Read Online Kiss and Make-Up by Gene Simmons - Free Book Online

differentjust because they were black? The three of us got along fine. We played records for each other, we hung out together, and we ate together. There was a difference culturally. Some of it was in the speech; I couldn’t quite understand some of the patois, and some of their cool references were completely alien to me. One of the guys’ friends actually made money, he said, by being a gigolo. This seemed bizarre to me. Women paying for men?
    South Fallsberg was a tiny community. The entire town had ten streets in all, and the school was the center. Primarily it was a hotel and culinary school, where people came from all over the world to learn to cook and run restaurant kitchens. I went up there to get a liberal arts education and to get away from my Jewish roots. I ended up smack-dab in the middle of the Jewish mountains—the Catskills.

     
    Some musings from when I was going to school in Staten Island.
     
    I wound up being a lifeguard at the Pines Hotel during the summer. I had learned to swim and gotten my swimming credentials at Surprise Lake. When I then took the test to become a lifeguard, the Pines Hotel hired me. That was the place where I had my first sexual escapades in which I actually took the bull by the horns. There was a black maid who cleaned all the rooms, including the rooms of the staff who worked at the hotel. We had these little rooms, just big enough to fit a bed and a sink in. One day I was leaving my room, and she was saying “Okay, are you ready? I need to clean up the room.” As we brushed past each other, I got aroused and closed the door behind me. She didn’t object. She was young enough but older than I was. I have always had respect for a clean room, never more so than that day.
    Being a lifeguard was a job, and I assumed it was an easy job—in an Olympic-size swimming pool, you’re never going to have to save anybody. Right? Wrong. One day I was sitting by the pool, watching over the place, and this classic Jewish couple came along—she about three hundred pounds, he about a hundred pounds, she torturing him verbally, he barely alive. To me, they might as well have been a hundred years old, although they were probably in their forties. She decided to take a dip. All the way in, walking toward the pool, she was talking her head off to him, talking, talking, talking. He wasn’t even looking at her; I’m sure he had heard it all before, a million times. She dove into the deep end of the pool—and promptly sank to the bottom. I looked up at him, thinking,
Please God, make him dive in and get his wife.
But he didn’t move a muscle. Nothing. I had to jump up, get in there, get her up, and stick my hip under her, which is a kind of life-saving method. She was fighting me every step of the way. Even when I got her to the side of the pool and tried to hoist her up, I thought,
Okay, he’s going to come over and help me hoist this three-hundred-pound whale up out of the pool.
But he did nothing. When she finally got up, with the help of other people, she went and lay down next to him on the recliner. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t verbally abuse him about not helping her. They both just stayed there quietly staring ahead. I thought it was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen. He didn’t lifta finger to save her, and she didn’t berate him for not saving her. That’s marriage for you.
    People had their young daughters with them, these horny Jewish girls who were coming up there to meet boys. During the weekends, I’d work at the hotel, and at night there would be Holiday Inn dances where AT&T telephone operators would come for the weekends. Once my friend Stephen Coronel came up to visit me on the weekend. We danced with girls and so on and got a room and picked up two girls and brought them back to the room. One of the girls fell asleep, and the other one was ready to be active with me, but I got engrossed in a movie. As I was watching it on the floor, Steve took my girl