Makeup to Breakup (34 page)

Now, I know my boys, and they were all checking out Gigi. Then Gene started showing off and threw Gigi a prototype of the new KISS collectible baseball.

“What do you think of this baseball, Gigi?” he asked her.

She looked it over and saw that there were two pictures of Gene’s face on it, one of Ace, and one of Paul. And none of mine.

“Well, it’s a nice ball, but where’s Peter?” she asked, and threw it back to him.

“You didn’t give him permission to use your copyrighted image, Peter?” she asked me.

Gene almost shit himself.

“Yoko Ono,” he said with venom.

We got to the hotel and we had a big meeting before the show. I was still hurt by what had happened the last night at the Garden. It was a Saturday night and we were running late and the Teamsters were going to get some outrageous amount of money if we hit overtime, so when we came
back after our first encore, Tim suggested we cut “Beth.” He didn’t know that that was my big moment, especially in the Garden, where I would hand my mother a rose after I sang the song. When we came offstage after “Rock and Roll All Nite,” I was in tears and explained to Tim how important “Beth” was for me to perform at the Garden. He had unwittingly taken away my homage to the memory of my mother.

I brought cutting “Beth” up again in the meeting and Gene and Paul just were ruthless, making fun of me and my concerns. I went back to the room where Gigi was and I was literally shaking and sweating.

“What’s the matter?” Gigi asked me.

“Could you just do me a favor and hold me?” I asked her. She was probably thinking that I was just conning her to have sex, but we laid down together in the bed and she just held me.

“We just had a meeting and you don’t know how horrible these guys are,” I said. “Nothing has changed. I thought these guys were different, but they haven’t changed at all.”

We played that night at the Fleet Center and the show sucked. Ace played especially poorly because Joe Perry and his son were in the audience, and having Perry there would always make Ace choke. That night I tried messing around with Gigi again but she didn’t go for it. I realized that this broad was serious. I flew her in on the private jet, had a nice steak dinner, she saw the band perform for free, and she still wasn’t putting out. I started thinking that maybe this was just the right type of woman for me. She actually thought for herself, she didn’t do drugs, and she was drop-dead gorgeous. Her ass could stop traffic. I wasn’t an ass guy, but I became one.

The next day Gigi flew back to New York and we went on to Canada. I began to live on the phone with her. I was falling in love and I couldn’t wait to get back to my room after the show and call her up. And I hate the phone. We’d stay on the phone for two or three hours every night and I told her about my youth, my first wife, my second wife, all of my problems.

About two months later we played Philadelphia and Gigi came d a nice chunk of change, w” ayisown to see me. We came back to the room after the gig and I was in full makeup and I leaned over to give her a kiss and she got all freaked out. Maybe it was my lipstick. So after I took off my makeup and stage costume,
we sat down on the bed and Gigi suggested that we play cards. I think she said that to divert a sexual encounter, because we still hadn’t had sex.

That night, I asked Gigi to go steady with me.

“Like you’re my girl and I’m your guy and there’s no women for me and no other men for you,” I said.

“Yes, Peter, I know what going steady means,” Gigi said. And then she said we should give it a try. From that moment on, we each gave 100 percent of ourselves into the relationship.

Which meant that I was finally getting lucky that night. Sort of. The first time we had sex was not great. I felt pressure after all those months of a long-distance courtship and I had a problem getting stiff. The Spoiler was more like a noodle. This was complicated by the fact that Gigi had insisted that I wear a condom. She started lecturing me about AIDS and genital herpes, and since I was a rock star I was a prime candidate for all of that. I hadn’t put on a raincoat for what felt like centuries. So we argued about that for a while and I had to call and get one of the roadies to get one.

Now that I had it, I had forgotten how to even put it on. Finally I got some sort of erection and it was getting bigger and I finally got the fucking thing on and it was half on and half off and I was losing it.

“Take your time, I understand,” Gigi said.

“There’s nothing to understand. It’s the fucking Trojan. It’s not used to being covered. C’mon, we’re not kids.”

Finally she rolled over and I put it in from the back and came immediately. I thought, Jesus, mother of God, I waited all these months and it’s over already?

So I dozed off for a few minutes and then I woke up and I was feeling horny and thinking I can keep it up so I started poking her in the back to wake her and she said, “You’re not going to get it up again.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know, and then you’re going to get frustrated and you’re going to get angry.”

“Well, maybe you should suck it. You don’t even know what to do,” I said, and we started arguing and she got up crying and put her coat on and
walked out. Now I was pissed off and she was crying in the hallway and I felt like shit. I called her back into the room.

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m just accustomed to sex-crazed women that do wild things to arouse me. I’m not used to sleeping with a lady and being gentle. You’re like a butterfly, you’re really tender, and I’m not used to that. You’ve got to give me a little time to adjust.”

We still had differences in what we enjoyed sexually. But I started weighing it out and I realized that in nine years I was going to hit sixty and it wouldn’t be about sleeping with four women or running naked through a hotel lobby. It would be more about really caring for one partner.

Gigi was the first woman I ever met that really loved God, like I do, so there was a spiritual connection there that I had never experienced. All I ever missed about Deb was fucking her. I never missed her company. No marriage will ever last on a foundation of sex alone. Eventually the raging fire,” Ace said. “Is” will diminish into a pilot light.

When Gigi and I first met, we were sitting there and I said, out of the blue, “The heart is a lonely hunter—”

“Yeah, that hunts on a lonely hill,” she said, finishing the poem. She told me that when she was a girl she had found that poem and she loved it so much that she kept it in her wallet. Fireworks went off in my brain. I knew that Gigi and I had to be destiny.

We had a break in touring and I took Gigi to Hawaii and we had a great time. I learned more about romance on that trip. I learned how to be nicer in certain ways, nicer than my usual no-holds-barred attitude about sex. When I left her early that last morning to go to the airport on my way to Japan, it was really emotional.

“I love you. I really think I’m getting this love thing,” I said. “I’m still not happy about a lot of things, though.”

“Yeah, I know what you’re unhappy about,” Gigi said. “But I’m sorry. It’s just not me. I’m not Deb.”

She was right. I had to get over the fact that every woman I got into bed with wasn’t Deb or Sweet Connie from Little Rock. It was a hard lesson to learn because I had been around crazy women my whole life.

It was nice to have a two-week break, because every place we went on
the reunion tour was total pandemonium. We’d have press following us everywhere we went, motorcycle escorts to the arenas. I used to love going up to the motorcycle cops and hugging them and telling them how much I loved policemen. They got us to the venues in time.

It was the same outside the country. There was always KISSmania in Japan, so that wasn’t new. We played the Tokyo Dome and the show was a nightmare. The stadium was so big that they had ramps on either side of the stage that protruded so far sideways into the audience that if you went all the way out on them, you couldn’t even see the other guys in the band. And if that was the case, who was going to cue the end of the song? Well, Paul took one look at those things and he immediately went ramp running. He was gone—he wasn’t even in the band anymore. Gene saw this and wasn’t about to let Paul have all the fun, so he took off—and he was the cue man. So I looked out and all I saw was Ace and a gazillion people. I was playing, and I was hearing Gene and Paul’s chords, but they were sloppy because they were out touching girls and throwing kisses. So the whole show went down the shitter. Then Ace disappeared. He wasn’t going to be left out. So I was all alone on the stage with all my guys running on the ramps.

Then I got an idea. At the very end of each show, all four of us would come out to the front of the stage and count one, two, three, and we’d all bow in unison. It was bullshit that I wasn’t getting noticed like the other three, so right before we lined up for the bows, I ran out on the ramp to the very end and gave a victory salute to the fans, and they went crazy. Then I came back, running right by the guys who were waiting to do the bow, and did the same thing on the other side of the stage. When I ran back and got in line, Gene leaned over to me.

“Are you satisfied?” he said.

“Very,” I smiled.

It was a wild trip for those two years we were out on the reunion tour. I was convinced that Doc was in collusion with Gene and Paul, ripping Ace and me off on all sorts of side deals. All I knew was that when the tour was over, Gene and Paul would be building mansions and Ace and I would wind up with a fraction of,” Ace said. “Is” that kind of money. I wouldn’t put it past Doc to get involved in shady dealings. He was arrested in 1988 for
helping a drug-smuggling ring—with connections to Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega—import forty-five thousand pounds of grass from Colombia to North Carolina. He pled guilty to a conspiracy charge but never served time.

Doc had hired this accountant named Paco who had toured with the Who and Led Zeppelin. Paco knew every trick in the book. One day Gigi accidentally walked into the count room, the place where the promoters settled up with the band. She saw two identical suitcases, one black and one brown, both packed to the brim with cash. They banned her from that area for the rest of the tour. When we told Ace that story, he was convinced that they were skimming off money and putting it into a Swiss bank account. Sure enough, we played Zurich and on a day off, Doc and Paco had to go attend to some business. We even told Gene and Paul about our suspicions, but they just chalked it up to Ace’s paranoid conspiracy theories. What else did I expect to hear from them?

I wanted the reunion to make up for certain things. I thought that maybe Gene and Paul had a point: Maybe they weren’t as crazy as I thought they were. Well, they were even crazier when we all got back together. I thought some of that old camaraderie would resurface, but in the end it was all about the M-O-N-E-Y. And here I was, trying to make amends for fucking up onstage in a show in 1978. So it was disheartening when I realized that they were taking so much from the party, and I was working so hard for so little. I had been a co-CEO of General Motors and now I was cleaning the latrines at a plant in Detroit.

It was so irritating to hear Gene say, “You’re working for me and you’ll do what I say or you’ll be fired just like any other employee.” I wanted to cut his throat from ear to ear. If he had said that to me back in the day, I would have taken a bottle and smashed it right across his forehead. But I had changed, even if they hadn’t. They were making more money than they’d ever make again in their lives because of Ace and
me,
the two fucking lunatics.ng clubs like

I
was a nervous wreck the whole day, just waiting for the armored car
to arrive. Finally, the doorbell rang in my apartment in Marina del Rey. I rushed to get to the door before Gigi. A man with a gun strapped to his holster gave me a small package. I quickly signed for it, tore the package open, and removed its contents.

“Who’s that, hon?” Gigi said from the other room.

I didn’t answer. She came into the living room to investigate. And then I got down on one knee, just like I’d seen so many times in the movies.

“I know I’ve been an asshole lately, but I love you so much and I will take very good care of you and I’ll always be there for you and I’ll provide a good life for you.”

Gigi looked down on a fifty-two-year-old long-haired man with tattoos. Later she would tell me that this wasn’t quite what she had envisioned for herself. She thought that she’d be married to a dignified, straight, Waspy guy, someone like Peter Graves. Instead she was getting Peter Criss.

“Will you marry me?” I finally asked her. We had been together for a year and a half by now and I knew Gigi was the right one. She was a sober, clear thinker, a good role model for my daughter. I love being married, so this just seemed right to me.

“Yes,” she said. She put that ring on and went out onto the balcony and kept looking at her hand. We celebrated with dinner at the Magic
Castle that night, and then we shot some videos of ourselves kissing and bouncing around the apartment like two little kids.

Meanwhile, Gigi was getting unsolicited advice about our marriage. One night Gigi got a call from Deb, who was obviously drunk.

“You know, Peter’s really a son of a bitch in the long run. You better be aware of what you’re getting yourself into,” she told Gigi.

Gigi got irate.

“Who are you talking to?” she said.

“Well, I’m his ex-wife,” Deb said.

“Yeah, ex,” Gigi answered. “How dare you talk about Peter like that to me?” a nice chunk of change,y when ik

They got into a huge fight and at one point, Deb actually said, “It should be me in that Learjet, not you.” When she hung up, Gigi told me that now she understood why I wanted to kill Deb.

We got married on May 3, 1998. I had a traditional big church wedding with Lydia and a posh Beverly Boulevard wedding with Deb, and I thought both of them sucked. So I suggested that we have a quiet wedding, just me and her. We’d fly out her mother. My drum tech could be the best man. Gigi liked David the hairdresser on our tours, so he could give her away. I could tell she wasn’t that thrilled about not having any of her friends there, but Gigi agreed.