Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  I remember looking out the back window as we drove off the grounds, vowing never to come back to a place like that. Then I looked at Deb and said, “I’m so sorry,” and we kissed and hugged like little kids in the backseat.

  We had a quiet Christmas Eve. We put up a tree and exchanged gifts. I wasn’t putting any medals on myself, but I was proud that I had made it through. I was so confident in myself that I had a couple of beers on Christmas Eve and nothing happened.

  But I was facing big changes in the new year. KISS was in turmoil. Ace had been miserable in the band after I left because he was on his own. “They were fucking animals,” he told me one day. “They ganged up on me morning, noon, and night. I lost every vote.” When we hung out together in Connecticut, he was always threatening to leave the band. He finally did in 1982.

  There were other changes, too. The album sales had declined and the tours were losing money. Howard Marks had promised my wife that we would never have to worry about money, but now management was singing a different tune. I was told that my house_ d” ayis in Darien was costing too much and that I should sell it and move to a cheaper place. They also told me that they could no longer afford to pay the rent on my parents’ new apartment in Queens. That really upset me. All of a sudden there wasn’t enough money to pay for a little apartment in Queens? My parents had never had nice things in their life. Getting them that little apartment made me feel so good. Now it was going to be taken away. I always felt guilty that I hadn’t done more for them. They had it so hard. But it wasn’t my fault they were losing that apartment.

  All I could think of was getting revenge on Marks and Glickman, who, in my mind, were fucking me. I was still raw from rehab and I wasn’t exactly making the best decisions. So I reached out to a kid I had met in rehab. Let’s call him Tony Vinzini. Tony and his older brother Christopher were at South Oaks for cocaine addiction. Tony was a little skinny guy, but Christopher was 250 pounds at least. He was in rehab for beating up a couple of cops and smashing their patrol-car window in. No jail: They put him in rehab. I told Tony who I was and he went crazy: “Oh my God, KISS!” One weekend he said, “My family is coming and we’d like to take you to dinner.” I went and met the mom. She had all the diamond rings, the leather skin from too much time down in the Miami sun, the bleached blonde hair. A million gold bracelets, a gold Rolex, and diamonds the size of your head. There was no father. They told me that he been involved in an accident in which he fell in front of a train and died.

  Their older brother, Louie, was running the family business now, some sort of waste-management operation. So we got friendlier. After I got out of rehab, they invited Deb and me out to their house. We got there and I was in shock. There was a guy standing guard at the front door with a shotgun. They lived on the water in Long Island, and there were speedboats docked in front of the house. There were a ton of expensive cars parked in front. In the backyard they had a huge swimming pool surrounded by statues of lions and horses and Zeus. It was like Disneyland meets the Parthenon.

  The clues were obvious, but I was clueless then. I was vulnerable. Obviously the older brother, Louie, picked up on that. I was such a mark.

  So I told Tony I was having a problem with my management and he set up a meeting with his older brother. Louie struck me as a very scary individual, but I was so consumed with revenge that I didn’t care. At dinner, I started telling Louie my tale of woe. I was in this huge band, they stole my money, they’re telling me I have to sell my house, blah, blah, blah.

  “Lookit, I’ll get your money back,” he said with great bravado. “We’ll straighten this shit out with these guys who ripped you off. You got books? Why don’t you bring me your books?” he said.

  I went to my safe-deposit box and I took all the financials that Marks and Glickman had given me over the years. I had never looked at them once. I brought the books over to Louie and he went through the documents, and then he knew more about my finances than I did. This had to be the craziest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some pretty crazy things.

  Next I set up a meeting with Howard Marks and Louie. I wanted Howard to know that Louie was now representing my interests. We walked into the office and Louie started asking Howard questions that made it clear he had read our financials. I could see that Howard was freaking out. He was shooting me looks like he wanted to kill me. Louie started demanding some exorbitant amounts of money that he claimed Howard owed me.

  “He already has a picture of my daughterTombu a deal in place,” Howard said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, it seems to me that you owe him a lot more money,” Louie said.

  “He’s got twenty-five percent of the band and he’s not even in it anymore. What more does he want?” Howard fumed. What I didn’t understand was why my parents’ rent couldn’t be paid anymore.

  They agreed to meet again to resolve the differences. I walked out of there content that I had some muscle behind me to get back at these guys. By then I had realized how connected Louie and his family were.

  The KISS office cut me off from any money, since Louie was disputing their figures. He had predicted that, so I was impressed. He convinced Deb and me to take twenty-five grand out of the bank so he could invest it: We would quadruple our money. Deb was so excited about this that she added ten grand of her own money. We handed over the money and Louie gave us promissory notes that looked as though they were drawn up by a sixth grader. Somehow he convinced me to have him hold my beautiful set of black-and-silver-striped drums, worth a good $15,000. One day a truck came up to my warehouse and they went into the truck, never to be seen again.

  He even worked on Deb and told her that he had good contacts in the modeling business and he could get her a gig with Jordache Jeans. Next thing, Deb was handing her valuable portfolio of all her work over to him.

  I turned my attention to selling the house. Deb was pushing for us to move to California, but that seemed too radical a step for me then. In the interim, I decided that we’d sell the house and put our stuff in storage and rent a house nearby. I wanted to turn the house over quickly. Louie decided that he was going to help me sell it. That’s when I knew something was wrong with the picture. I had a little voice telling me that maybe I shouldn’t give him the twenty-five grand, but Deb was confident he’d make us money. But the voice was getting louder. And it was saying, “Don’t do it, Peter.”

  We listed the house with a broker and soon enough, a couple from Texas was interested in it. But Deb made the mistake of telling Louie that we were about to sell the house to a really wealthy Texas family. A week later, the Texan came by our house. Apparently Louie had somehow tracked him down and threatened him if he went ahead with the purchase. Then he told the guy that if he did buy it, he’d have to pay Louie 10 percent of the sale because he was my attorney.

  “Who is this Louie guy?” the Texan asked me. “He’s following me around, threatening me.”

  I sat him down and explained the whole story. When I was finished, he just shook his head.

  “That’s crazy shit,” he drawled. “In Texas we’d kill someone for doing that.”

  “This ain’t Texas,” I said.

  A few days later I called Howard. “I invited the Mob in and I’m really sorry about it. We really should talk.” He suggested we meet in a tiny, low-profile bar near his office. He was waiting at the bar when I walked in but then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Louie and four guys follow me into the bar. Howard and I both turned white.

  Louie walked right up to me.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked threateningly.

  “What do you mean? I’m having a drink,” I said.

  “,” Ace said. “ted ever What’s Howard doing here?” He nodded in Howard’s direction.

  “We’re, uh, having a drink together.”

  “I don’t understand something. One minute you hate the guy, he stole from you, you want to get rid of him, and now you’re having a sociable drink with hi
m? What shit are you guys talking about behind my back?” he fumed.

  “What I don’t understand is what you’re doing here,” I said.

  “Let’s just say a little birdie told me there might be something going on,” he said.

  “There ain’t nothing going on,” I lied.

  I walked over to the bar where Howard had been watching all this.

  “Hi, Peter,” he said.

  “Hi, Howard.”

  “You told me you were going to meet me here alone,” Howard said.

  “Well, that’s a fucking dream,” Louie said. “That ain’t gonna happen. Whatever you guys need to talk about, you can talk about it in front of me.”

  “I have nothing to say. I’m leaving,” Howard said, and he paid for his drink and walked out the door.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  “I’m going home,” I blurted out.

  “Yeah, I think you should do that,” Louie said.

  A week later I was sitting in the house, having a couple of beers with my racquetball partner Don. Deb came into the room.

  “Louie is coming over, he wants to talk to you.”

  “I’m not talking to him. I thought we got rid of him,” I said.

  “He sounded scary and he said he was going to be right over,” she reported.

  I grabbed Don and we went out the back entrance of the house. There was a thick wooded spot not too far from the house and I led him there.

  “What’s going on? Why are we hiding in your own bushes?” he asked.

  “Look, I got involved with some bad guys and they want payback or something, so just be quiet. I don’t want them shooting us,” I said.

  “Are you kidding me?” This situation was just not computing with his Darien mentality. He shut up. After a few seconds, I heard a car come up and then the muffled sounds of a conversation.

  “I’m telling you he’s not here,” Deb said.

  “Bullshit.” I recognized Louie’s voice. “I know he’s here, and we’re going to find him.”

  I saw flashlights illuminating the backyard. Don and I were crouching in the brush like two little mice, not making a sound.

  They looked around the perimeter of the house, then they went back in. Soon after, I heard their car leave. We came out of the bushes and went back inside. Don looked like he was in shock.

  “They’re fucking crazy,” Deb said. “Should I call the police?”

  “No! Whatever you do, don’t call the police,” I said.

  That was the last I saw of Louie. But I still wanted my money and my shit back, so I hired a big-shot attorney who had been involved in the Agent Orange litigation. H,” Ace said. “ Jenileeed hime reviewed the case and wrote a letter to Louie’s attorney, but then he called me into his office.

  “Peter, if all you’ve lost is twenty-five thousand dollars and your wife’s portfolio and you can still walk, I would do just that. You say you might move to California? I couldn’t think of a better time. You don’t want to mess with these people.”

  I got the message. I dropped the suit.

  In retrospect, I think that Howard got these guys off my back. He was pretty connected himself to a couple of well-connected guys, and someone probably made a phone call and the trouble went away. Louie probably thought Howard was a piece of cake, a rube waiting to be taken. All I know is that Louie didn’t make any more trouble for any of us.

  But new trouble was lurking just around the corner. By then we had sold the house to the Texans and were living in a small="indent" aid=

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I’m sitting here and the view of the Pacific is just spectacular. We’re hundreds of feet above sea level and I only wish you can hear what I’m hearing now. It’s a coast guard helicopter patrolling the shoreline. I live in a very beautiful town, Palos Verdes, and I’m sitting here in my very special place that I don’t share with anybody. It’s a cliff that I drive to and park and sit on the edge and look for whales and check out the sailboats and watch these helicopters go by. I can even see Catalina from here. It’s just beautiful, man, totally beautiful.

  —Peter Criss dictation, 1984

  I didn’t know California then. All I knew was the Sunset Strip and Hollywood Boulevard. Deb went out to California a month before we moved out and found a place to rent, with an option to buy. It was up on a cliff in Palos Verdes. We had a ginormous living room with a spectacular view of the ocean. There was a small two-seater balcony off the living room. Both our bedroom and the kitchen also overlooked the ocean. If you went up one flight, there was Jenilee’s room, a guest room where I was going to set up my drums, and a large room for the pool table and,” Ace said. “un when ik all my gold and platinum albums. If you went out the sliding doors, there was a huge deck with a large swimming pool overlooking the ocean. Above us were just cliffs and rocks. This was like a movie star’s house. And it was costing us a movie star’s salary. We even had an elevator.

  Other than the occasional king snake in the swimming pool, it was paradise. Eventually I thought I’d start a band and write my book, but first I just wanted to enjoy California, get a tan, sweat, swim in the ocean. For the first year there, I fucked off. We’d go to Deb’s parents’ house every Sunday for a big family dinner.

  After a few months out there, I felt like a different man. I was actually mellower. I felt good about Deb—I didn’t fear that she was sneaking off and fucking Joe Kelly. We were a tight-knit little family. On Friday afternoons, I’d take my sports car down the hill and rent four or five movies and bring back a couple of shopping bags filled with Chinese food. I didn’t miss playing at all. I was a man of leisure. I woke up and went to sleep with Jenilee. In between we’d watch TV. During the commercials, I’d go to the kitchen for a snack and grab Deb’s ass. Life was pretty comfortable then.

  Deb and I didn’t have that much in common, so I made an effort to try to get into some of the things that she enjoyed. Deb liked golf, so I started playing. I was a natural at it, and it was something we could do together. I had a funny incident happen to me playing golf. I was in the men’s locker room and these black guys came in to play a round. They took one look at my long hair and one guy said, “Shoot, I didn’t know they allowed women in the men’s room.”

  “Yeah, we’ve all come a long way, brother,” I said.

  When Deb and I got into drinking together, it never worked out so well. We just didn’t get along when we got drunk. Even when we were sober, we’d still fight. Not the knock-down, drag-out, bruising and battling fights of our earlier days, but enough to keep you on your toes.

  After about a year or so of fucking off, I began to get the music itch again. It started when I took Jenilee to A&M Studios to visit. They all knew me there and they would let us come in and they would show her all the consoles. By the spring of 1986 I was ready to make a move. I had heard that the group Steppenwolf was looking for a drummer, so I met with their manager, Ron Rainey. It seemed like a good fit for me. They played real steady-Eddie beats, straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll.

  “I’m impressed that the drummer of KISS would come down for a job with Steppenwolf,” Ron said. “But I’ll tell you right off the bat, John Kay is no way going to have a drummer bigger than him in the band. He’d go crazy.”

  Apparently Kay was a control freak. Everything was business first, and they toured in a Winnebago that Kay had designed, playing the same reliable places every year.

  But Ron had gotten a tape from a new group that featured a chick singer named Jane Booke. Her husband was in the band, too, and they wrote the songs together. He told me they were looking for a drummer. I went down and listened to them and I thought they were pretty good. Jane was just adorable. She was around five foot six with unbelievably beautiful legs, the greatest ass, and big pouty lips accentuated by her flaming-red lipstick and framed by long, curly black hair that gave her a gypsy look. She’d have a guitar hanging off her—she couldn’t play it for shit, but it looked cool.

  The hu
sband played bass and he was good-looking, and they had this guitarist who was trying to stop drinking so he would smoke all the time, but Jane wouldn’t let him smoke in the loft they rented so he was going crazy. He could play, though.

  We started playing together, and we sounded great. They had never played with a hard drummer like me, so their light-poppish sound became heavier. Jane sounded like Chrissie Hynde and did all those Chrissie moves, and I liked that since I had a great view of her little ass in front of me all night.

  Ron got some money for us to do a demo at A&M, and it was like a homecoming for me. The demo came out okay and Ron started shopping it around. They had come up with a name by then, Balls of Fire, which I hated. We kept rehearsing all the time at their downtown loft. It took me an hour and a half to get there from Palos Verdes: That’s how dedicated I was to making this thing work.

  Jane kept telling me that she didn’t know who KISS was, so I invited her and her husband to my house. I showed them all the gold and platinum and they were in shock.

  “Wow, you guys sold a lot of records,” she said.

  “Yeah, we were a pretty big band,” I admitted.

  “Were you bigger than the Bay City Rollers?” she asked.

  I wanted to take a straight razor and cut my wrists. How could she be that stupid? Now I was pissed.

  We went into the kitchen and I was feeling disrespected.

  “By the way, if we get a record deal, I want fifty percent of everything. We’ll get a deal because of my name, so I want the lion’s share,” I said.

  They went crazy and told me they wouldn’t give me any percentage of the band. I told them I would quit. We finally decided to let Ron figure it out.

  By then Ron had sent Atlantic the demo and they liked it. So he set up a showcase for us at the Whisky A Go Go where all the Atlantic execs could come down and hear us live. I couldn’t believe that I was doing the Whisky after headlining Madison Square Garden, but I thought, “What the fuck. The Doors played there.”