We finished the sound check and had Chinese food delivered to the motel, then Krystal ran off with Lothar for half an hour while Celeste and Heather took naps and Lilly fell asleep in the bathtub.  Twenty minutes before we left for the arena, Heather called a meeting with the girls; as usual, I wasn’t invited.  She said they had a big surprise for tonight that they needed to work on.  I asked what was going on, but she wouldn’t tell me.  I jokingly recommended no full-frontal nudity.  She promised.  In about four hours, I would learn to be more specific in my pre-show directives.

     I sat with Martin forty-three rows back from the stage, the general area I always sat in so I could pick up the mood of the fans close to the stage, where the biggest Floozie-nutcases hung out, and still be protected from the craziness those people always caused.  Occasionally I would watch a show from the wings, when I needed to see some particular aspect of what one of the girls or the road crew or instrument techs were doing.  But I liked to be out in the mix, part of the energy, and there was no energy in the wings, just a lot of people running around.  I wanted to watch Floozie the same way every other fan did, because I was their biggest fan of all.  For me, it was a brand new, breathless, head-crashing experience every night, and I got to see it for free.

     The Broadbent was completely sold out, and when I’d checked a few minutes before nine, a sizeable crowd was still loitering outside the main doors, looking for scalpers.  Obviously the Mothers for Morality hadn’t done too good a job of preventing the youth of Louisville from flocking to the show to gorge on the evil poison of four West Coast sluts.  Truth be told, they probably contributed to it.  And the youth weren’t disappointed: Trusting Edith and the Dolly Lamas got them hopping, then Floozie turned them upside down.

     After “Lettuce Fetish,” Krystal let her guitar whine for awhile and then gently fade out – something she’d never done before.  Lilly kept riding the A note, and Celeste kept popping her snare and kick-drum – something those two had never done before.  I guessed, correctly, that the surprise was about to begin.  Heather stood at her microphone, wiping sweat from her face and slinging droplets into the front rows.

     “We saw those stupid protesters out front when we got here earlier,” she said, her voice echoing through the loud arena.  She paused while the crowd got a little of the rush out of its system.  Celeste rolled across a few toms.  “Maybe some of the music stores and radio stations caved, but thank God the Broadbent Arena didn’t – they’re giving you what you want.  Us!”

     Everybody agreed: Floozie was exactly what they wanted.

     “So I suggest you start buying your music on the Internet, or go to Cincinnati or Lexington or whatever.  And you can always get all our music on Floozie.com., plus some free downloads they keep changing all the time.”  She stopped talking, sucked in a huge breath, and yelled, “And as far as those fucking Mothers for Morality go – you can tell them Floozie said kiss our ass – and we’ll tell them, too, as soon as we fucking leave!”

     The place erupted, so Heather had to wait for the howls to die down.  Lilly kept pounding; Celeste crashed some cymbals.  Krystal was sitting on the drum riser, drinking bottled water and clapping and sloshing water all over her pretty bare legs.

     Heather was just getting started.

     “They say our music’s immoral – do you guys think it’s immoral?”  The audience, in a variety of loud ways, indicated that it did not.  “They say we’re bad influences – do you think we’re bad influences?”  Hell no, the audience said, only not in those exact words.  There was no doubt in my mind that many of the fans were far worse influences on the world than any Floozie girl could ever be.

     “Those people don’t know what a bad influence is.  You wanna see a baaaad influence?”  The crowd did, very badly.  Heather shrieked: “I said do you want to see a BAD FUCKING INFLUENCE?”

     People all over the arena started getting up; a lot of them were jumping up and down on their seats. Celeste launched a drum-roll on her snare. Heather watched the pandemonium for a moment then kicked off her shoes and dragged her dark blue tights down from under her skirt.  Flashbulbs electrified the semi-dark stage as the noise level went from loud to dangerously loud.  She stepped out of her tights, crumpled them up, sniffed them, shrugged, and tossed them like a baseball into the screaming crowd.  Flailing arms battled other flailing arms and bodies crashed into one another as people lunged for the garment as if it were gold.

     “Man!” Martin said close to my ear.

     “Yep,” I said, nodding.

     “Is she . . . she’s not going to . . .”

     “I wish I could tell you.”

     Heather was pointing a few rows back, laughing with somebody (presumably the lucky individual who’d got the gold).  “You know, I don’t really think that was a very bad influence,” she said and reached back up under her skirt and pulled down her panties, dark blue or black, stepped out of them, rolled them into a little ball, and threw them as far as she could into the audience.  A fight erupted out there.

     “That’s my contribution to a bad influence!” she screamed.

     A large bottle shattered somewhere near me.  Celeste and Lilly drove up the intensity of the beat, but it barely registered over the explosion from the crowd.  People from all over were leaving their seats and streaming down the aisles like crippled pilgrims approaching Lourdes.  The Blessed (and now panty-less) Virgin stood on the stage and welcomed them with open arms.  It was ridiculous, but pretty funny, too.

     Lilly stopped playing and went out to join Heather.  She turned off the volume on her bass and laid it flat on the stage.  All I could do was watch and pray, and that was no easy task: it was so loud, I literally couldn’t hear myself think.  Looking about as bored as always, Lilly stripped out of her pink tights and white panties, balled them up, and tossed them together.  Krystal was next, only she wore no tights, just red-and-white-striped panties that she twirled around her finger a couple times before sailing them into a sea of horny, hungry fish.

     “Let’s see, who’s left?” Heather said into the mike, and I shook my head and laughed, knowing exactly what would happen when luscious Celeste moved out front and started taking off her underwear.  Half the seats on the floor level of the arena were empty now.

     Lilly picked her bass back up; Krystal went back to the drum riser.  Heather drank from her water bottle.  She poured a little over her head then drank some more, reveling in the ferocious energy and noise she had created.

     “Oh, yeah, we almost forgot about Celeste.  You all know Celeste, don’t you?  Of course, you do.  Yoo-hoo, Celeste?”

     Celeste stopped playing, but there was enough stomping in the arena to sound like a billion kick-drums.  The crush of boys down in front were about killing each other to get a prime position for the next bad influence.  Police in white helmets and carrying clear plastic shields had converged on the floor at either side of the stage.  I could see the giant figures of Moe and Sal and about six others in their team lurking by the ramps that led off the stage and to the back.  Cameras kept the place sparkling.

     Celeste got up and started moving.  I’d never heard it get so loud so fast.  She and Heather exchanged a few words away from the mike, then she reached under her skirt and slowly pulled off her panties (yellow – no tights, too hot to play drums in tights).  She whispered something in Heather’s ear, and Heather yelled into the mike: “Celeste says she’s been kind of sweaty back there, doing all her drumming and stuff, so maybe she shouldn’t contribute her . . . little yellow thingies to our Floozie-style bad influence.  What do you think?”

     The crowd went nuts.

     “So you want her to put them back on?”

     The crowd went whatever was past nuts.

     “But they’re probably all wet!”

     Had the raging, foaming hormones with boys attached down in front chosen through a mass collective will to rush the stage, there would have been no way that all the kings horses and all Moe and Sal’s men could have put four little schoolgirls back together again.  But there was no need to fear: teenage boys weren’t into parading around with the fronts of their pants sticking out, so they stayed put.  (I’d been in the third row for a Runaways concert when I was sixteen.  Trust me on this one.)

     Heather smiled at Celeste and swept her hand out toward the swirling mass.  Celeste threw her panties in the direction Heather’s hand had swept.  I swear I could hear bodies collide.

     “Those are our gifts to you, Louisville, for coming out to see us tonight,” Heather yelled over the noise.  “You can keep them, ooooor you can take them outside when we’re done and shove them up those protester’s asses!  And tell them Floozie sent you!”

     The girls finished the rest of the show with no further stripping, which kept the police at bay and my ass out of jail.  I rounded them up backstage as soon as “A Tear Comes from Here” was finished and had security rush them directly to the bus.

     “We owned them,” Heather said when we were all settled and heading toward Cincinnati.  “God, can it get any cooler than that?  Gary, did you see how they reacted?”

     “Yeah, hard-on city,” I said.

     Celeste clicked her tongue.  “You said a bad word!”

     “You hear ‘hard-on,’ I hear the ring of cash registers.”

     “We might have overdid it somewhat,” Lilly said.

     “It’s just sex, Lilly,” Krystal said.

     “I know, but did you have another pair of underwear on?  No, right?”

     “No, did you?  Well, of course you did.”

     “I’m not going out there naked.”

     “You had a skirt on, how could you be naked?”

     “Skirts have been known to fly up.”

     “I think mine did a couple times during ‘Virginia’s Drunk.’”

     “See?”

     “If you guys feel the need to do that again,” I said, “I want you to wear another pair under the pair you take off.  Good work, Lilly.”

     “Lilly probably wears two pairs all the time, anyway,” Krystal said.

     “Shut up, I do not.”

     “I wore two,” Celeste said.

     “So did I,” Heather said.

     “Okay, so I’m Slut for the Night,” Krystal said.  “Who gives a fuck?”

     “Second pair if you do it again,” I repeated to Krystal, in case she’d chosen not to hear it the first time.

     “So you don’t care if we play around like that if the mood strikes us?” Heather said.  She stuck a piece of gum in her mouth.

     “No, it’s cool, but as the only one in the group close to emotional maturity, I need to say . . .”

     Krystal laughed.  “Yeah, maturity.”

     “Do you think spending so much time with us has changed you any?” Celeste said.  “You seem a lot more loose, less anxious all the time.”

     “I’ve learned a few things.”

     “Like what?”  Lilly came and sat next to me on the couch and pressed her shoulder against mine.  She smelled like sweat and the Reese’s peanut butter cups she’d just eaten.

     “Like I know how many boxes of tampons to buy for the next tour.”

     “Next time, we’ll show you how to use them,” Krystal said.

     “Okay, conversation degenerating,” said Celeste, who had also loosened up over time, though not enough to talk openly about tampons.

     “Well, I think what we did tonight was mucho sexy,” Krystal said.  “Did you see how they about passed out when Celeste went up there?  I thought they were going to storm the stage.”

     “It hurt my ears, it was so loud,” Lilly said.

     “Yeah, it should have been loud,” Celeste said.  “I spent like thirty-five bucks on that pair of underwear.”