Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

There had been a dead cow on the Indian reservation we had visited that Independence Day, and I had poked around the carcass with a stick, although everyone warned me to stay away from it. The doctors at the hospital were convinced that I had picked up typhoid from the cow, and they put me in the infectious isolation ward. Another two days went by as my white blood count soared, and for a week I had lost weight like sugar in a rainstorm. Almost ten days after I got sick they decided to slice me open and check inside.

I was full of peritonitis. My insides were literally riddled with it. I was rotting away. They tried to move my intestines aside to find my appendix, but my guts were too infected and not solid enough to touch. My appendix had burst a good week before, but it was too late to do anything about it now. They sewed me up again, stuck draining tubes in me, and told my parents I would die.

My father couldn’t believe it. Why had God let him go to Phoenix to work with the Indians, step out on faith with no money, no job, and now take his son away from him? He thought it must be a trial, like Abraham.

The doctors pumped me full of morphine and even though I was in a deep dream world, constantly hallucinating, my parents sat by my bedside and read the Bible and comic books to me: “The sickness is not unto death but unto the glory of God.” I looked like I was ready for Hitler’s ovens. I dropped almost half my weight, weight that I was never to recover. I reached a low sixty-eight pounds. I didn’t even want to jerk off with my pillow.

A call went out to church members around the country for help. In Los Angeles the church people who ordained my dad prayed and fasted for me. Letters and cards arrived to the hospital by the dozens while my parents waited for the end to come.

I can’t offer any explanation as to why I lived except that it was a miracle. There is no doubt about it. It was a miracle that I pulled through — thanks to Jesus, and the church and the faith of everyone around me. Years later, whenever my father would tell this story to people they’d laugh.

“Why would the Lord save the life of Alice Cooper?”

CHAPTER 3

There’s nothing like a year in bed to wreck your life.

They fed me steak and liver by the pound to rebuild my strength, but I just lay there like I had swallowed forty Valiums. After four months in the gloomy trailer we moved to a small furnished house on Campbell Avenue. The next spring, when I was just about strong enough to walk, I went to Squaw Peak Elementary School. My mother lived in mortal fear that someone would punch me in the stomach and split me open while I lived in mortal fear that I was becoming a Mama’s Boy.

There’s nothing more depressing for a little kid than to be a semi-invalid and weak and scrawny. It took away all my spunk. I wondered why God was taking so long to make me well. I watched Nickie enviously as she played outside the house with the other kids. I spent my days on my back, in bed, watching TV.

Idle time and busy hands lead to a lot of jerking off, sometimes seven or eight times a day. I kept hard in the bathroom by reading Frederieks of Hollywood catalogs and jerked off with toilet paper tubes coated in Vaseline. I loved toilet paper tubes. I sulked in the kitchen when my mother’s roll of paper towels were getting low and I snuck into the bathroom and flushed unused sheets of toilet paper down the hatch so the roll would use up quicker.

Tubes gave way to jelly donuts. I had affairs with a whole series of pastry. It was messy and expensive, but it was worth it. It took a lot of preparation to have a jelly donut ready when I wanted it, and it confused my mother when I stopped encouraging her to buy toilet paper and wanted to stock up on bakery goods instead. Then there was always the problem of what to do with the impregnated donuts. Much of what my parents thought was unreserved generosity toward my sister Nickie was actually a hideous gesture I prefer not to think about.

My dad got a great job — top secret for the space program in an electronics factory, no less, as had been promised to him by God in a dream. Soon we were able to afford to move into a three-bedroom Spanish style house in a Phoenix suburb called Coral Gables. On the first anniversary of my appendix attack I was shipped back to the hospital, where they reopened the same spot and scooped out the remains of my appendix which had formed lesions on my intestines. The two operations left a Y-shaped scar ten inches long and a half-inch deep. I still tell everybody it’s a shark bite.

By the time I entered Cortez High School in the fall of 1962 I was a driven child. The television had been my only companion for a year. I wanted to have friends so badly it haunted me. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be known. I wanted to be somebody special, somebody healthy.