Makeup to Breakup (25 page)

“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=

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 husband 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.”

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.