Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  That night, the whole place filled up with KISS fans wearing either black KISS T-shirts or Peter Criss T-shirts. We were in the dressing room, oblivious to all this, when Ron came in.

  “The Atlantic guys are all out there,” he reported. “Plus a lot of KISS fans.”

  “How many of them?” Jane asked.

  “Pretty much the whole audience is KISS fans,” he admitted.

  “Are you kidding me?” she moaned.

  “It doesn’t matter,” her husband said. “When we go out there, they’ll go crazy.”

  “Absolutely. For me,” I said. “See, that’s why I want fifty percent.”

  “Whateverrrr,” she said.

  Finally it was time to play. We walked out there and the audience started chanting, “PETER! PETER! PETER!”

  She started counting off the count but none of us could hear it, the crowd was making so much noise. We started the song and she was standing right in front of me and someone yelled out, “Get the fuck out of the way! We can’t see Peter!” Then the audience started chanting, “GET OUT OF THE WAY! GET OUT OF THE WAY! WE WA_a ” ayisNT PETER! WE WANT PETER!”

  Jane went ballistic.

  “If you fucking want to see him, here he is,” she screamed, and she smashed her guitar on the stage and walked off.

  “Get the fuck off!” someone screamed back, and then everyone started requesting the songs I sang in KISS. Her husband dropped his head, put his bass down, and left the stage, followed by the guitarist. I came around from the back of the drums to the front of the stage, blew some kisses, and then I left too. The guys from Atlantic walked out, and that was the end of Balls of Fire.

  I enjoyed being onstage again, however short-lived it was. And it was time to start making some money. We were living off the proceeds of the sale of the house because KISS had stopped paying me. When I relinquished my 25 percent share of the partnership assets, I never realized that the character and makeup I created was part of that agreement. Later, this would become a bone of contention. So that was the end of the revenue stream from KISS. Still, I never paid attention to my finances. Deb had total charge of that. My best friend, Eddie Mulvihill, was always telling me that he was convinced that Deb was siphoning off my money, especially after we got taken for that twenty-five grand by Louie. Eddie always had my back. He was my rottweiler, just like Sean Delaney used to be. Eddie worried more about my money than I did. He told me that they would do blow together and she’d bitch and bitch about losing ten grand of her own money in that deal.

  “That cocksucker idiot,” he told me she said. “I lost my own personal money. I should start opening up my own bank account.”

  I never thought too much of it until I saw that she started getting statements from a bank that wasn’t our neighborhood bank.

  I could never know if Deb was ripping me off. When we needed money back in New York, we’d just go to the office and ask for some and they’d open up a big leather bag, give you three or five or ten grand, and make you sign a receipt for it. She could have easily done that and stashed some of it away. One thing I did know: We weren’t going to be able to keep on paying an exorbitant rent if we didn’t start making some money.

  You know sometimes you can get real scared, you think you’re lost and you think it’s over, man, and you figure the glory days are gone. And now I face the pressures of everyday living that I never knew about. Being in KISS, it was always taken care of for me. Now that I’m a parent of a five-year-old girl, I find that the stress is enormous. Sometimes I freak out at night and go out on my balcony, look out over the ocean, and say, “Man, is it over? Do I still have it? Am I too old?” I guess every man must ask himself these questions when he’s struggling to get back on top of something he succeeded at. I want to make money and enjoy playing music at the same time. I get scared, man, I think maybe it’s not going to happen for me again. I’ve got a young wife, I know she loves me, but . . .

  I just get scared. All I know about is drums, man, that’s all I’ve ever known and that’s what I do the best. You know in sports when you’re a young, tough jock, you can do a lot of moves. When you get older, you can’t do those moves. That’s what happens to us in music too, especially drummers, it’s such a physical instrument. But I am a survivor. I am a survivor.

  —Peter Criss dictation, 1986,” Ace said. “ds”

  After the Balls of Fire fiasco, I couldn’t get anything going for the next two years. In 1987 I did get a chance to play with my old pal Ace, though. By then I had really assimilated into California and I had grown my hair long and dyed it blond. I don’t know why Deb hadn’t intervened and said, “You’re Italian, are you out of your mind? There are no blond Italians.” I actually thought I looked great. Don’t forget—it was the ’80s, the Hair Band days.

  Ace called me up and told me that he was going to play in L.A. with his group Frehley’s Comet, and he wanted me to come down and jam. I brought Jenilee with me and we had a great time.

  Ace’s band played a great set and on the final encore, he announced, “I have a really good friend who I called up and he said he’d love to come down and he’s here tonight. Peter Criss.”

  I came out and the audience went crazy. I walked out with my blond hair and a black tank top, tight black leather pants, and my high-tops. I waved and then got behind the drums and we played “Deuce.” It was a home run.

  Playing with Ace whetted my appetite. In 1989 I hooked up with a guitar player named Mark St. John. Mark had a short tenure in KISS, but they had crippled him to the point where he couldn’t play anymore. He had played on Animalize, and by then Gene and Paul weren’t talking to each other. So Gene had booked studio time in one studio and Paul was recording his songs at another place. Paul would call Mark to come by to record and he’d get there and Paul would be there with the producer and the engineer. Paul would tell him what to play and Mark would go into his Eddie Van Halen shit because that’s how Mark played, much too busy. He’d work with Paul for six hours. Then Gene would call and have him come to his studio, where he’d work him for another six hours. Mark told me that he would have to go home and put his hands in ice because he couldn’t move his fingers. When they went on tour, his hands failed him during the first show and they fired him. He went to a doctor and the doctor said that he had worn out his cartilage.

  I thought working with the former guitarist of KISS would surely make Gene and Paul crazy, but it made me crazy. I’d go to his house to rehearse and half the time he’d have overslept. One time the door to his room was open and I found kiddie-porn magazines from Germany all over the floor. It was really sick shit. This wasn’t Ace jerking off to a poster—this was way, way beyond that. When we recorded some demos with a singer we’d picked up, Mark came to my hotel room the night before at three A.M. with a cheap hooker and asked me to hold his eight ball of coke. After he left, I flushed the coke down the toilet. I was furious. It cost me thousands of dollars to pay for the demos and they were a disaster. We never came close to getting a deal.

  Around the same time, I decided I wanted to write my memoir. I hooked up with some publishing company on Sunset Boulevard near A&M Studios. I told the head honcho there my tales of woe and all the crazy KISS stories and he thought it would make a great book. They kept sending ghostwriters over to my house to work with me and that was a disaster, too. So I drove down to Big Bear and got a cabin and started dictating my story. I’d give them the tapes and the writers would come back with something that had nothing to do with what I said. I’m a Brooklyn kid, I talk with a certain syntax, and these guys were just fabricating a_a ” ayis different Peter Criss. So I dropped that idea.

  By the end of the eighties, Deb and I had to downsize once again. One day Deb came to me and told me that the realtor said it was insane that we were paying so much in rent and that it would be prudent to buy something. So we put down a chunk of money and bought a brand-new townhouse in Redondo Beach.

  It was spacious enough to house my pool table
and all my records, and we had a nice private backyard. We had a big sundeck and a storage area that I converted into a makeshift studio. But it was Redondo Beach. It wasn’t Palos Verdes, it wasn’t Beverly Hills, it wasn’t even Manhattan Beach, which was much more expensive.

  One good thing about being in Redondo was that I got totally into biking. I had dabbled with it in Palos Verdes, but now I got serious. I bought a custom-made bike and I’d get up at four A.M. and ride along the coast from Redondo all the way to Malibu and back. I was never in better shape; my leg muscles were like steel. Riding was a great natural high and it was always fun to ride past all those beautiful California girls in their skimpy little bikinis. I’d come home really horny after a ride and jump on Deb.

  I figured I’d get a band together, and Deb thought about going back to modeling, doing some catalog work. That was the plan. Deb tried to get bookings but it wasn’t happening, so she started a gourmet-basket business out of our garage. She’d take imported salamis and cheeses and mustards and spruce them up in a nice basket and sell them. That should have been my tip-off that money was running out.

  My relationship with Deb was as flat as my career at that point. I really loved her, but I didn’t think she really loved me. Sure, she loved me when we were living in a mansion and we had money up the ass. But now she was pushing thirty and she realized the party might be over. We never had a deep relationship. We never made a spiritual connection. We never talked about our feelings. But we still were able to regularly push each other’s buttons and fight. I remember we were sitting in the car one night. Nothing seemed to be going on musically for me, and she turned on the little light over the dashboard and said, “That’s the last fucking spotlight you’ll ever have.” I was just crushed.

  That only made me double my efforts to get a band together. A guitarist friend of mine put me in touch with a Canadian songwriter named Phil Naro. I got his demo and it blew my socks off. He was a great writer, and he hit the notes with the kind of clarity Steve Perry had. Phil told me that Gene and Paul were hip to him and Paul wanted to write with him. I convinced him to come down to Redondo and write with me instead. When he got there, I think he was a little bit uncomfortable with me smoking the occasional joint. He was a born-again Christian and he didn’t do any drugs at all. I don’t think he liked being away from his wife and newborn kid because he was calling her all the time.

  But I started cracking the whip, and we wrote every day. It was like having Stan Penridge around again, but better. This guy could sing like an angel. Now I didn’t have to be the lead singer. I could still do “Hard Luck Woman” and “Beth” and “Black Diamond,” but he could sing the new songs we were writing.

  Part of my urgency to write stuff and get the band together was thanks to a little letter we had received from the IRS. Apparently some of the tax shelters that Marks and Glickman put us in when I was with KISS were bogus, and now we were all on the line for a million dollars in back taxes. Of course I didn’t,” Ace said. “ds” have nearly enough money to pay it off, so we decided to find a tax attorney who could represent us.

  Deb had met this fat woman named Maureen, whose kid went to the same school as Jenilee. Maureen’s kid was a troublemaker and was always getting Jenilee into trouble. I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree: Maureen’s husband was in prison. Maureen worked at a big law firm that did a lot of environmental work, and she recommended that we go see a guy named Bob “Mac” McMurray.

  We met with Mac in his office in Santa Monica. He was a typical lawyer: tall, blue eyes, dressed suave, a lot of confidence. He promised to refer us to a tax guy, and he also said he could help me with my music career.

  With the IRS hanging over our heads, Deb got a job as a perfume girl at Nordstrom. The gourmet-basket business had gone to hell and she was getting nervous about our money situation. Eventually she worked her way up to salesperson, but it was still a far cry from being a lady of leisure in Darien.

  As if things couldn’t get any worse, I found out that my mother was sick. I flew back to New York and went with her to see her doctor the next day. After her examination, I asked if I could see the doctor in private. My mother was furious. We went into a nearby room and the doctor broke the news to me that my mother had cancer. It had started as lung cancer, but it had progressed to her bones. Now they wanted her to do chemotherapy.

  I came back out shaken. On the way home, my mother gave it to me.

  “You son of a bitch, what was that about? Now you’re Mr. Big Shot, you’ve got to talk to the doctor alone and find out what’s wrong with me? I know what’s wrong with me—I have cancer and it’s a reality and I’m not happy about it.”

  She had really changed. She was angry and bitter about her fate. She was only sixty-two but she had smoked Pall Malls all her life and never really followed through on follow-up visits to doctors. But now she was going to get chemotherapy, so I went back to California. I called home every so often and my sisters would tell me that Mom was doing okay, so I thought things were under control.

  Then, on New Year’s Day 1991, I got a call from my brother.

  “You better come home, Ma’s dying.”

  I was devastated. I hung up and called a travel agent. I had to take three planes to get to New York. I drank all the bars out on each flight and I still couldn’t get drunk, I was so sick to my stomach. Did my wife come with me? No. I took these horrible flights alone, rushing home to see my mother die, because Deb came up with some excuse not to go.

  I finally got into the city five hours later than scheduled. I rushed right to the house. They had an apartment at the back of their antiques store. I knocked on the door and my dad opened it. He had his head down and I walked into the room and I looked over and my mother’s bed was empty. The sheets were all made up.

  I sat down on the bed.

  “She passed on five hours ago. There was a blue moon out and it was shining on her face through the window of her room and she looked like an angel,” my dad said.

  “Maybe you were blessed that you weren’t here,” my brother, Joey, said. “You wouldn’t have recognized her.” My mother was a big Irish-German woman, but she was down to sixty pounds when she died. Despite what Joey said, I was crushed that I never got that chance to say goodbye a picture of my daughterEK ever and tell her how much I loved her.

  I sat on her bed and felt a huge wave of guilt wash over me. I was too late to hold her hand, too late to kiss her good-bye. Sure, I had been wrapped up in my problems with the IRS and trying to start a band and a rapidly deteriorating relationship with my wife. But now the closest person in my world was gone.

  How could I have fucked up like this? I didn’t have millions anymore, but I had some money. I should have rented an apartment in the neighborhood or even slept on my parents’ couch so I could be there for her. It took me a couple of psychiatrists and a couple of good benders to accept the fact that I didn’t fuck up. I should have, could have, would have, but it was too late. So now was I supposed to carry a cross forever? My mother would never have wanted that. She always understood me. She was always my pal.

  I stayed in Brooklyn and we made all the arrangements for the funeral. I called Deb and broke the news to her and asked her if she could come out as soon as possible. She gave me some shit about something that she was doing in L.A. When I asked her to bring me a pair of my dress shoes for the funeral, she told me to buy some new ones. And when she finally came out, she was a day late.

  We had a three-day wake for my mom. They were three of the worst days you’d ever want to have in your life. I was the oldest son, so I greeted all the people at the door so my dad wouldn’t have to. I had to sit there all day looking at my poor mother in the casket. That was the last time that I went to an open-casket funeral.

  Deb came on the second day and I felt no sympathy at all from her. It was clear that she wasn’t in love with me anymore. Her hugs were fake, her tears were fake: It was all a show.

  I hardly m
ade it through the burial. I was in a state of shock the whole week. That was why it barely registered that there were reporters hanging around outside the funeral parlor. When I came in or out, they would ask me crazy questions like, “What’s it like to sleep in the toilets of Santa Monica?” I just thought they were there because I had been in KISS. My father even got a call from a journalist who asked him, “Is it true that your son is a bum, sleeping in the streets?” My father went crazy and hung up on the guy.

  But when I got back home, I got a very disturbing phone call from John Good, the vice-president of DW, my new drum company. They were just starting out and I was only the third drummer to sign with them, but I really liked them, and John and I had become close friends.

  John sounded concerned. “Peter, are you okay?”

  “I’m fucking far from being okay, John,” I said.

  “Well, it’s all over all the tabloids,” he said.

  “What’s all over?”

  “They say you’re totally broke and you’re sleeping in the toilets of Santa Monica,” he said.

  “What are you talking about? You’re on the phone with me in Redondo. I just got back from New York, where I buried my mother.”

  He was confused. He didn’t know anything about my mother, he just knew that his office was fielding a ton of calls from fans who were concerned that I was a homeless bum in the streets of Santa Monica because they read about it in Star magazine, and then all the other tabloids picked the story up.

  “Peter, I’m so sorry. I guess you haven’t read the papers_a ” ayis. They wrote that you had burned through all your millions and you were homeless now. I would look into it when you’re feeling up to it.”

  I checked it right out and I was blown away. There was a photo of some bum who was claiming to be me lying in the toilets in Santa Monica, and next to it was a photo of me in my KISS makeup. I was furious. But it got worse. Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr, who were big fans of mine, were scouring the downtown area of Los Angeles, looking for me on skid row.