Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Dick Christian saw me talking to Merry Cornwall, and when he found out who she was he began laying on the bullshit thick and heavy. In ten minutes she started giving us boy-I-would-love-to-fuck-you looks. I had never really gotten those looks from an older woman before. (Merry, it turned out, was only twenty-three years old. I was nineteen.) And I was a virgin to boot, but I understood how to play the game. She told us that she adored the group and would try to book us at the Cheetah. She wanted to know where we were living so she could get in touch with us. Since we were supposed to be leaving the next day we took her number and promised to call. Merry Cornwall’s promise was enough motivation to get in touch with our only LA contact, Sergeant Garcia.

Garcia was on welfare, nearly as broke as we were, and lived in a tiny apartment in downtown Los Angeles. He took us in like long-lost inmates. We waited by Sergeant Garcia’s phone for Merry Cornwall to return our phone calls, but she never did. We got more depressed every day, dragging Sergeant Garcia down with us. John Speer played drill instructor every morning, dragging us up off the mattresses and making us set up our equipment to practice. The noise drove Sergeant Garcia out of his apartment. He would either walk the streets or go to see his psychiatrist at the welfare center. Sometimes he would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, “Harriet, take it out! Take it out!” He was starting to flip out again. This was the first time I had been exposed to somebody that crazy, and I tried my best to act natural. I made jokes about Harriet, which he didn’t laugh about, and about our being stuck in his house for the next five years, which he did laugh about. One day he came home from his shrink and told us that he had finally told his psychiatrist we were living with him, but the psychiatrist thought he was making it up and threatened to put him back into the hospital. He asked if one of us would go to his next session with him so his psychiatrist would know there were really eight people in his apartment. We thought this was very funny and drew straws to see who would go to Sergeant Garcia’s shrink the next session. Charlie Carnal won.

Charlie came back from the doctor’s and told us that when the shrink stuck his head out into the waiting room, he took one look at Charlie with his short hair and one side and long on the other and closed the door. Forty minutes later Sergeant Garcia emerged and told Charlie that his psychiatrist insisted that we move out for Garcia’s own good.

By the end of the week we were flat broke and couldn’t find a paying job anywhere in the city. We made plans to leave Sergeant Garcia’s and head back to Phoenix in three days’ time, and Dick went scurrying out into the streets for the last two days to hunt up a job so we could stay in LA. He was able to get us one more booking at the Hullabaloo Club, but again for no pay. We packed all of our things, loaded them into the car, thanked Garcia and went to the Hullabaloo Club for a farewell gig.

Dick disappeared around midnight, and just before we were supposed to go on he came back with a sharp-looking older guy in his thirties named Robert Roberts. Dick had gone to a bar, ordered a beer with his last sixty cents, walked over to the first person he saw and told the guy our whole story from Phoenix on. Bob Roberts offered his living room to sleep in, and again we were saved.

Bob Roberts lived just off Sunset Boulevard on Wetherlee Drive, not far from the Whiskey-A-Go-Go where we also dreamed of getting a gig. The neighborhood was called Evil Hill, which I thought was a very neat name for a neighborhood and I didn’t question it any further. We slept on a mattresses across the living room floor, all except for Dick Christian, who had wrangled his way into the mater bedroom. We weren’t at Bob’s a week when Mike Bruce went outside on the lawn to stretch out in the sun one morning. He was back inside in five minutes.

“There was this old guy who came out of the house next door, and kept yelling inside, ‘Bernard, get the kids and come outside! Bernard? Are you going to take the kids for a walk?’ Then this other guy comes out of the house with four poodle dogs and the first guy is yelling, ‘C’mon, kiddies, mama gonna take you to the corner.’ A couple of minutes later I was lying on the lawn with my eyes closed, and I got this eerie feeling somebody was watching me. I opened one eye and there was this guy sitting on a car, grinning at me. Finally he said, ‘Hi, fella, you got nice arms.’