Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  Paul is much more Machiavellian than Gene. Gene was crass and brutal, but he had a real naïveté about him. But Paul could cut your throat and he’d be out of the room before you even realized you were bleeding. He probably picked up a lot of techniques going to see his shrink all those years.

  Gene and Paul really have nothing in common. Gene embarrasses Paul in public with his crude behavior. Paul likes to feel that he’s cultured: He dabbles in painting. The only thing they can agree on is the importance of making money. Then they overlook each other’s faults and connive together to optimize their earning power.

  It was primarily the money issues that divided us on that tour. Having George Sewitt represent Ace and me was a huge mistake in retrospect. George threw a lot of fuel on the fire but when it came to crunch time, he folded like a cheap accordion.

  The bickering started when Ace and I got our first paychecks on the tour. The amounts didn’t seem right, so Ace and I grabbed George, threw him into the wall, and told him to get us more money.

  “I didn’t spend thousands of hours in a gym to get this chump change,” I protested. “We,” Ace said. “, which ed him’re on the cover of Forbes magazine, we must be earning some serious money.”

  So George made up a whole list of our demands and vowed to talk to Gene and Paul. He said Ace and I would get everything we wanted. The day of the meeting came and George actually wore a suit and tie. It was the four of us and George in the room. George started telling them all of our demands. They listened for a little while, and then Gene and Paul just reamed George out.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” they berated him. “You’re not our manager, Doc McGhee is. You’re just a guest on this tour.” They told him that he wasn’t going to come on the tour anymore unless they approved it, and that they didn’t give a shit what his concerns were.

  George started to melt. I’d never seen a man break down like that. Ace had to step in at one point. “Can you stop this? Enough is enough,” he said. They walked out of the room and George was devastated. His excuse was that he had taken a Valium before the meeting and it fogged his brain. Yeah, right. At one time this guy could do more blow than anybody in the room and he falls apart because he took one Valium?

  Ace’s response to all this misery was to retreat into his own cocoon of drugs and booze. Ace had a very large ego, almost on par with Gene’s, so it must have been extremely painful for him to be treated like an employee by those two. But doing coke and designer drugs was not the solution. Even I was lecturing Ace and telling him to straighten up. I would tell him that he couldn’t bullshit a bullshitter and I knew when he was fucked up. I’d remind him about his daughter and how’d she react to her father being blotto. But with a girl by his side to enable him, it was an uphill battle.

  The only time I got in trouble on that tour was when I had a little too much red wine. We were playing Madison Square Garden for three nights about a month into the tour and after the first show, I took my whole family to some nice Italian restaurant that Doc rented out for me. The bill came to five grand, but I didn’t care. They were so happy to have us at that place that they kept plying me with red wine so by the time I got back to the hotel, I was loaded. Red wine always made me romantic, so I started missing Deb. I decided I wanted her there at this glorious moment. I was back on top of the world: We had sold out the Garden for three straight nights. I was going to be rich again, a lot richer than her husband. And that’s all she ever wanted, right, the money?

  So I called her. It was about two in the morning in L.A. and I woke her up.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I don’t know, I was sleeping.”

  “Where’s Jenilee?”

  “She’s in her room, sleeping.”

  “Why don’t you get her and get something on and I’ll fly you to New York first-class and spend the week with me. I’ll wine and dine you and I’ll take you out and you can buy anything you want and we’ll have a great time.” I was drunk out of my mind. She was married to Mac by then, but I didn’t care. Just like he didn’t care when I was married to her.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Yeah, but so are you. This is a tantalizing proposition, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s nice, but I’m married, Peter. I have a son now.”_ w” ayis

  “Bring him, too. I’ve got a lot of money now, Deb. We could buy a mansion in Hollywood . . .”

  “I think you really have to sober up, Peter. I’m sure you’ll feel different tomorrow. Jenilee and I can’t hop on a plane and see you.”

  “All right,” I said, and hung up. The next morning I woke up with a brutal hangover and I thought, ‘What the fuck did you do, you idiot? You’re gonna do the same thing you did before, you’re that stupid?’”

  It was a reality check for me. I was so drunk and delusional that I thought I could do anything.

  Now that Deb was definitively out of the question, I went back to keeping my eyes open for girls. I actually had seen one girl backstage that first night before I went out to dinner with my family. I came out of my dressing room after the show and I met my best friend, Eddie, and his wife, Dottie. I was hugging them and I looked down the hallway in the Garden and I saw this tall blonde with black nylons. She was so hot. Plus I was a sucker for long legs. She was walking with this guy with long hair and I could only see his back.

  “I’ve got to have that,” I said, and Eddie laughed.

  “No, I’m serious. I want to see what she looks like from the front,” I told him.

  So I hugged them good-bye and I caught up with this woman. The guy she was with was Robbie Affuso, the drummer from Skid Row. He was a real sweetheart.

  “Glad you came down,” I told Robbie.

  “I wouldn’t miss it. You guys were so great,” he said.

  Then Robbie introduced me to the girl, whose name was Gigi. She had a flyer that she’d had signed by Gene and Paul and Ace, and now she asked me to sign it. I did it.

  “Is this your girl, Robbie?” I asked. They both answered no simultaneously.

  “Oh, that’s cool,” I said. “You’re really beautiful.”

  They were going to a Ford Modeling Agency party after the show. So I said good-bye but I kept checking out Gigi as they walked away.

  On the third night of the shows, I looked out into the audience, and there was Gigi again. I pointed at her with my stick and winked at her. There was a party after the show at the Rihga, where we were staying, and somehow I wound up in Gene’s room, where he was entertaining a stewardess and a beautiful girl we had met in Tupelo. Gene wanted to get rid of the young blonde from Tupelo and be with the stewardess, so he suggested that I take her downstairs to the party.

  We went downstairs and I felt a little dirty that I was sitting with this corn-fed twenty-one-year-old. I looked over and sure enough, there was Gigi sitting at a table with a bunch of hot girls and Ron Delsener, the legendary promoter. Apparently one of Gigi’s friends, who looked kind of trashy to me, wanted to fuck my brains out but didn’t have the nerve to approach me, so she had Gigi escort her over.

  Now I was sitting at a table with three chicks. Gigi started talking to Tupelo because she wanted to create an opening for her friend. But the whole time that I was talking to her friend, I was staring at Gigi. Before I could make a move, Gigi and her friend got up and circulated. Now I was desperate to get in touch with Gigi, so I left Tupelo for a second and went over to Ron Delsener and asked him to get Gigi’s number for me. He said it was no problem and I ,” Ace said. “ companyed himwent back to Tupelo. Then we went upstairs to my room and we were lying on the couch, watching TV, and I started playing with her titties. Then I threw her on the bed but I couldn’t get it up. I couldn’t handle being with such a young girl. I didn’t want to let her down, so I gave her probably the best head she’d ever received. She had a major orgasm and then she was waiting for me to fuck her and I went, “I really don’t feel well. I think you’d better leave.” She l
ooked at me like I was out of my mind, and I was. So she left and I went to bed.

  We had the next day off and I called Delsener and he came through with Gigi’s number. So I had a couple of beers and called her at home. She was a little taken aback that I had gotten her number from Ron, but she warmed up a bit and we started yakking for hours. I asked her to come over to the hotel but she told me that she was getting honored with a chip that night for twelve years of sobriety. That was impressive to me. I told her to drop by afterward, and she did.

  When she got there, Doc was sitting with Gene at a table by the bar and he told Gigi that I was up in my room and that I was expecting her. Well, that didn’t sit too well with Gigi, going up to a stranger’s room in a hotel. So she asked Doc if it was safe to go up.

  “Absolutely,” Doc said. “Of the four of them, Peter is the truest gentleman. He’s the oldest and the nicest. He will never, ever step out of line with you. I would bet my career on it.”

  A nice endorsement.

  She came to the door and I was happy to see her. I had ordered crème brûlée earlier and I hadn’t touched it, so we split it and then we talked. And talked. And talked. This girl could talk. She was obviously in tune with her emotions and she had hung out with older people so she seemed wise beyond her years. I was thinking that this was the greatest girl I’d ever met.

  Suddenly it was four thirty in the morning.

  “Why don’t you spend the night?” I suggested. “I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.”

  “No, I don’t want you to and you’re not going to touch me. I’m not that kind of girl.”

  “What do you think, you got gold between your legs?” I joked.

  “Well, yeah, and most men will dig for gold until they get it,” Gigi said.

  But she agreed to spend the night.

  Meanwhile, I was thinking, Yeah, right, you don’t want me to touch you, but once your ass is in the bed, it’s all over.

  I gave her a pair of my boxer shorts to wear and we both got into bed. I put my arm around her.

  “Don’t even think about it. I just told you,” she protested.

  So we each slept on our side of the bed. I was intrigued because this was the first chick who had turned me down since I had become a musician.

  In the morning we ordered breakfast and Doc came to the door. He suggested that I take Gigi with us to Boston for the next gig. We were flying for the first time in our new jet. Doc cleared it with the other guys, and Gigi agreed to go. She was going in the limo to the private jet. She was going to see the full power of KISS. She’s going to drop dead and she’s going to fuck me tonight in Boston. No way around that.

  We got to the airport and boarded the G-4 and I was floored. None of us ha,” Ace said. “, which ed himd ever seen such luxury in all our lives. Beautiful leather seats, a gorgeous bathroom, great food. It was obvious we were at a whole new level. We went in and everybody grabbed their spots. Doc and Paul sat toward the front of the main compartment. Gene went right to the rear because he hated flying. Ace, Gigi, and I sat in the seats next to the big table in the middle.

  Now, I know my boys, and they were all checking out Gigi. Then Gene started showing off and threw Gigi a prototype of the new KISS collectible baseball.

  “What do you think of this baseball, Gigi?” he asked her.

  She looked it over and saw that there were two pictures of Gene’s face on it, one of Ace, and one of Paul. And none of mine.

  “Well, it’s a nice ball, but where’s Peter?” she asked, and threw it back to him.

  “You didn’t give him permission to use your copyrighted image, Peter?” she asked me.

  Gene almost shit himself.

  “Yoko Ono,” he said with venom.

  We got to the hotel and we had a big meeting before the show. I was still hurt by what had happened the last night at the Garden. It was a Saturday night and we were running late and the Teamsters were going to get some outrageous amount of money if we hit overtime, so when we came back after our first encore, Tim suggested we cut “Beth.” He didn’t know that that was my big moment, especially in the Garden, where I would hand my mother a rose after I sang the song. When we came offstage after “Rock and Roll All Nite,” I was in tears and explained to Tim how important “Beth” was for me to perform at the Garden. He had unwittingly taken away my homage to the memory of my mother.

  I brought cutting “Beth” up again in the meeting and Gene and Paul just were ruthless, making fun of me and my concerns. I went back to the room where Gigi was and I was literally shaking and sweating.

  “What’s the matter?” Gigi asked me.

  “Could you just do me a favor and hold me?” I asked her. She was probably thinking that I was just conning her to have sex, but we laid down together in the bed and she just held me.

  “We just had a meeting and you don’t know how horrible these guys are,” I said. “Nothing has changed. I thought these guys were different, but they haven’t changed at all.”

  We played that night at the Fleet Center and the show sucked. Ace played especially poorly because Joe Perry and his son were in the audience, and having Perry there would always make Ace choke. That night I tried messing around with Gigi again but she didn’t go for it. I realized that this broad was serious. I flew her in on the private jet, had a nice steak dinner, she saw the band perform for free, and she still wasn’t putting out. I started thinking that maybe this was just the right type of woman for me. She actually thought for herself, she didn’t do drugs, and she was drop-dead gorgeous. Her ass could stop traffic. I wasn’t an ass guy, but I became one.

  The next day Gigi flew back to New York and we went on to Canada. I began to live on the phone with her. I was falling in love and I couldn’t wait to get back to my room after the show and call her up. And I hate the phone. We’d stay on the phone for two or three hours every night and I told her about my youth, my first wife, my second wife, all of my problems.

  About two months later we played Philadelphia and Gigi came d a nice chunk of change, w” ayisown to see me. We came back to the room after the gig and I was in full makeup and I leaned over to give her a kiss and she got all freaked out. Maybe it was my lipstick. So after I took off my makeup and stage costume, we sat down on the bed and Gigi suggested that we play cards. I think she said that to divert a sexual encounter, because we still hadn’t had sex.

  That night, I asked Gigi to go steady with me.

  “Like you’re my girl and I’m your guy and there’s no women for me and no other men for you,” I said.

  “Yes, Peter, I know what going steady means,” Gigi said. And then she said we should give it a try. From that moment on, we each gave 100 percent of ourselves into the relationship.

  Which meant that I was finally getting lucky that night. Sort of. The first time we had sex was not great. I felt pressure after all those months of a long-distance courtship and I had a problem getting stiff. The Spoiler was more like a noodle. This was complicated by the fact that Gigi had insisted that I wear a condom. She started lecturing me about AIDS and genital herpes, and since I was a rock star I was a prime candidate for all of that. I hadn’t put on a raincoat for what felt like centuries. So we argued about that for a while and I had to call and get one of the roadies to get one.

  Now that I had it, I had forgotten how to even put it on. Finally I got some sort of erection and it was getting bigger and I finally got the fucking thing on and it was half on and half off and I was losing it.

  “Take your time, I understand,” Gigi said.

  “There’s nothing to understand. It’s the fucking Trojan. It’s not used to being covered. C’mon, we’re not kids.”

  Finally she rolled over and I put it in from the back and came immediately. I thought, Jesus, mother of God, I waited all these months and it’s over already?

  So I dozed off for a few minutes and then I woke up and I was feeling horny and thinking I can keep it up so I started poking her in the
back to wake her and she said, “You’re not going to get it up again.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know, and then you’re going to get frustrated and you’re going to get angry.”

  “Well, maybe you should suck it. You don’t even know what to do,” I said, and we started arguing and she got up crying and put her coat on and walked out. Now I was pissed off and she was crying in the hallway and I felt like shit. I called her back into the room.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just accustomed to sex-crazed women that do wild things to arouse me. I’m not used to sleeping with a lady and being gentle. You’re like a butterfly, you’re really tender, and I’m not used to that. You’ve got to give me a little time to adjust.”

  We still had differences in what we enjoyed sexually. But I started weighing it out and I realized that in nine years I was going to hit sixty and it wouldn’t be about sleeping with four women or running naked through a hotel lobby. It would be more about really caring for one partner.

  Gigi was the first woman I ever met that really loved God, like I do, so there was a spiritual connection there that I had never experienced. All I ever missed about Deb was fucking her. I never missed her company. No marriage will ever last on a foundation of sex alone. Eventually the raging fire,” Ace said. “Is” will diminish into a pilot light.

  When Gigi and I first met, we were sitting there and I said, out of the blue, “The heart is a lonely hunter—”

  “Yeah, that hunts on a lonely hill,” she said, finishing the poem. She told me that when she was a girl she had found that poem and she loved it so much that she kept it in her wallet. Fireworks went off in my brain. I knew that Gigi and I had to be destiny.

  We had a break in touring and I took Gigi to Hawaii and we had a great time. I learned more about romance on that trip. I learned how to be nicer in certain ways, nicer than my usual no-holds-barred attitude about sex. When I left her early that last morning to go to the airport on my way to Japan, it was really emotional.