Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  Deb and I decided we had to sue the tabloid that was putting out this phony story, so we went back to Mac, the lawyer who was helping us out when the IRS got on our case. Mac said he had the perfect lawyers who would sue Star magazine and get us a big settlement.

  While we were waiting to see the lawyers about suing the tabloids, Mac got a call from The Phil Donahue Show. They wanted me to come on and talk about having an imposter pose as me. Mac was convinced that it would be a good thing to show to the world that the story was bogus, so we agreed to do the program.

  I had second thoughts. I looked like shit. My hair was still blond, I had put on a few pounds from drinking so much, and I was zoned out on tranquilizers because I was so out of it from losing my mom. I was literally anesthetizing myself morning, noon, and night over it. On top of that, add the IRS problem and the fact that I was getting that vibe from Deb that things weren’t really copacetic with us. But Mac was putting the pressure on and Deb wanted to go because it meant first-class everything, so I agreed. I just wanted it all to go away, I was so hurt.

  We got to New York and they brought us to the studio. They hid us backstage and put the imposter, a guy named Christopher Dickinson, on first. Phil was asking him how he could run around impersonating me: Didn’t he have any remorse for causing me all these problems? The guy was a total alcoholic maniac and he didn’t seem to care at all how any of this affected my life. To make matters worse, they had a girl and her mother who had flown this guy out to her house and let him live there for a week, thinking he was me.

  Next thing you know Phil said, “Well, we have the real Peter Criss here, and we’re going to bring him out now.”

  I came walking out, and they all looked at me in shock.

  “You know, you made my life a living hell,” I told the guy. “You made me sick and my mother just passed. How dare you?”

  Out of nowhere the chick says that I, the real Peter Criss, screwed her. She said that she had heard that I was homeless and she flew this guy out to her house but that when he got there she realized he wasn’t me. But now that I was here, she claimed that she had an affair with me.

  I was ready to kill someone at this point.

  “My wife is here,” I said. “Can my wife stand up for a second?”

  Deb stood up. She looked really classy and beautiful.

  “Look at her and look at you,” I said to the girl. “Do you really think that I would sleep with you after I married someone like that? You’re a pig.”

  The audience went crazy.

  Phil started taking live phone calls, and Lydia and my ex–road manager George Sewitt called and both vouched for my character. That was nice of them.

  When the taping was over, I went over to Dick,” Ace said. “ds” inson.

  “Are you happy about what you did to my life, you fuck?” I said.

  We were backstage in the dressing room getting ready to leave when Donahue came in.

  “I feel really bad for this guy,” he told me. “Why don’t you and I both throw in a grand and we’ll give it to him?”

  “Fuck you,” I told Donahue. “You want me to give him money after he made my life a living hell?”

  Donahue left the room. I was infuriated. What a jerk. Later on I found out that this Dickinson guy was crazy. He was going all around L.A. impersonating me—booking time at A&M Studios, ordering limos under my name. But I couldn’t even get satisfaction from outing this guy, I was in such profound pain over the loss of my mother. Everything that was said to me I heard three times. It was like I was experiencing life behind a smoky mirror.

  Meanwhile we had a lawsuit to pursue. These young lawyers that Mac found for us were great. They arranged for People magazine to come to my house and do a photo spread to show I wasn’t homeless. We did mock trials: They put together big blowups of photographs of the imposter and me side by side. They were convinced that we would kill Star magazine at trial. We never even got into the courtroom. We met their lawyers in the hallway and the two sides talked. My lawyers came back to where we were standing.

  “They want to give you a substantial amount of money and we’re out of here. Or we could go to court. It might be costly, but I think we’ll win. That’s why they’re making such a generous offer,” my lawyer said. He strongly suggested I take the money and run, so I did.

  That little bit of good news was overshadowed by the news I got from Bill Dooley, a nice engineer at the Record Plant who had felt sorry for me and given me free time when Mark St. John was running up my bill in the studio. I invited him and his wife to dinner at our house. We also had Mac, the lawyer, there because he was divorced then and it would be nice for him to have a home-cooked meal. The next day, I saw Dooley in the studio and he looked a little squeamish.

  “Can I tell you something, Peter?” he said. “It’s really uncomfortable, but I feel close enough to you that we can talk about it.”

  “What?”

  “My wife says that your wife is fucking that lawyer that we had dinner with last night.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, Bill,” I protested.

  “I love you, man, and you’ve been through a lot with your mom and the tabloid shit, but you have to know this. My wife saw them making out in the kitchen while we all were shooting pool.”

  I didn’t want to believe Bill, but deep down I knew he was right. I had felt those vibes for months. It certainly explained why Deb wasn’t with me on that flight to see my dying mother. She was too busy back in Redondo fucking Mac.

  Now that I was back in L.A., I redoubled my efforts to put together a band. I really wanted to get on the road and escape the hell that my life had turned into. It was really hard on Phil Naro to get comfortable with us and the daily arguments Deb and I were having. Plus he might as well have been a male version of “Beth,” calling his wife every fifteen minutes. He stayed with us a little while longer and we wrote a beautiful song about my mother dying called “B,” Ace said. “ A” ayislue Moon Over Brooklyn.” The demos we did were good, and I wanted to take a band out on the road, but he freaked out. He wanted to get back to his wife and kid. I really liked Phil. He was great but it just didn’t work out.

  I was getting all these musicians through my friend Bob. I had met Bob when I was still living in Palos Verde. Bob sold the best fucking marijuana in the world out of his small mobile home. We became incredibly close, and Bob wound up just giving me all the pot I needed. In return, I let him hook his camper up to my electricity source. I’m sure the neighbors loved that.

  Bob was a real authentic granola-loving hippie who introduced me to a Spanish guitar player named Ray Carrion, who brought in a bass player named Mark Montague. And along with Phil Naro, the first incarnation of Criss was born.

  When Phil split, we replaced him with a singer named Phillip Anthony. I rented out a little rehearsal space in Redondo for twenty bucks a day and we rehearsed our asses off. All the guys had day jobs because I didn’t have the money to pay them. I was riding on my fame just to convince them to join the band. When it got too rough and someone wanted to quit, Bob would bring them pot, and these guys were just pure weedheads—no coke, no pills—so that convinced them to stick around. They were all hungry to make it.

  We did a couple of shows in November of 1991 at the Exposure 54 club in downtown L.A. To me it was atrocious to be back in a club, but these guys were flying on cloud nine because they were onstage with a famous person. They all bought special clothes and made their hair up all chicky and we got a great response. It was enough to make me get an agent and start touring.

  But we still couldn’t get a record deal. We floated the demo around to Geffen first, but they were like, “No way.” Then we took it all around town but we got shot down everywhere. The record industry had jumped on the grunge bandwagon, and that wasn’t my kind of music. It wasn’t rock ’n’ roll. None of the guys could believe that we couldn’t get a deal, but it wasn’t like KISS was doing so well themselves at this point. They were on the
balls of their asses, losing money left and right.

  Meanwhile things just seemed to be deteriorating with Deb. I still hadn’t confronted her with the news I had heard about Mac. We were fighting a lot about the most trivial things. I noticed that she was a little more cynical and a little more cocky than usual. That was probably because she had a rich lawyer waiting in the wings.

  So after one fight, I decided to bluff her.

  “I’m going to move out and take my gold records,” I told her.

  “Fine, take them and go,” she said. She was so cold.

  We’d say shit like that and then we’d make up. But not this time. We got into another fight, and I repeated my threat. I started taking my records down off the wall, but instead of stopping me, she didn’t say a word. In fact, she even took me to Hollywood and helped me pick out a place to live. So all of a sudden, we were getting separated.

  “I don’t want to live with you anymore,” she said. And then she told me all about Mac. I can’t remember the exact words, because hearing them was so devastating my brain went blank. But the gist of it was that she was seeing Mac and she wanted a divorce.

  I was miserable living alone in Hollywood. My friend Bob the hippie thought that he would cheer me up by setting me up with a skinny little rug-rat ,” Ace said. “Sd ever blonde who had done some porno films. We talked a few times on the phone, some hot, nasty talk, and then one night I answered the phone and it was her.

  “I’m downstairs in front of your place. Why don’t you come down and get me?” she said.

  I was lonely and I figured I’d check her out at least. She was sitting downstairs, and she actually looked pretty good. So I brought her up to the apartment. Nothing happened that night, we just talked, but I saw her another time and she came to a rehearsal. That day I took her back upstairs and we tried to get it on in bed. We used to do a thing in KISS called the reach-around. When you’re making out with a girl, you stick your finger in her pussy, move it around a bit, and then, while you’re still in front of her making out, you surreptitiously take a whiff of your finger. If there was no odor, she’d pass the finger test. But if she smelled funky, there was no fucking.

  Well, this chick did not pass the test. She was definitely a “Whoa.” So we got into bed and started fooling around and I couldn’t really get it up. The whole thing was too depressing. But at one point I get semihard and I got as far as putting the head of my dick in her pussy before I freaked out about catching something from her. Later I obsessed about it and felt like my dick needed to have a year of not being touched because I went into the most unholiest hole in L.A.

  A few weeks later, I took Deb and Jenilee out for dinner at Benihana. We had a few of those crazy mai tais, so Deb got a bit of a buzz on. I dropped them back at the townhouse in Redondo and I got out of my new Eddie Bauer truck to say good-bye and Deb told me to wait there, she and Jenilee just wanted to get out of their clothes. Well, Jenilee didn’t return, but Deb came back in a see-through nightgown. The truck was in a carport and Deb led me to the back of it where nobody could see in and she opened her nightgown and she was naked and she grabbed me and wanted to fuck right there on the truck.

  I would have, but it suddenly hit me that I had been with that rug-rat tramp a week before. The last thing I wanted to do was give Deb some disease. I did have class.

  “We can’t do this. We’re separated,” I protested, but I didn’t tell her the real reason I was holding back.

  “Go to hell,” she said, and tightened her robe and stormed off. Then my daughter came out and said good night to me. And my shot of ever fucking Deb again was over.

  Of course, I had no disease—it was all in my head. I should have thrown her over the truck and given her the fuck of the century, but I didn’t.

  A week after that, Deb called me and begged me to come over. I got there and I had never seen her so distraught.

  “Mac broke up with me,” she was crying. “He dumped me and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m so in love with him.”

  I was sitting there like, Should I shoot her or just throw her through the window? My heart was breaking and she was going on about this schmuck dumping her. But as much as I was pissed off, if she would have said, “Come back to me,” I would have. I was that stupid and still in love with her. Of course, a couple of weeks later they got back together.

  It was only a matter of time until I got served papers. Deb’s fat friend Maureen, who introduced us to Mac, came by my apartment one day with her kid and Jenilee. I opened the door and she handed me some papers.

  “What’s this?” I asked.,” Ace said. “ds”

  “Read it,” she said, and stood there gloating. I should have punched her right in her fat fucking face.

  I didn’t look at the papers, but I had an idea.

  “No, you’ve got to read them and see what they are,” she said. She just wanted to see my expression.

  “I’ll read them later.”

  “No, I have to wait. Debra told me,” she said.

  So I pulled them out of the envelope and it said, “You are hereby served that Debra Criss is filing for a divorce . . .”

  She broke out into a shit-eating grin. I just slammed the door on all three of them.

  Then I sat down at my kitchen table and just stared at the papers. This was it. The end of the line. The reality just slapped me in the face. I had always harbored the fantasy that maybe Deb and I would get back together. Sometimes I’d call her mother. Betty, Deb’s mom and I got along great. I really felt she loved me. She’d say, “You guys may get back together. She’s seeing this guy, but who knows?”

  When I got the papers, it was the death knell to that idea. I had put thirteen years of my life into that relationship and now I had nothing. It went further than the money; it was devastation. My family was now officially shattered. The white-picket-fence life was forever over. I sat down at the table at three in the afternoon just staring a hole in those papers, and when I finally looked up at the clock, it was three in the morning. I don’t know where all those hours went.

  While we figured out the divorce, I got to see Jenilee every weekend and on holidays and birthdays. Saturday morning was like Christmas for me. I’d wake up elated and then pick her up like clockwork and take her to Disneyland or to the park. We’d eat Chinese food and rent spooky movies and then I’d bring her back Sunday night. Driving home alone after dropping Jenilee off was pure hell. I would play sad music and cry all the way home.

  By now my settlement with Star magazine was finalized. Out of the settlement I hads and they got

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I woke up the day after the earthquake in a much better place. I was in the middle of recording the Criss album, and I did have a record deal and a great bunch of guys who loved me. It’s not like I had nothing. That day, I had an appointment for my yearly checkup with my doctor, Terry Hammer, who was also a close friend: I always loved seeing him. He’s such a giving human being. I got in my rental car and had to take the local streets to Torrance because the town was a mess and a lot of sections of highway had collapsed.

  We talked a little bit about the earthquake, and then I confessed to him how close I had come to committing suicide.

  “Really?” he said, concerned. “I think I should give you something for depression. You’ve been through a lot, Peter. Your mom dying, your marriage dissolving, the earthquake . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “The thoughts are gone. I’ll be fine.”

  “All right, but call me if you need me,” he said. “I’m always here, and I love you.”

  I went back to the car for the ride back to Hollywood. Before I took off, I checked the trunk of the car. I’d brought the bag with my hundred thousand in cash because I didn’t want to leave it back at the apartment. I had heard there was a lot of looting going on post-earthquake. I also had the .357 in the bag, along with a .38. And, just to be safe, I was carrying a tiny .25 automatic in my money pocket. You could
n’t be too careful amidst all this chaos. Hey, I was a street kid.

  On the way back I got detoured and wound up in a shady part of Venice. I pulled up to a stop sign and there was a six-foot-four-inch black guy who looked really fucked up in the crosswalk. He was taking his sweet time to walk in front of me and I got pissed. I was ready to run him over. When he just about made it past the car, he hit the side of the hood with his fist.

  I gave him the finger.

  I looked down for a second, and the next thing I knew it felt like my head had shattered. This guy came around to my open window and punched me right in my orbital bone, shattering my cheekbone and part of my jaw. It helped that he was wearing big brass knuckles.

  I had never been hit that hard in my life. Not only did I see lights, I saw explosives. I slumped over, I was in another world. Now this guy had the door open and he was tugging at me, trying to get me out of the car. Thank God my seat belt had jammed. I had sort of come around and I saw that he’d gotten frustrated and was walking away.

  That’s when I thought, “Shoot the motherfucker. Take the .25 and go behind him and shoot him in the head. You won’t get arrested. He hit you with brass knuckles, he tried to rob you, you’re famous, and you shot him in self-defense.”

  “But you don’t just shoot someone in the back of the head,” another part of me argued._f” admitted.

  “You were in shock. Any good lawyer can get you off that. Just show the jury your injuries.”

  I wasn’t really rational at this point, but I finally realized that the last thing I needed to do was kill someone. I was bleeding profusely, and the best thing to do was to get home. I got to the apartment and gingerly walked through the rubble to the bathroom. The mirror had shattered, but there was a big enough piece of it to check out the injury.

  “Holy fucking shit,” I gasped. My face looked as if it had been run over by a truck.

  I got really dizzy and I went into the bedroom and fell on the mattress that was on the floor, and passed out. The next morning, I woke up in excruciating pain. I looked down at the mattress and it was literally soaked in blood. I called Michael, my new guitar player, and he came right over. He took one look at me and turned pink, purple, and blue.