Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

My bedroom was in the dungeon of the house. Many years ago it had been used as a speakeasy, and there was actually a panel in the living room that became a door when a little buzzer was pushed on the other side. Behind the door a flight of stone steps led down to a stone-walled cellar where the walls were painted, all-too-realistically I was afraid, with signatures and dates: “Whitey — 1926”; Dora and Dolores — 28.”

Mike enlarged his family, too. He got a puppy as a gift the first week we moved into the house.

Glen’s girlfriend, Ginny, brought her own dog when she moved in, and suddenly the house was a kennel. The two dogs would shit all over the place, and Jack would show up in the morning for a crap patrol. He’d call the two dog owners into the living room and demand a cleanup. A marathon argument would ensue.

“That’s Yo-yo’s shit.”

“No it’s not, man. I’m telling you that’s your dogshit and you have to clean it up like a man, man. What a baby, man. It’s a little piece of shit. What’s the big deal. Clean it up.”

“That’s the point, man. It’s a little piece of shit, and my dog shits bigger. And browner, too, man. I’m telling you. Honest!”

Michael was head over heels about Suzi Cream Cheese. She had gumdrop eyes, a big heart, the mind of a stockbroker and the soul of a hustler. She trusted no one. To Suzi Cream Cheese the world at large was a narc. Suzi had mastered the art of double-talk, not just the mumbling of disconnected words, but the grave intonations that went along with it. She gave the impression she understood something very deep and at the heart of the matter that you were obviously not getting. She was famous for being eccentric, the only purebred Warhol person I met in LA.

Suzi Cream Cheese lived for a time in a log cabin stuck in the woods behind Frank Zappa’s house, and the day before our big contract signing, Mike and I snuck over there like two kids disobeying daddy’s orders. We spent the evening watching Miss Christine, Suzi, and Pamela bounce off the walls, all very nutty and charming. We left the cabin near dawn to find the van on a steep incline, the windshield frosted over with a thick layer of ice. I sat inside while Mike wiped hard on the windshield with a rag. I guess he wiped a little to hard. The van started to roll backwards down the hill with me inside and crashed into Zappa’s fourteen-thousand-dollar sports car. Mike ran down the hill after the van and jumped in just as the lights went on all over the house. Zappa ran out after us and chased us down the road in his bare feet.

We were sick with fear for two days, especially when Zappa’s office called that afternoon to say the contact signing was postponed. We waited for him to call back and cancel altogether, but the following day, as scheduled, we put our signatures on the dotted line. Either he never knew it was us who wrecked his car or he never cared.

In November of 1971 [1968 I guess it’s meant to be] we recorded our first album, Pretties For You. For a week straight we arrived at the studio and played through every song five or six times with Herbie Cohen and Zappa working over the levels in the control room. We thought we were just getting down to business, ready to lay the bed tracks and experiment, when Zappa walked out of the glass-enclosed booth and said, “Okay. Your album will be ready next Thursday.”

I said, “There are a few mistakes in that stuff. We weren’t even ready to record,” but he just patted me on the shoulder and said, “Not to worry. Not to worry. We’ll work everything out in the mix.”

We didn’t see or hear the album until five months later.

Nighttime was scene-making time for me in LA. Nobody would pay fifty cents to see us perform but we were first on party guest lists. Instant celebrities. No fuss, no waiting. Just add recording contract to one rock group and stir. We met literally thousands of people at these parties.

We had, unfortunately, the reputation of being the ultra-gay band in Los Angeles, and there were a few people who took the initiative to find out the truth and get to know us better. People who did, and got to know us and what we were about, often became entangled in our madness, possessed with the concept of Alice Cooper, and wound up deeply involved in our lives for years to come.

I was at one of those parties lurking in the kitchen. Kitchen lurking was my favorite pastime. It was compulsion motivated purely by greedy hunger. Parties were the best place to eat. You could fill up while you were there and usually find something in the kitchen to take away with you.

I was rifling through a pantry, tucking away a can of tuna fish into a tablecloth I wore as a shirt, when I realized a man was watching me. With great bravado I looked up, walked over to a can opener and opened the can. I ate a piece of tuna with my fingers and sized up the intruder: blond, impish face, sleepy and glassy eyes. I offered some tuna to him and he said, “I’m too drunk to swallow.”