Last spring, I returned to West 211th Street, in Upper Manhattan, to the one-bedroom apartment where I grew up. It hadn’t been a happy home, to put it mildly. I hadn’t been in that building in sixty years. I’d driven by it once or twice, and I hadn’t had a good feeling when I did.
This time, I had a specific reason to go there: along with my wife, Erin, and my oldest son, Evan, my three younger children—Colin, age twelve, Sarah, age ten, and Emily, age seven—were with me, and I wanted them to see the place where I’d started my life. I hoped it would help them understand the difference between their lives and mine.
Years ago I had visited the area in Queens where my family moved when we left Upper Manhattan. Queens is where I lived when I went to high school, started playing music, met a bass player named Gene Simmons, and eventually started KISS. But after that visit, I fell into a few weeks of feeling miserable. It sort of confirmed what I had always thought: these places from my past held only negative associations for me.
Still, I thought it was important to give it another try. I hoped this visit to 211th Street would offer a beautiful chance to give concrete reality to the stories I’ve told my kids over the years, to make my childhood memories into something tangible for them.
So we went back. Or, I should say, I went back, since they’d never been there.
I was born with a crumpled mass of cartilage instead of a right ear, a facial difference known as microtia. From the time I can remember, people stared at me—both kids and adults. People seem to detach a deformity from the person—instead of being treated like a human being, I was treated like an object. An object of curiosity in some cases, I guess, but most often an object of disgust.
When I started to attend the elementary school right next door to our apartment, PS 98, I didn’t have any friends, but I was always the center of attention. And that sort of attention felt just horrific to a five-year-old. I wanted to disappear. Or hide. But there was no place to go.
It was one thing when somebody stared at me—that was bad enough. But when someone yelled out at me, that drew other people’s eyes to me—everyone would look at me, scrutinize me. I felt violated and threatened to my core. These were the worst moments—like the kid who would point and yell, “Stanley, the one-eared monster!”
All I could think was: You’re hurting me.
On top of that, I never had a shoulder to cry on. My parents insisted on not talking about it. Kids need parents. Kids need protection. When my parents didn’t empathize with me and didn’t want to hear about my problems, I felt cut off from everybody.
For most of my life, West 211th Street had represented just one thing for me: pain.
But now, as I drove up toward the apartment, I wondered whether it would be different.
We arrived and walked through the entry arch to the five-story walk-up and stepped into a paved space surrounded by the building—to call it a courtyard would make it sound too nice. Memories started to rush back. Crossing the yard, I suddenly remembered jumping on another kid’s back and biting him. This kid had taunted me and spat in my face. The courtyard triggered the memory because I’d been there one day with my mom and explained to her that this kid had been bullying me and hinted that I might want or need her help dealing with the situation. And she had told me, a kindergartner, to fight my own battles.
“Don’t come crying to me,” she said.
Which led to my attacking the kid.
Entering the apartment, my initial reaction was surprise at how small the place was. Obviously, when we remember something in one scale—based on our size and stature as a child—and we go back, it’s startling. The building was also a bit rundown, but it was the size that really surprised me. As small as I remember it, this was so much smaller. And four of us had lived in it—my parents, my sister, and me. My parents had slept in the living room on a foldout sofa, and if my sister or I got up earlier than them and wanted to go to the kitchen, we had to crawl under their bed.
My heart was racing. I was a bit light-headed.
Back outside, we saw the school next door, and the schoolyard where I’d been called “Stanley, the one-eared monster.”
I’ve always told my kids to remember that their dad was teased and ridiculed. I’ve always told them that it hurt me and that they should remember, when dealing with other people, how I had been a target. That means a lot to them, and I see its impact in their eyes. Colin is aware of others’ vulnerabilities, as is Sarah. Even Emily is keenly aware of the feelings of others. If it happened to their dad, it could happen to anybody.
And it does, though during my childhood it never occurred to me that I might not be the only one to be bullied and to suffer. Children tend not to think in terms of how they fit into the wider world. I never thought about anyone else being taunted and bullied because my world was just me. And even if somebody else was being subjected to similar treatment, it didn’t matter—I was still hurting. I wouldn’t have been consoled knowing that somebody else was also getting beaten up.
My children all know about my being stared at and pointed at, about my having trouble in school and not being able to hear—all kinds of adversity. It’s the best way for them to really understand that sort of thing, to attach a face to it: my face. A face that, as a member of their family, probably means the most to them.
But now, standing there in that apartment and schoolyard more than sixty years later, all of it felt like another lifetime. The memories were still there, but my connection to the place no longer had negative overtones. I could tell that, unlike earlier visits to places in my past, this one wasn’t going to leave a mark. It wasn’t going to cause pain or bitterness.
That has everything to do with who I have become. And by that I don’t mean a globe-trotting rock star with a fancy house and a fancy car. I achieved that fairly early in my life and have realized it didn’t help smooth over the emotional scars. At one time I thought a Playboy Playmate and a bankbook full of cash was the answer. But it wasn’t. I had wanted so desperately to rub my fame in the faces of cruel classmates at reunions, but it didn’t help me feel better. I had wanted so badly to be desired by the sort of women who had always ignored me, but I found I still couldn’t establish meaningful relationships. I had wanted so badly to surround myself with the trappings of success, but I found that stuff was still just stuff, no matter the price tag. On the one hand, I had accomplished everything I had ever wanted and more. But on the other, I still languished emotionally, never entirely comfortable with myself, never entirely happy.
The beauty of success is that it has given me the potential to realize a quest: to be the best me. But who I’ve become is different from who I thought I would become.
And the reason why this visit to my childhood apartment was different from previous glimpses into my past was that when your life is in order, the chaos that you may have been through recedes and becomes irrelevant. I was once much more connected to those times and my struggles in that place. Yet now I was back there with none of that baggage.
I felt some of the same emotions I felt when talking to my dad in recent years about the changes in our relationship. That place—211th Street—may have been where I started, but it wasn’t where I ended up, literally and figuratively.
In some strange way, the place now seemed oddly beautiful—because of my sense of perspective, because I could see how far I had come. And again, I don’t mean materially. I can now appreciate my past for the same reason I could finally write my story in Face the Music, and for the same reason my relationships with people like my father have continued to evolve since that book came out. We keep secrets when we haven’t come to terms with the past. We are in turmoil when we haven’t come to terms with our feelings. But once we are comfortable, we are freed by letting go.
Going back to 211th Street was a terrific opportunity, a moment of clarity.
When our lives correlate with being in a good place, I realized, then we’re ready to unveil difficult things, because they’re not the same burden they once were. We may have been unwilling victims in the past, but we can choose whether to allow that past to make us victims in the present and future.
I often hear people express the idea that living well is the best revenge. But I don’t know. If we’re living well, we shouldn’t need revenge. If we still feel that need, then maybe we’re not living so well after all. Living well, at this stage in my life, means not needing revenge, not even wanting revenge.
But then again, who really knows what it means to live well, at least in advance? For most of my life, I sure didn’t. It was something I had to learn—the hard way, and over a long period of time.
The thing is, life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. So over the years I’ve created my own. I’ve spent a lifetime adding hard-earned principles to this instruction manual, and in following it, I’ve achieved not only traditional success but also the peace of mind that allows me to see things in a different light. Up to now, that manual existed only in my head, but I decided to turn it into a reality in order to share it, to unveil it as a result of feeling unburdened by my past.