Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

We shrugged it off as weird LA people, but the following day while Mike was out on the lawn again, an older distinguished man started a conversation with him, and Mike told him about the band. The guy offered to discuss managing the group if Mike had dinner with him. Since we were practically starving and the chances were that Mike could take home a doggie bag, we insisted he accept the invitation. The man picked Mike up in a Cadillac, and we all stood in the doorway of the house grinning and waving and trying to make a good impression on our potential manager.

Mike was only gone for half an hour when he came back to Bob’s house ashen white. His friend had taken him to a drive-in southern-fried-chicken joint, and just as Mike was about to bite down on his first piece of solid food in days the guy asked if he could give him a blow job. Mike made the man take him right back to the house while his friend cursed him all the way home.

“He called me a cock teaser,” Mike said, astonished at the thought. “Can you imagine that?”

Dick and Bob Roberts listened to this and roared with laughter. All of us were wide-eyed suburban innocents, and we were baffled as to why Dick and Bob thought it was so funny. We found out the next night. Mike, who was sleeping in the closet because there was no room in the living room on the floor, began to raise hell about why Dick was getting to sleep in the master bedroom in a real bed, while Mike, who was a full-fledged member of the group, had to sleep on the floor of the closet. He made quite a stink about trading sleeping space for a few hours, and Dick looked worried for the first time.

It must have been a terrible night for Dick. One by one he took us into the bedroom and told us he was gay and that the only reason we had a roof over our heads was because he was fucking Bob Roberts. It was a horrifying thing to learn about a close friend for an unsophisticated bunch of eighteen- and nineteen-year olds. It was like Dick had told us he had leukemia. Dennis was baffled. He knew it was earthshaking consequences, but he really didn’t know what it meant that Dick was “gay.”

It was a touchy time for everyone. Did he really suck on cocks? we all wanted to know. Up the ass? We were all very tense until I figured what the hell, we were friends and he never came on to any of us, and I started making terrible jokes about it. “I feel a little gay myself,” and that kind of thing. As much as we tried to take it in our stride, it was never forgotten. It created a break between the band and Dick. It set up a barrier of fear, and as hard as we tried we just couldn’t chalk it up as another of those strange things that happened in LA. What if that kind of thing happened to us?

At the night we escaped the claustrophobia of Bob Roberts’ house by walking up and down the Strip, around the record stores and headshops, trying to score chicks. Three hot months passed at Bob Roberts’ house. I suppose that if we could have afforded it, we would have used drugs to pass the time, but it was simply too expensive for us to get into. I smoked a couple of joints, but I didn’t like getting stoned. It made me nervous. Yet it was impossible to face the months of future shock without a buffer. Everything went so fast, we all grew so quickly, that we needed lubrication to keep on going. I was twenty years old, and I never in my life tasted alcohol. The first time I took a drink, I chugged on beer out of sheer terror. It was quite an evening, my first glimpse of the weird LA scene. The group and I were standing in a psychedelic headshop across the Boulevard from Tower Records, when an LA surfer waif, one of those seventeen-year-old girls with sunstriped blond hair and a plastic surgeon-manufactured pug nose, asked if I was a singer. Not that she had seen me anywhere, but she said that I looked like I was a singer in a rock and roll band. She invited the five of us up to a party on Sunset Plaza Drive where a film crew from the University of Southern California was filming a documentary about hippies.

We walked up the hill with her to a white stucco house. As soon as we got through the front door the chick disappeared up a staircase. The house was unfurnished, wood floors and large windows overlooking the city. There was a table made out of a door turned on it’s side resting on four bricks and a dozen pillows thrown about the room. There were also kittens, at least twenty-five of them, sleeping, crawling, pissing on the floor. In the corner, with her head resting on one of the pillows and her body covered with sleeping kittens, was a little girl. I stood there for a long time waiting for the surfer waif to return from upstairs, and when she didn’t come back I sat down on a pillow next to the sleeping girl and looked out of the window at the city below. The other guys went upstairs to explore the house.