Laurie’s in the tailgate lot, telling me about the time her mom burned all her albums. “My Kiss albums, my Mötley Crüe albums, my Judas Priest albums. There was a big church get-together, and she took my albums. And I’d worked for them.”

”And they burned them at the church?” I ask her.

”They had a big bonfire, yeah. That destroyed my life. I hated my mom.”__

No one will say whose idea the suicide pact was. Nikki Sixx says he can’t remember. Tommy Lee can’t remember. Mick Mars can’t remember. And Vince Neil definitely can’t remember. Now, they’re probably lying about this collective memory block, given that they’ve all got a similar rehearsed answer for why this is the end—something about not wanting to be out on tour in a decade with none of the group’s original members. “Like Guns N’ Roses,” Vince tells me. “There’s only one guy left in the band.”

But let’s go ahead and take them at their word, because this is Mötley Crüe, and when you spend thirty-three years in one of the most celebrated, sex-crazed, drug-addled metal bands of the 1980s, you’re going to forget more decadence and lunacy than lesser men will experience in a lifetime. Let’s focus instead on the fact that they signed a contract—they should’ve signed it in blood for an added flourish—and the contract stipulates that after this tour, none of them can play a show under the name Mötley Crüe ever again. Of course, “this tour” began last summer and runs until the end of 2015. And of course, musicians are the only people worse than pro athletes at staying retired. But let’s take the contract at face value, because these men are no strangers to litigation—they’ve pretty much all sued one another at some point—and because it’s more fun to pretend that this really is the end, and that the end didn’t actually come, for them and for all of us, a long time ago. The groupies are all married now. They all brought someone tonight to go home with.

So: I’m gonna act as if this is the end, and you are, too. So come now, children of the beast. Come in your leather miniskirts and your halter tops. Come in your slitted dresses and your ripped jeans and your stiletto heels. Come in your white jean jackets and your studded bracelets and ratty Overkill T-shirts. Tonight you will see flames—clouds of flames. Tonight you will see dancers in latex nurses’ outfits and fuck-me stockings prancing across the stage. Tonight you will hear very loud guitars connected to very big rows of speakers that will hang from the ceiling, curving and draping like bandoliers across the body of a fearsome demon soldier. Tonight you will sip from guitar-shaped rum runners that cost more than your mortgage. Tonight you will forget what year it is, and you will raise your fist and shout at the Devil one last (maybe?) time. Because tonight is the end, and the end means death and hell and fire—FIAHHHHHHH!!!—and that is fucking rock ’n’ roll, and this is Mötley fucking Crüe.