Makeup to Breakup (28 page)

I gave him the finger.

I looked down for a second, and the next thing I knew it felt like my head had shattered. This guy came around to my open window and punched me right in my orbital bone, shattering my cheekbone and part of my jaw. It helped that he was wearing big brass knuckles.

I had never been hit that hard in my life. Not only did I see lights, I saw explosives. I slumped over, I was in another world. Now this guy had the door open and he was tugging at me, trying to get me out of the car. Thank God my seat belt had jammed. I had sort of come around and I saw that he’d gotten frustrated and was walking away.

That’s when I thought, “Shoot the motherfucker. Take the .25 and go behind him and shoot him in the head. You won’t get arrested. He hit you with brass knuckles, he tried to rob you, you’re famous, and you shot him in self-defense.”

“But you don’t just shoot someone in the back of the head,” another part of me argued._f” admitted.

“You were in shock. Any good lawyer can get you off that. Just show the jury your injuries.”

I wasn’t really rational at this point, but I finally realized that the last thing I needed to do was kill someone. I was bleeding profusely, and the best thing to do was to get home. I got to the apartment and gingerly walked through the rubble to the bathroom. The mirror had shattered, but there was a big enough piece of it to check out the injury.

“Holy fucking shit,” I gasped. My face looked as if it had been run over by a truck.

I got really dizzy and I went into the bedroom and fell on the mattress
that was on the floor, and passed out. The next morning, I woke up in excruciating pain. I looked down at the mattress and it was literally soaked in blood. I called Michael, my new guitar player, and he came right over. He took one look at me and turned pink, purple, and blue.

“Catman, you’re really fucked up,” he said. He rushed me down to the car and we drove back to my doctor friend Terry’s office.

Terry walked into the room and his face hit the floor.

“Peter, are you all right?”

Before I could even answer, Terry was ordering X-rays and making plans to contact a surgeon.

Just my luck: Dr. Lowe was down the hall, one of the best reconstructive surgeons in L.A. Terry called him and he came in and he took one look and said, “We’ve got to operate now. I’ll call the hospital to have him admitted.”

They rushed me into surgery and I was in there for five hours. It was a very painful procedure. They had to go through my mouth to reconstruct the cheekbone. This doctor was pretty rough, and he didn’t have the best bedside manner. One thing I learned: Your bones are not meant to be held together by screws. One whole side of my face had this scaffolding device, so I couldn’t really move my head. I was in so much pain the whole time I was in the hospital that I kept pressing that button for dope nonstop. I think my morphine bill alone came to ten grand.

I was so excited the day that Deb and my daughter came to visit me. I was still in love with my ex-wife. But she came in and she was as cold as ice. She just stared at me.

“How are you feeling? Are they taking care of you?” she asked in a real off-hand manner.

I could hardly talk because my jaw was wired and my face was all bandaged. But I could feel the iciness filling the room. I could understand that my daughter might be in shock to see her dad fucked up like that, but Deb’s aloofness was just reprehensible.

When they left, the room just filled with loneliness. I was lying there wishing that she would just die—that on the way home she’d crash the car and my kid would survive, but she’d be killed. I would never have treated a dog the way she treated me in that hospital room.

When my doctor friend Terry came in that night to check on me, I was beside myself.

“I can’t believe she just came here and walked out and she ain’t coming back, she told me that,” I wailed. “I don’t even know if I want to get better.” To add insult to injury, Terry confessed that it was his idea for Deb to visit me.

I really felt like I didn’t want to live. I just lay there in that bed crying, thinking, How could people be like that? This was a woman whom I had put up on a pedestal, b a nice chunk of change,b” ayisought her anything she ever wanted. And now my doctor was showing me more love than my ex-wife.

I felt like the world had forgotten Peter Criss, that I was just another casualty of the wars of L.A. after the earthquake. As much of a cocksucker as I may have been in the past toward other people, I could never have pulled off something as heartless and selfish as Deb had. I knew that if it had been Deb in that hospital bed, I would have visited every day even if I didn’t love her anymore. The Catholic in me would been there with flowers. She was still the mother of my daughter, and that connection would never fade. But for her to leave me there in that bed like a wounded animal and not show an ounce of compassion was heartbreaking. That was the worst pain someone could experience, much worse than the violence that had put me in the hospital. It was a pain that I carry even today. And I can never forgive her for that. I could forgive her for fucking around behind my back, but this was deeper to me than cheating. I just couldn’t comprehend how the mother of my child could be that callous and cold to me.

But my band members dropped by often, and Terry came in every day to check on me. I finally got released and they brought me out in a wheelchair and Michael came to pick me up and he was horrified. My whole face was bandaged up and my eye was sagging off to one side. I looked like a mummy. That day I nicknamed him Angel because he and Tall Man were the only ones who really took care of me. They put my bed back together and cooked me meals, whatever I could eat with a straw. Tall Man even slept on the floor beside my bed because we were still getting some aftershocks.

I had to keep going back for follow-ups to make sure the screws were
in place and that I hadn’t developed an infection. But I had an album to finish, and the record company kept calling me to see when it would be done. All that was needed to complete the album were my vocals, so I bit the bullet, so to speak, and went back in the studio. I carefully removed the wiring from my jaw, popped a bunch of painkillers and swigged them down with some scotch, and went in and sang. I thought I was being noble and strong and showing the band some real leadership, but I’d go home and cry all night from the pain. When I’d go back to the doctor, he’d explode, “Why are these screws moving? You can’t sing right now.” But I did. To this day, I still get pain in my face.

When I recovered, the guys urged me to go back out on the road. They were so uplifting and so great to be around. There wasn’t the constant game playing that went on with Gene and Paul. These kids adored me; they looked up to me. I was the old-timer, and everything I said was gold. I thank God to this day that they were around at this time when I was getting beat up from all angles.

Deb let me slide on the child-support payments until I had healed. The IRS wasn’t so compassionate. Every so often I’d get another bill, and it seemed that the amount I owed was doubling. Not that I could pay anything anyway. Or even knew how to. I had been married most of my life and I always had my wives or people like Chris Lendt taking care of things. So I never even knew what to do with a bill. When I moved into my apartment, I started getting gas and electric bills. I called Tall Man.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Those are bills, dude,” he explained. He literally took me to a bank and opened up a checking account for me and showed me how to make out the checks and keep a record of them. I was forty-seven years old and learning how to write a fucking check. When you’re living in that fame bubble, you don’t have to worry about anything but playing. It took ,” Ace said. “w ” ayisme a long time to adjust to real life.

Now I had to go out looking like a mummy, and it wasn’t pleasant. The last thing I expected was to find a girlfriend in this state, but somehow I did. On the ground floor of my building there was a big health-food store with spectacular food, and being a bachelor and recovering from my surgery I wanted to eat right and regain my strength for the tour.

I was shopping there one night and I saw a cute little redhead approaching me in the aisle. She was in her thirties and she was wearing a white shirt and black tie like waitresses wear, and that impressed me. We started talking and she didn’t seem to be at all taken aback by the bandages on my face, which impressed me even more. She had a majorly cool personality and we started talking about food and she told me she worked at a Japanese restaurant.

I got her phone number, I called her, and we went out for some high-end Chinese food on Beverly Boulevard and we had a great time. The next time Lynn and I went out, I brought her back to my apartment and one thing led to another and we screwed all night. She was really hot and she had nice perky natural boobs, which you don’t often see in L.A. Lynn was a real exotic knockout, a half-Swedish, half-Hawaiian mix. I was not the most handsome man at that point, especially with my eye hanging down like Igor’s, but that didn’t seem to bother her. I was just beat up in general—from my divorce, from the loss of my fortune, from all the drugs I had taken—and here was this girl who looked right past that, so I was truly grateful.

The Criss album,
Cat #1,
came out in August of 1994. I learned firsthand what it was like to be on a chintzy label like TNT. They had no real distribution, so when Tall Man and I went to their office in the Valley, I saw boxes and boxes of the record stacked up in a supply room.

“What’s going on with the record?” I’d ask.

“Oh, it’s going good. We got orders,” they’d say.

But there were no promo people pushing it, nobody out there hawking it. One day they got the bright idea that if I did a bunch of interviews, it would sell some discs. So I sat there from nine in the morning until ten at night, doing the same interview over and over again. It didn’t make an impact. I was furious that I had signed such a bad deal. My only hope was to hit the road, play in a city, do an in-store signing, and move some records.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Lynn was blossoming. We were seeing each other every weekend and I suggested that we move in together. But I was over Hollywood by then and I told her that I wanted to live near the ocean. She suggested Venice Beach, one of the coolest spots in L.A.
There were bodybuilders there, hippies, skateboarders, beautiful chicks walking by all day half naked. What’s not to like?

We found an adorable pink beach house with a big living room, a decent-sized bedroom, and a guest room. It had wood floors and a fireplace and the rent was reasonable, especially since we were going to split it. I was sick of being taken to the cleaners by women. I wanted her to feel that she had to contribute something if we were going to be in a relationship.

Things started out okay. We’d bicycle on the promenade every day until the sun would go down, and then we’d have a margarita at a local joint. It was a really cool life for a while. Then one day she told me that she had lost her job at the Japanese restaurant.

“I’m actually a topless dancer now,” she said. a nice chunk of change,b” ayis I didn’t know it then but she always had been.

“I don’t really give a shit. I love you—whatever you do is cool with me,” I said. But it really wasn’t. I settled for it at first. She would get home at three in the morning and I had to get up and rehearse all day with the band for our tour.

I had done a few tours with the band, or at least with Tall Man, who was the only original member left. Those early tours had been brutal. We had a shitty beat-up bus and I’d curse from the first day I got on it. But the guys loved it—they didn’t know any better. There were a few nice moments. On our second tour we were driving through Yellowstone in a blizzard on a two-lane melt-top road, and when we got down to the valley floor, a herd of buffalo started running alongside the bus. We opened the door and you could literally touch them, they were so close.

My Smith & Wesson .45 came out a lot on those early tours. Tall Man would open the curtain on his bunk a little bit and he’d see me waving it around. I think I busted a few caps into the pool in Lake Tahoe. Hey, it was boring on the road.

We didn’t really know what we were doing those first tours. Hippie Bob was the road manager, and he was in charge of the merch. We found out that he had brought only one box of T-shirts on the tour, and that was the only way we made our extra money, since we didn’t have any albums yet back then. He sold out the T-shirts the first night, and that was that. But he did keep the guys in righteous weed. We all made it clear that
if there wasn’t top-of-the-line smoke, we weren’t going out. Bob came through and delivered a nice little package to each guy on the bus.

I had Tall Man handle all the business. He’d get all the shit straightened out and then he’d present me with the options and I’d make the final decision. For doing that, I gave him a percentage of the profits. The agents, the manager, the record company told me I was out of my mind and that I should just pay him one twenty-five per show like the other guys got, but that didn’t seem fair. He was taking on a lot of responsibility and he deserved to be rewarded for that.

For the new tour, he found us a great Silver Eagle bus. They were the original rock ’n’ roll buses; this one probably had a million miles on it, but it was dynamite inside. It slept twelve and there was a game room in the back with lounge chairs and a big television in the middle. Each bunk had nice curtains and a small TV. There was a nice-sized kitchen and a bathroom. I didn’t know how we could afford it, but the guys decided they would rather go in comfort and be safe than have a bigger paycheck.

This was the tour that the Captain emerged. The first day, I walked onto the bus wearing a navy officer’s blue coat with the hash marks and gold stripes, and I had on an officer’s overcoat with the stars and epaulets. On top of my head was a white admiral’s hat with the navy emblem. I looked like a white Michael Jackson. Our bus was going to be called the Enterprise, and I was going to run it like Captain Kirk. Mark, the Tall Man, was my Number One. Angel was Number Two. Whoever was the vocalist, and they changed often, was Number Three.