Hit Hard

by Joey Kramer

  “Joey,” she said, “I’m at the hospital.”

  Right then I knew what was coming.

  “Daddy passed about an hour ago,” she said.

  I let the news settle over me for a second. When I was able to speak, I thanked Amy for letting me know, told her I’d see her the next day. Then I hung up the phone.

  I walked back into the room where April and I had been watching TV, and when she looked up, she could tell by my face that something big had happened.

  The Foundation Room

  Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “My father just died,” I said. Then I burst into tears.

  April tried to comfort me, but I needed to be by myself, so I went out into the laundry room, got a coat, and went outside.

  Parkinson’s had been taking down my dad for years, so we knew this was going to happen, but we still hadn’t expected it to happen quite so soon. And even though I knew it was coming, when it actually did, I felt really empty and alone. This was late winter/early spring in New England, and on the coast where we lived, the marshes that time of year have this dead, matted straw look to them. I walked down across the lawn a little bit, and with the night air cold in my face, I could see the river that ran just below our property down to where it opened into the ocean. It was an amazing view in the moonlight, but somehow the beauty of it meant nothing to me at that moment. The thing that kept coming to mind for me was how I had never connected with my dad the way I’d wanted to, and now that chance was gone. I’d forgiven him for all the things he’d done to me when I was young, but that feeling of resolution was bittersweet. I still felt like I’d been sold short, especially in that the Parkinson’s had begun to take him away ten years earlier, and we never had a chance to be the kind of father and son I had wanted us to be.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept reflecting on what it would have been like if we’d had the kind of relationship I’d always dreamed about—and especially his telling me he was proud of me. I tried to focus on some of the good stuff, like when he came out to L.A. during Sgt. Pepper, but the finality of death left me reeling.

  The next day, April and I drove down to New York with Jesse. My mom had a burial plot that they bought years before, but nothing else was set up for the funeral. I had to do all that with her in just a couple of days. We picked out the casket and made the arrangements, and the morning of the service, my mom and I had to go in and legally identify the body.

  Opening of the House of Blues in Los Angeles, 1994

  Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.

  I felt good that so many of my friends came to support me that day. When I gave the eulogy, I focused on the main lesson my father taught me, which was that the most important things in life were family and friends. Take care of your friends and be a friend, he’d always said.

  Afterward the family stood around talking, and a lot of people came up to me. They all described how my father had told them that if there was one thing he was ever sorry for, it was the way he treated me when I was younger.

  I appreciated the words of support, and while I knew they were said out of care and love, in a way hearing them just made me feel sadder.

  We went to the cemetery, and the whole band was there, along with Tim, our manager. We put my father’s casket into the ground, and I’ve never cried that hard in my whole life. I cried so hard for so long that I couldn’t even see. By the time it was over, I was physically wrung out from crying. I just really was at a loss for how to handle all my feelings, because I was losing something that I never really had to begin with. There was love, and there was anger, and guilt about the anger, and over all just a huge feeling of emptiness and loss.

  After the funeral, my mom and my sisters and I were together for a few days, but then I had to get back to work, which meant heading off to Japan. I had commitments to the band and to the big house and to all the rest of it, so I didn’t really have time to mourn my father’s death the way I might have.

  At the time, I was also responding with some of the old habits—just get on with it, put your head down, and stay busy. It wasn’t that I was consciously denying the grief, it was just that I wasn’t really dealing with it the way it deserved to be dealt with. What I didn’t realize was that, even after all the therapy and rehab, and even though I wasn’t on drugs, I was still pretty numbed out. By shutting down and going right to work, not allowing the process of grieving to run its course, I was just postponing the real confrontation with all my contradictions and conflicted feelings. I was also feeding the inevitable showdown with myself making what was soon to come much more intense.

  Get a Grip had put us safely back in the game, bigger than ever. So being on the road was even more pressurized than before. Which also meant pressure for us to get back into the studio. Steven and Joe went down to Miami for preproduction, and Tom and Brad and I stayed up in Boston rehearsing.

  Meanwhile, April was getting ready to set out on her spiritual journey to see Sai Baba in India. She and Isaac Tigrett had been talking about this trip for many months, and she made it official around maybe October or November.

  The band always took time off during Christmas and New Year’s, so when the holidays came, there was a lot of family, and a lot of presents, and a lot of socializing going on. April and I had a New Year’s Eve party, not for the band, but for buddies like Jack Scarangella, David Brega, Richard Guberti, Frank Gangi, David Hinkleman, and Donny Wightman. I have a picture of all of us together, and I look really bad. I remember them saying to me at the time that my face was really long and drawn. People were asking me, “Are you okay?” “What’s wrong?” or saying, “You don’t look happy.” I think they were trying to get me to go someplace to get some help, but frankly, I didn’t want any more of that kind of help. I just wanted to be home, living my life—or so I thought.

  Playing the Letterman Show, 1994

  Courtesy of Kevin Mazur.

  April could see the kind of condition I was in, too, but I knew she really wanted to go on this trip to India to see Sai Baba. So when she asked me about it, I said, “I’ll be fine. You go ahead and take your trip. I’ve got to work this out on my own.”

  Tom and Brad and I started drilling again in January, and I thought I was kind of okay for a while. But within just a few weeks I started feeling a little strange, and I started getting depressed, only I didn’t know that I was depressed. All I knew was that I was feeling a lot of pain and deep, unexplainable sadness. It was starting to crush me.

  Figuring it out

  Courtesy of Gene Kirkland

  One day Tom and Brad were with me, rehearsing the arrangements we were getting ready to record down in Florida, and I just put down my sticks. This horrible despair suddenly hit me, and I started talking about how I was feeling and how long I’d been feeling it, and I said that if I had to go on feeling this way for a prolonged period of time…well, I could understand how someone could start thinking about suicide. I wasn’t saying that I was going to kill myself. I was saying that I had some new insight into what’s going on when people do kill themselves.

  Tom and Brad took that statement and ran with it to Tim, who was still like a nervous nanny as far as our behavior was concerned, though not necessarily without reason. I immediately became the designated patient, and Tim wanted me to go into suicide-prevention treatment. But I knew there was no way I was going to kill myself. Like that lady I’d heard at the AA meeting in L.A., I knew that I’d rather feel the pain than not feel anything at all. It’s just something in the core of me, some determination from my parents that makes me love life too much. But by being so down, I could see how people get there. And it’s a scary place when you’re thinking, This fuckin’ sucks. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m done.

  The nearer we got to April’s departure day, and the more I realized she was really going to India, the more I became agitated. This was a big deal for her, and she seemed so sure it was th
e right thing for her to do, so I thought I was wrong to not want her to go, but it was hard. Jack B., my AA sponsor, was with me to drive her to the airport, but when the moment came for me to actually say good-bye to my wife, I just broke down in tears. I had told her to go ahead and go, and that I would be okay, but the truth was, I felt totally abandoned.

  Reflecting back now on my relationship with April, I realize it wasn’t the first time I felt April either physically or emotionally abandoned me; the reality was that this had been going on for years, and if any of my friends or family tried to make me see that and do something about it, I would always rationalize and justify April’s behavior. I was afraid to acknowledge anything might be wrong with our relationship. I was not equipped to stand up to what I was certain would be April’s insistence that what I was saying was wrong or, worse, that my bringing it up would piss her off. So when April was leaving this time, even though it didn’t add up for me that, once again, she would not be there with me, and for me, everywhere I turned, things seemed to make less and less sense, so I didn’t know how I felt about anything. It would take nearly a decade before I felt strong enough with myself to confront the issue and say to April that some things needed to change between us.

  After she got on board and the plane took off, Jack and I drove back to my house, and I remember his telling me, “We’re having fun; we’re in training now,” but I didn’t see it as fun at all. Jack was a marine, and while he was a great advocate for AA, he just wasn’t the kind of guy I needed to help me through this. I didn’t need somebody to coach me to tough it out. I needed somebody just to be there, and maybe to listen if I ever felt like I had something I needed to say.

  After Jack left, I called Frank Gangi. Frank was an amateur pilot I’d met years before when we were trying to line up a couple of planes for a trip. We became great friends over the years, and he could tell just by my voice that something was really wrong.

  “So, bro, you want me to come over there?”

  I said, “Yeah, Frank. That’s really what I need.”

  So Frank pretty much abandoned his business and dropped everything for maybe ten days. This was an amazing act of friendship, and I will be eternally grateful to the guy. He moved into my house and camped out and looked after me. I so didn’t want to be by myself, and Frank was being such a prince, but once he got there, I really didn’t have much to say. It was just the presence of somebody else close by that I needed. If Frank hadn’t been there with me, I don’t know what would’ve happened. I couldn’t even drive a car.

  After a while, I decided that even with Frank’s help this was just not working. I said to myself, I gotta get out of here, and I booked a flight to Florida to go record with my partners who were all down there in the studio. I thought that if I could really get going on the record, together with the sunshine and the change of scene, then all this pain and shit would go away. Which meant that I was still in denial about what was really going on—I was starting to dive into the full-scale breakdown that would land me in California two days later. When Steve Chatoff came in to see me that first morning at Steps, he was with his wife, a beautiful redhead named Charnay. She’s a psychologist and he’s a registered nurse, and their specialty is dealing with people in the music industry. That was the first time I heard the term flooding used to describe my condition. They agreed that I was too deep into that to get any real work done, but over time, I began to see Charnay as my therapist every day.

  On autopilot, October 1997

  Courtesy of Gene Kirkland

  Eventually I became okay with staying in the room by myself instead of in a bed by the nurses’ station, although, a lot of times, as I look back on it now, the isolation really bothered me. At the same time, it forced me to deal with a lot of my shit. I would lie in bed at night, and my real solace at the time was talking to Baba, the spirit guru that April had gone off to see in India. It would be ten o’clock at night, and I’d be saying: “Baba, please help me to help myself.”

  I never felt like eating, and I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I just wanted to hide in my room, back in bed. I used to kind of just gaze out onto the patio, and I would see people either taking a smoke break or having their morning coffee and moaning about not being able to have real coffee. All they could have was decaf, because Steps wouldn’t let you have any kind of stimulant at all. It kind of made me glad that at least I didn’t smoke. At least that was one addiction I had avoided.

  Tom and Joey in the studio

  Courtesy of Kevin Mazur.

  The clinic gave you this rolling series of wake-up calls leading up to seven thirty. They would call you at a quarter to seven, seven o’clock, quarter past seven, and then at seven thirty you really had to be up. I would wait until the last possible minute to put my feet on the floor. I was so anxiety ridden and depressed and emotionally distraught that sometimes I’d just have to take it from hour to hour…sometimes from minute to minute. There were times, I remember, when I sat in my room, watching the second hand tick by on my watch.

  But mostly what I did was cry and ask myself, Where the fuck is this coming from? The biggest mystery to me was that I had this overwhelming pain in my gut. I didn’t know why I was feeling it or even what it was. All I knew was that it hurt—worse than anything I could even imagine. I didn’t know emotional pain like that could create such physical pain.

  After about five days they said they wanted me to start on antidepressants, but I had never taken any before, and I didn’t want to take them now. I figured I could deal with the depression without medication. But this depression was just one big hole, and I was right at the edge, looking down into the darkness, and the darkness had a gravitational pull all its own. I didn’t want to go down there, and yet I couldn’t pull away. I was really stuck, and it was scary. So I had to give myself time. I had to be really patient, spend the time in a controlled atmosphere, and calm down so I could learn what the depression was all about. I needed to get more educated about myself and about why I was feeling the way I was. Ultimately, I started taking the antidepressants; they became part of the regimen and, eventually, part of the ultimate solution.

  After a while I started going to classes. I went to classes about child abuse, sexual abuse, codependency—you name it. Sometimes I participated a little bit, being patient with myself, because at first I was so anxiety ridden that I couldn’t even sit and listen. And even more so, I was not able to take instruction to try and learn about what was going on with me. But I did my sessions with Charnay. I saw her every day, and I did my group therapy. Going down to the depths of all this pain changed me in many ways, and after a while I really got into the process. I learned to feel happy and experienced joy from realizing that I had the kind of strength I needed to actually come through something like this.

  I had done the work to get clean and sober, and now that I was, I could feel the pain, which meant that classroom-like blackboard sessions had purpose. Understanding what was going on intellectually wouldn’t be just the booby prize anymore, a way of avoidance and denial. Steps wasn’t just “tell me about your pain,” it was also “let me explain to you how this usually works.” The “what’s going on” helped me get to the “why,” which helped reinforce the goal and set the course for making some real changes.

  They told me at Steps that a common denominator with so much personal turmoil is people being hurt, and the hurt causes them to shut down. So I was able to relate to what they were talking about in the blackboard sessions. Every once in a while, the light bulb would go on.

  I had done all these forms of therapy—sometimes on my own, sometimes initiated by Tim—only to realize that I’d only been dealing with this stuff on a surface level, which at this stage of the game meant I wasn’t really dealing. Until my system of defenses and denial began to break down, I wouldn’t be able to absorb the real lesson.

  One of the ideas that became a lot more powerful for me at Steps was this concept of post-traumatic stress. Father
Bill and I had talked about it at Chit Chat, but now I was in a better position to connect the dots. I remembered a time April and I were coming up the Hutchinson River Parkway in New York, going into Connecticut after visiting one of my sisters. We were in a new Porsche Turbo, and I had slowed down from about 120 to around 80. I was cruising along next to this guy in a Lamborghini, and suddenly a deer hopped out in front of us from out of the woods. He hit the front of my car, flattened against the side of it, then came apart. April completely flipped out. I simply pulled over to the side of the road and took care of business. I asked her if she was okay, went out and examined what happened to the deer, made sure there was nothing I could do, then got back in and drove home.

  It wasn’t until about forty-eight hours later that I started to react. I had taken the deer’s life and was feeling really bad about it. Remembering that delayed reaction, I now realized that this was the way I always processed—or didn’t process—big emotions. You do what needs to be done; you react later. It can come in handy in emergencies, and with me, I could see that this was how I dealt with everything. But sooner or later, it takes a toll.

  Alone in a crowd

  Courtesy of Wayne Mazer.

  What I was coming to see was that all those emotions that I never really processed had waited thirty or forty years to bubble up to the surface. That buried pain affected how I dealt with any authority figure throughout my life, whether it was my father, Steven Tyler, Tim Collins, April, or now Steve Chatoff, the shrink. Whenever I was around an authority figure, I had a deep, unconscious fear that was tantamount to the fear of being beaten. As a result, I’d go overboard trying to please, even when it meant denying my own emotional reality or my own boundaries.

  One thing that became very clear was that by not completing the grieving with my father’s passing, then and there, I had exceeded the limit of what I could contain. That was the pain that finally insisted I stop and pay attention. When I didn’t, it built up and built up until it all came flooding out. That and everything that I’d stuffed in, packed down, and kept inside for forty-five years.