Face the Music: A Life Exposed by Paul Stanley

thought I was a bum.
    My sister and her boyfriend drove around in a van apparently selling drugs and also dropped acid daily, sniffed glue, and did whatever else they did. Ultimately she got pregnant, but by the time she gave birth, she had separated from the guy. I was at the hospital with my parents when my niece, Ericka, was born.
    My sister was in no shape to raise a child. She was still struggling with mental illness and still heavily self-medicating. One weekend my father and I rented a van, drove to Boston—where she lived in some sort of commune—loaded all the baby things into it, and carted it all back to my parents’ apartment. The baby was already living with my parents anyway.
    From that point on, interaction with Julia almost completely stopped. There was still fear and uncertainty about whether she would try to take Ericka back or start a custody battle with my parents. Once, Julia came to the house to visit and was clearly not well. She was holding Ericka, and suddenly I heard the front door bang open and saw Julia running down the street with the baby. We had to run after her and grab Ericka back. It was terrifying.
    As part of my parents’ philosophy of not acknowledging problems, my niece grew up calling my mom—her grandmother— “Mom.” And because my dad wasn’t comfortable choosing what to be called, he became by default “Honey,” which was what my mom called him.
    Whereas Gene was a college grad earning good money as an assistant teacher or a clerk—he held several jobs during the first few years I knew him—I had bounced from gas station to deli and dropped out of college. Now I was getting ready to take the exam to become a part-time New York City taxi driver. While other kids in our neighborhoods were studying to get credentials for long-term careers, I had left myself no alternative but to succeed in music. I had no choice but to spend twenty-four hours, seven days a week, plotting how I was going to accomplish that. For me, it was all about work. You can gauge how important something is to you by how hard you are willing to work to get it.
    Fortunately for me, despite his mother’s opinion of me, Gene seemed to agree that he and I were better together than on our own. I think our partnership meant more to me at the time, though. With a modicum of approval and somebody to hang out with, I eventually stopped going uptown to see my psychiatrist, Dr. Hilsen. Gene, on the other hand, seemed to have more going on in his life than I did, whether it was girlfriends or jobs or whatever. On the surface, he also seemed more content than I was, more happy-go-lucky. From my perspective, I saw Gene as important to the plan—and the plan was all I had in my life. I had realized after being rejected by publishing companies that I needed a band as a vehicle to get my material out there. On my own, I was at least three people short of the team I needed. In Gene, I felt I had found another key member of the team.
    By that stage I had met or seen a lot of people who wanted to be musicians and said they were going to be stars, but most of them didn’t have the discipline and weren’t willing to commit to doing the work. Talent was all well and good; the people who won, however, were the people who worked the hardest. Gene had a work ethic like mine.
    Once I landed a job driving for a taxi company called Metro, based near Queens Plaza, I had money when I needed it but still had near-total flexibility. I drove a big Dodge sedan with a flimsy partition between me and the backseat. The business was at a turning point at the time, with fewer and fewer classic cabbies. The old guys with cigars were being displaced by people like me—actors and musicians, people who needed a source of income and a certain amount of freedom. I quickly figured out what the company looked for as a minimum take for a shift, so I could work to the minimum if I felt like it—basically, how hard I worked determined how much I