Free No Regrets by Joe Layden Ace Frehley John Ostrosky Page B

ended benignly, with barely a punch being thrown. Once in a while, though, the band was equally loaded, and when that happened it didn’t take much to provoke a violent disagreement.
    There was the time in Paterson, New Jersey, when I was invited to sit in with Tommy Doyle’s band because they were short a guitar player for the night. I expected a typical Jersey bar, filled with guys in T-shirts and jeans, smoking and hanging out with their girlfriends, tossing back bottles of Rolling Rock. Instead I stumbled into a place that looked more like a mob lounge, very laid-back and moody, with guys in suits accompanied by ladies who probably were not their wives. Itwas most definitely not a rock ’n’ roll venue, but I didn’t care. I started drinking early and hard, and kept right on pounding through the night; with each successive beer my guitar playing became, if not necessarily sharper, definitely louder.
    Much louder.
    It’s probably fair to say that I failed to exercise the appropriate level of respect or restraint, given the nature of the clientele and ownership. When the owner approached me during a break and complained about the volume, I blew him off. By the end of the night he’d had enough. And I’d had one (or ten) too many. As we broke down the stage and packed away our instruments, I asked Tommy if we’d been paid. He explained that the band had in fact been paid its fee, but that the owner had originally promised a little something extra for me, since I filled in on short notice. That way Tom wouldn’t have to pay me out of pocket, and the other guys wouldn’t feel shortchanged.
    So I found the owner, who was working behind the bar, and asked him (rather impolitely, I’m sure), for my money.
    “Fuck off, asshole. You already got paid.”
    That was probably the least hostile thing either of us said in a profane exchange that lasted roughly five minutes, and ended with the owner reaching over the bar and leveling me with a right hand so solid that at first I thought he’d cracked a beer bottle against the side of my skull. But he hadn’t. The guy had simply used his fist to shut up a drunken guitar player, and he’d done it effectively. The next thing I knew, the guys in the band were carrying me across the parking lot and stuffing me into the back of a van. They drove me back to the Bronx, brought me upstairs to my room, and put me to bed.
    I woke the next morning feeling like utter shit. My face was swollen and bruised, and my right eye was so red that it looked as though blood was leaking into the socket. Coupled with the natural awfulness of a twelve-pack hangover, these symptoms left me feeling like I was on the brink of death. But it was when my mother saw me that I realized just how bad it must have been.
    “Oh, my God!” she screamed, putting both hands over her mouth. “You need to get to a hospital.”
    When your mother doesn’t even ask for an explanation, but simply tells you to get medical help immediately, you know you’re in trouble. So I went to see our family doctor, who immediately ordered an X-ray. The diagnosis: a shattered cheekbone.
    “The whole thing is crushed,” he explained. “You need plastic surgery or you’re going to have problems with breathing and eating for the rest of your life.”
    He paused.
    “Not to mention, you’ll look like shit.”
    Our family didn’t have a lot of money or fancy insurance, or anything like that, which made the prospect of reconstructive surgery daunting, to say the least. Luckily we had an ally in our family doctor. This guy had been treating me literally since the day I was born—he delivered me. He was an old-time family doctor who wanted quality care for his patients, regardless of their financial state, and sometimes he intervened on their behalf to make sure things worked out.
    “Let me make a call,” he said. “I’ll see what can I do.”
    He did plenty, arranging for the services of a Park Avenue plastic surgeon named Dr.