Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

We were, of course, both virgins, but I was allowed to sneak feels in the back seat of a car or behind the garage where we’d get sticky and dusty from grappling on the desert. I wrestled with her tits and stuck my tongue down her throat, praying that one day she would loosen up and forget herself, letting her hand touch the general area of my crotch, which was so hard most of the time it must have torn holes in her clothing. Toward the end of my last year in high school she eventually let me get into her panties — but that didn’t mean she made it easy by removing any clothing. I had to somehow get my hand under her skirt without lifting it up too high and then bend my arm so it could slide down her panties and I could get my hand on her crotch. “This can’t be right,” I thought. “How can this be any fun?” The first time I actually felt her thatch I shot my load instantly, wracking myself with convulsions as I turned into a helpless blob of gelatin in Mimi’s lap. Mimi had never seen this happen before, but she was going to get used to it.

“Are you all right?” she asked me in the darkness with my hand twisted inside her clothing.

“Sure, sure,” I lied. “It’s just my asthma.” One night we were laying between two amplifiers in the back of a station wagon outside the VIP Club. She had a special treat for me: she popped a tit. First one, then the other, right out from under my letter jacket and her pink mohair sweater. I almost knocked her bubble hairdo right off her head getting my hands on them, stuffing them into my mouth like bologna sandwiches. I thought this was the prelude to actually getting to see and touch and smell and taste that forbidden thatch of hair.

“I’m letting you do this because it’s the last time,” Millie told me.

“I can’t hear you,” I thought, “my mouth’s full of tit.”

“Vince, honey. This is kind of a goodbye treat, because my mother says I can’t see you anymore.”

I knew that Mimi’s mother hated me, hated that I was in a rock band, hated the people in the band too, but I had never been simply banished from anyone’s life before. I stopped eating just long enough to ask her why.

“Because of your hair. My mother thinks it’s disgusting, that you’re turning into a queer or something.”

I would have gladly offered Mrs. Hicki a vivid display of my masculinity if Mimi would have opened my fly for me, but her objections really worried me because Mrs. Hicki wasn’t the only person who didn’t like my hair. Mr. Buckley, the principal of the school, was not delighted to see how long my hair had grown when I returned to school for my senior year, and told me not to come back until I got a haircut. I sat in front of a mirror while my mother stood behind me gingerly trimming my hair while I howled in pain.

The Jan Murray road show of Bye-Bye Birdie was booked into the Phoenix Star Theater in November, and by making slight alterations in the story line the plot was about a whole rock band called “Birdy.” The producers used a local rock group in every city to cut down on expenses and raise the community interest in the show. When they got into town someone contacted Jack Curtis, and he recommended us. We went into rehearsals just three weeks before the show opened.

I was thrown out of school the second time on the day of opening night. My hair wasn’t even that long — just over my collar — but Buckley had a whole year to think about long hair at the draft board, and he was obsessed by it. My mother went to speak to him and explained what he already knew. My father was a minister, I was a good kid, a fair student, and I needed my hair long because I was a professional. (Hah!) I was even in Bye-Bye Birdie. But Buckley wouldn’t hear of it. Long hair was a symbol of rebellion he told her. A symptom of disease. I was suspended from school until after the show when I took another trim.

In the spring semester, just before I was about to graduate, Buckley threw me out of school several more times, bringing my total suspensions to eight. But by spring, Buckley wasn’t the only one complaining.

I was still going to church with my family every week. The band wouldn’t even take Wednesday night jobs because it was church night. I was, after all, the minister’s son and I liked going to church. The church members didn’t like it though. They not only objected to my hair, they objected to rock and roll and everything that went along with it — people who smoked tobacco (and maybe more) and drank liquor (and maybe worse).

The church members were subtle.

“Cut your hair, girlie!”

“Are you a fairy?”

“When are you going to get a dress, Vincie?”

They tortured me in the tackiest, most adolescent ways for months. They alluded I was doing something sacrilegious. I just kept my mouth shut, but it wasn’t easy.