No Regrets (31 page)

I remember one time when Monique was just a baby,
and I was home in Connecticut, waiting for a limo ride to the airport. When the car arrived, I was in the bedroom packing my bags. I could hear Jeanette yell, “Come on, Paul! You’re going to be late!”

We had a big, sloping, circular driveway, with a fountain in the middle, and when I finally got outside, the limo was parked just off the edge of the driveway. I knew right away the guy was in trouble. The driveway was made out of asphalt with a cobblestone border, and the driver had managed to back the car into the rock garden and get the undercarriage stuck on some of the larger rocks.

“Sorry, Mr. Frehley,” he said nervously. “I’ll get us out of here in no time.”

No time is about what I had. Here I was, already late for a flight to a KISS show, with my road manager calling me, and everybody else freaking out because I’d missed flights in the past and had made it pretty clear that I was becoming disenchanted with my role in KISS.

“Get the fuck out!” I shouted.

Then I jumped in the car and hit the gas. The wheels started spinning like crazy, but the car didn’t budge.

“Idiot limo driver,” I muttered under my breath. “Where do they get these fuckin’ guys?”

The driver began to panic. For all I know he’d only been on the job a day or so and he was worried about getting fired.

“We’re going to have to get a tow truck, sir,” he said.

“Bullshit!” I yelled. “I’ll drag you out of there.”

I ran down to the garage and fired up the four-wheel drive—a Chevy K-5 with monster-truck wheels. I pulled up in front of the limo and tied the bumper of the car to the back end of my truck using a thick nylon rope.

The limo driver’s eyes widened.

“Mr. Frehley, I’m not so sure this is a good idea.”

“It’ll be fine. Get behind the wheel and put it in neutral. I’ll pull you right out of there.”

I had a little hangover from the night before, and I had popped a few quaaludes to ease the sting. I began revving the engine. The car started to move, accompanied by an awful scraping sound—the undercarriage being dragged along the rocks. The sound, I later discovered, had spooked the driver, prompting him to throw the car back into park. Physics took over from there. The rope snapped and my K-5 was catapulted forward—right into the front of my house! The car smashed through a wall and came to a stop in the closet of my baby daughter’s bedroom (she wasn’t there at the time, thank God).

I got out of the car, dazed and bleeding from my chin. Jeanette was screaming, “Paul! For Christ’s sake, you’re in Monique’s bedroom!” The limo driver was in shock, and the next thing I knew, paramedics were on the scene, examining me in my living room.

“You need to get to a hospital, sir.”

“Not possible,” I said. “I have to get to a concert or twenty thousand people are going to be really pissed.”

Eventually they relented and agreed to let me go, but not until I had signed a waiver declining medical attention. I called my road manager and explained sheepishly that there had been a slight mishap at the homestead, but that I was on my way to the airport. He booked me on a later flight, and I remember getting on the plane and washing down some Valium with a Bloody Mary. I fell asleep for most of the flight, and upon arrival, jumped into a waiting limo and headed straight for the venue, where I quickly threw on my makeup and performed a great show—as usual.

All in a day’s work.

In April 1982, shortly before KISS went into the
studio to begin recording
Creatures of the Night
, I was home in Connecticut, preparing for my inevitable departure from the band. What I mean by “preparing” is simply this: I wasn’t writing songs for KISS and I wasn’t participating in most band business, including public appearances.
Simply put, I had lost interest. The days passed in a blur of drinking and drugging, interrupted by the occasional outing with friends.

On opening day of trout season, I went fishing with Anton Fig and an acquaintance of mine named Alf, whom I’d met through my guitar roadie. Alf, who lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, not far from my home, was brilliant when it came to finding and catching trout (which is not the easiest thing to do). Alf led us around half of Connecticut to just about every little backwater creek in the state. We caught a dozen good-sized trout and then went back to his place to get a cold drink (or two… or three). Alf was also a home brewer whose specialty was apple wine that he stored in big fermenting barrels in his basement. He used a lot of sugar, so the wine was really sweet, but it was also strong—“probably twenty-five percent alcohol,” Alf boasted. “So go easy on it, boys.”

Anton and I each had a couple glasses of this shit, which would have been enough on its own to provide a nice buzz. On top of the beer we’d been drinking all day (hey, come on—who doesn’t drink beer when they’re fishing), it left us damn near shitfaced. Not that we were concerned. We climbed into my Porsche and headed back to my house.

The last thing I remember before the accident is telling Anton to buckle his seat belt. Then, according to the accident report, we must have hit a patch of sand on the shoulder of one of those serpentine New England country roads and lost control of the car. We careened into a stone wall, which slowed the Porsche just enough to prevent us from being killed, and then slammed head-on into an oak tree. If it had been a cheap car we likely would have died instantly.

At first we weren’t sure how bad it was. My face and head were bleeding slightly, and my lower leg was sore; Anton’s back was aching. But we both got out of the car and walked away—amazing, considering the car had been crumpled to half its normal size. We both declined medical treatment, and the police officers who investigated the accident were incredibly nice and accommodating, offering to give us a ride back to my house.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We have a cooler full of trout in the car.”

I popped the rear hatch of the Porsche, not sure what carnage would present itself. But the cooler was intact, so we moved it to the patrol car for the ride home, which was only about five minutes away.

Incredibly enough, there were no tickets dispensed as a result of the accident. The damage appeared to be limited to personal property: my car. The local police were not ball-busters. I lived in a small, affluent community, and the cops believed their job was to protect the taxpayers, rather than harass them. They did that in those days, especially in a tight-knit community where people have money, and where cops don’t have much to do except make sure everyone is okay. Times have changed, obviously.

So the officer dropped us off at my house, where Jeanette and Anton’s wife were waiting for us.

“What happened?” Jeanette asked.

“Nothin’. Never mind.”

She reached up and gently dabbed at my face.

“Your nose is a mess.”

I pulled away and laughed dismissively, then put the cooler on the counter. “Let’s just cook the fish, alright?”

“You guys look like hell,” she said.

I’m sure we did, but between the beer and the apple wine, we were feeling no pain. I gave them both a little story about the accident, leaving out the part about all the drinking, said we were fine, and then commenced cleaning the trout. For the next few hours we cooked and ate and drank. It wasn’t until around eleven o’clock that night that the throbbing started, first in my ankle, and then in my head.

“My back is killing me,” Anton said. “What the hell is going on?” The answer, of course, was that we had been in shock, attributable partly to the body’s natural response to pain and trauma, but also to all the chemicals coursing through our systems.

“Come on,” Jeanette said. “We’re going to the hospital.”

We went to the emergency room, where doctors informed me that
I’d broken my nose and suffered a hairline fracture of the ankle. I’d feel like crap for a while, maybe a long while, but I’d be okay. Anton, meanwhile, had sprained his back. And what did they prescribe for our discomfort? Percocet and Valium.

Jackpot!

We went back home, loaded up on painkillers and tranquilizers, and passed out.

It wasn’t until the next day, when I got another look at the car, that I fully understood how lucky we’d been. If his seat belt hadn’t been buckled, Anton probably wouldn’t have survived the accident, and I don’t think I could have lived with that—killing a friend because I was loaded. I thank God I never seriously hurt anyone (other than myself) because of my stupidity. As it was, Anton would experience back problems for some time afterward. If not for the fact that he was such a good and loyal friend, he probably would have sued, but that’s not the way Anton rolls.

The injuries I sustained in that accident affected me for several months and contributed to my lack of enthusiasm over getting back into the studio with KISS. Really, though, I had no interest in remaining with the band. The breakup was not nearly as explosive as you might think. It happened over the course of several months, with numerous conversations and meetings involving me and the guys, as well as our management team. Paul actually came up to the house and we hung out and talked for a while. We went to a mall in Stamford, Connecticut, did some shopping, and tried to recapture some of our old friendship. I look back on that now and realize it was a generous gesture on his part. Paul tried very hard that day to talk me out of leaving, but there wasn’t much he could do to change my mind.

“Paul,” I said, “I’m really unhappy. It’s not that I want to leave, but I feel like I have to leave.”

I remember a conversation with my attorney, in his office. He struggled to convince me that quitting KISS was the stupidest thing I could do.

“I know it feels right to you at this moment,” he said. “But it’s not. It’s a terrible business move.”

I knew that if I didn’t leave the group, I was going to die. Everything about my life was in disarray at that time. I felt no connection to KISS anymore and wasn’t happy with the direction the band was taking. I distinctly remember waking up one day and having a cup of coffee in the kitchen while glancing out at our beautiful dining room with marble floors. I suddenly became filled with despair and began entertaining suicidal thoughts.

Shit! Is this it? Is this what I worked for and dreamed about my whole fucking life? Is this how it’s going to end?

I felt trapped, and so I did what I always did when I was anxious: I escalated my alcohol and drug use to numb myself.

It’s hard to point a finger at one particular problem. Each thing fed something else: the drugs, the drinking, the band, my marriage. Obviously if I wasn’t drinking and doing all the drugs, my judgment wouldn’t have been so clouded and I might have made a more intelligent and sound decision. But it wasn’t like I decided overnight. I’d been thinking seriously about leaving KISS for more than a year, maybe longer. After the success of my solo album, I knew I was more creative when I had some distance from other guys in the band, so it was probably only a matter of time before we split. And again, it was all about the money for them; it was never about the money for me. I sat in my attorney’s office one afternoon and listened to him make his case. The numbers were staggering. We’d just renegotiated our record deal to the tune of nearly $15 million. That didn’t include merchandising or concert revenue, which, combined, were probably worth another $20 million.

Per person.

“Please, Ace,” my attorney said. “Think about this very carefully.”

I had been thinking carefully, if not clearly. Here I was, a kid from the Bronx, a guy who had known what it was like to get by on practically nothing, and now I had a mansion in Connecticut, a fleet of cars, and more money than I could spend. But who did I know up there? Who
were my friends? My coke dealer? I was suffering from an assortment of maladies, culture shock and loneliness among them. I was spinning out of control and I didn’t know how to stop. About the only place where I felt like I had any power was my professional life. Maybe if I quit KISS, everything else would fall into place. To this day I still believe that if I hadn’t left the band, they would have found me dead somewhere. I would have OD’d or driven my car into a tree and ended it all. I told that to my attorney and his response was one of disbelief.

“But Ace… it’s fifteen million dollars! That buys a lot of therapy.”

I just shook my head. “You’re not listening to me, and I don’t know how else to explain this to you. I’m going to kill myself if I don’t get out of this situation.”

Gene eventually weighed in as well, tried to convince me that there was plenty of opportunity for me to do side projects even while working with KISS.

“Go off and do your own records,” he said. “We don’t care. Have fun. But don’t quit the band. It’s not necessary.”

No one understood. I needed to get away from them. They didn’t approve of my lifestyle, and I didn’t approve of what they were doing with the band. I couldn’t be a part of it anymore. What’s worse than having a ton of money and not having a good time? I would gladly have given up millions to walk away. In fact, I did. Although it wasn’t officially announced until 1983, I quit the band in ’82, and I think it saved my life.

Barely.