David Vardeman
One day the Klotzes' daughter Fenix arrived home from prison. "Goodness!" her mother said. "How fat you've grown. Your prison diet must have consisted mainly of starches."
"May I come in?"
"By all means. First I must warn you: Your father is taking singing lessons. He is becoming a country singer."
"I have plenty of aspirin and gin, so that should be no problem."
"He might ask you to join his band. It will help that you've been in prison. You will get more bookings that way. But first you will have to lose weight. You can't be a star and a fat pig at the same time. If you remain fat, you can sit in the audience, but you can't be on stage."
Her second day out, Fenix decided to walk the old neighborhood and see if she could determine where her life went wrong. Her father offered to accompany her and point out some of the places he thought it might have happened. But she said, "No, you stay at home and practice your country singing. This is something a woman has to do on her own. For I am a woman now, Daddy, and no longer your little girl."
Fenix ate four eggs and a rasher of bacon and left the house. "She will lose weight swiftly now that she is giving up demon starches," her mother said. "Protein and saturated fat will turn her into a goddess."
"I believe our daughter will now make something of herself," Mr. Klotz said. "But God knows what that will be, or if words even exist to describe it."
As Fenix walked along the sunny sidewalk, she mused, "People who get what they want often come to regret it. They become famous only to be murdered by one of their crazed fans. Or they figure out where they went wrong and spend the rest of their lives frozen in one moment, trapped like a fly in amber. God, I hope I don't turn out to be one of those parolees that goes around looking for a return to youth and innocence."
She came home four hours later, reeling drunk. "I got a job washing poodles."
"Do they let drunk ladies wash poodles, Darling?" her mother said.
"They do where I work."
"Is it just poodles?" Mr. Klotz said.
"I suppose if a schnauzer came in, I couldn't refuse it, but I get the feeling it's mainly poodles."
"Well, your mother and I very much hope you will enjoy washing poodles and will be a great success at it. It's the sort of thing that could lead somewhere."
"One way to get people to notice you is to clean their dogs," her mother said. "And now I think the best way for us to celebrate your little success is for me to cook that butt roast I've been hanging on to. Did they serve you butt roast in prison?"
"Do you think a place that wouldn't let you own a tongue scraper would serve you butt roast? The average warden doesn't care what's on the back of an inmate's tongue."
"That's not the kind of warden I want my daughter imprisoned by."
Three weeks into washing poodles, Fenix threw in the sponge and said to her boss, Patrice, owner of Poodle Douche, "This poodle washing is for the birds. I've got breeding too, and a pedigree as long as a coma patient's toenails. I didn't sit around prison for three years just to get out and scrape the bottom of the barrel. Any one of these poodles has a better life than I do. But unlike them, I've paid my debt to society."
Patrice pulled something out of her mouth, stared at it, and heaved it past her blind mother into the trash can. It made a ping when it hit the side of the barrel. She threw up her arms and her belly flowed into prominence. "Three point shot!"
Prince the poodle barked at her and then spit like a camel, a thing only Prince could do, and that endeared him to Patrice.
"Did you just throw something hard right past my blind eyes?" Patrice's mother said.
"Oh, calm down," Patrice said. "You think everyone does everything out of contempt for your blindness."
Without paying attention to what she was doing, Fenix clipped a plug of hair off Prince's back. She was thinking about her life. She pictured it as a school of minnows swimming in cloudy gelatin and being inexorably congealed into postures of furious fruitless effort as the temperature dropped.
"My life is clotting," she said. Whenever contemplation was upon her, her left hand had no idea what her right hand was doing. She tried to feed the plug of his hair to Prince. He wouldn't take it, so she stuffed it in her bra. Prince would be her last poodle. She thought, "The time will come, years hence, when I will look back on my life and want to have a memento of the very moment I got back on track."
"I don't have any idea what I'll do from now on," she said, "but it sure as hell won't include washing poodles."
Patrice's mother said to Patrice, "If I knew where you were, Girlie, I'd reach out and slap you for talking to me like you do."
"I'm right where your butt leaves the universe, is where I am, you stinky old blouse."
"Keep it up, Girlie, and I'll have my lover Kelso bulldoze your front teeth."
"Your lover Kelso has a face like a slice of blood sausage."
Patrice's mother turned her head and made a face. "You're not the baby girl I had. Some monster pulled a switch in the crib."
"Kelso is lying in a pile of rubber dolls. I'd always heard blind people were mean. When I wound up with you sitting on your ass all day in Poodle Douche I found out it's true."
"Who gave you the money for your Poodle Douche? Who's silent partner in your Poodle Douche, without whom there would be no Poodle Douche?"
"Your lover Kelso has five teeth, all of them rotten."
Fenix pulled a sugar cube from the pocket of her pink smock and fed it to Prince as though he were a horse. She said to herself, "Poodle Douche is coming apart before my very eyes. This is an historic event. To think, I started it by reaching out for greater things."
"I am twenty-seven," Patrice wailed, making big gestures, "have the midriff, cheeks and thighs of a cherub, and the wrists of a blacksmith. My thoughts are bubbles that rise to the surface of my brain and pop. What then am I to do if not wash poodles?"
She shoved her mother off the stool and sat down and wept. The old woman ended up hugging the inverted water bottle on the dispenser as though it were providing her forbidden pleasure.
Fenix sprayed off Prince and lifted him out of the tub and to the floor. He ran through the shop, shaking water everywhere. "Mrs. Kettelbaum," she addressed Patrice's mother, "stay where you are until the floor dries, unless you very much want to break a hip in addition to everything else. Prince got the floor wet."
"Now don't you wish you hadn't killed those old eyes with your championship boozing?" Patrice said.
"I can still pull a trigger and swing a curling wand."
"One day you'll see the error of your ways." Patrice bit off and spit out a piece of her necrotic thumbnail before putting out her arms to beckon Fenix. "Come close and comfort me as I try to beat off this panic attack. I don't want a career as much as I want status and a milieu."
"Then the only thing for you to do is join the girl band I formed just this instant called Peroxide Bitches."
"All this time you were standing there forming Peroxide Bitches?"
"I was quiet about it."
"I don't know anything about music."
"That's not the point, is it?"
"What is the point?"
"The point is to exchange one milieu for another, the poodle for the star. The only thing is, we've got to keep from being murdered by a crazed fan."
"I'm joining too," Mrs. Kettelbaum said. "I'm sure as hell not sitting around Poodle Douche by myself."
"Hell, no! You're fifty-seven and look eighty," Patrice said. "There's no way you can be in Peroxide Bitches. We'd be the laughing stock of Woodstock."
"All we have to do is burn this joint down, collect the insurance money, and we'll be on our way," Mrs. Kettelbaum said.
Fenix said, "We can sit your mother on stage with an accordion, and she can just hold it. She doesn't have to do a thing. She'll be like our mascot or something."
"Oh, no," Mrs. Kettelbaum said. "If I'm up there, I'm going to do a little bit of dancing."
Patrice rolled her eyes. "Oh, great. You'll be crashing into amps and tripping over cords and shit."
"No, here's what we do," Fenix said. "We put a ball and chain on her so she can only dance so far from her stool. Or we'll put her in a cage or something. It'll work out. The main thing is for me to lose some weight. I need to shed forty-seven pounds before we launch Peroxide Bitches."
"The hell you do," Patrice said. "The nice thing about peroxide bitches is they can be fat and have sloppy clothes. They can have thick forearms and ankles and crooked glasses. They can have bellies bigger than their hips and pull their mother's hair on stage."
"I could beat on my cage with a curling wand and then electrocute myself with it for the grand finale," Mrs. Kettelbaum said.
"We'll work all that out," Patrice said. She made an open aside to Fenix, "Watch her try to steal the show."
Fenix said she believed everyone present at the formation of Peroxide Bitches should be a part, including Prince.
"But Prince is a man dog," Mrs. Kettelbaum pointed out.
For a while they discussed calling their new girl group Man Dog but decided against it. "That would be letting the tail wag the dog," they said. "We can't change our name just because Prince is a boy. We will pretend he is a girl like they did with Lassie."
"He is the right color," Patrice said. "We will put him in the cage with you," she said to her mother. "Don't get him excited, and no one will know he's a boy."
When Mr. Rice came to fetch Prince, the three women explained he could not have Prince back because they had just formed Peroxide Bitches and Prince was an integral part of it.
"Very well," Mr. Rice said, "but be aware that when reality sets in and you're starving on the road, you will probably wind up sacrificing and eating Prince."
"We are not one of those girl groups that eats it members," Fenix assured him.
"Ha!" Mr. Rice said. "The ditches from here to LA are filled with the bones of girl group members the other band members swore they wouldn't eat. What makes you think you're any better than all the other girl groups before you?"
"Do you think we're troglodytes or something?" Fenix said.
There was no need to share with Mr. Rice that they could easily live like queens for a year on the insurance money when they fire-gutted Poodle Douche. They'd get to LA long before they had to eat Prince.
When Fenix got home that evening from her final day at Poodle Douche and announced that she had formed Peroxide Bitches, her mother's face dropped. "What is it now, Mother?" Fenix said. "Why has your face dropped?"
"I had hoped you would at least ask me to join Peroxide Bitches."
"But we already have one old woman making a fool of herself in a cage. Besides, you always said you'd never strip your hair."
Mrs. Klotz waved it off. "Oh, I said that."
"Why not join Daddy's country group? Country fans like them falling off the bone. You'll fit right in. You can keep your spit curls, put on twelve petticoats, and pin your forehead back."
Mrs. Klotz made fists and shut her eyes and jumped up and down like a child throwing a tantrum. "I want to be in Peroxide Bitches! I want to be in Peroxide Bitches!"
"I hate how you are using emotional blackmail to get into Peroxide Bitches."
Her father clipped Fenix on the shoulder. "You should have heard her fifteen minutes ago, whining to get into The Freeloaders."
"What's The Freeloaders?"
"The band I'm loading."
"Jesus! It'd be great if we have two famous bands in the family."
"If you two think I'm going to sit at home and knit while you two rock the nation, you've got another thought a comin'! I'll become famous in my own right. I'll have an affair with the president or someone else high up."
Mr. Klotz wrinkled his nose and spun his index finger around his ear. "You'd better start with a city councilman or the mayor before you go right into the oval office."
"Jesus again!" Fenix swore. "What president's going to look twice at you? All your staples are coming out."
Peroxide Bitches experienced several delays in launching. Kelso, Mrs. Kettelbaum's five-toothed lover, put the first pin in the balloon by pointing out that burning down Poodle Douche would do little toward providing financial backing for Peroxide Bitches as Patrice and her mother were renting space and had neither ownership rights nor fire insurance.
"Oh, right," they said when Kelso pointed this out.
Because no money would be forthcoming from burning the place down, Patrice continued to operate Poodle Douche, but more sullenly than before. When customers pulled their poodles in, they saw the message pulsing in her eyes: "God! Not another goddamned poodle!" They saw her heart was no longer in poodles. All she did was dream night and day of running off with Peroxide Bitches.
Kelso invested five thousand dollars in Peroxide Bitches, but that did little more than buy the cage and pay a welder to fashion the ball and chain with leg clamps for Mrs. Kettelbaum. Nonetheless, this was a step in the right direction. To build advance buzz about Peroxide Bitches, Patrice set Mrs. Kettelbaum up in her cage, on a stool, wearing ball and chain, in front of Poodle Douche. Whenever anyone strolled by and said, "Why are you sitting in a cage, on a stool, wearing that ball and chain, for God's sake?" Mrs. Kettelbaum was to answer, "I am here to let you know about the exciting new girl band Peroxide Bitches. Watch for it."
Princess, the dog formerly known as Prince, often sat in her cage with her. When authorities to prevent cruelty to animals caught wind of the display, they arrived with news cameras to demand an explanation for what they called "vicious treatment of a poodle."
The reporter stuck the mike through the bars of the cage so that Mrs. Kettelbaum could be heard plainly. Prince was on his best behavior. "I am not abusing this bitch poodle," Mrs. Kettelbaum said. "After all, I ask you: which of us is blind and wearing a ball and chain? But even though I am blind and caged and wearing a ball and chain, I am not a victim of elder abuse any more than Princess is a victim of animal cruelty. This is about Peroxide Bitches. Peroxide Bitches. Keep thinking Peroxide Bitches. Keep your eyes open and your ears to the ground for Peroxide Bitches."
Patrice, seeing the fuss, stepped out of Poodle Douche holding a wet poodle with which she gestured meaningfully. "What are you doing to my mother? Get your hand out of her cage. Move on before I call the authorities and get you forcibly removed from my mother's cage. What gives you the right to harass her? She is merely exercising her God-given American right to be clamped to a ball and chain inside a cage with a bitch poodle. Show me the law that says you can't be a blind woman sitting on the sidewalk clamped to a ball and chain inside a cage with a bitch poodle in front of her daughter's Poodle Douche."
"She was babbling something about Peroxide Bitches," the reporter said. "Can you tell us something about the meaning behind Peroxide Bitches?"
Patrice picked the reporter's name badge off her chest where it was pinned and read it. "Wanda Klegg. Certainly, Wanda Klegg, I can tell you about Peroxide Bitches. But, first, don't use 'babble' to describe another citizen's speech, for there is contempt in the very word. Second, Peroxide Bitches is the hot new girl group my friend Fenix Klotz and I have formed. We are all set to start playing local clubs pretty soon. Mother and Princess here are band members. Where did the name Peroxide Bitches come from? Fenix was in prison, and 'peroxide bitches' is the term of contempt she now uses to refer to the other lady inmates. That is where the band name Peroxide Bitches comes from."
"So this is a publicity stunt," Wanda Klegg said.
"Publicity stunt, my ass, Wanda Klegg. Just remember, you called on us; we didn't call on you."
The false alarm set off by the animal cruelty people won Peroxide Bitches considerable attention. The TV station ran what it called "The Poodle Douche" encounter as part of its "Can You Believe These People?" segment, a nightly feature that showcased the ballsy, the extreme, and the hybrid. This sequence billed itself as "following the shift from the center to the fringe." The piece featuring Prince(ss) and Mrs. Kettelbaum in the cage was so wildly popular that viewers called in and demanded it be repeated that night on the late news. It was also replayed on the next evening's two news shows with the warning "for mature audiences only" (parents had complained about its content), and then featured prominently on the station's website.
A mere two weeks later, "Peroxide Bitches" appeared on the cover of Gutter magazine, a rag devoted to the local arts scene, including tattooing, pornography, doll making, antiques, and the mainstreaming of perversion. Gutter's motto was "perversion is only a lack of acquaintance."
The photograph of Peroxide Bitches on the cover of Gutter was taken in front of Poodle Douche. Mrs. Kettelbaum, crowned with a peroxide afro wig, grasped the bars of her cage and snarled. She held a curling wand in one hand. Princes(ss), dressed in a silk skirt to hide his true nature, stood with his paws on the seat of Mrs. Kettelbaum's stool, barking at her Spandexed rear. Patrice held an electric guitar she had bought for the occasion. The salesman had taught her how to hold it so that she'd look like she knew what it was for. Her peroxide hair was draped over one shoulder and stuffed in her mouth. Fenix wore black boots, black fishnet hose, and a lemon-colored bustier with a large heart cut out of it to show her belly button. She wore a jester's mask, face up, as a hat. A stiff batch of her hair exploded out of the jester's mouth into the air like vomit. She held a microphone in one hand and in the other a sign that read, "The caged lady is blind."
Mrs. Klotz was there too. She had found it harder than she'd imagined to initiate an affair with a local official. Fenix had inducted her into the band as consolation in her despondency. She sat in a wheelchair at a drum set borrowed from Stacy, the thirteen-year-old girl next door. She held the sticks up with a look of vengeance as though she were God finally getting around to destroying the whole shebang. She too had stripped the color out of her hair. A thirty gallon garbage can labeled "peroxide" was featured in the foreground.
The caption on the cover of Gutter read "Peroxide Bitches Break Out."
The article was in the form of a Q and A with Fenix. It revealed that she and Patrice had met in prison where she was doing time for aggravated arson and defacing a national park; Patrice for prostitution, appearing nude at a ten o'clock mass, and terroristic threatening of a midwife. The two of them discovered a mutual love of high-pitched harmonizing and honed their musical skills as founding members of The Padded Cells, the prison glee club. The Padded Cells gained a reputation in the penal system and were invited to perform a song Fenix and Patrice co-wrote, "Bitching in the USA," as part of the Boston Mental Health Crisis telethon.
The interview chronicled their dreary post-prison months living in a dumpster in Soho and performing with a Mr. Microphone on the steps of the Met on pay-what-you-can nights.
Reading the article, Patrice said, "This all sounds very unfamiliar."
Fenix said, "Don't worry about it. When you are just dragging through life, it's easy to lose your memory."
Mrs. Kettelbaum, a.k.a Kiki Hovis, was portrayed as a former member of a band called And Then There Were Nuns that in the early 70s had paved the way for the punk movement. She'd gone blind drinking bathtub gin. Fenix and Patrice heard of her existence and tracked her down and rehabilitated her, offering her a cage and a singing job. She also contributed rhythm with the curling wand. Mrs. Klotz, identified as one Agnia Pflugg, was said to be a bisexual former Miss Worcester turned dental assistant who took the rap for the dentist when several patients' gold crowns went missing. She was also strongly implicated in the unsolved disappearance of three of her Miss Worcester rivals.
The upshot of their appearance in Gutter was that the manager of the local club, Buzzard, booked them for a three week run two weeks hence.
"I had better start learning to play this fucking thing," Patrice said, swatting Fenix on the butt with her guitar.
"And also," Fenix said, "I need to know how to sing."
After seven days of rehearsals after hours in Poodle Douche, Peroxide Bitches had learned what chords were and that some were different from others, the difference between major and minor keys, and what the word octave meant.
"Thank God for the internet," Patrice said.
"I hear a tri-tone is a mystical interval that drives people wild," Fenix said. "We should probably find out what tri-tones are and get some in there. The Lorelei built all her songs on the tri-tone and lured the sailors to their deaths with it, so it would be a pretty good secret weapon to have on our side."
After several more days, Patrice had learned to slide her hand up and down the guitar frets with great rapidity. "They do that a lot," she said. "I've seen it. Visually, I think I'm just about ready. Also, you kind of point it like it's a bazooka you're killing a bunch of lowlifes with, or like it's a fire hose and you're spraying down a bunch of rioters. They go crazy when you do that. Then you lean back and point it up in the air and make this face like this like you've just backed into a cactus. And then you sort of use this other hand like you're picking at bad skin. Piece of cake. Now let's hear you sing."
Fenix shook her head and lifted her hands to within a few inches of her ears, bent over and went into her own artistic space. "First, I have to get it clear in my own mind what integrity is and what it means to be one of the integrity people."
"I think we are ready to go, except for the sound part of things," Mrs. Klotz said.
Mrs. Kettelbaum shook the bars of her cage, swiveled her hips, and barked, a thing Prince was too lazy to do. Fame had already made him complacent.
"Let's hope we don't become complacent like Prince," Fenix said. "We have to keep reaching for the next rung of the ladder."
Mrs. Kettelbaum produced a document sent by the medical equipment rental company threatening legal action for non-return of the wheelchair she'd rented for the Gutter photo shoot. "Don't worry about that," Fenix said. "These things happen in the beginning. I'll buy you a dozen wheelchairs when we're famous. Did you tell them it's part of the act?"
"I said I'd have it back by five p.m. that day."
"You were supposed to tell them there were contingencies."
Peroxide Bitches used this opportunity to write a new song called "Just Try to Get Your Wheelchair Back, Bitch." It flowed out of the moment. That experience clarified what Peroxide Bitches' approach to their music would be from then on: let it flow out of the concern of the moment. Once they'd gotten that simple concept down, the floodgates that had held back their creativity burst open. Within five minutes after finishing "Just Try to Get Your Wheelchair Back, Bitch," they had completed two more songs: "There's Something Wrong With Food If It Makes You Want to Puke," and "Why is My Toe Turning that Godawful Color? (I Don't Remember Smashing It)"; and Patrice had learned how to use a pick without flipping it into her face.
Their confidence soared. They said, "Who knew all we had to do was write songs with the stuff we say in them? When we get on stage, we'll sort of just sing the tunes that come into our heads, play the notes that are right there within easy reach, beat the drums like hell till we get tired and then slow down."
"I always suspected that's what these musicians were up to," Fenix said.
One of the last songs the quintet wrote before they were scheduled to take the stage at Buzzard was occasioned by the theft, at knifepoint, of the drum set belonging to thirteen-year-old Stacy, the Klotzes' neighbor, by Stacy and her twenty-one-year-old boyfriend George. Stacy pronounced George "Gorge," which might have been right, or she might have pronounced it that way out of sheer stupidity. At knifepoint, Peroxide Bitches didn't think to ask. They knew George-pronounced-Gorge's age because in the process of robbing her property back, Stacy grabbed the knife from George-pronounced-Gorge and said, "Let me have that. You're twenty-one, and I'm only thirteen. They'll go a hell of a lot easier on me if one of them gets stabbed. You load the set."
Fenix held the door of Poodle Douche while Stacy and George-pronounced-Gorge carried out the pieces of the drum set. "I want you to know, Stacy," she said, "that once I too led a life of crime. But now I've turned that mess around by forming Peroxide Bitches. And one day you will too."
Stacy's parting words, "I wish I'd stabbed you!" became the title and opening words of the first number in their set.
After the thieves left, Mrs. Klotz said they could get some more free publicity if they called and reported the robbery, but the others thought that would raise more questions than it was wise to raise.
Just then, the postman delivered a package addressed to Peroxide Bitches c/o Poodle Douche. The return address read simply: "A Fan."
Mrs. Klotz was saying, "Let's not worry about more drums. I'll just roll around the stage and beat on whatever I can find."
"You can get in the cage with me and Princess," Mrs. Kettelbaum offered, "and do rhythm on the cell bars while I twist."
Patrice tore into the box like her capacity to breathe was inside it. When she uncovered the gift, she screamed and threw the box into the air. The contents, several pairs of exceptionally stinky woolen socks, fell out of the box to the floor. Assuming they were something alive and possibly rabid, Fenix stomped on them with all her might and then looked up and said to Patrice, "It's only stinky socks. Why are you hysterical?"
Mrs. Kettelbaum stepped out of her cage and slapped Patrice, who was hyperventilating, hard on the face.
"Wait! There's a note." A piece of paper had fallen out of the box as it flew across the room. Mrs. Klotz retrieved it and read it aloud. "You're going to stink like these."
"I'm not going to go on tomorrow night," Patrice whimpered. "Not if somebody hates us enough to send us dirty socks they tell us we're going to stink like."
Mrs. Kettelbaum sniffed with curiosity. Prince knocked a pair from her hands and rolled in them. "How do you suppose they got them so stinky?" Mrs. Kettelbaum said.
"I don't know," Patrice said. "But if somebody hates us enough to send those, anything could happen."
Fenix recalled her thought of several months ago, that fame was not an end to be striven for but a curse to be protected from. How different her attitude now. Her heart said, "Hell, yes, bring on the fame, now that I'm this close. I must have been a nut to think it wasn't worth the risk. That's the attitude of a loser, a never-ran. God! I'd risk anything for fame."
She held a pair of the socks up by the toes. She gagged but put a brave face on it. "I used worse than this for a pillow in prison. If they think they can intimidate this Peroxide Bitch with dirty socks, they'd better think again. This sort of thing always happens on the brink of success. Some insanely envious person always shows up."
Mrs. Klotz recognized her husband's handwriting but said nothing. She'd noticed he'd been wearing and re-wearing the same woolen socks to run in and storing them in zip-lock bags between workouts. But she had her own peculiarities and never sought to question those of others. So, he was jealous of their success and using the gift of stinky socks to show his contempt.
Anonymous stinky socks. The anonymity of it doubled the insult. To know the origin of stinky socks somewhat mitigated the threat, as one could get a reading on the exact motive behind it. Knowing the source, you could strike back, and there was satisfaction in that. In this instance, the satisfaction, the revenge came to Mrs. Klotz in the form of a song inspired by the parcel of anonymous stinky socks. Meant as an insult, she could turn it to the advantage of Peroxide Bitches. With Peroxide Bitches, everything, even things meant to derail them, immediately turned into art, just as every object Midas touched turned to gold.
Mrs. Klotz excused herself to powder her nose and returned in short order with a brand new song, "I'm Going to Stick a Chicken Leg Down My Boyfriend's Throat." She changed the word from husband to boyfriend to throw the other band members off the scent and because Peroxide Bitches were supposed to be rebels to the bone, thumbing their noses at conventional bonds.
"I just came up with this great new song," she said. "Using my unfettered imagination and my muse Hecuba, I put myself in the place of a Peroxide Bitch who discovers that her boyfriend has sent her the gift of stinky socks to undermine her confidence. Instead of letting it undermine her confidence, she takes power from the offense. And in the middle of the night, she sticks a chicken leg down his throat."
"That is great," Fenix said.
Even Patrice started to come around. "The thing about Peroxide Bitches," she said, "is that they're never on the defensive. They're always on the offense side. Our aim is to offend! When there's nothing left to offend, we'll be dead. Warriors to the last!"
Mrs. Kettelbaum suggested that in that spirit they do a last-minute name change and become The Amazons, or The Lesbos, but the others said those names might limit the broad appeal that Peroxide Bitches had and possibly offend some more sensitive persons. "We want to be as inclusive as we can be," they said.
And so they stuck with Peroxide Bitches, though other names might have been possible, if misleading.
By the time they took the stage the next night, Peroxide Bitches had seventeen songs under its belt, having learned, in its so-far brief life, the artist's trick of using as material just anything and everything that came along, like chefs emptying the refrigerator of whatever was about to go bad into a pot and making a soup of it, using all the flat colas and wine and gin and whiskey and curdling milk and twice-used grease for stock.
That, in a nutshell, is how Peroxide Bitches were launched. The reviews of their first night's performance were so abysmal that crowds flocked to see them. "If you like train wrecks," one review began. Another said, "Only from the padded womb of a state mental institution could such an act have been born. These four squawking lunatic babies belong in straitjackets." Kelso, acting as manager of Peroxide Bitches, picked up on the straitjacket theme, and the next night all four band members (except Princess) came out on stage in straitjackets. Fenix kept hers on the entire performance. Following the third night, an article reported that rarely had an insult to taste and intelligence of this magnitude been foisted on the public. After this notice appeared, there was such a frenzied demand for tickets that the band had to add a third show every evening. With the wave of success buoying them, the poetry and music flowed out of them like blood out of a severed limb. Their music was entirely confessional, a sort of dialogue with the audience telling what was going on in their lives and driving them, what was on their minds in their most pensive, soul-searching moments. As such, they debuted a song their fourth night that contained the lyrics, "We're so popular, we didn't need to burn Poodle Douche to survive."
During the first six months of Peroxide Bitches' meteoric rise to fame, boxes of stinky socks arrived at least once a week. But the band members remained unfazed. Patrice waved the band's bank statements under her nose and said, "This is all I smell." They handled the negative input by writing a power ballad, their first song to top the national charts, called, "Your Socks Don't Bother Me."
Peroxide Bitches became known to their hardcore fans as the socks band, as socks and sock iconography figured so prominently in its concerns. Rumors circulated that the women of Peroxide Bitches were members of a weird sock-worshipping cult that met on Saturday afternoons, and videos appeared on the web purporting to show them conducting vile sock rituals, with socks scat and lewd sock rubdowns, selling their impure souls to Hoseakon, god of socks, to give them great worldly success and heap riches and sex appeal upon them. Another anti-Peroxide Bitches video sponsored by a group called Clean Up America featured an actress posing as Mrs. Kettelbaum describing the acts she forced Prince(ss) to perform in exchange for a clean kennel. The more vehemently Peroxide Bitches denied the authenticity of these exposés, the more numerous and explicit they became. The negative campaigns achieved the opposite of their intent. The more vigorous the attacks on Peroxide Bitches, the more the band's popularity grew.
By and by, Peroxide Bitches' efforts to beat the bushes and drive out these defamers grew half-hearted. Finally, they gave up addressing the rumors and gossip. The symbiosis between Peroxide Bitches and their morally upright enemies was complete. Both groups, the band and their scheming detractors, needed one another to exist. Together they gave the public what it wanted: a complete misrepresentation of the truth and the glorification of ineptitude and blind egotism.
In the third year of their hegemony, Peroxide Bitches was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, Junk Food of the Dark Soul. Fenix, as conceptual artist, went onstage to accept the award dressed in a gown made of the stinkiest of the socks they'd received. She said, "I want to give thanks to all you peroxide bitches sitting on your bruised rumps in prison rec rooms across this great country, chomping at the bit and wondering how to get back on the streets a.s.a.p. and make society pay." She thrust the statuette into the air and shouted, "This is for you, all you bruised and tattooed peroxide bitches out there! Make them pay. And, please, stinkier socks, please."