Feels Like the First Time (27 page)
Read Feels Like the First Time Online
Authors: Shawn Inmon
Dawn’s eyes were large and she looked uneasy about suddenly being the center of attention. I took her hand in mine and slipped the rings out of my pocket. “Dawn Adele, for the third and final time in our life, I want to ask. Will you marry me?”
There were tears in her eyes, and her answer was barely audible.
“Yes.” She smiled and my heart beat a little faster, just like it always did when she looked at me like that.
I slipped the rings on her finger and she gasped a little when she saw they were the rings we had looked at together. “You said these were sold!”
“They were. To me.”
Behind me, I heard four men who were on their own Valentine’s Day dates.
“Well, what’d she say?” They asked.
I smiled and gave a thumbs-up. They stood and applauded. Much of the section around us joined in. I finally stood, acknowledging the nods and good wishes. I wiped my brow and sat back down.
It had been spontaneous and natural when I knelt in the rain in Doss Cemetery and asked Dawn to marry me. This time it was relaxed and easy with the outcome no longer in doubt. We were two small-town kids, playing dress-up and having our moment in the big city. I held Dawn’s hand across the table and admired the way the candlelight sparkled in her new diamond. Our eyes locked and I smiled. I was ecstatic to know that our lives would be intertwined as long as we were both alive.
Now that we were together almost all the time, I had time to ask Dawn questions that troubled me over the years. One of the things I wondered about was why she had propositioned me on New Year’s Eve, 1978. It was so out of character that I was never able to understand why it had happened.
When I asked Dawn about it, she said she thought I was at the UW, going out with college girls, and slowly losing interest in the young girl I left behind. She thought having sex was the best way to hold on to me. She was wrong, but at least it helped me understand why she had acted that way.
I had also wondered what she had thought about KISS II. Did she think it was cool at all, or was it just an embarrassing memory?
“I loved you in spite of KISS II,” she said, laughing. “Not because of it.”
Of course, it didn’t matter. KISS II died when we blew our sound system in the spring of 1978. I had worn the costume when I dressed up a few times for Halloween but I left even that behind by the early ‘80s. Sabrina often asked me to “do Gene Simmons, Daddy,” but I always declined. That was all behind me.
Then I joined Facebook in August 2009. I found a lot of old friends waiting there for me. Joining Facebook was a big step for me. I had avoided social media because I was unhappy with my life and didn’t want to be in contact with anyone. I was frozen and isolated, and thought I would always stay that way. Then Dawn and I happened, and everything changed. Those first few months after I joined, it felt like a high school reunion. I reconnected with dozens of old friends I hadn’t spoken to in many years.
One of those old friends was Tracey Antrobus. I sent her a friend request and got a message back immediately.
Tracey
I sent a message back to Tracey thanking her for the laugh. No one would want to see me onstage wearing spandex. It wasn’t going to happen.
Over the next few months, someone would occasionally drop me a Facebook message along the lines of “do you remember that crazy thing that you and Jerry did with KISS?” Suggestions of a KISS II reunion persisted until April 2010, when I got this message from my old friend and classmate Alice Guenther:
Hi. We are planning a multi-class party at the Mossyrock Community Center during the All-Class Reunion at the end of July. There will be dancing, songs from our era and we’ll all have a great time. Anyway, we were wondering if KISS II would like to secretly surprise everyone and come out of retirement, or come ALIVE (as my husband put it), and perform a couple songs for good old times? I realize that the costumes and face paint are probably gone, but we think it would be fun! Think it over–talk to the rest of the band. You know how much work it would require better than the rest of us.
Alice
I’m not sure why, but suddenly it didn’t seem so unreasonable to think about getting back together. A few months earlier, Dawn, me, Jerry, and his wife, Lynn, got together for the first time in many years. We started with lunch, but it stretched into a five hour conversation about everything. Ever since then, we’d been looking for a reason to hang out together, and this seemed like a way to make it happen.
I called Jerry and told him what Alice had asked us. We decided to get together the next day and figure out if it was possible. It was already mid-April, and the All-School Reunion was just three months away.
The next afternoon, I met Jerry at the Starbucks on Meridian in Puyallup. I brought my 18” tall Gene Simmons statue for inspiration. Jerry sat down across from me, and I pointed to the statue.
“What do you think? Can you make me look like that?”
This was no idle question. Jerry’s hobby was making period-accurate armor. He took several minutes to look over Gene’s Destroyer-era costume, making calculations and imagining things I couldn’t even guess at.
“I can make this.”
“Okay, then. The next question is whether or not we want to do this? It’s been a long, long time.”
“I can tell you this,” said Jerry. “We’re not going to do all that work just to show up and wave and do a couple of songs. I think we should do four shows and I think we could sell out the gym.”
I was skeptical. Our roles hadn’t changed after all these years. Jerry was the big idea man, and I was the wet blanket.
We decided to give it a try. I tried to contact Bill Wood, who was our Ace Frehley, and Chip Lutz, our old Peter Criss, while Jerry got to work on designing my costume. We had decided to stay with the same era of KISS as before. It was clear that my costume was going to be the most challenging to construct.
We hadn’t performed in thirty years. We didn’t know if the rest of the band had any interest in reuniting, and we didn’t have any costumes. On top of that, I didn’t know if anyone wanted to see fifty-something guys in spandex and platforms lip-syncing to thirty-year-old music. I also had my doubts about whether the Mossyrock School District and the All-School Reunion Committee would welcome us with open arms.
I put out a teaser about a possible KISS II reunion on Facebook. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Our roadie from the ‘70s, Jeff Hunter, said he would help us out. On Facebook, he said, “If we manage to pull this off, KISS II will have had a long career. Not a good career, but a long one.” I thought that was a pretty good motto for KISS II. Jeff agreed to be our stage manager, which meant that he took care of pretty much everything.
I tried to contact Bill Wood through his wife’s Facebook page. For a while, she said he might be interested. But in the end he decided he didn’t want to play with us.
Chip Lutz was tough to track down. He wasn’t on Facebook yet, but eventually we found a tax record in his name in Tacoma. Jerry and I drove up there, but Chip was at work. His father-in-law was home and promised to have him call us, which he did.
Most of the interested parties gathered at the Weibles’ big house in Puyallup: Dawn and I, Chip and his wife, and of course, our hosts Jerry and Lynn Weible plus their kids.
It took us about thirty seconds to start insulting each other like we were all still in high school. Chip looked great, and we even threw an impromptu practice together in the basement. The chemistry all felt right, but in the end, we couldn’t talk Chip into joining, which left us an Ace and a Peter short of reviving KISS II.
It turned out that we were in luck. The answer to our missing Ace was right in front of us all along. Jerry’s oldest daughter, Brittany, was a guitarist. She had been a KISS fan since she had been able to walk. We rehearsed with Brittany in the role of Ace. Jerry and I were worried because she was so good that we knew she was going to blow us off the stage.
I’ve often thought that a committee is the place where good ideas go to die, and this was no exception. The committee was upset that we had waited so long before springing this idea on them. They also didn’t want to allow people from outside of Mossyrock to attend any event held at the school. Truth be told, they weren’t crazy about having KISS music played on school grounds for several hours at a stretch. At one point, one of the older citizens of Mossyrock said she didn’t want the kind of riff-raff we would attract to town.
We walked out of the meeting feeling a little bemused. We were without a venue and more determined than ever to stage our concert. We immediately dubbed the shows
The Riff-Raff World Tour–Mossyrock.
The one positive aspect was that the people on the Committee had referred to Jerry and me as “kids” on more than one occasion.
We spent the whole ride home brainstorming ideas about how to get around this roadblock. Before we got home, we remembered that the old G Theater in town had gone out of business. Before that, they had built a pretty decent stage in front of the screen. As soon as the G was brought up, it was all we could think about. It was where I saw my first movie ever,
Mary Poppins
. It was where I saw Jenny Agutter go skinny-dipping in
Walkabout,
providing me with my first lesson in female anatomy. It was also where Dawn and I went to see movies when I didn’t have enough gas to get us out town to the Fox Theater or the drive-in.
It took us several days, but I learned the names of the current theater owners–Mike and Vicky Howard. They had bought it some years before from Paul Ghosn, the “G” in the G Theater. I called Mike and Vicky, and they didn’t sound all that crazy about the idea of opening their shuttered building for several nights so that we could pretend to play KISS music. But I’ve been a salesman all my life, and before I got off the phone, Mike agreed to at least meet with us to discuss it.
The next day, Jerry and I drove down to Mossyrock and met Mike at the theater. Neither of us had been in the theater for thirty years, so even though it was frayed around the edges and smelled musty, it was incredible being there. It was much larger in my memory. In fact, it was pretty small, holding about 120 people. It was an odd feeling to walk through the theater. The snack bar was smaller than a coat closet and the old-fashioned seats and mid-century architecture were amazing to see.
We sat on the stage and talked to Mike for a long time. He asked about our background, what we did for a living, and wondered what we were going to do with the money we made. We told him we had formed a scholarship fund for Mossyrock High School students and named it after an MHS grad that had recently passed away–Michael Sean Deasy, Jr. During high school, Mike Deasy had worked in the G Theater as a projectionist. It all seemed perfect. We also told him that our core value was that we wanted to leave any place we ever played in better condition than when we found it.
Mike scanned the dust-covered seats and walls. “That shouldn’t be too hard. You know, people come through here all the time, wanting to use the theater for one thing or another, but I have a feeling about you guys. You can use the theater for your shows.”