Kiss and Make-Up by Gene Simmons Page A

I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but apparently word had gotten around that I knew what I was doing, and they wanted to try having me stick my tongue in their mouths, too. The seeds of what would later be KISS were all planted during this period: television, the Beatles, superheroes, science fiction, girls. Everything about America was coalescing in my mind.
    Being in a band also opened up certain social situations. For example, I didn’t know what a country club was—we were still relatively poor. But in the summer my next band, the Long Island Sounds, got invited to play at various country clubs around the area. We walked into these places, and we were amazed. Everyone there was being served. They had drinks that they took with them into the swimming pool. They drove nice cars.
    After one of the dances, a girl invited me to come back the following Saturday for a swim date. I came back happily, and the two of us went swimming, which was really just an excuse for making out in the pool: our heads were above water, but our bodies were under water, and we were hugging and necking and kissing. Her parents were nearby, but they couldn’t see us or pretended that they couldn’t. I must have been nervous, because in the middle of this, I felt as though I had to let out some gas. In fact, a major amount of gas. I thought I was pretty sophisticated, and that I could do it so that it would come out silent—in class, at least, I never let a raspberry go full steam; I finagled the cheeks left and right and kind of squirmed for the sake of subtlety. In the pool, I figured that it was even easier, but for some reason logic escaped me, and it didn’t occur to me that the gas would rise. All of a sudden, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the water started bubbling, there was a huge noise, and the beast emerged. The girl untangled herself from me and swam away. I never saw her again.

     
    Cosmos Stiletto
, which I edited and published, was the merger of two magazines,
Cosmos
and
Stiletto.
My friend Stephen Coronel did the artwork for this issue, #11.
     

     
    When I wasn’t in New York, I was in New Jersey. By that I mean that during the summers my mother sent me off to summer camp. She had started doing better and had managed to save a bit of money, and one summer she announced that I was going off to Surprise Lake Camp. The big surprise at Surprise Lake was that there was no lake, just this little pond. I stayed there for three weeks, which seemed like an eternity, mainly because there was no television. I thought it was a prison. To me, it was like yeshiva again, where everybody ate communally, where you had to line up just to get something else to drink. The last thing I wanted to do was hike, and the second to last thing was play sports. One day I left the campground and went into the nearest town, which was Monticello, I think, and I bought a
Fantastic Four
comic book. That was my support network for the rest of the summer; I kept rereading it and rereading it. Eventually, I learned to make do with the camp’s arts and crafts program, because they had a mimeograph machine, and I learned how to publish a newspaper.
    I also sang in the camp talent show, which would have been pleasant if it weren’t for the fact that it was the site of one of the most horrific things that ever happened to me. Those summer camp talent shows are all the same. Someone tap-dances. Someone else juggles. A group of people form a choir. I had some kind of singing group, and we were onstage, and since it was the middle of summer the bugs were everywhere, more so because there were spotlights onstage. Right at my moment in the show, the rest of the stage went black, and I was in the spotlight by myself. I opened my mouth to take a deep breath, and I swallowed a giant moth that died violently, squirming all the way down my throat. I couldn’t wait to get back to my bunk and read the
Fantastic Four
comic book again.
    Camp was the first