Hit Hard

by Joey Kramer

  And while I’m not denying that I can still feel angry, I’ve come a long way in dealing with my father issues and my father figures, so I don’t have to hold on to the anger any more. Which means I’m getting unstuck. Letting go of the anger allows me to be more selective about where I focus, as with my dad, when I try to remember the pleasant images, as opposed to the ones from later on when he was miserably sick, fragile, and dying.

  One of the memories I choose to revisit is from 1955—September. I was five years old, and we were living in the Bronx. My dad came home from work early one day, and he had a pair of roller skates for me. We sat down in the living room in our apartment on Davidson Ave., and he helped me put on those skates. And then we made it out to the front hall and out the front door, and he held my little body to keep me balanced, guiding me through the lobby of the building. We went outside, and he held my hand and helped me skate down the street.

  I said to my father, “Dad, can we go look in the windows, in the store windows?” And my father looked at me and said, “You know, Joey, you don’t have to call me Dad. You can call me Mickey if you want.” And I remember looking at my dad and saying, “Okay, Mickey.”

  And when I think back to that moment and let myself feel his love for me, I get to be his little buddy. We’re back there together, looking in the store windows, with me on the skates and him holding me up every time I start to fall.

  I now know that, for Mickey, expressing love was showing discipline, so for me, love and abuse became two confused elements of what it meant to have a connection. Hitting me was his way of disciplining me, and disciplining me was his way of showing love. At his core, that’s all he knew how to do—but I don’t believe that deep down that’s the way he wanted to be with me.

  My pal Scott Sobel, the guy who was painting my apartment when my girlfriend, Cindy, had her epileptic seizure, worked for my parents for a while. He was just a kid out of high school, on the outs with his own parents, and he did so many odd jobs around my parents’ house that sometimes he’d just spend the night. He told me recently that he felt as if they wanted to adopt him as a kind of surrogate son, as if “we sort of blew it with Joey, so maybe we can get a second chance with Scott.”

  He also told me a story about my dad. It was on that same Father’s Day when I showed up with the Cadillac. Scott said that, just a few days before that, Mickey had pulled him aside and, out of nowhere, told him about the time he’d beat the crap out of me for coming home late. “I thought he’d never forgive me,” Mickey told him. Scott’s comment to Mickey when he saw the Cadillac was “I guess he forgave you.” Then Scott described the huge smile on my father’s face. Today, that story puts a smile on my heart—with my dad’s name on it.

  With my mother, we’re still working on it. I still have issues about the way she stood by and let my father beat me up. I’m still angry, but I’m trying to “let it go and let God,” as the saying goes.

  I believe that when I was a young kid, my mother lived her social insecurities through me. She insisted that I line up with them and that I measure up according to those insecurities and those values. I could never identify the feeling or understand it until much later, but the way she assigned priorities made me feel like she loved those standards more than she loved me.

  Now that I’m an adult, I can see that she was simply a product of her own upbringing. She didn’t choose to have those insecurities—they were foisted on her by her own circumstances growing up, and those circumstances weren’t easy. That’s why compassion has to be the name of the game. Unfortunately, while my mother and I were living all that high drama, neither one of us had the skills that would have allowed us to talk about it and understand each other’s point of view. With my mother, it was always a monologue, never a dialogue.

  Steven and I have also made a lot of progress—or maybe I am just better now at understanding that whatever Steven’s issues are, they are his issues, not mine. I used to be afraid of his anger and how he would react if I played something he didn’t like. Now I play what I play, and if Steven likes it, that’s great. If he doesn’t like it, and it’s something we can work on, that’s great too. But I’m learning more and more how to own myself. I’m learning how not to be dependent on what Steven or anyone else thinks about me in order to feel good about myself. I’m also learning to treat myself with respect each day, which means not showing up everywhere as a victim in the world I see. Treating myself better and not inviting abuse has actually allowed me to renew the joy in working with Steven. He’s a brilliant, obsessive perfectionist. If Steven starts getting intensely intense, I don’t need to make it about me. It doesn’t get to me the same way it used to, because I am no longer an unwitting participant in the same old song and dance. For him to get to me, I have to take what’s being said negatively, and I do that less and less as time goes by. I recognize his intensity as his and have no need to own it myself. However imperfectly, I don’t obsess about other people or their issues. I’ve come to believe that Eleanor Roosevelt was right when she said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.”

  Japan, June 2002

  Courtesy of Ross Halfin.

  The whole story of my adult life has been about peeling back the layers to get down to what’s real. I didn’t realize it at first, but in the past five years or so, I had slipped back into denial about some basic unhappiness. I was numbing out on my lifestyle—the stuff—using the money that rock ’n’ roll brought me as a drug. If I felt lousy, I could go buy a new Lamborghini, or I could go buy another house. I’ve never thought of myself as that kind of person, but when it came to my attention that that’s how I was living, well, I wanted to do something about it. But first I had to peel back one more layer to get down to the root cause.

  April and I were in the kitchen one evening, and she started reaming me out and yelling at me in a demeaning and condescending way, and then she walked out of the room. I didn’t even take any special notice. Once again, I accepted this kind of behavior, which had become a fairly common occurrence in our relationship, as the price of doing business. It had become such a regular pattern, so familiar to me, that I didn’t even know I was doing it. Oh, am I being bullied and demeaned? Really? Isn’t that just the way it is in a marriage? Happy? I guess I’m happy. April says we’re happy.

  Me and Mom, 1999

  Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.

  But our daughter, Asia, was sitting there, and after a bit of stunned silence she looked at me and said, “Wow, how can you let her talk to you that way?”

  Asia just put it into words, and suddenly my eyes were opened.

  Up until that moment, I had never consciously acknowledged the way April talked to me, because, just as unconsciously, I had never believed I deserved anything better. “Jesus, Joey,” Asia went on. “She’s been going at you like that for as long as I can remember. That sucks, Joey, and you shouldn’t put up with it.”

  With all the work I’d been doing, and with all the levels of awareness I’d passed through, I was right up against the wall of my shell, ready to bust out. Asia’s comments were like the last stage in the chemical reaction that gets the chick to stick its head through the shell and up into the open air. What she was saying was, “This is not okay.”

  The pattern in my childhood was so well established that the relationships I entered into as an adult just naturally followed the same blueprint. My father and mother, Steven and Tim…my role in relationships with them was to be the accommodating victim. It’s like a lock and key, the two parts to the same puzzle.

  With April it was the same way. She was another powerful personality with issues of her own. Those issues pushed April into some pretty intense behaviors—demanding, controlling, and judgmental. But even given the slow way I’d become aware of the basic pattern, it still amazes me that it took me so many years to catch on.

  In 2007 I walked out of my big estate in Marshfield, and I’ve never looked back. The breakup was my idea,
and April was none too happy about it. The fractured relationship was something we both had to take responsibility for. We tried to work out the rough edges, but after a while I realized that the problem was so deeply embedded that it really couldn’t be reconciled. The path to my near destruction was so long and convoluted, and the road back toward health so demanding, that I knew I could never get where I needed to be if I were limited to working from inside an abusive marriage.

  I’ve taken a lot of heat for leaving—from myself, from others—but tough as it’s been, I know it was the right thing to do. I’ve had to ask myself if this was some “middle-aged crazy,” superficial decision, but I know that it wasn’t. This was a very painful part of a remedy for a lifelong problem.

  I know that each of us contributed to my misery. For years, April complained that I was shut down, but of course I was shut down. I’d been shutting down since the age of two! The task before me was to complete the process of opening up.

  In the past, whether it was Mickey or my mother or Steven or Tim or April, I gave these people power over me, in part because I allowed the pain that they themselves were carrying to penetrate my boundaries and reinforce the negative things I felt about myself. What I needed to do was build up stronger personal boundaries, first and foremost by building a healthier sense of self. Then I could allow those people to simply be who they are and to see them with compassion for whatever pain they felt. I needed to stop looking at the way my father behaved or the way Steven behaved or the way April behaved and change the way I behaved in response to them. I needed to find new ways of guiding my own life, changing the kind of relationships I participated in. I had to stop offering up my own sense of inadequacy, which merely encouraged their willingness to harp on those same inadequacies. I needed to stop buying in to the abuse, which meant getting out of my role as willing and enabling recipient. That’s the only way it could become clear that the behaviors of these people were about them, and not about me.

  The change I’m trying to make in my life is not about saying fuck you, but about finding a way to look out for myself (as well as for other people) and to have compassion for myself (as well as for other people), and the first step is to say that I deserve love, and that I do not deserve abuse. To accomplish that, I need to see these other people not as tormentors, but as individuals who have their own shit to deal with. Looking at it that way allows me to be compassionate toward them as well.

  What I’m working toward is to have a continuing awareness of the principles of emotional well-being so that I don’t need a therapist—or my stepdaughter at the kitchen table—to reflect things back to me in order for me to see them. It’s sort of like when I go to a drum lesson and I want to pick up some ways of seeing and thinking that I can then use on my own. It is about learning, and I always want to learn, whether it is about the drums or about myself. The learning process involves opening myself up and sharing more of myself with other people, people who are just as willing and who are also going along the same path in trying to increase their awareness and their compassion.

  Relationships change, but things really line up differently for me only when I achieve a different relationship with myself. A lot of the drama comes from trying to be right and trying to prove somebody else wrong. But my experience tells me that such a desire merely prolongs the pain. I have love and compassion for April, but I need to be in relationships where love and compassion are matched by respect, understanding, and support. April and I lost those latter three too long ago.

  I experienced a great sense of loss when my marriage broke up, but as for the material things that went with the breakup—I couldn’t care less. When I first had the opportunity to have finer things like cars and stereos and cameras, it was really nice. It was also novel, because I’d never had that kind of financial freedom before. But as I moved along in life and started to grow up, I realized that all the “stuff” and the comfortable life were part of the trap I was in. I was as anesthetized by money and the “stuff” it could buy as I had ever been by drugs and alcohol. Money and “things” put a beautiful wrapper around my wreckage. I needed to let myself do some unwrapping in order to see things for what they really were.

  In the house April and I shared, we had a piano that cost $30,000, and neither one of us plays the fuckin’ piano. I have an appreciation for the beauty of the instrument and for how it was made, and so I enjoyed having it. But in order for me to move on, I had to let it go. The same for all the other luxury items I left behind. It took me awhile to realize just how much the big house and the grand lifestyle were not important to me. Nobody put a gun to my head to get me to buy into it, and I could enjoy it, but it wasn’t really what sustained me.

  It’s amazing now how letting go of “stuff” has also eased my fear of financial insecurity. I would get stuck in that trap by thinking that whatever I had was never enough. I have to have more faith in myself and maybe more faith in life. To some extent, this means putting it all in the hands of a higher power, letting it go, knowing that everything will be whatever it will be. For me, that’s also called a huge step in the direction of being healthy and happy.

  In June 2008, just before the launch of the Aerosmith version of Guitar Hero, there was a surprise birthday party for me, and I was really moved to share in the realization that there are a lot of people who really love me. Steven was there, and we got to talking about the next tour and how great it was going to be, and it was like we were still twenty years old, brothers in arms, revved up to go out and take over the world.

  On our way to the stage

  Courtesy of Ross Halfin.

  Courtesy of Ross Halfin.

  I’m lucky that I personally still find so much that is rewarding and fulfilling in the music. That’s what it’s always been about for me—not the money or the fame. I just love to play the drums. After ten or twenty years with a band, a lot of guys are burned out. After thirty-nine years with Aerosmith, I know I still have a lot to learn, which is why, whenever we perform, I always go out and listen to the act that’s opening for us, to keep up with what the young guys are doing.

  I have my passion for cars, so I’m experimenting with new ways of enjoying that passion, of finding new challenges that have to do with cars. For one, I’m part owner of a dealership on the South Shore of Massachusetts called Corvette Mike. I’ve also talked to some other dealers in the area about partnering with them to sell high-end imports. It’s great if we can make some money, but I wouldn’t bother if it were just about the money. Cars are simply a source of beauty that really speaks to me. A love of cars was one of the things that was a bond for Tom and Brad and me, and its something where I have real expertise. It’s a way I can express myself and share the experience with people I love.

  I’ve taken down a lot of the barriers I put up with family and, really, the barriers I put up in life in general. I feel pretty solid in my new outlook, and one thing I know for sure is that, given the amount of drugs and chemicals I put into my body, I’m lucky to be here at all. Embracing that helps to allow me to experience real joy now in ways that were impossible back then; and there are a lot of people who bring a lot of joy to me. My son, Jesse, is a miracle and a gift. He’s now a drummer, too, with his own band called Destruments in San Francisco. Asia is doing great, living in Canada with her husband, Tom. They’re raising their daughter, Sophie, who is very smart and strong-willed like her mother. And just as I was finishing this book, Asia gave birth to a baby boy they named August.

  I am finding so many rewards that come with committing to heal myself. I have had to go through a lot of things, like lack of self-awareness, an enduring victim role, and suppressed anger. But I am willing to do the work, and now I’m in an infinitely better place and finally feel deserving and capable of relationships in which I am the best version of myself. Much in the way, as I said earlier in the book, that when the student is ready, the master appears, I have experienced what can happen as a result of being truly "ready" for
an open, loving connection with another human being. The “appearance” of Linda in my life, not as master but as loving companion, could not have happened without all of the work I have been doing. Work that has readied me for a relationship to which I can commit authentically with honesty, compassion, nurturing, respect, and love—deeply grounded in the openness, kindness, and generosity of spirit that is Linda. Our relationship is something I’ve never experienced before, and it’s a treasure. I’ve found companionship that amazes me. But looked at another way, it’s the most logical thing in the world, and I, like Linda, like everyone else, deserve to be genuinely happy and to experience love the way it was meant to be—but we had to be ready.

  This is what it’s all about

  Courtesy of Michelle Munday.

  In order to get my head and heart clear, I first had to allow myself to feel the pain and sink to the depths of an emotional bottom so low that the only way back was to learn to deal with the lows instead of numbing out to them, and then to move through them to get beyond them. But once I got to the other side, the job still wasn’t over. In fact, the job is never over. I have to keep it fresh, and I have to be aware, which means working at it every day. Every day I learn something, I put it to use the next day. I have to keep digging back in the box and putting a little oil on the tools to keep them in good working order.

  Looking back at that day in the Marlin Hotel, barely able to see through my tears, I know that I was lucky to have my breakdown. Seems strange to say that, I know, but I was given the gift of desperation, which left me with a clear choice—and I chose to get beyond that desperation. I was forced to strip down all my defenses and my ego right to the bone so that, with a lot of help, I could look at myself from the inside out. For me, this was the only way I could build myself back up and truly heal.