Face the Music: A Life Exposed (2 page)

For some people, a near-death experience causes the epiphany that changes the course of their life. In fact, if you page through a stack of rock and roll memoirs, you might think every musician is required to have a close call with the beyond that becomes the definitive milestone in his or her life.

But I never tried to kill myself. And I never did much in the way of drinking or drugs, so I can’t say I ever woke up in a hospital after being resuscitated, forced to take stock of my life. Still, I have had a few brushes with death. And in those moments the gravity of the situation certainly triggered soul-searching. But to tell you the truth, none of those near-death experiences had as powerful an effect on me as something that might not seem so rock and roll. Instead of coming when I had a gun in my mouth or a defibrillator on my chest, my epiphany came to me on the set of a Broadway musical.

In 1999 I landed the lead role in the Toronto production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Phantom of the Opera
. The title character is a music composer who wears a mask to hide a horrible facial disfigurement. And there I was—the kid born without an ear, Stanley the monster, who had spent his life playing music with his face obscured by makeup—playing that character. One scene in particular touched a psychological nerve in me. In his cape and mask, the Phantom has a dangerous but elegant appeal. Just before he steals away his love interest, Christine, and takes her to his lair, he leans in close to her and she pulls off his mask, revealing his horrid face. Something about his being unmasked and her touching him in that moment of intimacy struck a deep chord inside me.

One day during my run as the Phantom, I received a letter addressed to me at the theater. It was from a woman who had recently seen the production. “You seemed to identify with the character in a way I haven’t seen in other actors,” the woman wrote. She went on to say that she worked for an organization called AboutFace, which was devoted to helping children with facial differences. “Would you possibly have any interest in getting involved?” she asked.

Wow. How did she pick up on that?

I had never spoken about my ear. As soon as I’d been able to grow my hair long, as a teenager, I’d simply hidden my ear and never addressed my deafness. It was something I kept private, secret. It was too personal and too painful. But I decided to call the woman. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I wasn’t sure what to say. But I opened up to her, and it felt good. Soon I started working with her organization, talking with children and their parents about my birth defect and my own experiences, sharing in their experiences. The effect it had on me was amazing.

I felt freed by talking about something that had always been so private and personal and painful. The truth had set me free—the truth and
The Phantom of the Opera
. Somehow, putting on the Phantom’s mask had allowed me to uncover myself. In 2000, I became a spokesman for AboutFace. I found that helping others helped me heal myself. It created a calm in my life that I had never known before. I had been looking for external factors to pull me out of the abyss when all along the problem was inside me.

I realized it wasn’t people who
showed
their emotions who were weak, but the ones who
hid
their emotions who were weak. I needed to redefine what it meant to be strong. Being a “real man” meant being strong, yes: strong enough to cry, strong enough to be kind and compassionate, strong enough to put others first, strong enough to be afraid and still find your way, strong enough to forgive, and strong enough to ask for forgiveness.

The more I came to terms with myself, the more I was able to give to others. And the more I gave of myself to others, the more I found I had to give.

Not long after this transformation, I met Erin Sutton, a smart, confident, practicing attorney. From the very start, we were totally open and honest with each other; there was zero drama. She was understanding, nurturing, stimulating, and above all, consistent and self-assured. I’d never met anyone like her. We didn’t rush into a relationship, but after a few years we both realized we couldn’t imagine not being together. “I never hoped for a relationship like this,” I told her, “because I didn’t know something like this even existed.”

It was a quest, an unending push for what I thought I should have—not only materially, but in terms of who I should be—that enabled me to reach that point. It was a quest that began with the aim of becoming a rock star, but that ended with something else entirely.

And that’s really what this book is about. It’s also why I want my four kids to read this book someday, despite the fact that the path I took was long and arduous and meandered through some pretty wild places and times. I want them to understand what my life was like, warts and all. I want them to understand that it really is up to each one of us, that anyone can make a wonderful life for himself or herself. It may not be easy. It may take longer than you think. But it is possible. For anyone.

I collect my thoughts and look into the mirror again. There, staring back at me, is the familiar white face and black star. All that’s left to do is empty a bottle or two of hairspray into my hair and vault it up to the ceiling. And put on the red lipstick, of course. These days, it’s hard to stop smiling when I wear this face. I find myself beaming from ear to ear, content to celebrate together with the Starchild, who has now become a dear old friend rather than an alter ego to cower behind.

Outside, forty-five thousand people wait. I picture taking the stage.
You wanted the best, you got the best, the hottest band in the world
. . . I count in “Detroit Rock City” and off we go—me, Gene Simmons, and Tommy Thayer, descending onto the stage from a pod suspended forty feet above as the huge black curtain drops and Eric Singer beats the drums below us. Fireworks! Flames! The initial gasp of the crowd hits you like a physical force.
Kaboom!
It’s the greatest rush imaginable. When I get out there on stage, I love to look out and see people jumping, screaming, dancing, kissing, celebrating, all in a state of ecstasy. I bask in it. It’s like a tribal gathering. KISS has become a tradition, a ritual passed down from generation to generation. It’s an amazing gift to be able to communicate with people on that level and have so many of them out there, all of them, all of us, together, decades after we started. The smile will not leave my face through the entire set.

Best of all, that smile will remain on my face as I walk off the stage to return to the totality of my life.

There are people who don’t want to go home—who
never
want to go home. And once upon a time, I didn’t, either. But these days, I love going home. Because somewhere along this long road, I finally figured out how to create a home, a real home, the kind of home where your heart is.

No place for hiding, baby, no place to run

H
ome is an interesting concept. For most people it is a place of refuge. My first home was anything but.

I was born Stanley Bert Eisen on January 20, 1952. The New York apartment my parents took me home to was on West 211th Street and Broadway, at the very northern tip of Manhattan. I was born with an ear deformity called
microtia,
in which the outer ear cartilage fails to form properly and, to varying degrees of severity, leaves you with just a crumpled mass of cartilage. I had nothing more than a stump on the right side of my head. And my ear canal was also closed, so I was deaf. That left me unable to tell the direction of sound, and more importantly, made it incredibly difficult for me to understand people when there was any kind of background noise or conversation. These problems would lead me to instinctively avoid social situations.

My earliest memory is being in our darkened living room, with the shades drawn—as if to keep the conversation a secret between only my mother, my father, and myself. “If anyone ever asks you what happened to your ear,” my parents told me, “just tell them you were born that way.”

In the beginning . . . there was a Starchild.

My sister, Dad, and me, at Inwood Hill Park near our apartment, Uptown Manhattan, 1952.

With Mom and Dad in Lake Mohegan, New York.

If we ignore it,
my parents seemed to intimate,
it doesn’t exist
. That philosophy would rule our house and my life for much of my childhood. I got simple answers for complex situations. And despite the fact that my parents wanted to ignore it, nobody else did.

Children seemed to detach the person from the deformity—I became an object instead of a little kid. But children weren’t the only ones staring at me. Adults did, too, and that was even worse. One day in a market on 207th Street, just down the road from our place, I realized one of the adults in line was staring at me like I was a thing instead of a person.
Oh, God, please stop,
I thought. When somebody stares at you, it’s not limited to you and that person. Treatment like that draws attention. And becoming the center of attention was horrific. I found the scrutiny and relentless attention even more excruciating than being taunted.

Needless to say, I didn’t have a lot of friends.

On my first day of kindergarten, I wanted my mother to leave as soon as she got me to the door of the class. She was proud. But I didn’t want her to leave for the reason she thought. It wasn’t because I was independent and sure of myself. I just didn’t want her to see me being stared at. I didn’t want her to see me treated differently. I was in new surroundings with new kids, and I didn’t want to go through that in front of her. The fact that she was proud of me told me that she didn’t understand anything about me—my fears went over her head.

One day I came home crying. “Somebody spat in my face,” I wept. I had come home looking for support and protection from my mom. I assumed she would ask who had done it and then go out and find the kid’s parents and tell them such behavior was unacceptable. But instead she said, “Don’t come crying to me, Stanley. Fight your own battles.”

Fight my own battles? I’m five!

I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want people to leave me alone
.

But I went back out, and about an hour later I found the kid who had spit on me. I punched him in the eye. But he barely seemed to remember the incident and couldn’t figure out what the big deal was.

One thing was clear after that: home was not a place where I could find help. Whether I was beaten up or taunted or anything else, I had to handle it on my own.