No Regrets (32 page)

May 21, 1983

It started on a Friday afternoon, around five o’clock,
with a phone call to Buddy, a close friend and drinking partner who ran a successful jewelry business in Manhattan.

“I’ll be there in a little bit,” I said.

“You bringing the DeLorean? I haven’t had a ride yet.”

“Sure, why not.”

We met at Buddy’s place at Nineteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, and then headed to a little bar called Harvey’s a few blocks away. I’m not sure exactly how long we stayed there, but I know that by the time we walked out, I was already too high to get behind the wheel of any automobile, let alone a DeLorean, but I was oblivious to it, and so was Buddy. You’d think I would have learned a lesson after nearly killing myself and Anton when I smashed up my Porsche, but it never really
sank in. Even though I had moved on with my career, my reckless behavior continued.

On our way back to Westchester, we passed through upper Manhattan, driving wildly. A police car spotted us and gave chase, but luckily we eluded them by taking side streets and running a few red lights. Somehow we made it back to Buddy’s house without having an accident or getting arrested. When we walked into his joint I quickly passed out on the couch. The following morning we got up and started drinking beer for breakfast, and the whole process started all over again. Later that afternoon we ended up in White Plains at a bar called Cheers, which was owned by Buddy’s cousin. It was the day of the Preakness horse race, and everyone was having a good time, but we started to have a little too much fun, and realized we needed to split to avoid a confrontation—or worse. By the time we left the parking lot, I had already smashed into two cars. As we pulled into an intersection on Post Road, I ended up rear-ending a third car ever so gently. Unfortunately, at the same time a police car was passing us in the opposite direction and witnessed the love tap. The impact was so slight that I presumed there was no damage to either car, but the other driver got out of his two-hundred-dollar piece of shit looking pissed.

I also got out of the car, but I couldn’t find any damage. At that point the police officer approached and asked for my license and registration. Since I had been driving with a suspended license for DWI, I knew I was going to be arrested, I went back to my car and pretended I was retrieving it from the glove compartment. My survival instincts kicked in, and I made a judgment call.

“Buddy, get out of the car.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?” he said.

“Just get the fuck out of the car!”

“Ace, man… don’t do anything stupid.”

“I laughed. Don’t worry about it. I’m outta here!”

As soon as Buddy got out, I pulled down my gull-wing door and put the pedal to the metal, leaving a patch of burnt rubber in my wake.

Now, I’ve done a lot of crazy things in my life, but this one was one for the record books. For the next hour I played a real-life game of Grand Theft Auto, leading police on a high-speed chase through Westchester County. I flew through red lights, bouncing off other cars and embankments, narrowly avoiding a major catastrophe. Although I was pursued by a half dozen police cars, only one cop had the balls to pull up alongside me. I was going about sixty miles an hour against traffic on the Bronx River Parkway. He simply pointed a finger at the shoulder of the highway—a universal symbol for “Pull over, asshole.”

The officer couldn’t keep up with me in his unmarked Chevy Nova. As I shifted into fifth gear, I politely smiled and waved bye-bye… and left him in the dust.

After losing the cops I pulled into a deli to make a phone call. Steam and smoke were rising from the hood and the undercarriage, and the car looked like it had been through a war zone. I surveyed the damage and just laughed to myself.

Hey, I pulled a “Smokey and the Bandit” and got away with it!

In my insanity, I figured I would just walk into the deli, call up one of my friends, and have them come pick me up. I’d report the car stolen and let the cops spend the next few days chasing around some phantom thieves who took my DeLorean for a joyride. What I didn’t realize was that the owner of deli had called the cops after observing me and the condition of my car outside.

I called my buddy, Crazy Joe. “Yeah, pick me up in a few minutes. I’m reporting the car stolen.”

What I had failed to notice was that the street was filling up with police cars. As I exited the deli, I was confronted by a dozen or more cops with gun barrels drawn and aimed at my head. It reminded me of a scene from
The Blues Brothers
.

“Put your hands up!” one of the officers shouted. “Don’t move!”

I froze in my tracks, as they cuffed my hands behind my back. I wondered how I was going to explain the more than six grand I had in my pockets at the time. I mean, who carries that much cash, aside from
someone looking to buy drugs, which of course was exactly what I had in mind.

Luckily, I hadn’t succeeded. Six grand could buy a lot of blow in those days, and I can only imagine the charges I might have faced if I’d managed to make a score before the cops gave chase. As it was, they booked me on charges of drunken and reckless driving. I was fortunate, though. A couple of the cops knew who I was and immediately started making conversation. When we arrived at the police station in White Plains I was treated like a celebrity by several of the younger officers. I posed for pictures and signed autographs. Then they took my mug shot—a keeper if ever there was one. In the photo I’m wearing a T-shirt with an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe on the front. Marilyn’s eyes were made of clear plastic with floating pupils and everyone got a kick out of it. Most of the officers and detectives were friendly, but one cop wasn’t even slightly amused. He was a black sergeant, new on the job, and he quickly became agitated by the special treatment I was apparently receiving from the other cops.

“Put this guy in a cell!” the sergeant shouted. “I don’t care what group he’s with.”

The room fell silent for a moment. I tried to break the tension with the following line:

“Yo! I’m with the Temptations!”

Everyone cracked up. Well, everyone except the sergeant, who stared at me disdainfully, in much the way he probably stared at any wiseass drunk. He was about to throw my ass in a cell when another young cop stepped forward and intervened. His name was Jimmy Jenter, and he was the cop in the Chevy Nova who had signaled for me to pull over earlier.

“Hey, Sarge,” he said. “Can I take him back to my office and see if I can get someone to bail him out?”

The sergeant said nothing at first, then waved a hand dismissively.

“Yeah, sure. Get him out of here.”

Jimmy took me to a back room, let me make a phone call, and gave
me a cup of coffee. He seemed like a pretty serious guy, a little older than he looked, but he wasn’t pissed at me. His demeanor was calm and professional. While I was waiting for my ride, he told me that he was a recovering alcoholic and had been sober for three years. He’d recently lost a nephew to a drunk driver, which should have made him want to kick my ass, but he revealed not a trace of anger.

“Look, I’ll probably never see you again,” he said before I left the station. “But if you ever get tired of living like this, and you want to do something about it, give me a call.”

He handed me an Alcoholics Anonymous card with his name and phone number on it. Out of courtesy, I tucked it into my wallet, thanked him for all his help, and left with my buddy Joe, who had bailed me out. Little did I know at the time that Jimmy would end up being a lifelong friend.

There were consequences to the DeLorean incident. My license was revoked, I had to pay a large fine, and I received a bunch of negative publicity that made international headlines. In a way, I was fortunate. Had this been twenty-five years later, the fallout would have been much worse: mug shot on TMZ.com, video clips of my courtroom appearance on CNN, and cell phone footage of the car chase drawing millions of hits on YouTube. The worst sort of notoriety: a celebrity falling hard. Not to mention the harsh legal ramifications that would have come down on me. The other consequence was a court-ordered two-week stint in a hospital detox unit, and some mandatory AA meetings. At one of the first meetings I was approached by a guy who looked familiar. He walked up to me, extended his hand, and said, “Hi, Ace. You remember me?”

Not sure what to say, I merely shrugged.

He smiled.

“I’m Jimmy—the cop who gave you the card when you were arrested.”

Holy shit!
I hadn’t recognized him out of uniform.

“How you been?” he asked.

I laughed. Seemed pretty obvious how I’d been.

“Working the program, I guess. We’ll see how it goes.”

Jimmy eventually became my sponsor in AA and one of my closest friends. We’ve been to hundreds of meetings together over the years, and we’ve spent a lot of time hanging out and chatting. The difference between us is that Jimmy never relapsed. He was a rock; I was a rocker. But I thank God that he came into my life. He never gave up on me, through good times and bad.

Especially the bad.

Once I embarked on my solo career, I paid little
attention to what was happening with KISS. There were financial and legal matters I should have handled more professionally, but I simply wanted to move on with my life and put the KISS years behind me. But I wasn’t really moving. At best I was treading water. In my heart I realized that nothing takes you out quicker than resentment. And yet I was filled with it. I didn’t want people to even mention KISS when they were in my presence, which was ridiculous, of course, since the band had been such a huge part of my life. I couldn’t just pretend it had never happened. In a very real sense, the early eighties were troubled times until I formed my new band, Frehley’s Comet. They were years largely wasted on drugs and alcohol. That entire period went by in a blur, as I isolated myself up in Connecticut. I tried to keep my nose clean (so to speak). Since I was still on probation, I knew that any future transgressions would not be dealt with lightly. It’s really serious to get in trouble when you’re on probation. You go right to jail, and jail is not a good place for celebrities.

I’d walked away from the twelve-step world after only a handful of meetings. “This is for the fucking birds,” I told Jeanette one day.

From time to time, I rented out my studio to friends and other artists, simply because it was there and it was such a terrific, state-of-the-art facility. A diverse group of artists passed through its doors: the 1960s folksinger
Melanie; Neil Smith and Dennis Dunaway from Alice Cooper’s original band; Rolling Stones producer Chris Kimsey; and the late Bob Mayo from Peter Frampton’s band, to name just a few.

On one occasion I had a song idea I wanted to lay down, but I had rented out my studio to some friends. When that happened I usually went to North Lake Sound in White Plains. This particular studio was only forty-five minutes away and had become sort of a hangout for me in the late seventies. It was owned by Chip Taylor (the singer and composer), Jon Voight (the actor), and Joe Renda. (Incidentally, Chip and Jon are brothers.) While I was putting down my song idea, some friends of mine stopped by to see what was going on. I decided to take a break, and after a few drinks and some lines I decided to call it a day without any more recording.

Instead I invited my friends up to Wilton so I could check on how things were progressing at my place. I was driving Jeanette’s Corvette and somehow all three of us squeezed into it. Me, my friend Richie Ayers, Tommy, and a quart of Stoli vodka, to boot! Needless to say, while driving up the Merritt Parkway we all indulged in the Russian spirit and some blow, and by the time we got off the parkway in Norwalk, we were all pretty loaded. My judgment was somewhat impaired by that point, and I almost ran over a cop directing traffic at an intersection. When I realized what I had done, I panicked and hit the gas. The police soon showed up at the gates of my property to arrest my ass, but I didn’t respond to their calls. Instead I called my attorney and pleaded with him to feed the police some sort of excuse. Somehow my attorney pulled off a magic act here. He called the local police and calmed them down to the point where they left the front gates and decided not to arrest me. To this day I’m still not sure exactly what bullshit explanation prompted their retreat, but I do remember making a large contribution to the local PBA that year!

But the party didn’t end. After my nerves settled down I became frisky with a .357 Magnum. Escaping the clutches of the law had made me feel invincible, so I proceeded to go downstairs with my trusted
Smith & Wesson just outside the entrance to the studio and conduct an experiment. I was interested in figuring out how many times a .357 Magnum bullet would ricochet off concrete walls before coming to a halt. I felt like I was being scientific, figuring out the trajectory of the bullet, where it would strike, and the geometry of the angles its path would follow. Attempting all this, mind you, under the influence of God only knows what else I had consumed since escaping the clutches of the law.

I got off at least two or three shots without killing anyone, thank goodness, but I did succeed in emptying out the whole recording studio and house! I remember thinking,
Where did everybody go? I’m not dangerous; I’m not trying to hurt anyone.
Fortunately, that was the end of ballistics training for the day, as I went upstairs for a nap. My recollection of this event was a little foggy, but when consulting with my friend Richie Ayers, he confirmed every detail. Incidentally, Richie’s dad is the famous Marvel Comics artist Dick Ayers. Richie told me, “I couldn’t believe all the precise calculations you made before firing the first shot! It was as if you were a mad scientist on a quest!”

Thinking back, I thank God for getting my friends and me through that day without any injuries. I can’t help but wonder, in amazement, how the human brain works. It can still retain with accuracy events that occurred while under the influence over thirty years ago. It’s really quite fascinating.