Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

By July of 1968 — a short ten months after it all started — the band was $100,000 in debt, most of it passed in bad checks for plane tickets and hotel bills around the country. We had practically no money at all, not even the twenty-dollar-a-week allowance that Shep and Joey had paid to us from their own pockets. They were legally responsible for the $100,000 debt, and Shep was still trying to keep us out on the road and pay for the rent on the John Phillip Law house in Los Angeles.

We ran out of gas, dollars, and inspiration in the midwest. We landed, for want of a better place to land, on Jefferson Street in Detroit, where there was an abundance of sleazy hotels to live in. We became experts at deceit and pilferage to survive. We rifled groupis’ handbags while Mike Bruce fucked them and walked out on checks in restaurants. We could only stay in a hotel until they asked us to pay our bill, then we had to skip out. I felt no guilt. It was me or them.

Sneaking out on hotels became our specialty, and that’s not easy when you look like a convention of half-drowned rats. We developed all sorts of techniques, leaving the rooms, one by one every hour, moving luggage through windows, dressing in layers and layers until we could undress in the van around the corner. By the time the last person was sneaking out of a hotel the first would have checked into our next one down the block.

Detroit was a hot little hole that summer. I had developed a chronic cough, and I don’t think I took two deep breaths that whole summer. I sweated away July and August in a darkened hotel room with a bottle of scotch at my side. My parents were sending me a five-dollar-a-week allowance — when they could find me.

The girl, groupies, and boys kept coming. I didn’t think twice about whether or not it was a strange way to be spending my twenty-first summer. After I sat in the hotel for two weeks, day and night, Neal began to hassle me about staying in so much. It was unlike me not to want to party, and he was right. He said he had met two classy girls who were invited over — not for a drunken brawl — but for conversation and drinks. I told him I wasn’t interested in tea luncheons, but Neal obviously wasn’t going anywhere without the rest of us to back him up, and after he complained and whined awhile he said, “Listen, one of these chicks is a tap dancer. A topless tap dancer.”

He found my soft spot. I was dying to learn how to tap dance, and Neal knew it. Ever since I realized that if Jesus Christ were human he’d walk like Fred Astaire, I wanted to take dancing lessons. Besides, it would have looked great on stage if in the middle of one of our songs I broke into a little tap dance. But topless? What was a topless tap dancer? I had to go and see.

The topless tap dancer was Cindy Lang, a dreamy eighteen-year-old with enormous brown eyes that blinked cowlike as she took in all ninety-eight pounds of me. I took in all one hundred pounds of her, and I instantly felt goofy and uncomfortable. She was so beautiful I was intimidated. It was lie getting a blind date with Raquel Welch. Her hair, shiny and dark brown with the sheen of fur, streamed down to her ass. She was tanned and velvety, her nose was delicate aristocratic slope. She greeted us at the door of a tiny wooden house just south of Detroit. Inside it was immaculate, decorated with antiques that instantly gave me the horrors. I looked around at Neal and Glen and Dennis and wondered which one of us would be the first to break something.

The four of us carried on in our typical way. Neal bopped Glen over the head and Glen punched Dennis in the ribs. It must have looked like the Three Stooges came to tea. I couldn’t bring myself to sit down, everything looked so fluffed and orderly. We walked back and forth in front of each other stepping on our toes. For the first fifteen minutes conversation consisted of “Excuse me,” “Pardon me,” “That’s all right,” “Don’t mention it.”

Finally all of us sat down on an old sofa and it broke underneath us. Nobody laughed. Cindy glared at us like we were a bunch of baboons. The only time I spoke to Cindy Lang the entire evening I asked her about topless tap dancing and found out, much to her amusement, that she was nothing of the sort. She was entering her freshman year in a local art school, a native Detroit girl (like me) and the daughter of a police captain.

The next day, suffering from a terminal case of “shys,” I sent Michael Bruce to Cindy’s house dressed in a bathing suit to ask Cindy if she wanted to take a swim at our hotel. Michael in a bathing suit was always good bait. When Cindy got to our hotel she was furious that we didn’t have a pool; I thought it was incidental. She agreed to have lunch with me anyway.

I had received my $5 from Phoenix that morning and felt flushed until, Cindy ordered a fish dinner that came to $3.50. I ordered a Coke. I didn’t want to tell her how poor I was. I wanted her to think I was a famous rock star.