Kiss and Make-Up by Gene Simmons Page A

places were like or how big the crowds were. We were on cloud nine.

     
    I had all sorts of odd jobs while the band was crystallizing. While I was in high school, I had learned to type, and in college I even started a little business, typing term papers for fifty cents a page. So when I came back to the city from college and was trying to get the band started, I took a job with Kelly Girls, later the Kelly Agency, which supplied temporary secretaries and typists to businesses all around the city. It was decent work, and also a great way to meet girls, since there were very few guys there. Through Kelly, I ended up getting a job at
Glamour
magazine, and within a few weeks I became indispensable, not only because I could type ninety words a minute but because I knew how to fix the hectograph and mimeograph machines. Pretty soon I got moved from
Glamour
to
Vogue
, where I worked as the assistant to the editor, Kate Lloyd. That lasted about six months, although at the same time I was working as a cashier at a deli. With all this work, I couldn’t get to the practice space until nine or ten at night, but I made it, and we would rehearse until two in the morning. I never had a moment’s rest. It got so busy that I moved my bed and my television set into the loft, so I could wake up and go to work without traveling for an hour by subway.I always worked, so I often had to pay the rent or lend the band money for food or the subway.
    In fact, my social life started to center on the loft, because I would arrange for the girls to meet me after rehearsal and spend the night. Not every girl dared venture into 10 East Twenty-third Street; those who did were the few and the brave, because this place was a hole. It didn’t have any windows. We had put up floor-to-ceiling egg crates to dampen the sound. Some of these egg crates had broken eggs in them, so it was a field day for cockroaches. And you could hear them, the pitter-patter of little feet. One night after I turned off the lights I had a girl on top of me on the bed, naked. All of a sudden she let out a bloodcurdling scream. Well, something must have crawled over her, because she jumped up, ran into a wall, and fell down in the pitch-black room. When I turned on the light, she was trying frantically to jump up on the bed; she wasn’t willing to let her feet touch the floor. “Get my clothes,” she said. “Get my clothes. I felt something on my back.” That was the last I ever saw of her.
    As soon as I graduated college and got my B.A., I taught sixth grade for six months in Spanish Harlem. It was a fine experience in some ways, and less satisfactory in others, but it didn’t last long. Then I started working for the Puerto Rican Interagency Council as the assistant to the director of a government research and demonstration project called Improved Services to Puerto Ricans in Northeastern U.S.A. and Puerto Rico. The project was a way to track government funds and how they actually went down through government and local authorities and to determine whether they did actually get to the Puerto Rican population. Because of a government rule, I was the non-Puerto Rican working in there. But as it happened, the director liked me enough, because I could do anything. As I said, I could work the mimeograph and the hectograph machines. I also used the offices after they were closed and on weekends to send out our mailers. I used the typewriter and the layout and the stencils, and Peter knew a printer downtown. Ace did nothing. So we were able to put together a very professional-looking promotional package with a photograph, a one-page bio sheet, and everything else. I got the year-end issues of
Billboard,Record World
, and
Cash Box
, which were music-industry trade magazines, and copied out a huge list of record company executives, managers, music reporters, and so on. Then I sent out our mailer. I must have sent out a thousand of these mailers to everybody and their cousin, and people