When we returned to the theater a half hour before Floozie was to open, we entered through a back door. Guys in the two headlining bands – older, seasoned, all the rage in the San Diego area, according to Robert – were loitering backstage.  They had the hair and the makeup and the attitude.  We got our share of looks: four fresh-faced kids in schoolgirl uniforms and ponytails didn’t exactly fit in.  Bottles of gin and whisky made the rounds.  The air was so full of pot smoke I worried the girls would get stoned.  A kid, couldn’t have been over sixteen, was shooting something into his arm while two ugly, half-naked girls watched.

     Another young guy, with a head full of the loveliest golden-brown hair I’d ever seen, clomped up to us in knee-length red boots.  Obviously in one of the bands, he wore tight black leather pants and no shirt.

     “You guys Floozie?” he said, eyeing Celeste, who ignored him.

     I saw Sonny waving at us from where he was talking with several people by a table.

     “Yeah,” I said.  “You’re who?”

     “They’re pretty young.”

     “We’re twelve,” Heather said.

     “Shit.”

“Excuse us, sir,” Sal said, bruising his way in between the rock star and the girls, nudging our group into a walk.  “We got some business over here.”

     Moe, right behind him, gave the leather boy a hungry look.  As we moved toward Sonny, I heard the guy say, “Dude, they even got security.”  Another voice, somewhere, said, “I’d do ‘em.”

     After Sonny reminded the girls to play their four songs and get the hell off the stage, we escaped to a relatively peaceful section of the wings, where Krystal’s and Lilly’s guitars stood on stands.  Out in the theater, the crowd was winding up – lots of yelling and thousands of feet stomping the floor.  I was about to launch an impromptu pep-talk when Lilly tugged my sleeve.

     “I don’t feel good.”

     “What’s the matter?”

     “I think I’m going to throw up.”

     “Jesus Christ,” Krystal said.

     “Where’s a bathroom?”

     I saw a door marked Ladies.  I pointed, and off Lilly ran.

     “Okay, this is lovely,” Krystal said.

     “I don’t feel very good, either,” Heather said.  She yanked down on the hem of her skirt as if she were suddenly very aware of her legs.

     “Are you sick?” I said.

     “No, I’m just . . . all weird.”

     Bending over to stretch out her legs, Krystal said, “Well, can you wait till after we play to get any weirder?”

     “Look, it’s just like we’ve done a million times,” I said.  “We’re just doing it in front of more people, that’s all.”

     “A lot more people,” Heather said.

“So what?  No problem.  Just go out there and focus on the music.  De-focus on the audience.”

Heather nodded, waited, made a sound that might pass for a laugh, play-punched my arm, and said, “Right, how hard can it be?”

     Celeste was leaning back against a wall full of staples but no posters that the staples had once held, speaking quietly under her breath.

     “You okay?” I asked her.

     “I’m praying.”

     “At a time like this, you’re praying?” Heather said.  Now she was fiddling with her cross-tie, screwing it all up.

     “She’s a Catholic,” Krystal said, still bent over.

     Lilly returned looking pale.  “I don’t think I can play.”

     “Sure you can play,” I said.  “All you have to do – all you all have to do is remember one thing: you’re Floozie.  You’re the band every guy wants to see and every girl wants to be.”

     So much for the pep-talk.  By the time they walked out on stage, they were a band that I doubted anybody wanted to see or be.  Gone was the bravado, the brashness, and the confidence.  In their uniforms, they looked like helpless little schoolgirls with no more business on a rock and roll stage than behind the space shuttle controls at NASA.  Krystal had been fine until the moment she got out there; now she was gazing into the packed theater like the proverbial deer in the oncoming headlights.

     I attributed it to habit and nothing else that they got the first song, “Nursery Rhymes,” started.  Lilly jumped in late, and that threw Krystal off; Heather spaced the first line of the second verse and sang the first line of the first verse in its place.  Krystal’s fingers were sloppy as she struggled to impress an audience that wasn’t all that interested.  Nobody was yelling or waving or even swaying to the beat, which Celeste – no surprise – was pounding out perfectly.

     The song ended to mild applause.  No cheering, just some clapping.  Before they could launch into “Angel Eyes,” some clown shouted, “Jailbait!”  Somebody else yelled out, “Suck me, baby!  Wooo-hooo!”

     The heckles grew louder and more vulgar.  When “Two Witch Sandwich” ended, several condoms, thankfully in packages, sailed onto the stage.  One hit Heather in the face.  A pair of orange boxer shorts followed.

     “Lift your dress!” a boy screamed, and that started a chorus of chants: “Lift-your-dress!  Lift-your-dress!  Lift-your-dress!”

     Heather became a piece of wood in a skirt.  Krystal glanced back at Celeste, who was waiting for Heather to do the lead-in they’d scripted for “Zip Trip.”  Heather’s lips moved, lights picked up the gloss of her pink lipstick, but no sound came out of her mouth.  A few boos replaced the chants.  Pretty soon the whole damn theater was booing and laughing.

     Heather turned and raced off the stage in tears and flung herself against me.  I held her shaking little body as I waited for the rest of the band to catch up, which they did.  Quickly.  And just like that, Floozie was forgotten.

     Heather and Lilly cried all the way back to the motel – proud Heather because she was humiliated; gentle Lilly because she was traumatized.  Had they been the eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds Eric had suggested I recruit for my band, I would have told them, Hey – welcome to the real world.  Suck it up, stop acting like babies.  But they were babies, so I let them cry.

Saturday’s show at El Toro Naval Base was no better, at least in terms of the music.  Constant mistakes on everybody’s part except Celeste’s made the band sound like they’d had their first rehearsal a week ago.  Lilly threw up again before going onstage and completely forgot how to play the simple bass line to “Two Witch Sandwich,” so she played nothing at all.  Heather mixed up the words to everything.  Krystal screwed up all four solos.  On a positive note, because it was a military crowd and not as wild as the drunk and drugged civilian animals at the Palladium, there were no calls for Heather to pull up her skirt, and nobody threw condoms at her.  And the band did manage to get through all four songs before running off the stage, Heather again in tears.

At the motel, they questioned their sense in ever wanting to be in a rock band in the first place.  Only Lilly ate the food we’d brought back from Burger King and threw up right after.  Now I was wondering if it wasn’t stage-fright but a bug she’d picked up.

The show Sunday was at 2 p.m., in a high school auditorium in Chula Vista, a suburb of San Diego.  It was a disaster, worse than the first two, if that was possible.  The girls were mentally lost and unmotivated.  Krystal wouldn’t even put makeup on her face – what’s the point, she said, if we’re just going to get laughed at again?  I had no pep-talks left to give them.  All I wanted was to get through this one and be done with it.  They made a barrage of mistakes, incessant heckling flew from a predominantly teenage Hispanic audience, Lilly threw up in the parking lot, Krystal broke her B string during “Nursery Rhymes” and played the rest of the set without it, because she had only the one guitar.

On the drive back to the motel to get our stuff that nobody had thought to load before we left for the show, I listened to talk of never playing in front of anybody ever again, of embarrassment, of self-loathing, of hating the music business (this last from Celeste, as if she knew anything about it).  It had hurt them bad, like so many things in the adult world would hurt them someday.  They were laboring under it as if it was the bitter end of a love relationship, even though none of them had ever had their hearts broken by a guy.  There were a lot of tears.  There was anger and doubt and all the other wind-blown emotions teenage girls could manufacture at a moment’s notice and ruthlessly infect themselves with.  It was just like Robert had predicted: they were going to have to learn this business from the ground up . . . from the ground looking up was more like it.  Only then would they be as good as they could be.  It hurt me to watch them hurting.  They were more than a band to me now.  They were like my daughters.