CHAPTER FOUR
We Were KISS
About once a week, the guys would end up at my house.
Not a regular club. Not a scheduled rehearsal. Not anything that had been discussed in advance or agreed to formally. Just the natural gravitational drift of four boys who had established, without ever saying so, that my bedroom was the place where certain things happened. Things that required space, limited adult supervision, and a decent set of speakers.
The rule was always the same: If we were going to be KISS... We had to be four.
Four guys. Four legends. Four idiots in a bedroom pretending the carpet was Madison
Square Garden. No exceptions. No substitutions. If someone was missing, we were just guys listening to records. With four, we were something else entirely.
We'd drop onto the floor, pull out the albums from the milk crate I kept beside the record player, and stare at the covers the way other kids stared at baseball cards — with a reverence that was completely genuine and would have been completely inexplicable to any adult in the vicinity. Thick vinyl. Album art like scripture. Gene Simmons sticking his tongue out like he was personally daring your parents to disapprove of everything you were and everything you planned to become.
We didn't just listen. We studied.
The KISS Alive! album in particular. Side one through side four. Every track a
revelation. The specific sound of a live crowd that had been worked into a frenzy, tens of
thousands of people screaming for four men in demon makeup who had somehow convinced the
world that this — all of this, the fire and the platform boots and the blood and the screaming —
was the natural endpoint of human aspiration.
We were fully convinced they were right.
When the needle finally hit the record — that particular moment when the arm dropped
and the first crackle of vinyl gave way to sound — the room transformed.
The walls of my bedroom stopped being walls. The carpet stopped being carpet. The
ceiling stopped being the ceiling with its familiar crack shaped like an unnamed island.
Everything else stopped being everything else, and what was left was just the music,
enormous and certain, filling the space the way only really loud rock and roll can fill a space:
completely, with intent, as if it had always been there and the room had been waiting for it.
I was always Paul Stanley.
Always. Without negotiation. Without exception.
Not because I could sing best — Jimmy's voice was actually better than mine and we
both knew it. Not because I was the natural leader of anything — that was Jimmy too, in almost
every context. But Paul Stanley made being alive look like the loudest job on Earth, and at
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, that was the job I most wanted. He stood at the center of the stage and
played his guitar like the instrument was an extension of something essential, and when he
screamed into the microphone he didn't seem to be performing — he seemed to be reporting.
Like the music was already inside him and he was just letting it out.
I understood that. I wanted that. So I was Paul Stanley. Every time.
The other roles got divided with slightly more negotiation, though 'negotiation' is
generous — it was more like annual acceptance of the inevitable. Jimmy was Gene, because
Gene Simmons had the electricity of someone who believed his own mythology completely, and
Jimmy related to that on a cellular level. Rick was Ace, because Ace Frehley played lead guitar
with a kind of controlled cool that suited someone who did everything with contained precision.
And Dougie — poor, cheerful, indestructible Dougie — was Peter Criss.
Every single time.
He never complained. Which either meant he didn't mind or that he had decided, in the
characteristically Dougie fashion, that the drumming was actually the most important job and
everyone else just hadn't figured it out yet.
A flashlight became a microphone.
A tennis racket became a guitar — not just any guitar, a Les Paul, held low against the
hip the way real guitarists held them, the way you held something you were genuinely committed
to.
A broom was a bass if you held it with enough confidence.
Dougie's percussion setup was improvised from whatever was available. On good days,
this included two actual drumsticks he had acquired through means he never fully explained and
an upturned laundry basket that produced, when struck correctly, a surprisingly reasonable snare
sound. On other days it was his hands on the floor and his feet on the wall and a pencil against
the dresser, and the rhythm was questionable but the commitment was absolute.
We'd listen to those albums for hours.
Side A. Side B. Flip the record like it was a ritual — which it was. Every song felt like
freedom. The specific freedom of being inside something bigger than your actual life, inside
something that didn't care about your homework or your chores or the fact that Stockton in
August felt like living inside a convection oven. The music was climate-controlled. The music
was perfect. The music was ours for as long as the needle was in the groove.
And the best part — the absolute best part — was that nobody could tell us we weren't
KISS.
Not in that room. Not on that carpet. Not with the speakers going and the album art
propped against the wall and four boys standing in formation, each absolutely certain that what
was happening here was real and important and that the fact that it would be completely invisible
to any outside observer was beside the point.
Jimmy would throw his head back in the middle of a Gene Simmons screech and his hair
would fan out and for just a second — just a fraction of a second — he looked the part. He
looked like someone who had never once doubted his own significance. And maybe in that
moment he was right.
Rick played his tennis-racket guitar with the same economy of motion he brought to
everything, but his head would nod slowly, slightly, like a metronome set to cool, and you could
see him give himself over to it by degrees, the reserve dropping away millimeter by millimeter
until by the middle of side two he was genuinely somewhere else.
Dougie played drums like he was being paid by the enthusiasm. He played with his whole
body, with his face, with a running commentary addressed to a crowd only he could fully see. On
one memorable afternoon he stood up mid-song, broom in hand, and walked to the center of the
room and did a full Peter Criss drum solo using the broom as a microphone stand and the floor as
a stage, and it was so completely, sincerely committed that nobody laughed. We just watched.
Because that was the deal. In that room, you took it seriously.
We were legends. We were loud. We were immortal.
For exactly as long as the record played, we were the thing we wanted to be.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, my mom would crack the door open.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just the door swinging back six inches to reveal her
standing in the hallway with the specific expression of a woman who has seen many things in her
life and has made peace with most of them.
She would look at four sweaty boys performing absolutely nothing for an audience that
existed only in their collective imagination, and she would say:
'Are you all... alright in here?'
We'd freeze. Every time. Like rock statues. Four boys and a tennis racket guitar and a
broom bass and the still-spinning record, suddenly still, looking at her.
Then somebody would whisper — it was usually Jimmy, it was always Jimmy — dead
serious, without a trace of irony: 'Ma'am... we're on tour.'
And she would look at us for one more second, her face doing the thing it did when she
was deciding whether to say something or just let us be what we were. And she would always
choose the latter. She would nod once, as if this confirmed something she had suspected.
'Dinner in twenty minutes,' she'd say. And close the door.
We'd hold it for three more seconds — frozen, breath held — and then the needle would
find the groove again and we'd explode back into it, louder than before, because she had seen us
and hadn't stopped us and that felt like permission. That felt like the world confirming what we
already knew:
This was real.
This was exactly as important as it felt.
Later, as the curtain fell on another successful night of rock and roll — which is to say, as
the needle reached the end of side two and the arm lifted with a soft mechanical click — the
imaginary crowd still screaming for more as the band made its way backstage toward the
kitchen.
Dougie stopped at the doorway and turned back toward the room.
He lifted one hand high and waved slowly, majestically, like a man saying goodbye to
thousands. Like someone who understood that the proper way to leave a stage was not to walk
off but to recede — to let the crowd have one more moment, to honor them with the fullness of
your departure.
'Thank you,' he whispered. 'You've been incredible.'
Jimmy brushed past him. 'Alright, alright. Curtain's down. Let's eat.'
Dougie glanced back for half a second, the corner of his mouth twitching. Like he knew.
Then he lifted his hand a little higher anyway.
Legends didn't explain themselves.
That's when Mom appeared, clapping her hands once like a manager calling the band
back to reality.
'Great show today, guys!' she announced, and she said it without irony, without
condescension, without any of the adult reluctance to enter the world of a child's imagination.
She said it like a fact. 'Now — grilled cheese and fruit salad.'
She set the plate down on the kitchen table like backstage catering. Paper plates, a
sweating pitcher of Kool-Aid, sandwiches cut into neat triangles. She had not been expecting
company. She had set the table anyway.
'Even rock stars have to eat,' she said.
We shuffled in like we'd been summoned back to Earth. Dougie's face lit up.
Rick sat down with the careful economy of someone who didn't want to take more than his share. Jimmy reached for a sandwich and ate it in three bites and was already reaching for another.
'Thank you, Mrs. Davis,' Rick murmured, barely looking up.
Mom nudged the plate toward him gently, without comment. Just: here. There is more.
You are welcome to it.
Teppie was there that day — she'd appeared at the back door sometime during side three, drawn by the music or the noise or some instinct we didn't fully understand yet, and had sat on the porch step listening. My mother had simply opened the door wider and said 'come in' the way she said everything: like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Teppie took her sandwich with both hands and ate it carefully, the way she did everything — with a precision that looked like consideration, like she was being thoughtful about the space she occupied.
Mom kept talking. Kept the plates moving. Kept the afternoon ordinary and warm and safe in the way that ordinary and warm and safe are actually extraordinary when you're old enough to understand how rarely they coincide.
She glanced at me across the table and her voice softened. 'You've got a good crew here, Kev.'
I shrugged, pretending it was nothing.
She met my eyes, and something in her expression said she knew I was pretending. 'Don't lose them, okay?'
I nodded like I understood.
I didn't. Not yet. Not for years. But she did. She already did.
I've thought about that sentence my whole life. 'Don't lose them, okay.' She wasn't talking about phone numbers or addresses.
She was talking about the thing you have when you're seventeen and you all still fit in the same afternoon — the particular abundance of that, the way it feels permanent even when it isn't. She had been young once.
She knew what was coming. She was telling me to pay attention while there was still time. I was nodding like I understood and I was already half out the door in my mind, already thinking about the van and the river and the rest of the afternoon.
I didn't slow down. I never did, not then. That's the one thing I'd go back and change, if I could change anything. Just that. Just slow down.
Just stay at the table ten more minutes and look at all of them.