Face the Music: A Life Exposed by Paul Stanley Read Free Book Online Page A

Art, despite keeping to myself, the chance to see girls in T-shirts and no bras—another advantage of the lack of a dress code—was more than enough to get me to school every day. But I soon found I was at odds with myself and everybody else. I looked hipper than I really was because of my hair and clothes. But my hair was blown out in part for one very specific reason, and I felt intimidated by the kids I thought were genuinely hip. As I slowly learned, covering my ear didn’t change anything. Like everything else in life, ultimately it wasn’t about what other people saw, it was about what I knew and what I felt.
    One day at school, one of the cool girls called out to me. Victoria was curvy and blond, with disarming blue eyes. It was well known that she had the coolest friends, in and out of school. I was wearing a leather jacket with fringe, which was a hip look at the time, and a look not many people were rocking yet, even at Music & Art. “Hey, fringe!” she said.
    I went over to talk to her and somehow mustered the courage to ask her out. It was like an out-of-body experience—somebody was talking, and it was me, but I felt totally disconnected because it was such a leap into uncharted territory. She said yes, and I walked away in a state of exhilaration and terror.
    We went to a concert at the Fillmore East. But when we got there, she knew tons of other people in the audience. We wound up sitting with her friends. I was immediately intimidated because they were hip, and I was an uptight kid from Queens. They started passing a joint. I took a hit each time it was passed to me, and I got pretty high. Soon I was talking nonstop, until Victoria said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
    That shut me up for the rest of the show.
    After the concert we went back to her parents’ apartment. I was still really stoned and also paranoid because Victoria had seen a chink in my armor and questioned my coolness. I ended up talking to her dad—and continuing to talk to him long after she had slipped off to her room and gone to bed. I eventually slithered out of the apartment feeling like a complete jerk.
    From then on in school she snickered whenever we ran into each other. I don’t think she meant to be mean, but she wasn’t laughing with me.
    Another girl I saw briefly lived in Staten Island. She was half Italian and half Norwegian and lived in an Italian neighborhood. She was hooked on speed—between me being a bit stocky and her having no appetite, I often got to eat her lunch, which her mom lovingly prepared, not knowing who would actually end up savoring it. The first time I met her mom, she seemed to like me; the next time I went over to her house to pick her up, I wasn’t allowed into the house.
    “I can’t go inside?” I said to the girl.
    “No, my mom thought you were Italian, but she found out you’re a Jew.”
    That was my introduction to the wonderful world of anti-Semitism.
    After a while, the double-whammy of my insecurity and my inability to hear what was going on in class had me falling into the same old pattern in school of getting lost, getting frustrated, isolating myself, and eventually cutting school as often as I could get away with it. I knew how many days I could be absent, how many classes I could miss, how many times I could be late—and I used them all to their fullest. Those were the school statistics that mattered most to me.

    My rank: 552 out of 587 students. If you can’t graduate at the top of your class, distinguish yourself by graduating at the bottom. It’s a miracle they let me graduate at all.
    I became a ghost—hardly ever in school, and when I was there, nearly invisible. I sat in the back of my classes and barely spoke to anybody. Once again, I was living in self-imposed exile as a result of my defensiveness and social anxiety. Once again, I was beginning to shut down. Life was poisonous and desolate. My sleeping problems returned. Once again, I would wake up