Makeup to Breakup (39 page)

So I went to New York and met with Paul Shaffer. Paul was an old friend, and he listened to the tracks that I wanted him to play on and loved them. He wound up offering to play for free—that’s the kind of guy he is. But we did pay him.

Through Paul, we got the great bass player Will Lee. He didn’t play for free. He had his fee and he was going to get it no matter what the gig was. But he was a world-class musician, so we bit the bullet. We went into a studio in New York and he was there for hours, playing bass on five tracks. When it was over, he came over to me.

“You know that ‘Send in the Clowns’ cover you’re doing? I really dig it. I’ll play on that for free,” he said. So that became a special track with both Will and Paul playing on it. Paul also turned me on to Clifford Carter, who did all the string arrangements.

We went home and I recorded the vocals in my huge two-story-tall living room. The sound was brilliant. Then I decided that even though we had recorded the CD digitally, I wanted that warm analog sound. Thousands of dollars later, that was accomplished.

It was time to mix the CD. I soon realized that I didn’t know how to do a mix with all these different elements. I was in a guitar band. Give me three guitars and a set of drums, and I could produce fine. But twenty strings and cellos and French horns, I don’t know where the fuck I’m going. And Tom Perkins, the engineer, was in even further over his head. He was basically a sound engineer for dialogue. He didn’t know how to mix music. I had hired two young engineers to assist, and they told me that Tom had no idea how to work with all this new technology: He was so old school. I was turning into a gestapo officer, screaming at Tom every time he fucked up. Lucky for me, Chris Jennings stepped up and engineered the rest of the album and we had the great George Marino, from Sterling Sound, master the disc. By the time we were done, the CD cost me at least a hundred grand.

In July of 2007,
One for All
was finally released. It had taken me three years to make it. My lawyer cut a really good distribution deal with a company called Megaforce and they did a good job, getting me into Best Buy and other big chains. I hired Lori Lousararian, a great publicist, and we broke our asses doing radio interviews, sometimes twenty a day. We
had a signing at a record store in the Village and there were hundreds of people lined up around the block. Things seemed to be looking good, thanks to Gigi.

So imagine how devastated I was when the CD failed. I really believed it would sell. I thought the fans would want to scour the lyrics to see if there was any dirt in them. After all that work, the recording, going into the city to mix it, all that money, I was crushed. I never really wanted to wear all those hats. I’d rather be a member of a team than a boss any day. But I wasn’t just one guy in a band, I was
the
guy, so this fail,” Ace said. “Td ever ure was all on me. I couldn’t even blame the producer! I was the producer.

I was so depressed and Gigi thought that going to Hawaii might jar me out of my funk. But it was worse there. I went to my favorite spot, a big rock that overlooked the ocean, and I took my Walkman and listened to my album over and over again. I couldn’t believe that it had tanked. There were such great songs on it, and great players. We covered my mom’s favorite song, “What a Difference a Day Makes,” with just Paul Shaffer, Will Lee, and me playing the brushes. I had cut Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.” Those wonderful lyrics—“Isn’t it rich, isn’t it queer / Losing my timing this late in my career? / And where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns / Maybe next year”—were a sly reference to KISS.

I had hired the best guns in the world, and I thought that I couldn’t fail. So I sat on those rocks listening over and over again, and each song was like a knife twisting into my heart and my guts.

I went back to the hotel. Gigi was lying by the pool, and I told her that I wanted to go up and take a nap. But I didn’t. I just wanted to be alone, and as soon as I darkened the room and lay down on that bed, I cried and cried like a baby. I became the most miserable man on Kauai, the most beautiful spot on the earth.

When we got back to New Jersey, I was still almost suicidal. And, to my discredit, I started taking things out on Gigi. She had worked very hard on the CD, doing tons of footwork and arranging flights and dealing with the publicist and the distribution company. It was stressful on both of us, and when the CD went nowhere I blamed Gigi and started talking about a divorce. It’s true you always hurt the one you love. It was far from her fault. I found it very difficult to let go of my pain, even going back to
my mother dying and my divorcing Deb. So all that shit came surfacing again, and it was a terribly stressful time for both of us.

But, to our credit, we went to marriage counseling and worked out our problems. Gigi was determined not to let me wallow in my misery. She pushed me to get right back in the studio and work on a rock CD. She had been getting tons of e-mails through my Web site asking for a rock album, so she had arranged for Angel to come back to New Jersey and start working again. I was still feeling the wrath of failure from the ballads CD, so I wasn’t too into getting right back to work. But she went downstairs, put a lot of my memorabilia in storage, and hired some guys to build a nice big studio. I didn’t want to record in a closet again: I wanted a room big enough for my whole drum kit.

I almost felt forced into this rock thing, but as Angel sent me song after song, it started lighting my pilot light up and the fire grew and my belly started feeling warm again. Angel and I worked on every arrangement, and the songs were shaping up great. Angel was possessed. He never stopped working. He’d spend hours in the guest house, sitting at the table, playing with his headset on, working on the material. Then he’d go, “Cat, I’m going downstairs to the studio to put down this stuff while I got it in my mind.” I’d say, “Fuck it, I’m going to watch
The Simpsons,
” and he’d be down there working away.

I brought in Richie Scarlett, Ace’s old guitar player, who I promised I’d use on one of my albums when we were on the Bad Boys tour. I made him play bass on some of the tracks. He had switched to bass for a while when he was playing with Leslie West, and he had become a great bassist. He was back to guitar, but I convinced him we needed a a nice chunk of change,gd ever bass player, not another guitarist.

By October of 2007 we had thirteen great tracks, and all they needed was my vocals. But then fate intervened. Gigi was upstairs in the bathroom, finishing up a shower. She was toweling off and looked down and saw blood all over the place. At first she thought that her period had come, but then she sat on the bed to towel off her legs and when she got up the towel was just saturated with blood.

By the time she called me up, she was sitting on the toilet.

“I think I’m having a miscarriage,” she told me. I looked at her and saw
blood dripping down her legs, and when she got up, there were clumps of blood on the towel.

I flipped out. I had never seen anything like that in my life.

“We got to rush to the hospital, right now!” I screamed, and started running around the house like a chicken without a head, trying to get dressed. My whole brain just became mush.

“How about we just go to my gynecologist, who knows me, before we rush off to an emergency room, where I’ll be waiting for hours?” she suggested.

She was thinking clearly, so we drove to her gynecologist’s office. The office was in a converted house, and I was not impressed with the place when we got there. They took Gigi in right away and I was sitting out there, waiting and waiting, freaking out. The doctor finally came out and told me that they were going to do some tests on her.

A couple of days later, they called her and asked her to come into the office. When she got home, she sat me down and told me that she had cancer. It was an aggressive sarcoma that could spread rapidly through the body, but they had caught it early. Gigi seemed to be taking this okay, but I think she was just in shock. Here she was, just turning forty. You don’t expect a diagnosis like this.

At first, I was in total denial. When she said, “I have cancer,” all I could think was, Yeah, that’s what they tell you so they can make extra money. I couldn’t accept that the disease that took my mother was now attacking my wife. When the news sank in, I couldn’t breathe. I felt like my heart was going to blow up in my chest.

I was so angry at God. How could he do this to a person who was so spiritual and helped so many people with their own problems with sobriety? Then I just got angry in general. I was angry at Gigi for getting it. I thought about the fact that she smoked cigarettes, the thing that killed my mother. Maybe the cigarettes caused this.

“How could you get cancer? Now you’re gonna die and leave me alone,” I said to her. I was such an asshole.

Ever since my grandmother took that diabetic stroke in front of me, I had no heart for dealing with people who were sick. But God forbid you don’t take care of me when I’m sick: I’ll kill you. I was that way with Lydia,
Deb, and Gigi too. If they got sick, it was “Take a fucking aspirin, have a bowl of soup, see you later.”

But this time, besides being angry, I was really, really scared. I hadn’t been that scared since I had gotten carjacked and I was sitting alone in my apartment. I just couldn’t believe I was going to lose my wife at such an early age.

Gigi’s men and women friends from her 12-step program were much more supportive than I was. They were calling morning, noon, and night. I always had issues with the whole 12-step thing, but if that’s what it took to get Gigi off drugs and drinking, then God bl,” Ace said. “Td ever ess her. But the way they rallied around her gave me a whole new respect for them.

One day I came home from the gym and Gigi was talking with a friend. I figured they were discussing her cancer, so I went upstairs and took a shower. I was lying naked on the bed afterward and unconsciously checking myself, because if you wore spandex as much as I did you would notice things that don’t belong there. So I felt my pecs and they were fine, but when I passed the towel over my left nipple, I saw stars. It felt like someone had popped a nail into it. Then I started messing with it and I felt a small lump behind the nipple.

Of course, my first paranoid thought was that I had cancer. Cancer was on our minds 24/7 then. But men don’t get breast cancer, so I figured I had lifted weights at the gym and strained something. It was probably a cyst.

The next day, Gigi was scheduled to consult with Dr. Gae Rodke—a well-respected doctor in Manhattan—about her cancer, so she suggested I come along with her. Gigi went in and I was waiting when the nurse came over to me.

“Could you come in? The doctor wants to see you, too,” she said.

I went back and Dr. Rodke explained to me what tests she wanted to do on Gigi. She had wonderful blue eyes and a reassuring smile and she really made me feel that everything was going to be okay with Gigi. Then she said, “Your wife mentioned that you have something on your breast. Would you mind if I look at it while you’re here?”

I took my shirt off and she started futzing around with the nipple.

“Hmmm. Let me do something,” she said.

She rubbed some lubricant on my left breast and did a quick sonogram.

“If you were my husband, I would send you to see my colleague Dr. Alex Swistel. He’s over at Cornell, and he’s a wonderful doctor. Let me call over and make sure he can see you right away.”

Peter, what is she telling you? There must be something wrong here. She’s sending you to see a heavy doctor, you get the message?

“I could come back . . .”

“Now, Peter,” she said. She got Swistel’s office on the phone and told them that she had a VIP patient and she’d like it if Alex could see me immediately.

We went right over to Cornell, and it was a beautiful building. We got to Dr. Swistel’s suite and there’s a big sign,
BREAST CANCER RESEARCH
. Now I was freaking out again. We sat down in the waiting room and I looked around—all women there, except for a couple of men who were there with their wives. I saw a very tall, beautiful young girl who had no hair and was wearing a scarf. She could have been a model, and here she was, dealing with this. Another woman was obviously on a lot of medication and was nodding out in her seat. All around there were women who looked drained of life, with sunken cheekbones and wigs. You just felt you were in a room of cancer, a room that no one should ever have to be in.

I was sitting there holding Gigi’s hand, really nervous. They called me in, and Dr. Swistel introduced himself. He was like House: He had a whole bunch of young doctors following him around.

Swistel started feeling the nodule.

“Do you think it’s breast cancer?” I spurted out.

“I don’t know, but at this point I doubt it,” he said, trying to reassure me._gd ever

Then one of the resident doctors started asking me a few questions. She was straight off the boat from Ireland, a beautiful brunette with green eyes.

“Do you feel any nausea?” she asked me in that thick Irish brogue. I had learned some dialects in acting school, so I answered her right back in a nice brogue. She gave me a great smile.

“I love the Irish,” I said. “I have a shamrock tattoo. I’m half Irish, actually.”

Gigi was not smiling. She was pissed that I was flirting in front of her.

Dr. Swistel told me to hang there: He was going to run a test and come right back. The Irish doctor followed him out.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Gigi cracked. “She’s only here for the day. You’ll always have that wandering eye, huh, Peter? You will never change.” We laughed about that Irish doctor the whole way home.

Swistel wanted to get a biopsy on the nodule and was going to have me make an appointment with someone at Cornell, but Gigi wondered if it would be all right to schedule with a doctor closer to our house in Jersey. I hated to come into the city, and she knew of a breast center nearby. Alex reluctantly agreed, so we made an appointment with this doctor in New Jersey.