Makeup to Breakup (4 page)
Authors: Larry Sloman,Peter Criss
“What’s your problem, Master Criscuola?”
“I have to go, sister.”
“Well, I think you could wait an hour, right, Master Criscuola?”
What! I’m ten years old. I gotta go
now.
“Sit down, Master Criscuola.”
So I peed my pants. I had to go through the whole day with wet, pissed-up pants, and it was freezing out. I remember walking home and my pants got stiff, and my mom screamed at me.
Another time—oh, God—I shit my pants.
“Sister, sister!”
“What’s the problem, Master?”
“I gotta go number two.”
“Wait.”
Well, you can’t wait: You’re a kid. So I shit my pants. And it stunk. And I’m sitting in it. Then I walked down the steps at the end of the day and the shit was falling down my leg and everybody was laughing at me. It was one of the worst days of my life. I came home and said, “Ma, the nun is torturing me. She wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom and I made in my pants and I had to sit in it all day.”
Where did they come up with these tortures? One time a nun threw me into a pitch-black cloakroom for hours. Well, you’re thirteen, and your imagination starts running, and the coats turn into monsters and the arms of the coats start moving. I was screaming bloody murder, but the nun wouldn’t let me out. I had to sleep with the light on in my bedroom after that, I was so traumatized.
Their major punishment was cracking your knuckles with a ruler till they bled. I’d be talking or I didn’t have my homework or whatever, so she’d march me up to the front of the room in front of the whole class. I’d put my hand out and she’d whack my knuckles four or five times. It hurt better than ” aylbig-time. But if you moved, you’d get ten more smacks.
One time I made the mistake of bringing my toy soldiers to school. I was playing with them in the back of the class. The nun came up, took the toys, and then dragged me over to the metal wastepaper basket.
“Now you sit in it,” she said.
“In the basket?”
“Yes.”
My legs had rim marks around them when I got out. I couldn’t walk: I was hunched over for hours. These were cruel and unusual punishments. Today, if you slap your own kid they put you in jail. But those nuns got away with all that shit. So after nine years of torture, I went to my mom.
“Ma, this ain’t right. I got one more year to graduate. Let me go to public school, please!”
Thank the Lord, she agreed and I went to P.S. 122.
In retrospect, that might not have been the smartest move. Sure, I got
away from those sadistic nuns, but now I was facing big black guys, huge Hispanic guys, tough Italian guys who were left back year after year. We were fifteen and they were nineteen! They always sat at the back of the room and called you out so they could kick your ass and get your lunch money. I wouldn’t take shit from nobody. I would turn around and say, “What’s your problem?”
“What’s
my
problem, motherfucker? You’ll see after school.”
I was fucked. I’d try to go out the back way; they’d be waiting there. I’d try another way, but they’d have that covered, too. Then I’d get my beating. One guy would grab me in a headlock, another guy would punch me in the ribs a few times, punch me in the stomach, throw me to the ground, and then they’d both stomp on my head. I’d go home with a ripped shirt and black eyes and my mother would say, “What the hell happened to you?”
“I got beat up again.”
My dad had his own advice.
“If he’s bigger than you, hit him in the back of the head when he doesn’t see it coming. If he doesn’t go down, hit him in the head with a brick. I don’t care what you got to do, there is no such thing as fair fighting. Fight to win.”
My uncle George had the same attitude. “Get a bat. Wait until after school, come behind him, and break his knees with a bat.” I got really good with a bat. In fact, I still carry a bat in my car to this day.
But what they didn’t factor in was that these weren’t one-on-one fights. I was going up against organized gangs. There were no gangs in Catholic school. In public school there were fourteen gangs and I was getting beat up almost every day, so I had to get into a gang for self-preservation. If you weren’t in a gang, you were a pigeon.
I got in the Young Lords, along with my best friend, Jerry Nolan. Eventually, as you got older, you’d graduate to the Phantom Lords. They were one of the top gangs. The Phantom Lords were always in the news for killing other gang members, racketeering, robbery. They were really gangstery guys. That’s what you’d aspire to. Isn’t that great?
Gangs were all about turf. The Young Lords and the Phantom Lords were predominately Puerto Rican, but where we lived the kids were
mainly Irish and Italian. If other gangs would try to come into our neighborhood, the word would get out to the Puerto Ricans and the
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d ever n they would come down and whoever had come, they’d get scared shitless and leave. You didn’t want to fuck with the Lords. We were really like wannabes. They let us fight next to them, but we weren’t as badass as these Puerto Rican guys.
One of the things we used to do was pick on the Hasidic Jewish who lived in the neighborhood. I was hanging out then with a bunch of asshole kids who were really prejudiced, so we’d chase the Hasids, knock their hats off, pull their curls, and kick their asses.
My aunt Rose, my uncle George’s wife, was Jewish. She was an absolutely gorgeous woman with the body of a movie star and long black hair. I’d go over to her house and eat matzo ball soup and gefilte fish, and I loved it. I’d even visit her mom’s house and eat herring with cream sauce. One day I was sitting there looking at her mom’s menorah and the Sabbath candleholders and it dawned on me that they were the same as the Hasidic kids: They were all Jewish. I loved Rosie and her mom, so why was I knocking these Hasidic kids’ hats off ? “What a piece of shit,” I thought. “What’s wrong with you? Are you a Nazi, running around beating up people who don’t deserve to be beaten up, just like you get beaten up after school?” I never messed with the Hasidic kids after that.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t an angel. I got into a lot of fights when I was running with the Lords. I used a stickball bat and I would get my shots in. I hit a guy once with an aerial from a car, wrapped it really good around the neck. Got hit with one, too. This black guy snapped an aerial on my head and the ball from the top of it stuck in my head. I had to go to the hospital to get it pulled out. I still have a hole there that hurts when I touch it. I’ve been in knife fights, been cut by razors, cut by a meat cleaver.
Sometimes the wounds were self-inflicted. One time I was being chased by a bunch of guys on the south side of Brooklyn. I didn’t know the neighborhood that well and it was dark. I ran down an alley between two buildings to escape them, and I ran right into a brick wall and knocked myself out. I woke up the next day with a big cut on my head.
Eventually I got a little reputation for being a tough guy and I worked my way up to war counselor. That was the guy in charge of the weapons
that we’d use in our rumbles, whether it was bats or chains or switchblades. I started thinking that there might be some money in this shit, and I began to build zip guns and sell them for five bucks a pop. I used to hide the zip guns I made in a vent in my grandmother’s bathroom. I’d unscrew the four screws, put six or seven guns up there, and put the vent back on. Sure enough, my uncle George found them. I came home one day and he and my grandmother were sitting there with the guns on the table.
“This has got to stop,” he said.
“Okay, Unc. I won’t do it anymore, promise,” I lied.
Then my grandmother, who knew me well, said, “Bullshit!” and she took a broom and broke it over my head. I thought I would have to go to the hospital, my head hurt so much. They dumped the guns in the sewer and my gun-toting, gun-selling days were over. But I still had my knives.
Sometimes I’d take a girl to the movies. The best movies were at the RKO theater on the south side. But that wasn’t on our turf—it belonged to the Jesters, a tough all–Puerto Rican gang. If you went alone, just you and her, you didn’t know if you’d get home alive. A lot of times on the way out, I’d take a beating with a bat. One time me and a bunch of the guys changed my personality would ever from the gang took our girls to the RKO to see Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas in
The Vikings
. We figured we could see the movie, slip out at the end, and we wouldn’t get snagged. It didn’t work out that way. Sure enough, every member of the Jesters was watching the movie that particular Sunday afternoon.
“We’re fucking outnumbered. We’re going to have to fight these guys, and we’re gonna get killed. I’m not up for this shit,” I moaned.
When it really got down to it, everybody got punky quick because we weren’t really bad guys. I could fight with best of them, but I’d rather not: I’d rather just look like a badass and not really
be
the badass, but sometimes you had to stand your ground.
We came out of the theater, and there were about thirty of them outside waiting. They had aerials from cars, chains, and a baseball bat with a nail through it. So immediately it was like,
“Run!”
and everybody just took off. They didn’t bother with the girls, but they ran right after us. I was running down the street and I tripped into a bunch of garbage cans and this Puerto Rican kid was right behind me and he grabbed a garbage
can lid and started beating my head in with it. I was holding my hands up to protect my head and he was beating my hands and my knuckles started bleeding. There was blood all over my clothes. I popped my switchblade out, turned around, and boom, the blade went right up his armpit and out through his shoulder. He started screaming in Spanish and I just took off. I turned around and saw him pull it out, and there was blood squirting out of his shoulder. I couldn’t believe it. He was the first and only guy I’ve ever stabbed. But it was him or me.
I wasn’t raised in a violent family. The only two times my father beat me, I had it coming. I was basically a good Italian-German-Irish kid who didn’t want to get his ass beat every day in school. Now I was seventeen years old and after three years of this shit, what did I have to look forward to? Becoming a member of the Phantom Lords? Those were the guys you see in prison for life with tattoos all over their necks and teardrops tattooed on their faces. They were real killers. Stealing cars, robbing stores, assassinating people. But my best friend Jerry Nolan and I weren’t sociopaths. We certainly didn’t want to die. And by then, both of us had found something to beat on besides other people’s heads. We both had drum sets, and we both saw music as the antidote to these mean streets.
And as usual, my mother was right there, steering my moral compass. “Do you see Jimmy boy play drums?” she’d lecture me. “Does your friend Louie play drums? How about Peter Cudereski? No. The only person you know who plays drums is Jerry. Well, Jerry was born to play drums and so were you. You both got gifts from God. Don’t waste it. You’re going to break my heart if you stay with this gang stuff, because you’ll wind up in jail or dead.”
I don’t know if she really itle>Makeup to
“Y
ou came out of my womb dancing,” my mother would always tell
me. Whether or not that’s true, there was a bit of genetic predisposition for me to love music. My dad loved to dance. He was a great ballroom dancer, but when he got loaded he used to improvise and do the strangest dances I’d ever seen. Unlike my mother, he hated Elvis and rock ’n’ roll. My father loved big-band music, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Gene Krupa—that’s what he called
real
music. He did like the Beatles, though.
My mom loved music, period. She could sing like an angel. She sounded just like Dinah Washington. For a German-Irish woman, she had a wild hair up her ass and she just fell in love with rock ’n’ roll. She’d always have the radio blasting Elvis and Gene Vincent and Bill Haley and the Comets.
But when I was about almost ten, I heard a song that my father was playing, Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” And the rhythm of Gene Krupa’s drums hit me like a lighting bolt from heaven. That was it for me. I wanted to be that guy playing the drums. Forget about being a fireman: I knew, deep down inside, that my destiny was to play drums. Even when I was five, I’d turn over my mother’s pots and pans, took her forks, butter knives, or wooden spoons, and began banging away. I got addicted to it. My father would complain that I was making too much noise, but my mom really liked it. “Let him alone,” she’d say. “There could be a lot worse things he’d be doing.”
I became obsessed. When I wasn’t banging on the pots, I’d figure out ways to play real drums. Whenever I’d go to a relative’s wedding, I’d get my chance. They’d rent out the local Knights of Columbus hall and the women would bring cold cuts and potato salad and they’d hire out a little trio band. And as soon as they took their break, boom, I’d be up on the drums, banging away.
When I was seven, my parents bought me a toy set of drums, endorsed by one of my favorite TV programs,
The Rootie Kazootie Club
. It was a bass drum with two drums attached. I broke the toy, I played it so hard. My next set of drums was a makeshift set that my dad assembled. He bought a busted-up old army marching-band snare drum at a hockshop and rested it on top of a wooden box. For cymbals, he took two garbage-can lids, attached some nails to them so you’d get that sizzle when you hit them, and soldered each lid to a thin mop stick. Then he put the sticks into buckets of cement to keep them stable. I put some stars and glitter on the front of the box and wrote out the name
STARS
, which is what I named my imaginary band. I would then sit on a chair on top of some phone books and play the snare with brushes.
I set up the drums in my mother’s bedroom and I practically never left the room, playing along to the songs on the radio. When I was twelve, I came across a white doo-wop group that used to sing down the street and I hung around themTo add insult to injury, when ick until eventually they let me sit in and back them with my brushes and my snare and the garbage-can lids. These guys would be down in the basement singing “Da-da dom, ba-da dom,” and there’d be a little twelve-year-old kid back there playing away, those old C-F-G-minor oldies but goodies, over and over.