Kiss and Make-Up (20 page)

Fueling the fire for the Satan-worshiping nonsense was my hand signal, which involved the pinky, the thumb, and the index finger. This started innocently enough: during concerts, I’d hold the pick with my thumb and my two middle fingers. Some people mistakenly thought it was a gesture of some kind, so they started waving their index and pinky fingers toward me in return. The second part of the hand signal came from my love of Spider Man: in the comics, he sometimes had his middle finger pressed against the inside of his palm. I copied that in an early photo, and the fundamentalists seized on it. In point of fact, the hand signal actually means “I love you” in sign language, though I didn’t know that at the time. This hand signal, ironically enough, became a standard gesture for other heavy metal bands and their fans, and it has been in constant circulation ever since.

I was getting the hang of handling magazine reporters. A
Rolling Stone
writer wanted to do a story on the band. He came up to
a duplex I was renting on Riverside Drive in New York to interview me for what he said would be a cover story. When I met him, I was very careful to cultivate the Demon mystique. I wore all my spider and silver jewelry and my leather pants. I puffed up my hair as big as it would go. With my seven-inch platform boots with silver dollar signs on them, and black nail polish, I thought I was ready to project a perfect bad-ass rock and roll image. He was right there with me through this entire interview. Then at one point the door buzzer sounded. I answered it, and in the doorway was my mother with enough food to feed the world: fresh hot soups, veal cutlets, pancakes, jams, cake. She insisted that he and I—I think she called us “hungry boys”—stop what we were doing and eat. She kept calling me by my Hebrew name, Chaim, and told the writer I was a good boy. The big bad Demon was just a mama’s boy.

Being a mama’s boy, though, has never kept me from chasing the ladies. I bedded down one girl after another. There was no end to them—they were in every hotel room, every backstage area, every limousine. At one point I found out that the Carpenters were staying in the same hotel. I called Karen Carpenter, who was staying a few floors below me, and left my female guest in my room to go down there with the idea of seducing her. Karen was certainly playful enough on the phone with me: very giggly, very friendly, and very suggestive. But when I walked in on what I thought was going to be an evening of seduction, it became something else. Karen was a sweet, frail girl: she still looked fairly healthy, not as gaunt as she would later become from anorexia. I spent most of the early evening talking with her about all kinds of things. Mostly she was fascinated and curious about my bed-hopping lifestyle. She didn’t understand it. Although she did admit that lust is a strong urge, and she agreed that men were susceptible to the powers of lust, she was nonetheless convinced that I didn’t actually want to do what I wanted to do but was actually doing it to avoid intimacy. But she said all this in a very nonjudgmental way.

At the end of the conversation, I said, “Well, it was nice talking to you, I’ve gotta go.” She wanted to know where I was going. I said I had left a girl upstairs and I would have to go and keep her company.
Karen was flabbergasted that the girl would wait for me and simply not leave. I thought it was bizarre that she would even ask me that. Where I had initially walked down with seduction on my mind, the truth is, sex was the last thing that either one of us wanted from the other that night. Maybe because of that, the experience has remained in my mind all these years.

Our lifestyle changed drastically after
Destroyer
, especially after the boost from “Beth.” I bought houses for both my parents, even though I hadn’t seen my father since he left me as a child in Israel. Paul did likewise for his folks.

But Ace and Peter lived at the edge: they bought many cars and lived in many houses. At one point Ace built a home recording studio with poured concrete, then found he couldn’t use it because his neighborhood wasn’t zoned for it. Between them they cracked up or crashed at least ten cars—Mercedeses, DeLoreans, you name it. The funniest one was Peter crashing in his garage. The fire department had to come in with the jaws of life to get him out of his car in his own garage.

Another part of our lifestyle changed too. As I have said, we always had plenty of women on the road, but now we had the means to treat them like queens, and that caused problems in our personal relationships. There are some hilarious stories about Peter. I had a liaison with a girl and then Peter fell for her. They saw each other for a little while, and then Peter brought her phone number back home. His wife was a jealous woman, and was brighter than Peter, so he hid the phone number under the stereo. His wife was cleaning one day, and she actually lifted up the stereo and found the number. So she called up this girl and said, “Hello? This is the Oregon Health Department. Are you so-and-so?”

The woman said, “Yes. Why are you calling me?”

“Well, we just need to find out if you are familiar with a Peter Criscuola, who is otherwise known as Peter Criss, drummer in KISS.”

“Yes?”

“Well,” Peter’s wife said, “he may have the clap. We are trying to ascertain what period of time you may have had physical contact, because you may need to get a check-up. Can you tell us the specifics?”

At this the woman came clean with the specifics: it was this time of night, in this Holiday Inn. “Thank you very much,” Peter’s wife said, and hung up.

When he came home, she had him pinned. “Peter, where were you at seven-thirty at night on Monday … were you with so-and-so?” She had him dead to rights.

In May 1976 we sold out Madison Square Garden for three nights in a row. This was a big deal for us; when we were starting out, the four of us used to sit in our loft at 10 East Twenty-third Street and say that we had only ten blocks to go to reach Madison Square Garden, which is on Thirty-third Street. And now we were there.

CBS News had a broadcaster named Kaity Tong—she was one of their big stars then. The cameras were all over us, and she kept asking me questions about the experience: less about rock and roll and more about the freak show aspect of our lives. “You guys look so weird. And you are the guy who sticks his tongue out—how long is it, anyway?” I was close to seven feet tall in the outfit, and she must have been about five-two. Her arm was stretched way up into the air to hold the microphone near my mouth. While she was interviewing me, with the cameras all around me, I felt something in back of me. I turned around, and my mom (all five-four of her) was trying to fix something, to make it look right. I was wearing a thin strip of leather with studs around it, and it ran right through the crack of my butt and connected to a codpiece covered with spikes, and my mother was trying to brush off a piece of lint, or clean a spot, or something. It was like trying to walk up in back of a tank and take off a piece of thread.

By this time my mother had remarried. Her new husband was a man named Eli, a Polish gentleman who had lost some family in the war. He worked in the clothing business, and he worshiped my
mother. If they were walking down the street and she saw a piece of clothing she liked in a window, he would study it intently and then make an exact replica for her. The timing of the remarriage was good, because it allowed me to get on with my life. When I was younger, it was just the two of us, my mother and me, and at that time I probably would have had difficulty dealing with a remarriage. When Eli came along, though, I was already out of the house, at college, and ready to be on my own.

Eli and my mother didn’t really understand the band project. I had this pact with my mother: if my music career didn’t work out, I would fall back on teaching. That seemed to satisfy her, but beyond that, it was all a mystery to them. I don’t remember talking to either of them very much at that time—I was so busy trying to build up the band—although I do recall having conversations with Eli about politics. I was a young man, more liberal and more accepting of difference. He was less liberal. One of the things I came to understand was that when you had seen what he had seen—when you had witnessed your family murdered by people supposedly representing your government—you didn’t necessarily believe in liberal politics.

In 1976 KISS went over to Europe for a major tour. We arrived at Heathrow Airport in London and came off the plane in full makeup. The press was all over us, and we drove around to all the sights and had pictures taken for the magazines. I was in awe, because it was England, the home of the Beatles. It was like a pilgrimage to Mecca.

One of our female aides in England was an attractive Indian woman. By the time we got to our hotel, I convinced her to be my guest in my room. It was a fine welcome to a new country. Our hotel overlooked Hyde Park. It was a medium-quality hotel, but it prided itself on archaic notions of proper behavior. For instance, when I had female visitors, they were not allowed to visit me in my room, so I had to sneak them in.

British nightlife was just as rewarding as American nightlife. One night we went to the Marquis Club, and it was packed. I roamed around the room looking for a new friend or two. I walked
up to the bar and asked for a Coke. I never drank and have literally never been drunk in my life. Patti Smith was standing next to the bar. I don’t recall saying a word to her. I was more preoccupied by two stunning girls standing at the far end of the room. All of a sudden Smith turned, slapped me across my face, slurred something, and walked off. To this day I am clueless as to what made her do that. But it didn’t take me long to walk over to the two lovelies, start dancing with both of them on the dance floor, and in short order take them both back to the hotel. The ladies turned out to be two of the Coconuts from Kid Creole and the Coconuts, a band I later loved and would often go to see. The evening at the hotel began hot and heavy. We were apparently making quite a bit of noise, because there was a loud knock on my door. It was Paul. Didn’t I realize, he said, that it was the middle of the night? Couldn’t I keep the noise down? I apologized, came back in, and the girls and I moved the bed away from the wall, put the mattress on the floor, and continued on with our business. It was probably five in the morning when we all became ravenously hungry. I ordered a feast. It came up in a surprisingly short time, but I had inadvertently given the wrong room number, and the hotel delivered all the food to Paul’s room. He was, by that time, in no mood to joke. From then on, Paul insisted he never wanted the room next to mine.

The rest of Europe wasn’t quite as fulfilling as England. For starters, the accommodations were different from what we had come to expect. European hotels weren’t like American hotels; they were smaller, and the plumbing didn’t always work the way it was supposed to work. Also,
Alive!
wasn’t selling well everywhere, so in some countries we felt like we were almost starting over. In some places we packed arenas, and in some places we played to mostly empty houses. France didn’t have a strong rock and roll tradition—even to this day, it hasn’t produced rock stars of any consequence. At times it was extremely frustrating. But for every France, there were places like the Scandinavian countries, which were wonderful. Wonderful crowds, wonderful fans, wonderful girls.