Makeup to Breakup (24 page)

She walked in looking like a million bucks, like a class act from Beverly Hills. But when we started our session, I couldn’t believe my ears. Everything was on me. “He beats me up, he goes crazy when he’s on drugs,” she told Dr. Rai. It was like she had never snorted a line in her life. I felt like Mike Tyson on Barbara Walters listening to Robin Givens. “He’s intolerable. He’s an absolute maniac when he starts with the blow. He wrecks things.” I was dying to butt in and say, “She’s just as fucking bad,” but I thought if I started squealing on her, there was no way of getting her back.

I was tearing up and she was going, “Oh, Peter, look at you. Look what you got yourself into. It’s breaking my heart.” I was thinking, “You fucking bitch. You were the one who was two hours late to our wedding because you were snorting up a storm.” Instead I was reduced to saying,
“I’m so sorry, come back to me. I’m a changed man. Ask Dr. Rai, I’m the best patient here.”

We sat down alone later in the little cafeteria and we talked. It was almost like we were strangers. I asked her if she would stay with me and she said, “Let’s see how it goes.” She was adamant about me sticking it out for the full nine weeks.

It was a hard day. When she and Jenilee left, I was up all night in bed crying. I felt ashamed that after all we had been through and been blessed with, she had to see me here in this place.

She came back the next weekend. I counted the days until Saturday came around. The next time she came I was so horny I was beside myself. I knew it was totally against the rules to have sex in the hospital, but I didn’t care. We got someone to watch Jenilee and we snuck upstairs to one of the rooms and she lifted her dress up and we did it. It lasted maybe a few seconds, I was so horny. We were both giggling, hoping not to get caught. The next weekend, I got a pass to go home for the weekend. We could have proper sex, but it was weird. It wasn’t hot and wild like it used to be because I was sober. I didn’t even know what to do straight. I was worried about everything I did, everything I said. I was walking on eggshells.

With Deb and Jenilee back, I was feeling a lot better. I began taking over the whole ward, and we actually started ,” Ace said. “ted ever having fun there. I made up
CLASS OF ’82
T-shirts for everyone. By then Thanksgiving had rolled around, but they wouldn’t let me take the whole four days off. They let me go home for dinner, but I had to be back that night. My pal Tim, the cop, had a friend who had a private plane and he dropped me off at the airport near Darien. I was sitting there with my little bag waiting for Deb to pick me up. Deb drove up and we went home and the house smelled wonderful from all the great stuff she was cooking.

She had invited the Kellys, the family who had sold us the house and who lived in a smaller house nearby. The husband, Joe Kelly, was a hell of a drinker, complete with one of those big bulbous red Irish noses. We sat down for dinner and I could see in their eyes that they were uncomfortable because they couldn’t even have a glass of wine in front of me. It was silly. My problem was never alcohol, it was cocaine and pills.

After dinner, we went to the billiard room and shot some pool. Just
months before, I had been sitting in this room, up all night, shooting billiards and betting a thousand dollars a shot. Now I looked in the mirror and a drug-free guy was looking back. Soon it was time to leave and Deb fixed me a turkey sandwich to take back. Joe drove me back to the hospital in my Datsun Z. Back on the ward, everyone was so depressed, sitting around with their turkey leftovers and little slices of pumpkin pie.

My nine weeks were almost up. Christmas was coming up, my favorite time of the year, and we all got in the spirit and decorated the ward. We were all excited about the prospect of going home. Before you “graduated,” as they called it, you had to have an exit interview with your family and a panel of doctors and nurses and counselors.

“You know this will be no picnic for you, Peter,” Dr. Rai told me. “You’ll have many temptations in the business you’re in. Nothing has changed with respect to that.” He was right on the dime. What changed was me, and hopefully I had the tools to deal with the outside world.

That day, after the interviews, everyone went to the chapel and every patient gave a little farewell speech. When it was my turn, I thanked Deb for standing by me and I thanked my doctor and the nurses and the counselors and my fellow class of ’82. I had ordered up a special stretch limo for the day and we loaded my stuff into it and I shook hands with everyone and hugged and thanked Dr. Rai. He was such a cool man.

I remember looking out the back window as we drove off the grounds, vowing never to come back to a place like that. Then I looked at Deb and said, “I’m so sorry,” and we kissed and hugged like little kids in the backseat.

We had a quiet Christmas Eve. We put up a tree and exchanged gifts. I wasn’t putting any medals on myself, but I was proud that I had made it through. I was so confident in myself that I had a couple of beers on Christmas Eve and nothing happened.

But I was facing big changes in the new year. KISS was in turmoil. Ace had been miserable in the band after I left because he was on his own. “They were fucking animals,” he told me one day. “They ganged up on me morning, noon, and night. I lost every vote.” When we hung out together in Connecticut, he was always threatening to leave the band. He finally did in 1982.

There were other changes, too. The album sales had declined and the tours were losing money. Howard Marks had promised my wife that we would never have to worry about money, but now management was singing a different tune. I was told that my house_ d” ayis in Darien was costing too much and that I should sell it and move to a cheaper place. They also told me that they could no longer afford to pay the rent on my parents’ new apartment in Queens. That really upset me. All of a sudden there wasn’t enough money to pay for a little apartment in Queens? My parents had never had nice things in their life. Getting them that little apartment made me feel so good. Now it was going to be taken away. I always felt guilty that I hadn’t done more for them. They had it so hard. But it wasn’t my fault they were losing that apartment.

All I could think of was getting revenge on Marks and Glickman, who, in my mind, were fucking me. I was still raw from rehab and I wasn’t exactly making the best decisions. So I reached out to a kid I had met in rehab. Let’s call him Tony Vinzini. Tony and his older brother Christopher were at South Oaks for cocaine addiction. Tony was a little skinny guy, but Christopher was 250 pounds at least. He was in rehab for beating up a couple of cops and smashing their patrol-car window in. No jail: They put him in rehab. I told Tony who I was and he went crazy: “Oh my God, KISS!” One weekend he said, “My family is coming and we’d like to take you to dinner.” I went and met the mom. She had all the diamond rings, the leather skin from too much time down in the Miami sun, the bleached blonde hair. A million gold bracelets, a gold Rolex, and diamonds the size of your head. There was no father. They told me that he been involved in an accident in which he fell in front of a train and died.

Their older brother, Louie, was running the family business now, some sort of waste-management operation. So we got friendlier. After I got out of rehab, they invited Deb and me out to their house. We got there and I was in shock. There was a guy standing guard at the front door with a shotgun. They lived on the water in Long Island, and there were speedboats docked in front of the house. There were a ton of expensive cars parked in front. In the backyard they had a huge swimming pool surrounded by statues of lions and horses and Zeus. It was like Disneyland meets the Parthenon.

The clues were obvious, but I was clueless then. I was vulnerable. Obviously the older brother, Louie, picked up on that. I was such a mark.

So I told Tony I was having a problem with my management and he set up a meeting with his older brother. Louie struck me as a very scary individual, but I was so consumed with revenge that I didn’t care. At dinner, I started telling Louie my tale of woe. I was in this huge band, they stole my money, they’re telling me I have to sell my house, blah, blah, blah.

“Lookit, I’ll get your money back,” he said with great bravado. “We’ll straighten this shit out with these guys who ripped you off. You got books? Why don’t you bring me your books?” he said.

I went to my safe-deposit box and I took all the financials that Marks and Glickman had given me over the years. I had never looked at them once. I brought the books over to Louie and he went through the documents, and then he knew more about my finances than I did. This had to be the craziest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some pretty crazy things.

Next I set up a meeting with Howard Marks and Louie. I wanted Howard to know that Louie was now representing my interests. We walked into the office and Louie started asking Howard questions that made it clear he had read our financials. I could see that Howard was freaking out. He was shooting me looks like he wanted to kill me. Louie started demanding some exorbitant amounts of money that he claimed Howard owed me.

“He already has a picture of my daughterTombu a deal in place,” Howard said. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, it seems to me that you owe him a lot more money,” Louie said.

“He’s got twenty-five percent of the band and he’s not even in it anymore. What more does he want?” Howard fumed. What I didn’t understand was why my parents’ rent couldn’t be paid anymore.

They agreed to meet again to resolve the differences. I walked out of there content that I had some muscle behind me to get back at these guys. By then I had realized how connected Louie and his family were.

The KISS office cut me off from any money, since Louie was disputing their figures. He had predicted that, so I was impressed. He convinced Deb and me to take twenty-five grand out of the bank so he could invest it: We would quadruple our money. Deb was so excited about this that she
added ten grand of her own money. We handed over the money and Louie gave us promissory notes that looked as though they were drawn up by a sixth grader. Somehow he convinced me to have him hold my beautiful set of black-and-silver-striped drums, worth a good $15,000. One day a truck came up to my warehouse and they went into the truck, never to be seen again.

He even worked on Deb and told her that he had good contacts in the modeling business and he could get her a gig with Jordache Jeans. Next thing, Deb was handing her valuable portfolio of all her work over to him.

I turned my attention to selling the house. Deb was pushing for us to move to California, but that seemed too radical a step for me then. In the interim, I decided that we’d sell the house and put our stuff in storage and rent a house nearby. I wanted to turn the house over quickly. Louie decided that he was going to help me sell it. That’s when I knew something was wrong with the picture. I had a little voice telling me that maybe I shouldn’t give him the twenty-five grand, but Deb was confident he’d make us money. But the voice was getting louder. And it was saying, “Don’t do it, Peter.”

We listed the house with a broker and soon enough, a couple from Texas was interested in it. But Deb made the mistake of telling Louie that we were about to sell the house to a really wealthy Texas family. A week later, the Texan came by our house. Apparently Louie had somehow tracked him down and threatened him if he went ahead with the purchase. Then he told the guy that if he did buy it, he’d have to pay Louie 10 percent of the sale because he was my attorney.

“Who is this Louie guy?” the Texan asked me. “He’s following me around, threatening me.”

I sat him down and explained the whole story. When I was finished, he just shook his head.

“That’s crazy shit,” he drawled. “In Texas we’d kill someone for doing that.”

“This ain’t Texas,” I said.

A few days later I called Howard. “I invited the Mob in and I’m really sorry about it. We really should talk.” He suggested we meet in a tiny, low-profile bar near his office. He was waiting at the bar when I walked in but
then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Louie and four guys follow me into the bar. Howard and I both turned white.

Louie walked right up to me.

“What are you doing here?” he asked threateningly.

“What do you mean? I’m having a drink,” I said.

“,” Ace said. “ted ever What’s Howard doing here?” He nodded in Howard’s direction.

“We’re, uh, having a drink together.”

“I don’t understand something. One minute you hate the guy, he stole from you, you want to get rid of him, and now you’re having a sociable drink with him? What shit are you guys talking about behind my back?” he fumed.

“What I don’t understand is what you’re doing here,” I said.

“Let’s just say a little birdie told me there might be something going on,” he said.

“There ain’t nothing going on,” I lied.

I walked over to the bar where Howard had been watching all this.

“Hi, Peter,” he said.

“Hi, Howard.”

“You told me you were going to meet me here alone,” Howard said.

“Well, that’s a fucking dream,” Louie said. “That ain’t gonna happen. Whatever you guys need to talk about, you can talk about it in front of me.”

“I have nothing to say. I’m leaving,” Howard said, and he paid for his drink and walked out the door.

I didn’t know what to do.

“I’m going home,” I blurted out.

“Yeah, I think you should do that,” Louie said.

A week later I was sitting in the house, having a couple of beers with my racquetball partner Don. Deb came into the room.

“Louie is coming over, he wants to talk to you.”

“I’m not talking to him. I thought we got rid of him,” I said.

“He sounded scary and he said he was going to be right over,” she reported.

I grabbed Don and we went out the back entrance of the house. There was a thick wooded spot not too far from the house and I led him there.

“What’s going on? Why are we hiding in your own bushes?” he asked.

“Look, I got involved with some bad guys and they want payback or something, so just be quiet. I don’t want them shooting us,” I said.