Makeup to Breakup (23 page)

When it was time for dinner, they served roast beef. But they wouldn’t give us knives to eat it with. Do you know what it’s like to eat roast beef with a plastic spoon?

I didn’t sleep well that first night. But I was stuck there because I had voluntarily signed in, so I figured I’d better make the best of it. Out of the twenty-five or so patients on this ward, four of us were kicking alcohol, two of us were in for coke, and maybe a couple were kicking heroin. The rest of the people were mental patients. The ward was nicknamed the Flight Deck because it was where you took off from. But from the looks of most of the people there, they weren’t getting very far.

I got incredibly lonely my second night there. I hated sleeping alone. I missed the camaraderie of being out on the road with an army of guys. I started thinking about Deb and her seeing me in a place like this. Then I thought about letting my parents and all our fans down. I felt so guilty for getting so out of control, for not being able to handle the drugs, Mr. Cool Tough Italian Kid from the streets of Brooklyn. I found out later that it was actually normal to feel this way, it was part of the therapeutic process, but right then I just felt like such a loser.

I was lying in bed and these thoughts were just flooding my head. I saw Jenilee and then I saw myself as a little boy and it was Christmas and we were bringing a tree home in the snow. I started crying uncontrollably and I couldn’t stop. Just then, a young male nurse walked into my room and sat down on my bed. He was around five foot ten, probably weighed around 170 pounds, dark hair, a really nice-looking man. He had pens and pencils in his perfectly white starched jacket.

“We’re going to get you through this, Peter. It’s tough tonight, I know, but don’t worry,” he said. Then he told me that he saw me perform once at Madison Square Garden and that I was terrific. Now I felt even guiltier, a fan seeing me like this. It killed me. But he couldn’t have been any sweeter, and we talked for hours on that bed. He made me feel good about myself.

His visit got me through that horrible night. The next morning, I asked the head nurse at the desk if I could see him again.

“Uh, Mr. Criss, we don’t have any male nurses on the night shift. This is a lockdown ward. There was no male nurse on.”

“Bullshit. He came into my room and told me everything was going to be cool.”

“I’m sorry, but there was no male nurse on duty last night.”

I thought to myself, “Holy shit, you idiot. Either you hallucinated that whole scene or you had an angel come into that room.” Deep down I knew he was an angel. And right then I decided that I was going to stick this out and get better.

One morning I went to the breakfast table and there was a beautiful girl sitting across from me. I looked at her—I couldn’t help it, she was so pretty—and I noticed that there were burns on her arms, and her wrists had scars on them, and her throat had been cut in three different places. I couldn’t believe that a girl that pretty didn’t want to live.

I spent a week on that ward. I didn’t like it; it wasn’t easy to see people getting put into straitjackets and shuffling around and staring vacantly at the big TV. On Saturday night they had a big party and we could all stay up late, watching TV and eating potato chips and pretzels and drinking soda. It wasn,” Ace said. “ted ever ’t like drinking champagne and snorting coke and getting in a hot tub with some naked women, but it had to do.

After a week, Dr. Rai asked me if I wanted to stay.

“You can legally leave now, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. “The full program is nine weeks, and if you did that I would be very proud of you.”

I thought about Jenilee and how much I didn’t want to lose her. I was worried about Deb, but I was more worried about my daughter. So I thought, I can do nine weeks.

After a week on the Flight Deck, they moved me to a ward that had only alcoholic men. The place smelled like a fucking drunk tank and it was impossible to sleep with all their snoring. I would sit up all night and bullshit with the head nurse because I didn’t want to lie down with all these drunks. Deep down I felt really bad for those guys. I spent a week on that ward and finally they transferred me to a much nicer unit.

Now I was on a ward with my own people—the cokeheads and junkies. Finally I could sit and eat with people who didn’t want to shoot themselves or cut their wrists. It was just a bunch of guys relating war stories: “Yeah, I started with a line and next thing you know I was shooting coke . . .” It was funny, I had been such a rebel my whole life, but in here I never broke the rules. I did everything I was told. I never once caused a fight or gave the nurses a bad time. I was never confined to my room. I was a model patient because I really wanted help.

I was also learning major lessons in humility. I couldn’t just go out and have a steak at Peter Luger’s. I had to eat whatever they were putting on the plates that night. They had a chapel there, and I went to it every day and got a lot closer to God. I did so much praying, I should have been a priest. I started realizing that the drugs had changed my personality, and after a few weeks I felt like I didn’t have that monkey on my back anymore. But still I would beat myself up and wonder, “How the fuck did you let yourself get to a point where you needed to be here? How could Peter Criss do this to himself ?”

Whenever I got on that guilt trip and felt like such a failure, Dr. Rai was there to lift me up.

“You did nothing wrong,” he’d say. “You’re just like every other Tom, Dick, or Harry. People fall into the trap. People get addicted. You’re not above all that. I hate to tell you that even though people tell you you’re a big star, you’re not that unique.”

I felt comfortable in this new unit. They woke us up at five in the morning for breakfast and then I’d see Dr. Rai for an hour. Then we had group therapy and then a class about the chemical impact drugs had on the body. After lunch we saw another therapist and then had a few other classes. You’d see your doctor again for a brief time after dinner, and then we had another group session before lights out at ten o’clock.

I would lie in bed all night thinking about how I wound up in this place. I realized just how much pain I had to endure to do my job. I’d tear ligaments all the time, in both of my shoulders, just like a professional athlete. But we were in the middle of a tour so we couldn’t stop. We had to think about our careers. So I’d see a succession of doctors to get those huge cortisone shots to alleviate the pain. The injections themselves
were extremely painful, but I took them because I wanted to play. I remembered when we had to stop that European tour and I had to be taken off the plane in a wheelchair because_ d” ayis I was in so much pain. I had to lie on my couch in my brownstone for weeks and just rest. If I had continued, I wouldn’t have been able to play again for the rest of my life, the docs told me.

I remembered getting a shot from a quack doctor at the L.A. Forum just so the show could go on. I had to play that show—we were taping it for
Alive II
. By then my right hand had been broken a few times. I had been partying with Ace the night before the show. It was getting to the point that we were getting so big and people were screaming so loud no matter what we did that the success almost got depressing. We were doing the same songs night after night after night. I needed an out from all that, and the drugs were it. Right before that show I remember putting half of my makeup on, looking over at Ace, and saying, “Ace, I can’t go on, I think I’m going to die.”

I felt the room was closing in and my breathing became erratic. Sean and Bill conferred and Sean ran out and found that fugazi doctor who gave me the shot. I felt like I was playing on another planet that night.

Eventually our road managers would travel with a footlocker filled with sleeping pills, pain pills, muscle relaxants. The show must go on. Just keep me going, and they’d worry about it afterward. It got to a point where I wouldn’t go on unless I had coke. And the promoters would supply the coke. Everyone had coke: The roadies had it, the truckers had it, the groupies had it. I’d lie in bed in rehab and think about all the insane events that had conspired to get me there.

Our little group got tight. There were two pilots who flew for Pan Am who were coke addicts. They told me that they used to steal the whiskey from the hotel minibars and stuff them into their pockets so they could take the edge off the coke when they were landing.

“I could have been on one of your planes and you could have killed me,” I protested.

“Yup, that’s why we’re here,” one of them said.

There was a nurse, there was a plumber, there was an electrician getting help. I got friendly with a reporter named Tommy who worked for
a big newspaper. And a motorcycle cop named Tim who was in there for alcohol addiction.

My story was just like any of the others’. I was addicted and I wanted to stop. I was doing five grams of coke a day. If my nose was bleeding too much to snort the coke, I’d take a cold capsule, empty the little beads out, fill it with coke, and take it orally, just to get high. My habit ran into thousands of bucks a week.

I was really shut off from the outside world. Deb and my parents didn’t even know I was in the hospital. After four weeks they allowed me to have visitors, and Chris started coming by every weekend. He’d bring me a couple cartons of cigarettes, which I didn’t need to smoke anymore since I wasn’t doing blow, so I passed them out to the other patients. He’d also bring me candy and magazines and fill me in on what was happening at the office.

The band sent me one fucking card the whole time I was there.
GOOD LUCK. GLAD YOU ARE THERE. FUCK YOU. GENE, PAUL, ACE
. I guess they thought they were being funny. Other than Chris, I had no contact with anybody else in the office.

Right after my fourth week, the doctor told me that he wanted to bring my parents up.

“No way,” I said. “I don’t want them to see me here.”

“You’ve got to have them come up, a nice chunk of change, d” ayis” Doctor Ray said. “It’s part of the treatment.”

The day they visited was the worst day of my life. My mother came in and shot me a look that was just crippling. I’ll never forget it until the day I die. It was like she was saying, “How did you get here, after all that work, all those hours of practicing, all those years of suffering? You finally became what you wanted, you married a gorgeous woman, you have a beautiful daughter and a beautiful house, and now you’re in a nuthouse.” I could just hear that internal monologue.

Ironically enough, it was my father who cried like a baby, the guy who could never show any emotion to me at all.

So I started crying, too.

“I wish I could help you,” he said.

“Me too, Dad.”

He must have gone through three hankies. My mother later told me that he cried all the way home to Brooklyn.

“I told you that woman you married was crazy. Now look where you are,” he said.

“Don’t talk like that,” Dr. Rai said. “You have to be positive.”

“What positive?” my father said. “He wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that crazy girl he married. And where’s your big-shot band? And your manager? Where’s all the people who said they loved you to death? They got rich, and you got addicted and put in the nuthouse.”

The session had become a nightmare. Dr. Rai told them that I was a cocaine addict and I didn’t have any control over it and they were going to clean me up and put me back into society so I could go back to my music. But until then, I was staying right there and he would like it if my parents could come up and visit me more.

“You’ll never see me here again,” my mother said, and they left. I went back to my room and cried my eyes out. I felt like a pile of shit. My own mother was refusing to come back because she was so hurt. She loved me so much that this was all too much for her.

Now it was time to deal with my wife. I had tried to write Deb a few letters the first few weeks I was in there, but Dr. Rai wouldn’t let me send them. He told me they were a little too emotional, but I think, in retrospect, that he was worried Deb would leave me. And that was the last thing I needed at that point. I later found out that Deb had actually written a letter to me after Chris told her that I was in rehab. It was a very heavy good-bye, adiós, it’s-all-over letter. She told him to bring me the letter, but Chris never did. He held on to it and eventually tore it up because he knew that if I read it, I would have broken out of that place and flown to California.

But Dr. Rai was preparing me for the worst.

“You know you may go home and she may not want you still,” he told me. “You may straighten yourself up and feel great about yourself and you may still go home to an empty house and a divorce. We hope that’s not the case, but I want you to prepare yourself for that, if it happens.”

So he felt it was too early for me to see Deb and the kid.

I had to be content with seeing Chris. But there was something strange
going on there, too. One time Chris came up with some long legal documents concerning KISS that he wanted me to sign.

“You cannot do this,” Dr. Rai said. “He is in no state to sign such documents while he is in treatme_ d” ayisnt here.” So Chris finagled them into allowing me out for a walk on the grounds. We walked out to a large field and sat down on a bench and Chris opened up his attaché case and took out some documents. He had me sign them and then he quickly put them back in his attaché, as if he was afraid of getting caught. I didn’t even know what the fuck I was signing. To this day I don’t know what those papers were about.

Finally, Dr. Rai told me it was time to contact Deb. He brought me to his office and, with my counselor there, we got Deb on the phone. It was bizarre. This was the first time I was speaking to her totally sober. I was crying like a child, expecting her to tell me to fuck off, that she would never see me again, but she didn’t do that. She said she’d come back East and see me. I felt reborn after that call.

A week later, Deb came to visit me. I felt great. I was really going to fight and win this. It was a weekend, and Deb pulled up to the place in my Datsun tenth-anniversary gold-and-black Z. She brought Jenilee, who was still too young to know what any of this stuff was. Everyone’s families were visiting, and I had bragged to everyone about my beautiful model wife who had been in a big Coppertone ad. She was on billboards all over the country in a bikini showing her wonderful Coppertone tan lines.