The wind hit Arsen in the face, determined to do some harm. Beads of sweat mixed with rainwater trickled down from his longish hair as he walked past the main door of the villa. Loud voices, clinking glasses, and smoke fumes trailed him, but he couldn’t care less.

Enough’s enough.

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 sound 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.