Makeup to Breakup (26 page)

I thought working with the former guitarist of KISS would surely make Gene and Paul crazy, but it made
me
crazy. I’d go to his house to rehearse and half the time he’d have overslept. One time the door to his room was open and I found kiddie-porn magazines from Germany all over the floor. It was really sick shit. This wasn’t Ace jerking off to a poster—this was way, way beyond that. When we recorded some demos with a singer we’d picked up, Mark came to my hotel room the night before at three
A.M
. with a cheap hooker and asked me to hold his eight ball of coke. After he left, I flushed the coke down the toilet. I was furious. It cost me thousands of dollars to pay for the demos and they were a disaster. We never came close to getting a deal.

Around the same time, I decided I wanted to write my memoir. I hooked up with some publishing company on Sunset Boulevard near A&M Studios. I told the head honcho there my tales of woe and all the crazy KISS stories and he thought it would make a great book. They kept sending ghostwriters over to my house to work with me and that was a disaster, too. So I drove down to Big Bear and got a cabin and started dictating my story. I’d give them the tapes and the writers would come back
with something that had nothing to do with what I said. I’m a Brooklyn kid, I talk with a certain syntax, and these guys were just fabricating a_a ” ayis different Peter Criss. So I dropped that idea.

By the end of the eighties, Deb and I had to downsize once again. One day Deb came to me and told me that the realtor said it was insane that we were paying so much in rent and that it would be prudent to buy something. So we put down a chunk of money and bought a brand-new townhouse in Redondo Beach.

It was spacious enough to house my pool table and all my records, and we had a nice private backyard. We had a big sundeck and a storage area that I converted into a makeshift studio. But it was Redondo Beach. It wasn’t Palos Verdes, it wasn’t Beverly Hills, it wasn’t even Manhattan Beach, which was much more expensive.

One good thing about being in Redondo was that I got totally into biking. I had dabbled with it in Palos Verdes, but now I got serious. I bought a custom-made bike and I’d get up at four
A.M
. and ride along the coast from Redondo all the way to Malibu and back. I was never in better shape; my leg muscles were like steel. Riding was a great natural high and it was always fun to ride past all those beautiful California girls in their skimpy little bikinis. I’d come home really horny after a ride and jump on Deb.

I figured I’d get a band together, and Deb thought about going back to modeling, doing some catalog work. That was the plan. Deb tried to get bookings but it wasn’t happening, so she started a gourmet-basket business out of our garage. She’d take imported salamis and cheeses and mustards and spruce them up in a nice basket and sell them. That should have been my tip-off that money was running out.

My relationship with Deb was as flat as my career at that point. I really loved her, but I didn’t think she really loved me. Sure, she loved me when we were living in a mansion and we had money up the ass. But now she was pushing thirty and she realized the party might be over. We never had a deep relationship. We never made a spiritual connection. We never talked about our feelings. But we still were able to regularly push each other’s buttons and fight. I remember we were sitting in the car one night. Nothing seemed to be going on musically for me, and she
turned on the little light over the dashboard and said, “That’s the last fucking spotlight you’ll ever have.” I was just crushed.

That only made me double my efforts to get a band together. A guitarist friend of mine put me in touch with a Canadian songwriter named Phil Naro. I got his demo and it blew my socks off. He was a great writer, and he hit the notes with the kind of clarity Steve Perry had. Phil told me that Gene and Paul were hip to him and Paul wanted to write with him. I convinced him to come down to Redondo and write with me instead. When he got there, I think he was a little bit uncomfortable with me smoking the occasional joint. He was a born-again Christian and he didn’t do any drugs at all. I don’t think he liked being away from his wife and newborn kid because he was calling her all the time.

But I started cracking the whip, and we wrote every day. It was like having Stan Penridge around again, but better. This guy could sing like an angel. Now I didn’t have to be the lead singer. I could still do “Hard Luck Woman” and “Beth” and “Black Diamond,” but he could sing the new songs we were writing.

Part of my urgency to write stuff and get the band together was thanks to a little letter we had received from the IRS. Apparently some of the tax shelters that Marks and Glickman put us in when I was with KISS were bogus, and now we were all on the line for a million dollars in back taxes. Of course I didn’t,” Ace said. “ds” have nearly enough money to pay it off, so we decided to find a tax attorney who could represent us.

Deb had met this fat woman named Maureen, whose kid went to the same school as Jenilee. Maureen’s kid was a troublemaker and was always getting Jenilee into trouble. I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree: Maureen’s husband was in prison. Maureen worked at a big law firm that did a lot of environmental work, and she recommended that we go see a guy named Bob “Mac” McMurray.

We met with Mac in his office in Santa Monica. He was a typical lawyer: tall, blue eyes, dressed suave, a lot of confidence. He promised to refer us to a tax guy, and he also said he could help me with my music career.

With the IRS hanging over our heads, Deb got a job as a perfume girl at Nordstrom. The gourmet-basket business had gone to hell and she was
getting nervous about our money situation. Eventually she worked her way up to salesperson, but it was still a far cry from being a lady of leisure in Darien.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, I found out that my mother was sick. I flew back to New York and went with her to see her doctor the next day. After her examination, I asked if I could see the doctor in private. My mother was furious. We went into a nearby room and the doctor broke the news to me that my mother had cancer. It had started as lung cancer, but it had progressed to her bones. Now they wanted her to do chemotherapy.

I came back out shaken. On the way home, my mother gave it to me.

“You son of a bitch, what was that about? Now you’re Mr. Big Shot, you’ve got to talk to the doctor alone and find out what’s wrong with me? I know what’s wrong with me—I have cancer and it’s a reality and I’m not happy about it.”

She had really changed. She was angry and bitter about her fate. She was only sixty-two but she had smoked Pall Malls all her life and never really followed through on follow-up visits to doctors. But now she was going to get chemotherapy, so I went back to California. I called home every so often and my sisters would tell me that Mom was doing okay, so I thought things were under control.

Then, on New Year’s Day 1991, I got a call from my brother.

“You better come home, Ma’s dying.”

I was devastated. I hung up and called a travel agent. I had to take three planes to get to New York. I drank all the bars out on each flight and I still couldn’t get drunk, I was so sick to my stomach. Did my wife come with me? No. I took these horrible flights alone, rushing home to see my mother die, because Deb came up with some excuse not to go.

I finally got into the city five hours later than scheduled. I rushed right to the house. They had an apartment at the back of their antiques store. I knocked on the door and my dad opened it. He had his head down and I walked into the room and I looked over and my mother’s bed was empty. The sheets were all made up.

I sat down on the bed.

“She passed on five hours ago. There was a blue moon out and it was
shining on her face through the window of her room and she looked like an angel,” my dad said.

“Maybe you were blessed that you weren’t here,” my brother, Joey, said. “You wouldn’t have recognized her.” My mother was a big Irish-German woman, but she was down to sixty pounds when she died. Despite what Joey said, I was crushed that I never got that chance to say goodbye a picture of my daughterEK ever and tell her how much I loved her.

I sat on her bed and felt a huge wave of guilt wash over me. I was too late to hold her hand, too late to kiss her good-bye. Sure, I had been wrapped up in my problems with the IRS and trying to start a band and a rapidly deteriorating relationship with my wife. But now the closest person in my world was gone.

How could I have fucked up like this? I didn’t have millions anymore, but I had some money. I should have rented an apartment in the neighborhood or even slept on my parents’ couch so I could be there for her. It took me a couple of psychiatrists and a couple of good benders to accept the fact that I didn’t fuck up. I should have, could have, would have, but it was too late. So now was I supposed to carry a cross forever? My mother would never have wanted that. She always understood me. She was always my pal.

I stayed in Brooklyn and we made all the arrangements for the funeral. I called Deb and broke the news to her and asked her if she could come out as soon as possible. She gave me some shit about something that she was doing in L.A. When I asked her to bring me a pair of my dress shoes for the funeral, she told me to buy some new ones. And when she finally came out, she was a day late.

We had a three-day wake for my mom. They were three of the worst days you’d ever want to have in your life. I was the oldest son, so I greeted all the people at the door so my dad wouldn’t have to. I had to sit there all day looking at my poor mother in the casket. That was the last time that I went to an open-casket funeral.

Deb came on the second day and I felt no sympathy at all from her. It was clear that she wasn’t in love with me anymore. Her hugs were fake, her tears were fake: It was all a show.

I hardly made it through the burial. I was in a state of shock the whole
week. That was why it barely registered that there were reporters hanging around outside the funeral parlor. When I came in or out, they would ask me crazy questions like, “What’s it like to sleep in the toilets of Santa Monica?” I just thought they were there because I had been in KISS. My father even got a call from a journalist who asked him, “Is it true that your son is a bum, sleeping in the streets?” My father went crazy and hung up on the guy.

But when I got back home, I got a very disturbing phone call from John Good, the vice-president of DW, my new drum company. They were just starting out and I was only the third drummer to sign with them, but I really liked them, and John and I had become close friends.

John sounded concerned. “Peter, are you okay?”

“I’m fucking far from being okay, John,” I said.

“Well, it’s all over all the tabloids,” he said.

“What’s all over?”

“They say you’re totally broke and you’re sleeping in the toilets of Santa Monica,” he said.

“What are you talking about? You’re on the phone with me in Redondo. I just got back from New York, where I buried my mother.”

He was confused. He didn’t know anything about my mother, he just knew that his office was fielding a ton of calls from fans who were concerned that I was a homeless bum in the streets of Santa Monica because they read about it in
Star
magazine, and then all the other tabloids picked the story up.

“Peter, I’m so sorry. I guess you haven’t read the papers_a ” ayis. They wrote that you had burned through all your millions and you were homeless now. I would look into it when you’re feeling up to it.”

I checked it right out and I was blown away. There was a photo of some bum who was claiming to be me lying in the toilets in Santa Monica, and next to it was a photo of me in my KISS makeup. I was furious. But it got worse. Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr, who were big fans of mine, were scouring the downtown area of Los Angeles, looking for me on skid row.

Deb and I decided we had to sue the tabloid that was putting out this phony story, so we went back to Mac, the lawyer who was helping us out
when the IRS got on our case. Mac said he had the perfect lawyers who would sue
Star
magazine and get us a big settlement.

While we were waiting to see the lawyers about suing the tabloids, Mac got a call from
The Phil Donahue Show.
They wanted me to come on and talk about having an imposter pose as me. Mac was convinced that it would be a good thing to show to the world that the story was bogus, so we agreed to do the program.

I had second thoughts. I looked like shit. My hair was still blond, I had put on a few pounds from drinking so much, and I was zoned out on tranquilizers because I was so out of it from losing my mom. I was literally anesthetizing myself morning, noon, and night over it. On top of that, add the IRS problem and the fact that I was getting that vibe from Deb that things weren’t really copacetic with us. But Mac was putting the pressure on and Deb wanted to go because it meant first-class everything, so I agreed. I just wanted it all to go away, I was so hurt.

We got to New York and they brought us to the studio. They hid us backstage and put the imposter, a guy named Christopher Dickinson, on first. Phil was asking him how he could run around impersonating me: Didn’t he have any remorse for causing me all these problems? The guy was a total alcoholic maniac and he didn’t seem to care at all how any of this affected my life. To make matters worse, they had a girl and her mother who had flown this guy out to her house and let him live there for a week, thinking he was me.

Next thing you know Phil said, “Well, we have the real Peter Criss here, and we’re going to bring him out now.”

I came walking out, and they all looked at me in shock.

“You know, you made my life a living hell,” I told the guy. “You made me sick and my mother just passed. How dare you?”

Out of nowhere the chick says that I, the real Peter Criss, screwed her. She said that she had heard that I was homeless and she flew this guy out to her house but that when he got there she realized he wasn’t me. But now that I was here, she claimed that she had an affair with me.