Makeup to Breakup (22 page)

“Hey, how you doin’?” I greeted him.

“Oh my God, oh my God, it’s Peter Criss,” the kid said. We started talking for a bit and he told me that he lived in Long Island in Brentwood with his parents and his name was Vinny Gonzales. Then he told me that his mother was 100 percent Italian.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You know who Steve Stevens is, right? We’re going to do a song that Steve wrote for me tomorrow night. If you bring two trays of lasagna and one tray of meatballs and sausage with spaghetti, I’ll let you upstairs to hear the session.”

Vinny rushed home and had his mother, Nancy, cooking all night. The next day I got to the studio at five
P.M
. and Vinny was standing there with four big shopping bags full of food.

I was a man simultaneously.

Vini Ponzia had gotten an all-star cast to play on the album. I spent some time with a vocal coach and it really showed in the grooves. I was proud of
Let Me Rock You
. It was probably the best I had ever sung in my life. The songs were all classy. They were made for me. Each one was better than the next.

And at last, they were going to put my face on the cover. We got our lawyer Paul Marshall’s wife to take the photo, and I loved it. Bill even hired a press agent to make me feel good. But it was all a charade. This time the record company didn’t even release the album in the U.S. Again, I was blackballed.

The year 1982 was horrible for me. It was a crushing blow that my two albums had failed. Deb’s favorite aunt died of cancer. I delved deeper and deeper into cocaine addiction. I was depressed and getting bloated. On top of all that, I was popping pills by the handful. I could have put a group together and toured, but I didn’t have the incentive. Touring crappy shitholes after selling out stadiums would have just made me more depressed.

So I put my drums in storage in the attic and I decided that I was going to be the best father that a daughter could have. I didn’t want to leave Jenilee’s side in her formative years, so I hung up the bad-boy leather and became Mr. Mom.

What a stupid fucking idea. I should never have put my drums away, but I wasn’t making rational decisions. There was nobody in my life to tell me, “Don’t do that, you’ll kill yourself with those drugs,” or, “Stop playing with those guns,” or, “Stop buying your wife lynx coats. You’re going to run out of money soon.” I really needed my grandmother or my uncle George to slap the shit out of me, smack me back to reality. I loved my family, but I was never close to my siblings. It was as if they were living in another world. I felt like a total loser, sitting out in the richest county in the country, surrounded by fucking Wasps who despised me and everything I stood for. I had a huge house with big black custom-made wrought-iron gates to keep the world out. It worked. Nobody was coming to see me.

The cocaine had completely changed my personality. I didn’t want to go out anymore. I was starting to get paranoid, convinced that there were people outside watching the house. I believed my phone was bugged. I started carrying a gun 24/7. And then I got a phone call from Sean Delaney.

Sean had broken up with Bill Aucoin and was living in San Francisco. He had just written a rock opera called
Spotlights and Lonely Nights,
and he wanted me to sing on it. So he sent me a tape and I listened to it and it was brilliant. I played it for my mother and she cried like a baby.

“You can’t let this one go by,” she urged me. “This is a piece of genius.”I8">LICK H
The lyrics were sensational. “Spotlights and lonely nights, I guess that’s the game I’m in.” The song was all about groping for stardom and then getting distracted by drugs. I called Sean to tell him how much I loved the song.

“We need to do this together,” Sean said. “Remember the old days?”

Both of us were misfits at this stage of our lives, both estranged from KISS. So I told him to come out and stay with us. He flew out and we got down to work. Every day, Sean taught me how to sing the song operatically, like Freddie Mercury would. After a few weeks of really working
hard, Sean said, “I need a little break. Would you mind if I flew in my lover from San Francisco?”

So the boyfriend came out, and he brought a ton of blow. Instead of working, it became party central. And when Deb and Sean were stoned on coke, it was like dealing with a gargoyle with two heads. They’d go crazy. I got into a huge argument with Sean about how his lover was distracting us from working, so the boyfriend got irate and went home.

Sean started pouting. He was really busting my chops, and I was on coke and booze and Valiums, so I was in no mood to take his shit. I went upstairs and grabbed a .357 Magnum. When I came back downstairs, Deb and Sean were playing with Jenilee in the kitchen while the nanny cleaned up.

I confronted Sean. “The only way I can think of getting you to shut the fuck up is to shoot you and bury you in the fucking bushes out there,” I said. With that, I let one off aimed at the ceiling and there was a huge
boom
. Smoke poured out of the sides of the barrel.

Sean screamed like a chick and went running out of the kitchen. Meanwhile, the nanny was in shock—she’d never seen anything like this. Deb was holding on to Jenilee for dear life, looking horrified. I started chasing Sean through the house, but somehow he found the doorway that led to a side door out of the house. He started tearing ass down the gravel path and I was running behind him, but I couldn’t catch up to him.

Sean ran two miles into town and went into the local police station. He told them that I had gone mad and I was holding my wife and our nanny at bay with a machine gun and grenades. Now the cops were in fear of their lives if they responded, so sure enough they dispatched six cars, filled with SWAT teams, all in total riot gear. They were ready for war.

I came back inside the house and Deb and the nanny and Jenilee were huddled under the kitchen table. I had a feeling that Sean was going to the cops, so I grabbed a few more guns and went out the back of the house and over to the guesthouse, which was a converted carriage house. It had a nice loft that overlooked the property. In my delusional state, I thought that was the best place to hold the cops off. So I laid out my guns in front of me like I was James Cagney.

Suddenly I heard what sounded like a squadron of cars rushing onto the gravel road. Sure enough, it was Sean and the cops. One by one the policemen poured out of their cars and took up formation circling the carriage house. Then the top cop stepped out with a megaphone.

“Mr. Criss, your house is surrounded. We’d like you to throw your weapon out and come out with your hands up.”

“Fuck you!” I screamed.

In the background I heard Sean sobbing, “He’s gone crazy. Don’t shoot him. Don’t smoke my baby.” Deb and the nanny had come out, and I saw lights I8">LICK H
Well, if I was going to go out, I’d go out in a blaze of glory. This is how out of my mind I was. I hadn’t slept for days, I was totally coked up, and now I was going to go out in a blaze of glory? I’m a fucking musician, I’m not Public Enemy Number One. Peter Criscuola, where are you? I can’t shoot it out with the cops, I’d get killed. There was probably a police sniper with a bead on my fucking stupid face ready to blow me to kingdom come.

“We really don’t want to hurt you, Mr. Criss,” the head cop said. “Please throw out your weapon and come out of there with your hands up. We’re here to help you.”

“All right,” I said, and I threw one gun out and slowly walked out with my hands up. Then, like in the movies, they put me up against the car and patted me down, but they were really being gentle about it.

Meanwhile, they sent a guy into the carriage house and he came out with my arsenal.

“Jesus, was this guy expecting a war to break out?” he said. They grabbed the guns and put them in another car and then Sean got into one of the cars and we all drove back to the station.

At the station, they sat me down behind an interrogation desk and a senior officer pulled up a chair.

“You want some coffee, Peter?” he said amiably.

“I don’t want no fucking coffee,” I spat back.

“Come on, be nice. Let us give you a cup of coffee. You’ll feel better.”

So I drank the coffee.

“This is a very conservative community . . .” he began.

“That’s why I live here,” I interrupted.

“I respect that,” he said. “But this kind of activity can’t be tolerated here.”

“That fucking guy drove me crazy,” I said. If I was going down, I was taking Sean with me. “He came to my home to visit and he brought drugs and he got me all fucked up on them. I don’t even know what he gave me. Some sort of powder.”

I heard Sean in the next room, with his high-pitched voice, “Oh, he’s lying. He’s lying.”

“Search him if you don’t believe me,” I said, and sure enough they searched Sean and found some blow, but they didn’t arrest him. They gave him twelve hours to get on a plane back to San Francisco. Then they turned their attention back to me.

“You know we can’t let you go home, okay?”

“What! I’m going to jail?” I protested.

C
hris rushed over and spotted the gun, the mound of cocaine, and
the empty magnums of champagne.

“I think I need help,” I told him. “I don’t want to do this shit anymore but I can’t stop.”

Chris immediately started making phone calls. This was early in the game, and there weren’t that many rehab places that knew how to deal with coke addiction. Finally, after about ten calls, he found a place in Long Island called South Oaks Hospital.

“They’ll take you, but we gotta go now.”

“Right now?” I said.

“I thought you wanted to go,” he said.

I tried to stall. “Let me just do a few more lines and a little more champagne,” I said.

“Now,” he insisted.

I did as much blow as I could anyway, and I backed it with some champagne and a few quaaludes for good measure.

“Okay, let’s fucking go,” I said.

Chris called for a limo and I started loading it up. I packed two suits, some silk shirts, a couple of pairs of nice boots, a killer pair of rock ’n’ roll leather pants. I brought a snare drum with sticks and a stand so I could practice in there. I had four
Playboy
magazines and a couple of paperback books to read. An acoustic guitar. I was packing like I was going to a
resort where I’d have my own room where I could play my guitar, read, chill out.

The ride there was pretty quiet. I was whacked out from partying with Tex. It was at least four or five days since I had slept, so I looked really bad. As we got closer to the place, I started having second thoughts.

“This is going to be good,” Chris said. “You ain’t getting Deb back unless you straighten out.”

“I don’t want to lose her and Jenilee,” I admitted. I loved them to death.

We pulled in to the grounds and I was impressed. Lots of land, nice foliage, the buildings looked nice. If you’re going to have to be put away somewhere, this didn’t seem so bad. We drove around to the back of a building where it said
ADMISSIONS
and it looked like you were checking in to a resort. Later I found out they don’t take you through the front because the sign there says
SOUTH OAKS PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE
. I would have flipped out if I thought I was going to a nuthouse. But that was where I belonged.

We went in and were directed to a room where I did my intake interview. My doctor was a five-foot-two Indian named Dr. Rai.

“So tell me your problems,” he said in his thick Indian accent.

I went into my history and this brown man started turning white. I told him about stuff my grandfather George when ick on the road, I told him about the SWAT team episode; I was totally honest.

Dr. Rai excused himself for a moment to confer with some of the other people there. Then he came back into the room with an admission slip.

“The first step to recovery is admitting that you have this problem. You should be very proud that you’ve taken that first step.”

In truth, I should have been there long before. I signed the paper and I looked up and a nurse had come into the room accompanied by two giant guys in white shirts and pants and shoes. I started to get a little uncomfortable.

“Mr. Criss, we’re here to take you to your room,” one of them said.

“Okay, is all my stuff that was in the limo up there already?” I asked.

“What’s up there will be what we put up there,” Dr. Rai said. “But there’s certain things that you can’t bring in here. We cannot have any
musical instruments. And there’s no place for dirty magazines here. We will give you hospital clothes to wear so your friend can take your suits and such back. None of that is coming into my hospital. Don’t worry, we will take care of you. We are going to take you off the bad drugs that you’re on and give you drugs that are necessary for you, like antiseizure medication.”

It suddenly hit me that this was not going to be a vacation. I was numb when Chris came over and gave me a good-bye hug, but I thought this was a good move. I really trusted Chris.

Then the two huge orderlies escorted me out of the building and we crammed into a small compact car. The nurse got behind the wheel and started off toward a nearby building. I was still stoned out of my mind, so I started rapping and telling them that I was Peter Criss, founding member of KISS. They were agreeing with everything I said but it dawned on me later that they would have agreed if I had told them I was Napoleon. I had no idea that they were taking me to a mental ward.

We got to the other building and climbed out of the car. One of the orderlies took out a huge loop of dozens of keys and started opening the doors. As we went past a door, he turned around and locked it again. The whole time, the other orderly was holding my arm. We couldn’t even get on the elevator without using a key.

We finally got to my ward and they checked me in and took me to my room. It wasn’t the Four Seasons, but at least it was private. But I noticed there was no lock on the door. As I was settling in, the nurse brought me some meds. A Valium, a painkiller, and an antiseizure pill. Hey, I never turned down a pill, so I took them and then walked out onto the floor of the ward. I took one look around and I thought I was in the film
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. There were all these people just shuffling around with vacant looks on their faces. I later found out that they were all on Thorazine, a powerful antipsychotic, and the slow, deliberate way they walked was called the Thorazine shuffle. One black guy came up to me and dropped a lot of money in front of me, saying that he didn’t need it because his family was wealthy. Another guy was sitting in the corner of the room telling jokes and laughing to himself. One older woman suddenly went into a rage and they threw her into a straitjacket and carried
her off. A few hours later, she came back a vegetable. I was in the middle of all this and I was scared. I thought, “What am I doing in this hell? I didn’t come here for this—I just came here to kick the fucking drugs.” I felt so bad for the people who were ,” Ace said. “ns” truly mentally disturbed, but at the same time it was frightening to be up there with them.