Kiss might be something of a guilty pleasure, but for MOLLY MCCLOSKEYthey are inextricably linked with a summer of love in 1980, and a recent gig in Dublin brought the memories rolling back
M Y FRIEND M AND I are lounging in my living room, having yet another discussion on the subject of Kiss, the glam metal rock band known for their painted faces and comic-book costumes who are that night appearing at the O2 in Dublin. I believe I have hit, finally, on the justification for our attendance.
“Just as we cannot choose our parents,” I say, “neither can we choose the triggers for our nostalgia.”
“Yes,” M says, “but we can choose which ones we revisit.”
“Hmm . . . maybe.” I mumble something about Proust.
M rolls his eyes. His own position is not unassailable. He may play Bach on his grand piano. He may idolise Herbie Hancock. But he spent his teenage years as a roadie for an Elvis impersonator who played Holiday Inns and wore a girdle under his white flares.
When I was in my teens, ricocheting between girlish desire and testosterone envy, I jammed to Calling Dr Loveand Shout it Out Loud. I was in love with Paul Stanley, the thick-lipped, bare-chested guitarist of Kiss. I was also in love with my brother's best friend, Jeff. Jeff had a crazy energy. He was ravenous for life. He was an athlete with a beautifully sculpted body. Jeff was in love with Gene Simmons, who formed Kiss with Stanley in 1973. Simmons is famous for his alarmingly long tongue, which he has flicked tirelessly through four decades. My abiding memory of Jeff is of him standing in our living room flicking his tongue, in homage to Gene.
Cut to 2008. Jeff is sitting in a wheelchair at a party in Portland, Oregon. He is hardly able to move his tongue. He cannot walk or speak clearly. Gene Simmons is there, too, sans make-up. He is raising money for Jeff's medical expenses – auctioning off backstage passes to Kiss concerts and a guest appearance on his reality TV show, Gene Simmons' Family Jewels.
By virtue of his diagnosis, Jeff should have been dead by about 1988. The average life expectancy of a person with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) – a progressive neurodegenerative disease – is two to five years; Jeff was diagnosed in 1983. Instead, he married and divorced. He fought for custody of his daughter and raised her in his own parents' home. He still helps to coach the football team at our old high school. He is writing a book titled Wake Up Call! Why Your Life Kicks Ass Even If You Don't Know It– about, as he says on his website, "why life is fantastic".
Jeff has an email subscription list, too – communiques describing his daily battle with ALS. The message: Don’t waste your life. Among his subscribers are Simmons and Tommy Thayer. Thayer is another Kiss member, and has known Jeff forever. Back in the 1980s, Thayer was in a band called Black’n’Blue with Jeff’s brother. The boys got us into a couple of their nightclub gigs and my friend had a liaison with Tommy Thayer.
I explain all this to M. “It’s not so much Kiss we’re going to see as a chunk of my youth.”
"And Dr Love?"
" Dr Loveis just the madeleine."
A rumble emanates from the arena. M and I scurry in just as a booming voice intones: “The hottest band in the world . . . Kiss!” Gene, Paul and Tommy (the drummer is in situ) appear on a platform – all leather, spikes and sequins. There is smoke and fire. The crowd roars. The boys launch into . . . something.
There is not much leaping about this night, the limited mobility only partly due to the stacked heels. Paul has had two hip replacements and has gone a bit thick around the middle. His camply androgynous appeal has morphed into something shrill. Tommy looks like a regular guy, just up there jamming. As for Gene, now 60, he has still got it, even if it is a little bedraggled, even if it is not your thing. He spits fake blood and rises to the rafters. He pulls his hips in a circle, at the centre of which is his silver-riveted groin guard. When he stomps over to the corner of the stage nearest us, we gasp and crane our necks as though the lion at the zoo has ambled over. When he crooks a finger or a tongue, our skin crawls, even as we laugh.
The overhead screens do the band few favours – there are close-ups of double chins and chicken necks and liver-spotted hands. When Paul punches the air, the flesh of his upper arm jiggles. I see man-boobs. Gene’s make-up appears to be running into his eyes. He keeps squinting and blinking, like a very big boy trying not to cry.
None of this matters – nobody is fooling anybody here. The point is not that we're forever young; the point is how briefly we are. By the time they play Shout it Out Loud, I am singing along, and I have lost track of where irony ends and sentimentality begins.
It is only that night that I realise how precise was Jeff’s take-off of Gene, not just the head-shaking tongue-waggle, but the way he walked – a loose limbed, bowlegged swagger – and the raw animalesque energy. The uncanniness makes my scalp tingle.
The last time I saw Jeff was in 2005 at my brother’s wedding. He was in his wheelchair and I bent down to try to understand what he was saying. It took some time, but finally I realised that he was referring to something we hadn’t spoken of since the day it happened: our single afternoon of surreptitious love in the summer of 1980, before we knew too much or even anything at all, back when the reasons why life was fantastic were too many to count.
Molly McCloskey is writer fellow at Trinity College. Her memoir, A Perfect Circle of Light, will be published next year by Penguin Ireland
