Makeup to Breakup Read online

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  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  under the covers” dChapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Photograph

  aid="3Q280"> For Loretta and Joe, my parents

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  aid="5N3C0">

  PROLOGUE

  Have you ever tasted the barrel of a .357 Magnum that’s halfway down your throat? It’s a really unforgettable sensation, like a piece of iron dipped in oil, with sort of a coppery aftertaste. I got my first and (hopefully) last taste of one on January 17, 1994, sitting on the floor of my debris-strewn bedroom in Los Angeles.

  Just twelve hours earlier I had been lying in bed, watching TV. It was around three A.M. and I was cozy under the covers when I feel a little tremor. I’d been through quite a few “shakers” in California. Chandeliers rattling, traffic lights swaying. But this was different. The tremors started getting more frequent and I started to hear a rumbling noise, so I sat up in the bed and all of a sudden the whole place shook big-time and the TV flew off the dresser, tumbled down, and blew up. I was like, “Motherfucker!” Then the lamps fell over and I was like, “Holy shit!” Turned out this was the beginning of the Northridge earthquake, a massive catastrophe that killed thirty-three people and injured more than eighty-seven hundred.

  I’m a Brooklyn boy: I knew about cockroaches and rats and zip guns, not earthquakes. So I started to panic. I heard glass shattering in the bathroom. I was hearing all this devastation, and just then another big jolt came, and my bed collapsed and the huge wooden armoire started dancing across the bedroom and then tipped over. Behind the armoire, on a nail, I had hung a bag that was filled with $100,000 cash. That was all the money I had to my name. I wasn’t going to put it in a bank—didn’t trust them—and I was in trouble with the IRS then, so I figured I’d keep the cash nearby and if someone was going to rob it, that’s a big piece of motherfucking shit to move. But now the huge armoire was lying on the floor and the bag was hanging from the nail, exposed.

  My fear of death set in. Lamps were flying through the air. I got up and ran into the living room and I saw all my KISS gold albums falling off the walls and shattering. I also had a full cabinet of Steuben crystal that I had managed to pry from my ex-wife’s hands, and all that precious crystal busted up. All of a sudden, the couch flew through the air A&M Studios” admitted., the armchair went over, and I got thrown into the bathroom wall. I was thinking, “Jesus, I’m going to fucking die in some shithole apartment in Hollywood. I just don’t believe you’re going to take me this way.”

  So I found my .357 Magnum, tucked it under the waistband of my sweatpants, threw my bathrobe on, pulled on some sneakers, grabbed my bag with the cash, and ran. I knew enough not to take the elevator, so I rushed down the steps. It was still dark out and people were screaming, running half naked out of their apartments into the street. Outside, it looked like a war zone. Cars were overturned; a water hydrant had blown up and there was water gushing out into the street. People were running around screaming that it was the end of the world. Then, like in a movie, I heard a rumbling sound and I saw the tar separate and the street crack open. Everybody was panicking, but suddenly I got strangely calm. I was scared, but once I had my footing and my money and my gun, I knew no one was going to take them from me.

  I just kept walking around in circles; I didn’t know where to go. By then the sun was coming up and there was an aftershock and everybody screamed again. I had circled back to the front of my building, where hundreds of people had congregated. All the windows of the health-food store on the ground floor had shattered, and the food was all over the ground. Our underground garage had collapsed and lots of cars got totaled.

  By late afternoon, they let us back into the building. I walked into my apartment and I couldn’t believe it. Everything I had of value was leveled. I had no bed. The rod in the walk-in closet had collapsed and my clothes were on the floor. The refrigerator had toppled over and all the food was going rancid. The kitchen cabinets broke open and there was sugar everywhere. In the living room, all my records were shattered on the floor. The top of my People’s Choice Award, which I had won for “Beth,” had broken off. My daughter’s pictures had fallen off the wall and smashed into a million pieces. Everything that I used to look at and cherish was destroyed.

  I didn’t have electricity yet, so I lit a few candles. I was filthy, covered with the dirt and grime of the streets, but I couldn’t shower because the whole shower had fallen apart. Even if it hadn’t, there was no water. I couldn’t even run the sink and wash my hands. I walked back into the bedroom and sat down on the mattress on the floor. I had to brush away the soil from my flowerpots, which had all broken. It was dusk and a huge wave of depression rolled over me and I almost threw up. I felt like there was a hot poker plunged into the pit of my stomach. I thought I was taking a stroke. I couldn’t even breathe right: The air felt thin from the dust and the dirt in the apartment and the rotting food. The whole room stank from death.

  I thought to myself, Why should I keep going? I was in the middle of recording a new album, but fucking whoop-de-do; I was on TNT, a clown label. Then I started talking to myself, like in that Peggy Lee song “Is That All There Is”: “What do you really have to live for? Your two marriages have gone to shit. You hardly see your daughter. You got a hundred grand, but you were worth twelve-some-odd million at one point in your life. If this had happened when you were in KISS, your manager Bill Aucoin would have been there with fifty cop cars, twenty ambulances, and a helicopter. When you’re on top and you’re making everyone rich, they all love you, babe. Life is wonderful. But now you’re really just a has-been. No one cares about you, especially in Hollywood.”

  I looked around the room. I once had money to burn. I’d fly to Barbados for the we North Carolina” aylekend. I lived in a twenty-two-room mansion and had my pick of four luxury cars. And now I was sitting on the floor in the middle of the debris of my former exalted life. It was then that I realized that I didn’t want to live. Life had been just a fucking nightmare, nothing but ups and downs and drugs and fighting, and I was sick of it all.

  So I pulled out the .357 Magnum and put it in my mouth. The barrel is about six inches long, and I easily put three inches in. The gun is an inch in diameter, so I began to gag a little. When I hammered the gun back with my finger on the trigger, I started shaking. I knew if I slipped, it was all over. I also knew that I had straight flat-head bullets in the gun, so if I pulled the trigger, my brains would wind up somewhere across the street. I was a lucky bastard: I had cheated death a few times, but that wasn’t going to happen with a .357 Magnum in my mouth. That gun would literally take a man’s head off. If you shot an elephant in the head, it would go down. That’s why Clint Eastw
ood loved it. It’s the most powerful handgun in the world.

  They say that in situations like this, your mind just starts racing, and you see your whole life before you. But for me, everything seemed to be in slow motion. I had cried wolf many times in my life, especially with KISS. I was known for quitting the band a million times. But this was different. This was far from a bluff, because there was nobody there that I was bluffing. Just me and the rubble.

  Then I thought about my mother. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t bless myself with holy water and then get in my car and rub the medal of the Virgin Mary that she gave me and say a Hail Mary for my mother. And then I kiss her Mass card that’s right there on the dashboard.

  My mother had died three years earlier, on New Year’s Day, 1991, and I still hadn’t gotten over it. I had been very close to my mother; we had a very strange, deep relationship. We were more than mother and son: She was my closest friend. I was still hurt and grieving her. I had been concerned my whole life about letting her down. I always realized how hard she had worked for me to be something, how much it meant to her that I became something. And if I offed myself, how could I ever meet her again in heaven?

  And what about my father? He was still alive; he’d be devastated. And I thought of the KISS fans, the greatest fans in the world. And then my eyes wandered a bit and I looked over at the fallen armoire, and next to it was a picture of my daughter. It was my favorite picture of her: Jenilee was about ten when it was taken, and she looked like a saint. And, miraculously, the glass wasn’t cracked, it wasn’t broken—the frame was standing up defiantly in the midst of all the rubble. That’s when it just clicked. I had been going through some real bullshit, but no matter what, I still had my kid, man.

  Suddenly there was an immense feeling of faith in that room. I began to believe that God didn’t want to take me in the midst of this massive lunacy—that he had more in store for me. But the depression was so dark and so deep and the pain so acute; I was in the middle of a tug of war, almost like a battle for my soul. I could feel the force of the power I had holding back the trigger with the gun in my mouth. I had the power of life and death, right there and then. And I was in full control of me dying or living. It was very, very heavy.

  But how could I do this to my little angel in the picture? So I pulled the barrel of the gun out of my mouth, put it back in its holster, and then locked it back up. And I North Carolina” aylresolved to go and finish the album and take my young band on the road and see whaow:0001?mime=t

  CHAPTER ONE

  I entered the world on December 20, 1945, feet first, ass backward, a breech baby. They didn’t have C-sections in those days so they had to take me out with a forceps, like you would use for salad. My mom, Loretta, said the whole process was so painful that she didn’t want any more kids after me. Of course, she had four more.

  I was also impatient, exiting my mother’s womb two months prematurely, a tiny little thing with long black hair down my neck. The nurses would dote over me; they had never seen a baby with that much hair. The cool thing is that I was a love child. My mom got pregnant, and then she and my dad got married a few months after. But my dad, Joe, wasn’t really ready to settle down. He was a handsome young Italian guy who loved ballroom dancing. My mother told one of my sisters that my father left for three years when I was young and then came back to the family. But I was never told that.

  What a family. I was named Peter after my father’s father. He and his wife, Nancy, moved to the U.S. from Naples and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where they had a farm. Besides their own kids, they adopted a bunch, so there were something like twenty kids in the family. My dad was born on the farm, but eventually his dad bought a six-family tenement building in Brooklyn, where he got a job as a mason. He was a real Italian who spoke only Italian, so one of the guys on the job, to bust his balls, would teach him English phrases like “Fuck you. Kiss my ass. I’d like some pussy.” He didn’t understand what it meant. One day he came home from work and my grandmother was cooking and he said, “Hey, fuck you, eat my dick.” My grandmother flipped out and my father had to tell him that wasn’t nice stuff to say, so the old man got furious and the next day he went to work and kicked the shit out of his coworker.

  I loved to visit my grandfather. In his backyard he grew grapes, eggplants, and tomatoes. I’d sit on his lap in the yard and he was like the Godfather. He’d have the big hat, the big pants with the belt, and the big sweater with the holes in it. He was tall, about six foot one, a really good-looking man. He kept pigeons in the back, and in the cellar he had all these rabbits in cages that I used to play with. My mother told me that one day she was eating his pasta sauce and she said, “That’s delicious, Pa. A little greasy, but tasty.” Then she found out it was made with rabbit, and she never ate the sauce again.

  He was a tough man. He didn’t believe in doctors. He used to pull his own teeth with pliers. He was a religious Catholic until one day he went to church and caught a priest screwing a nun, and that was it. He gave up his religion after he got a real dose of reality. I really loved him, and I was proud to be named after him. Vincent Price” admitted.

  But I disliked his wife, Nancy. She used to beat the shit out of me. My mother told me that when I was really young, she yanked me up upside down by my feet and I started hemorrhaging and literally bled from my penis. I got my revenge eventually. My grandmother moved in with us toward her last days. She’d sit in the kitchen bitching, complaining, her feet always soaking in warm Epsom salt water. She always wanted things, and she’d curse me in Italian. One day my friend Vinnie came over to play cowboys and she was all pissed because we were having fun, so we went to the back end of the railroad flat, got naked, and ran around the house, taunting her. She couldn’t do a thing about it because she was in her wheelchair. Finally my father came home and she mumbled something to him. He came over to us. “What! You got naked in front of your grandmother?”

  “Why would I do that, Dad?” I said, all innocent. “I came home to drop off my books. We had lunch and we left. She’s seeing things.” She was getting a bit senile, so he bought it and she was furious. I got even for all those years she abused me as a baby.

  Growing up, I never really knew my mother’s dad, my grandfather George, whom I was also named after. He was a real gigolo who left my grandmother when my mother and her brother were really young. Her brother, my uncle George, never forgave his father for deserting them. The old man rarely showed up in New York, but he used to send me things from all over the world: cowboy boots, trinkets. He was globe-trotting because he kept getting married to different rich women. After a few years he’d divorce the first one and then marry another one. He was a real smart guy. He’d read the dictionary for fun. When he moved to San Francisco in his seventies, he wound up smoking weed with all the professors in Berkeley and they gave him an honorary degree to put on his wall.

  When I was living in Canarsie with my first wife, he came to visit us with this really rich woman from Amarillo. She was an art collector. She had bought him a saloon. Then he dumped her and he got another rich one to buy him a restaurant in Albany. When he was staying with us, he’d get up in the morning, put on a white shirt and a tie, and place a rose on my wife’s side of the table. “Good morning, darling. How are you feeling today?” He knew the magic words.

  I visited him years later in San Francisco when he was much older and he had met a nice woman and they were living in an RV. We took a shower together in the trailer park facility and when he turned around, the guy was hung like a horse. He didn’t have a dick, he had a baby’s arm! My grandfather saw the surprise on my face and he said, “This is why I do so well in life. I’m a cocksman.” I had never heard that word before. “That’s a man who knows how to use his dick. I haven’t worked a day in my life, because once a woman gets some of this thing, it’s all over,” he explained.

  My grandmother Clara never seemed to get over his desertion. She was from a large Irish family
of major drinkers. Her family would come over to my grandma’s joint, get her drunk as a skunk, and then leave. By the time my granddad got home from work, they were gone and my grandma was passed out cold. Her drinking got so bad that my mom and her brother started missing school, and when my mother was ten, the state took them away and put them in a home. My mother hated it there. She never really got into it with me, but certain things would set her off. For the rest of her life, if she so much as smelled marmalade, she’d go off. “Don’t ever bring that shit around. They served me that every day better than ” ayl of my life when I was a little girl.” My mother never forgave her mother’s sisters and brothers for not stepping up and helping them out before the state took her and her brother away. They had a very hard life, and when they were finally reunited with their mother, Clara had stopped drinking heavily, and they tried to resume a normal family life.

  So this was the crazy world that Peter George John Criscuola was thrust into. I just made it crazier. I was a sickly child, and I put my mother through living hell. I caught everything—measles, mumps, whooping cough, a swollen testicle, chicken pox, ear infections, the works. I even caught ringworm from my grandma’s cat. When I started school, I was so anemic I’d go every week for a transfusion of fresh blood and vitamins. I was a mess. I must have weighed all of sixty pounds, a skinny kid with a big head and big baggy eyes and big ears. Thankfully, the priest at my school paid for the doctor visits. We couldn’t afford them.

  When I wasn’t getting sick, I was getting hurt. When I was seven, my mom went to visit a friend. They were having coffee and somehow I wandered away from her and went into the backyard. There was a little dog out there. The dog was eating, and I poked my face into what was going on and the dog figured I was going to take its food so it ripped at my mouth and tore my top lip half off. My mother heard the screaming and she saw I was bleeding profusely and rushed me to the hospital. My parents didn’t have money or insurance, so it was off to the emergency room, my second home in my younger years.