Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

I was only ninety-eight pounds and had spent a year and a half hunched over in bed, which left a curvature of my spine and shoulders which could have put the hunchback of Notre Dame to shame. My teeth, instead of being broad and straight, were pointed and spaced. I carried on my face the cursed Furnier nose. I was not exactly a front-runner.

But I had crystal blue eyes and a dazzling smile. I had wit. Nobody in high school had as keen a sense of humor. I was so fast and funny I lobotomized people with one liners. Another kid doing the same thing would have been obnoxious, but I coolly measured what I said and how I said it with almost professional judgement. I was a diplomat. I had taste and restraint.

Cortez was brand-new the year I started to attend. It was built out on the middle of the desert, a compound of brick and cinder block buildings that could have just as easily been an army camp or a shopping center. The Cortez High School sign was a translucent bubble that stood on top of a pole like a movie theater marquee. The auditorium and cafeteria were the same room, and every Tuesday morning in Assembly I would have to hold my nose so the smell of five hundred pounds of lasagna cooking in the kichen didn’t make me nauseated.

Whatever else the school might have lacked, it had a terrific gymnasium and athletic field. I tried out for the baseball team and promised the coach I would gain weight, but the first day of practice somebody broke my nose with a far-flung bat and the season was over for me.

I went out for track. My first year I went out for the 440, which was a long, long sprint for a skinny sick kid. I found that although I didn’t have much speed I had tremendous endurance. The coach, Emmet Smith, who was a fellow church member, worked hard with me, and I turned out to be a dynamic long-distance runner and a track star. In September of my sophomore year I lettered in cross-country. The first race that I ran I had been running for several hours nonstop, and when I got back to the school I stopped dead in my tracks and passed out. It made the front page of the school paper and I was a hero.

“Psyching out” was a big thing on the track team, and we spent as much time thinking up psych outs as we did practicing. I wore red knee socks to drive everybody else crazy and sometimes I’d run with a top hat on. When the gun went off I would scream, “Yut-a-hey!” which is Indian for something. I did it for energy, just like a karate yell, and to psych out the other runners. “Yut-a-hey” really got to everybody except the Indians, who knew what “yut-a-hey” meant. They would hear that and tear out and smear us. Boy, those Indians were fast.

By my junior year I had the reputation of being the school jokester, and I got my own column on the Cortez Tip Sheet. Working on the Tip Sheet was supposed to be a faggy job, since the paper was run completely by girls. It was almost as bad as taking home economics instead of woodworking shop. All the guys who made fun of me were crazy; I was the only boy in a roomful of girls every day for an hour. It was sixty minutes of blissful sexual excitement, the perfect fuel for my nighttime fantasies. I even started dating around then, although for a good long while I wouldn’t do more than hold hands with the girl while walking home from a movie.

My column was called “Get Out of My Hair,” which I filled with revelations of tremendous consequence about the Beatles, track, homeroom classes, bad cafeteria food and unfair dress codes. I signed the poison pen column “Muscles McNasal” — a little self-conscious, I guess — and my by-line ran under a dazzlingly poor picture of me taken by the Tip Sheet photographer, Glen Buxton.

Glen Buxton joined the journalism class shortly after I did. Glen was motivated by the girls, too, only he thought that he was a ladies’ man. He wore a four-inch-high pompadour of greasy blond hair that he molded into shape every day like a little plaster-of-paris lump above his forehead. His putty-shaped nose seemed to have been gobbed on his face, punctuated by a thin, smiling slash of mouth which was usually wisecracking. Glen swaggered around the journalism room all afternoon smelling from photographic developer, an unlit cigarette between his lips, and whispered to the girls, “Call me G.B., sweetheart.” The fact of the matter was Glen couldn’t get laid at sixteen if his life depended on it, and his tough guy act was just as limp.