Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

For five uncomfortable minutes I tried to explain that I didn’t know anything about the music business. I told him I was drunk and would be glad to drop him off wherever he was going if he just took it easy. The driver seemed very calm until we stopped in front of a closed bar and the black guy paid him some money, then he came hurtling around the passenger door and threw me out into the street. “Hey, no! No!” I yelled. “Take me to the Chelsea!” But he got back into the cab yelling, “Foo! Faggots and niggers!”

The black guy stood on the street and laughed at me as the cab pulled off. “You better come in and have yourself a drink to warm up,” he said.

“No thanks. I’ve got a meeting to go to.”

He laughed again and hooked his arm tightly under mine and led me into the dark bar. Although it looked pitch black from the outside the jukebox was still going, and there must have been a dozen people at the bar. When we walked in everybody turned to look at us. The place reeked of stale cologne and body odor. My new friend, who said his name was Norm, introduced me to the bartender and said I could order anything I wanted on his tab. Norm talked to people and spit on the floor. I spit on the floor with him and sipped my VO and Coke, waiting to make a dash for the door, amazed that I had allowed myself to be thrown out of the cab and went inside. I couldn’t wait to tell the guys.

“She is ugly!” a woman screamed in the darkness. “You found the ugliest fish of them all, Norm. Where’d you find that fish?”

She was talking about me. A black girl in a short skirt came over to me and ran her hand up my leg. When she brushed against my cock I made a feeble “oh, oh, oh” sound at her and shook my finger.

“This is Melissa,” Norm told me, “I think she likes you.”

I felt like I was going to be sick and told Norm, who walked with me and Melissa to the back of the bar and sat me down in the phone booth. When I was ready to throw up Norm led me into the bathroom, still tightly gripping my arm (his fingers reached all the way around my tiny bicep), and stood there unmoved while I threw my brains up into the toilet bowl. When I sat back down in the phone booth, exhausted, the girl said, “I bet that boy’s no bigger than my pinky.”

“Why don’t you leave him alone?” Norm said protectively. “Can’t you see he’s sick?”

“Sick. That’s just a junky drag queen throwing up her shit. Why you takin’ up with drags?” she asked Norm.

“He ain’t no drag. He’s a singer in a rock band, you know?”

“I still bet he’s no bigger than a pinky. He’s a fag, man. I telling you… look at the way he’s dressed up.”

Norm looked at me with what I was afraid was a dubious expression on his face. Finally he said, “You want to get laid?”

“I want to get to my meeting,” I told him.

“I told ya. I spotted that a mile away,” the girl said. “Lemmee see. C’mon, honey. You want to get laid?”

I shook my head no but the girl was in front of me in the phone booth fiddling with the top of my pants. I tried to push her head away but I couldn’t get a grip of her tightly curled hair. Norm was laughing and people in the bar were whooping and cheering. I looked down and all I could see were two huge black lips painted with thick lipstick closing over my pale asparagus stalk. I pretended to pass out.

I can remember being thrown in the back seat of another taxi and Billy shouting at me with a towel wrapped around his waist, “That’s AWOL, man. You get two years in prison for that kind of shit, man!”

He shoved me through the door to my room and in the early morning light I could see Glen and a girl with matted hair asleep in my bed. I crawled into the bathtub and conked out.

I would say by the time we left New York, except for the thieves, pimps and rip-off artists, only twenty people remembered we were even there. One of them was Bill Graham who said, “I’ll never let those faggots on one of my stages.” The other nineteen were the high kings and queens of cult taste and pop culture. We had paid them some dues in New York, and they would remember us the next time around.

The morning we left New York Billy overslept. It was a Sunday, and we had to catch the eight o’clock flight. Shep had given Billy strict orders for us not to miss that plane, otherwise we’d have to drive all the way. I was still half asleep, throwing up my morning phlegm, when we piled into a station wagon and rushed to the airport. Even as we ran through the airlines terminal to the gate we could see the plane pulling off to taxi down the runway. Billy ran after it, pushing people aside, screaming through the window, “You goddamn son-of-a-bitch fucking plane! You eat shit!” He beat on the glass doors and almost cried out of frustration.

Two of New York City’s men in blue pointed out that it was Sunday morning, and arrested us for creating a riot and using foul language in public. They held us for five hours in a Queens station house until Shep came down and got us.

Billy, thank God, was fired.

CHAPTER 9