Makeup to Breakup (17 page)

I
was almost totally bathed in that white light when I began to hear
some noises. They seemed indistinct at first, but then I thought that I heard my name being repeated over and over. And in the background, I could hear horrific screaming and the words “Oh, God, help me. Help me. I can’t take the pain!”

Finally I opened my eyes and saw four doctors staring into my face. I was really pissed off that they had prevented me from going to heaven.

“Shut the fuck up!” I yelled at the source of that horrible screaming.

“Take it easy, Mr. Criss,” one of the doctors said. “You’re in a hospital and you’re in good hands. But you got a little bent out of shape in that accident.”

Then they filled me in. Fritz had been doing ninety miles per hour when he hit two telephone poles, knocked down a mailbox, and sideswiped four cars before ramming into a huge pole that caused the engine to blow up. The explosion threw me through the windshield and fifty feet into the air, at which point I went face-first into a curb in a fetal position. When the cops arrived at the scene, they didn’t even know I was there—they thought I was just some debris on the side of the road. When they finally found me, my heart had stopped and they had to revive me on the scene. As it was, I had broken all my ribs and all of my fingers when I went though the windshield, as well as busting my nose and sustaining a concussion.

I was the lucky one. Fritz had been belted in and he got caught in the inferno. He had burns over 70 percent of his body, which was why he was in such agony. He was so badly burnt that they had to give him morphine through the bottom of his feet. Bill Aucoin was one of the first civilians on the scene and he took pictures of the wreck but would never show them to me. They were too horrific.

They wheeled me into a private room and I passed out again. When I came to, the adrenaline had worn off and I was in agony. Lydia moved into a nearby hotel and visited me every day. Unbeknownst to her, Deb drove by the hospital every day and looked up at my room. She was afraid to come in and bump into Lydia, so she sent me a single red rose.

I had so many flowers in that room that it looked like a funeral parlor. But they started getting stinky and making me sick, so I threw all of them out. Except for that single red rose, which by then had withered considerably.

“Why are you keeping that one rose?” Lydia asked one day. with them anymore. when ick

“I don’t know,” I lied. “There’s something about it.”

After a few weeks in the hospital, Paul came to visit. He walked in indignantly and looked down at me with disgust.

“Look at you. You really fucked up,” he said.

“No shit,” I said.

“How long are you going to be here?” he asked.

“I don’t know. A while,” I said.

“You have to do your solo album. How could you do this? You’re really a fucking idiot,” he said.

What compassion. What heart.

“Well, I just came to see how you’re doing,” he said. “You’re not going to see me again. Oh, and Gene wanted me to tell you that he thinks you’re a loser and a moron and that you deserve everything you got. Good luck on your solo album, but he refuses to set foot in this hospital.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he wanted me to relay that message,” Paul said.

“Well, you did, so get the fuck out.”

Unlike the other two, Ace was by my side from the get-go. He came in the day after I was admitted.

“Cat! Look at you!” he said.

“I’m in such pain, brother,” I complained.

“Fuck this,” he said, and stormed out looking for a doctor. Seconds later, he had dragged the doctor into the room.

“You give him something for his fucking pain or I will burn this hospital down. Better yet, I’ll buy it and fire every motherfucker in here,” Ace said.

A security guard came into the room because he heard all the commotion, but Ace didn’t care.

“Bring in more bodyguards. I’ll kick their asses, too,” he said.

One night I was lying in bed in the hospital when this young nurse came in.

“Hi, Mr. Criss, how are you feeling?”

“I feel like shit,” I said. “I need painkillers. I can’t sleep.”

“Well, I’ll take care of you.”

She opened up the IV and I got some of that morphine drip.

“Are you feeling better?”

“Yes,” I said dreamily.

“I can make you feel even better,” she said, and she pulled the blanket down and gave me a blowjob. I couldn’t believe it. It was like something you’d read in
Penthouse Forum,
except she wasn’t that good-looking. Not that I complained.

When she finished, she smiled.

“I just wanted to be able to say that I gave Peter Criss a blowjob. I’m a big fan of your band.”

It was a great blowjob. I was coming and I was in pain and I had a kink in my back all at the same time.

She went and got a basin, wet a facecloth, and washed my dick, washed my balls, and put the blanket back on me.

“Good night, Mr. Criss,” she said. I never saw her again.

Fritz had been transferred to a major burn center by then. Eventually he;
font-weight: normal;s” made a full recovery and stayed in the business. When I got out of the hospital, I was still hurting and I wasn’t strong enough to go home. But we had to begin work on the solo albums, so I wound up staying in L.A., which was okay by me since that meant I’d see Deb.

I was head over heels in love with Deb. In retrospect, it was more lust. I was so taken by her beauty, but there was no depth to my feelings. No sense of companionship. I just wanted to fuck her every minute of the day. Was that so wrong? I didn’t think so.

Lydia had gone back to work on our new house, and the calls became less and less frequent. It wasn’t that we had a major falling-out. I was never that happy sexually with Lydia. It was impossible for her to measure up sexually to these girls who would do anything to boast that they slept with a rock star.

Deb could, though. She was a total party animal who could drink and snort as much as me. Plus she had a voracious sexual appetite. She was bisexual, which was really exciting since I had never had a girlfriend who went both ways. Later I found out that it was an asset in Hef’s world. His favorite thing was having three chicks at a time. He loved to watch and he liked to use elephant-sized vibrators. Deb once took me to a part of the Playboy Mansion where they had twenty-five vibrators and two-way dildos hanging on the wall. I liked Hef. He was a real role model for men: Who wouldn’t want to walk around in a bathrobe and get laid 24/7?

So all that hot sex had turned my head around. I convinced myself that I had fallen out of love with Lydia. I felt bad about cheating on her with Deb, but I couldn’t help myself. My dick was thinking, not my brain. When I decided that I was going to stay in L.A. to do my album, I went out with Chris Lendt and rented Vincent Price’s thirty-seven-room house in Holmby Hills, a stone’s throw from Hef’s mansion. I moved in with my bodyguard, Rosie. A few days later, I had him contact the Playboy Mansion and find Deb. He got her on the phone.

“Peter’s going to do his album in L.A., and he’d love to see you for dinner,” Rosie told her.

We went out to Chasen’s and she looked gorgeous. I brought her back to my place and we fucked all night and she moved in.

In retrospect, doing the solo albums probably put the final nail in the coffin of the band. From the start, Sean was against it. He thought there would be winners and losers, and that would be the demise of KISS. Sean’s idea was that we should each back the others on their solo albums.
But we got sucked into Bill and Neil’s grandiose schemes. We would make KISStory by releasing four solo albums on the same day. No band had ever done that before, and no band has done it since.

When it was time to break away and do the albums, Sean got depressed because he found out that he wasn’t going to produce mine. I had gotten together with Stan Penridge and worked on some new songs for the album. Stan and I would often get together and write when we were on breaks from touring. I decided that I wanted Giorgio Moroder to produce me. He had done a lot of work with Casablanca at the time and he would go on to do the music for
Scarface
. He turned me down because he didn’t like the demos that Stan and I had done, so then I tried Tom Dowd, who was Rod Stewart’s producer. Tom was in Mexico at the time, and the message he got was that a “Mr. Christ” wanted to talk to him about producing his album. By the time he cleared up the confusion and got back to me, it was too late.

So I went back to Sean, but he had simultaneously.

It’s a shame Sean and I didn’t work together on that album. He had a miserable time working with Gene. Gene was such an asshole then that he wouldn’t even call the great musicians Sean had rounded up by their proper names. He’d call them “Hey, lead guitar,” or “Hey, drums.” It took a revolt where they almost walked out of the sessions to straighten Gene out.

I wound up hiring Vini Poncia to produce me. He had produced Melissa Manchester, but I was more excited because he was Ringo Starr’s cowriter. We hit it off immediately. I hadn’t completely healed yet, so I played drums with little casts on each finger. It was incredibly painful but I had a goal in mind—to do the best album of the four and leave the band with dignity. If my fingers weren’t burning, my neck was in such pain I had to wear a brace. And when I really belted out a song, my ribs felt like I had just gotten stabbed. Vini was really impressed with my dedication.

I couldn’t wait to get to the studio every day we recorded. There were never any arguments, no fights in the room, no egos, unlike my other recording experiences. I treated the musicians as if they were my real band, as if we had been together forever. When we recorded “Rock Me, Baby,” I had three black backup singers and we all got loaded on champagne and put our arms around each other and sang our hearts out. This was the way an album should be made, having great fun working with a great producer and great people.

People often ask me how I come up with my lyrics and ideas for songs. Well, take “That’s the Kind of Sugar Papa Likes,” a song on the album that I cowrote with Stan. I was at the house one night watching Humphrey Bogart in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
and in one scene he finds out he has a winning ticket and he’s going to get two hundred pesos. He says, “That’s the kind of sugar Papa likes.” Of course, we changed the sugar reference from money to sex.

How I ever completed an album while I was living in Vincent Price’s house is beyond me. I really went into total Elvis mode. If Deb wasn’t enough of a distraction, I decided to fly in Stan, my old partner in crime. He cowrote a lot of the songs and he was a collaborator in all my drug experimentation. We’d do a session and then come back to the house and shoot some pool in the huge billiard room. If we got bored, we’d watch a movie in the theater that was almost the size of a small art-house cinema. Vincent Price had a huge vault for storing mink coats, so we kept our champagne chilled in there. He was a gourmet cook and he had a kitchen the size of an average apartment in New York. Rosie tried to follow Price’s recipe cards but half the time he almost burned down the kitchen, so for the most part we were living on Entenmann’s chocolate donuts, champagne, and cocaine.

While in L.A., Rosie had met a doctor who he thought was a pushover.

“It’d be a piece of cake to get some drugs from him.”

“You think so?” I was suddenly fully interested.

“He told me he loves you. He’d be happy to give you whatever you needed.”

I delusionald ever made a list. Fifty quaaludes, thirty Percodans, forty Valiums, thirty Seconals.

I didn’t think it was real, but sure enough, like clockwork every two weeks there’d be a big bag dropped off at the back kitchen door. Rosie would bring it in.

“Hey, boss, we got partying,” he’d grin.

I would throw these wild parties and invite a hundred people. I wouldn’t even necessarily show up at them because you could watch what was going on in the pool from a window in the basement. They couldn’t see you, but you could see them. So Deb and I would go downstairs with some champagne and a few ludes and watch everybody fucking, jerking each other off, guys finger-fucking chicks, and we’d fuck on the couch, watching them. After a while, I’d call upstairs, “Rosie, get the car.” We’d leave the party and go hang out at the Rainbow on the Sunset Strip.

We had been partying for five straight weeks when Lydia decided to come back out West. On July 3, I had sent her three dozen yellow roses to commemorate the day we met, but I kept dodging her phone calls. When I finally spoke to her, I told her that Rosie and I had spent the Fourth of July weekend in Malibu. I didn’t tell her that Deb was with us and that we had been at a great spa/resort that Deb knew about.

When Lydia arrived, I barely gave her a peck on the cheek. I was just not in love with her anymore. I told her that we shouldn’t have sex because I had gotten herpes from a blood transfusion at the hospital. I was fishing now. I told her that I wrote a song for her on the album called “You Matter to Me,” but that was a lie. Vini had written that song with John Vastano and Michael Morgan. I had to tell her something.

While Lydia was there, I went through my pockets and found all the credit-card receipts for that July Fourth weekend that Deb and I had in Malibu. I threw them into the wastepaper basket in my office and covered them with the other trash. I figured I’d dump it all when I got back from the studio that night. We left Lydia in the house, and while I was in the studio she turned everything upside down and found all the receipts. I couldn’t believe it. Of course, I insisted Rosie was my date. But I had a hard time explaining the receipt for two bracelets from Simon’s Jewelers.

Lydia hung around L.A. for a few more days and then went home. In August, Lydia got a call from Bill’s office. Sean got on the phone and
told Lydia that it would be a shame if that bitch wound up with all Peter’s money. When I found out about all this, I was furious.

I confronted Sean. “How could you have loyalty for Lydia and not me?”