pose until I heard Margaret snort.

She dropped her head, shoulders shaking with laughter. Mission accomplished.

I believe the existence of yoga pants proves there really is a God. The fact they make yoga pants that fit motherfuckers who don’t do yoga? That’s proof the devil is real. Aw, boos? You’re booing me? Seriously fuck you guys, you wouldn’t know funny if it bit you on the neck and laid eggs under the skin. See my man here down front right now? He’s on board, look at this guy hopping around like he doesn’t need those crutches. That’s the power of comedy! Dude, this isn’t a tent revival, keep those things on the ground okay? Be safe now, I’m getting the blame for everything these days so if you fall down and get hurt it’s gonna be on me, I can’t have that. Yeah, there’s no seating upgrade if you fuck yourself up to the point of needing a wheelchair. You got the best seat in the house, there’s nothing closer unless you wanna work security okay?

Dave finished strong, introduced us and jogged offstage. A roadie snatched the stool away as the applause swelled and the lights came up. I started strumming the opening to “Daisy Breaker” and got behind the mike. Looked over as Margaret came in on her microKORG and joined my vocals.

The audience were already clapping, singing every word right along with us. The young man on crutches in the wheelchair-accessible section stumbled against the galvanized barrier down front and center, his limbs moving out of sync with the rhythm of the swaying crowd.

He hoisted his crutches over the barrier and shouted.

His eyes found mine and he heaved his crutches toward the stage as security moved in.

They batted down one crutch, mantled the crowd barrier and swarmed the screaming man.

The second crutch lofted onto the stage and skittered past me. It slid under Margaret’s microKORG.

I took a step toward her.

Margaret looked down at the crutch and then everything I could see, everything that made sense ended in a flash of fire.