Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Merry Cornwall asked us to audition, again, on a Sunday afternoon. For several months Merry had been trying to convince us to move into a house with her, but I didn’t want to end up in another hippie crash pad with Merry inviting half the homeless kids of LA home with her. It was interesting how Merry was very involved in the hippie love movement and at the same time could be a no-bullshit businesswoman at the club. I thought of her as the hooker with a heart of gold. She had three kids and had never been married. She had no idea who the fathers were — just another faceless fuck on a series of one-night stands.

But in business and at the club she was responsible and straight. She wanted to manage us and promised to get us a recording contract, which Dick Christian wasn’t happy about. We had to get out of Bob Roberts’ house any day, and we took Merry up on her offer of finding us all places to live (with our salaries from the Cheetah as insurance we could come up with our share of the rent). Merry said she’d hunt up a terrific house for us on the beach near the Cheetah and in the meanwhile we could live in a two-room apartment she kept near the Hollywood Freeway.

The apartment was literally right underneath the Freeway, and the traffic buzzed by so loudly we were up every day at the morning rush hour. Within two hours our hangovers would subside enough for us to practice. On the third day we were living there, there was a tremendous pounding on the door in the middle of rehearsal. It was the police.

I was to meet and greet the LA police on numerous occasions during my sojourn in sunny California. The LA police and I were to become asshole buddies in the years to come because they loved to taunt wise-ass kids like me, and more than that, they loved to taunt Alice Cooper. I knew how far to step out of line with my teachers, but I had not yet learned that with the police.

I was standing in the middle of the tiny living room with a microphone in my hand when the door opened up and three cops were standing there with the manager of the building. I said in my microphone in a very queer voice, “Oh, officers, thank God you showed up. These boys were about to shoot the canary.” Then I realized how big and mean those guys were and that they weren’t going to laugh at all. As a matter of fact, the LA police never had a sense of humor.

They told me to shut the fuck up and amidst Bowery Boy protests of “Hey, what’s going on here?” and “Careful officer, I’m not wearing any underwear,” they frisked us and told us to pack up and move out. Merry Cornwall had run out on the rent in that apartment two months before, and if we didn’t split in ten minutes they were going to take our equipment as payment.

We loaded the car and drove straight to the Cheetah to find Merry and give her hell. When we rushed into the cool, empty hall, Merry was sitting on the edge of the stage drinking a beer with the Chambers Brothers. I was a big fan of the Chambers Brothers, and forgetting about our near tragic escape with the police I opened one of Merry’s beers and talked with them.

“What are you guys doing here?” Merry finally asked me.

“We had a little problem at our apartment,” I told her. She glanced at the Chambers Brothers, expecting me to embarrass the shit out of her.

“What happened at your apartment?” she asked pointedly.

“Castro Convertible came and repossessed the sofa. The florist refused to deliver fresh flowers every morning, and two guys in black leather with motorcycles and gun threw us out!”

“Hell’s Angels?” Merry frowned for a second and then said, “Hey, these boys have a big old house in Watts. Maybe you could stay there.”

“Oh man,” one of the Brothers said, “that place is a mess. And anyway, you’d have to put up with Long Gone Miles and his pirate radio station.”

I knew this was a straight line, but I’m a sucker for not taking people up on straight lines. I was too theatrical. I wanted to be surprised by Long Gone Miles. Anyway, everything we owned was in the back of Mike Allen’s station wagon in the parking lot, and I wanted to stay in LA at least till we got to play the Cheetah.

“I’m sure we can put up with Long Time Miles,” I told the Brothers.

“Gone,” he said.

“Long gone,” I said, and we moved into their house.

It wasn’t exactly their house. They owned it, all right, but they hadn’t

lived in it since they were teenagers. Their parents had moved out of Watts to a better neighborhood and except for Long Gone Miles the house had been empty for years.

It wasn’t exactly empty, either. On every floor of every room of the three-story building there were food wrappers, cans, broken glass, beer bottles, soda bottles, whiskey bottles, used condoms, stained mattresses, piles of plaster and tons of dog shit. When you flushed the second-floor toilet it dripped through the ceiling on the kitchen table below. Up on the third floor, in a rear bedroom, was Long Gone Miles.