Makeup to Breakup (41 page)

Then I came back to Mother Mary. I was on the balls of my ass and I owed millions to the IRS. I used to bring my Mitsubishi to get repaired in Santa Monica, and driving around the neighborhood I found a big church called St. Monica’s. So I went in and figured that I should start praying to Mary. She had helped me get through those crises when I was back in school.

“Mary, I owe three million dollars, my face has been bashed in, I tried to kill myself. You’ve got to help me, you can’t let me stay like this. I don’t know what to do anymore, I’m at the end of my rope. You’ve got to give me a miracle.” And I got it. A few weeks went by and George Sewitt called me and told me that we were going to do ,” Ace said. “ing oned him
MTV Unplugged
. You know the rest of the story.

I realized that my mother wore a Mary medal her whole life. (In fact, I wear it now.) Then I realized that I could never say no to my mother. So I figured that if Mother Mary came around and said, “Look, I need you to do me a favor,” what is Jesus going to do? Say, “No, I don’t have time. I have other miracles to perform”? No, he’s gonna take time out for her.

I’d be a liar if I said that my faith was so strong that doubt never crept in. I certainly doubted God when I got my cancer diagnosis. That whole time I just felt numb. When I was cured and when I later found out that Gigi had beat her cancer, too, I never really felt grateful to God. I was going to church twice a week to pray but the only emotion I felt was anger. I was angry that Gigi and I had both gotten cancer, and I felt guilty that I had beaten it when so many great people die from the disease.

One day I was at my local church and I got on my knees and prayed. Then I went over and sat in the booth with my rosaries. The church was empty and all of a sudden, it just hit me. I felt such shame for not showing God any gratitude for saving us both from dying.

I sat there and I heard, “You ingrate. You come in my house and doubt
me? How dare you? I saved your wife, I saved your life. How can you be so selfish?”

Tears started pouring out of me and I cried like I had never cried in my entire life. My stomach hurt from crying so much. I felt like I was about to throw up. A woman came into the church, but I didn’t care. I got down on my knees and wailed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I should be so grateful to you.” She turned around and ran right out of the church. I must have cried for an hour easily. I finally settled down and I felt like a new man, like I had been cleansed. I left the church and drove home and I felt like I had taken forty tranquilizers, I was so calm. I really felt that God had touched me.

Surviving everything, including the cancer, should have given me some insight and made me appreciate this glorious immaculate conception, should have made me dance on flowers every day and think, Oh, my God, I’m so happy to be alive! But that’s not in my personality. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve become a more serious Peter Criss, a deeper Peter Criss. I made a lot of mistakes when I was wasted on drugs, but I’ve also had my trust violated so many times. Trust was the most important code on the streets. Trust, honor, integrity, respect—all those things were very sacred to me. Then the trust was violated—by the mother of my daughter, by my manager, by my bandmates—all these people to whom I really gave the keys to my heart. So I have barbed wire around my heart, scars from the rock ’n’ roll wars. I’ve got battle fatigue.

My life’s been in a lot of turmoil lately. I haven’t really been active creatively since the CD I put out five years ago. I haven’t been in front of the public eye to hear that clapping—which is the true addiction, not the drugs. So I start feeling worthless and useless. Doing this book has stirred up some deep, deep feelings. I’ve been having weird dreams about Debra, and dreaming about Lydia and my daughter. Then I had a nightmare where some guy was chasing me and wanted to stab me. I’ve been opening doors to things that I haven’t talked about in years, scary things. But as an artist I know that it won’t work unless you put every fucking bit of your heart and soul into it.

I got up the other day and my brain just felt so overloaded; I felt so depressed. Then I went ,” Ace said. “qu” ayisto the gym, and that didn’t help. For the last few days I’ve been so melancholic and angry. I get to the point where I really
want to bolt. Maybe take a trip up to New York, check in to a hotel, get room service, see a show, just get away from it all. But I’ve learned that what you’ve got goes with you. You go to Paris, you’ll still have the same problem when you wake up in Paris. So the other day I was like, “I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to play my to be the fir

Then I was sitting in my studio and I looked at a picture of my daughter with my granddaughter. My relationship with my daughter has been very rocky over the years. It kills me that we don’t have a loving presence in each other’s lives. Then itd worse and I start having a panic attack and my heart starts beating really fast and then I’m not even thinking clear and I’m working on pure anger. All of a sudden I hate myself for not doing what I said I was going to do, work all week on my album, be happy and be positive. So now I’ve got a crown of shit, and I call it the Jesus process, where the crown gets really heavy and I feel the pain and I’m ready to take that gun and stick it in my mouth and say, “Fuck it, because there’s really nothing left here anyway for me.” And then I think, Am I a manic depressive? Maybe I’m bipolar? Finally I say, “You know what? I’m going to go to church. I’ve got to go talk to the Man and try to calm down or I’m going to take a heart attack.” Even then I’m thinking, So I’m going to say a few Hail Marys, and who are you kidding, this shit is going to keep going.

But the minute I open the door and walk in, it hits me in the ass and I bless myself and I’m in this place of total quiet and beauty. And I think, You don’t even see the guy, but you believe in the guy and he has a lot of these houses, all over the world. There are Jewish houses he owns, Protestant houses and Catholic churches. Talk about having houses built for you—no rock star will ever have houses built like this. And it makes me very humble and I realize how grand and how strong God is. So do I believe in him? Yes. Do I doubt him? Yes. I do doubt God a lot at times, and I talk to him about it.

So I go into the church and I do an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and an act of contrition and then I go, “Father, I ain’t doing well. I’m ready to kill myself. I have such pain. I just had an anxiety attack like I can’t tell you.
And my body hurts. I just feel like I want to die. I mean, look at the shit going on with me. I really miss my daughter and my granddaughter a lot. The holidays just went by again, and I didn’t see her. You have to help me with this. My writer’s going to be at the house in an hour. Doing this book is so painful. Do you understand, God? I want you to talk to me and make me feel better.”

And as I’m saying all this, I start getting answers.

“Oh, really? You got some pain? Your breast is hurting? The one you had the cancer in that you caught just in time so now you’re in my church, which you wouldn’t be if you didn’t get it just in time? That problem? The one that some people die from?”

I start realizing I have nothing to say.

Then I get, “So where are you living?”

“Oh, I got a nice house with a swimming pool,” I answer.

“Really? ,” Ace said. “ing oned himDo you know that fourteen million people are out of work? Do you know that some people live in a tiny cubicle and now they’ve lost their jobs so they can’t even pay their rent? And you’re bitching? How’d you get here? What are you driving?”

“Well, I have a BMW.”

“A BMW? You could have a little Corolla. Okay, you got any money in the bank?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re coming in here bitching to me about your minute little problems, Peter. You’ve come in my house many times and told me about some serious problems: when you your mother had cancer, when your wife had the cancer, when you had cancer, when your band ripped you off, when your best friend hurt you. I’d rather hear these problems than see you having a panic attack the last two days, hating yourself, wanting to jump through the window. ‘Oh God, no one loves me. I’m not worthy of this world. I feel like a dot on the wall.’ I’m not going to give you any pity or any mercy. Be grateful. Get out of it and be happy and leave my house with a smile and realize you’re walking out, not going out in a wheelchair.”

And it works. I’ve been praying that way for a long, long time, and I know if something ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Whatever way I talk to that man up there, I’ve had a pretty good run. I should have been dead many,
many times. I should have been on skid row at times. I should have OD’d many times. I should have been shot by one of my wives. I should have come to my end like all the other rock stars that I’ve seen die in these ways. I should have been a casualty of these wars, but for some reason I’m not.

So I can’t really feel any regrets. I almost died from drugs, I almost died in car crashes, I had cancer. Did I learn? Abso-fucking-lutely. I drive like an old lady now. I wouldn’t ever dream of doing serious drugs again. I wrecked some cars, I wrecked some rooms, I wrecked some marriages. And I paid for all that.

As much anger as I still harbor for the way the band fucked me over, I realize that the Christian thing to do is to forgive them. I’m working on that. To forgive is to live, and I intend to live a lot longer. It’s not healthy to hold on to that anger and let it fester.

I’m also trying to work through my anger toward Ace. I loved Ace. I would have cut off my arm for Ace, and he betrayed me like Judas for some pieces of silver. I was crushed by that. We were both street kids, he knew the code. His actions were so reprehensible that I’m sure that’s one of the reasons that he doesn’t even talk about the reunion and farewell tours in his book.

L
ife goes by so fast. I often look back at my life and ask myself: did
I do enough? Did I say enough? What am I leaving behind, a Cat face and the band KISS? Did I really make my parents happy and proud of me? Was I a good dad? I keep questioning myself more and more. I think everyone does that as they get older.

I’m getting older and closer to the box, and I don’t really want to be a grumpy man. I don’t really want to keep on holding on to that pain. I’m trying to forgive to live, but it isn’t always easy.

Sometimes when I get melancholy, Gigi comes over to me and grabs my face and says, “I hear you bitching, but you amaze me. You’ve almost been killed, you’ve been through hell and back, but you’re here. Babe, you’re a survivor and I love you to death and so does God. You have changed so many people’s lives for the better. What a blessing.” She’s right. I am a survivor. I think that comes from growing up on the streets of Brooklyn. Everybody has a breaking point. I’ve been beaten up and stabbed and shot at, and I’ve made it through. My first two marriages went sour, but I got through them with the help of God. Somehow I even summoned up the strength not to pull that trigger when I was sitting on the floor in Hollywood with the debris of my life scattered around me.

Maybe some of that strength came from having created something that will never be duplicated. KISS was a special band. There will never be another band like my band. It took special chemistry to create something
that was so unique and compelling that it became a band that put on events, not just shows. We created a rock ’n’ roll circus with the members flying through the air, spitting fire, and levitating a hundred feet up. We were a band, not a brand.

We resonated with our fans because, in the beginning, we were just like them. I was a skinny kid with big ears and dark circles under my eyes, the kid who had to join a gang to protect himself from getting beaten up every day. All four of us understood what it was like to be the underdog, and in us our fans found hope whether they were white, black, green, orange, whether they were gay or straight. We told them to lift up their heads and be proud of who they were. And they did. They are the KISS Army.

I loved my band. There was nothing better in my whole life. KISS was the band I always wanted to be in. I gave my heart and soul to KISS—in the beginning and even in the end, and my heart is with them still today. I blew out both my rotator cuffs from drumming my ass off, and I had hand surgery because my tendons were literally hanging off my fingers. I couldn’t even hold my sticks, I had to tape them to my hands, but still I played. After all, you wanted the best, and I gave you the best.

So how can I be negative? How many people came from the gutters _a when ikof Brooklyn and achieved their dream of playing that great cathedral of entertainment, Madison Square Garden? I know I made my parents proud. I will always see their faces in the crowd as long as I live. And I’m proud that I influenced untold thousands to pursue their dream and pick up their sticks or guitars and play music.

I’m prouder still about the work I do to fight cancer. Every October I hit the streets with thousands of people and march to raise money for breast cancer research. I’m a spokesperson in raising awareness of male breast cancer. There’s not a platinum record or lifetime achievement award that can touch the news that a person’s life has been saved because he heeded my warnings, went to his doctor and got treated in time.

It’s funny when I look back to when I first started playing music. I remember telling my mom that all I wanted in life was a cute white-picket-fenced house and a gold .45 record on the wall. Well, I got a lot more than that. I achieved things beyond my wildest dreams. So now it’s
time to go into a new phase and enjoy the rest of my years. I really don’t want to put on spandex and scream “Black Diamond” anymore.

But I still play drums every day. And I write songs. Whether I put them out eventually doesn’t really seem to matter—I’m a musician first and foremost. I’m always going to be in my studio, putting in the time, jotting down lyrics.