Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Two restless days went by after our aborted swim and lunch date. I didn’t dare call her because I couldn’t suggest doing anything except sitting in a dark hotel room with five other people watching mosquitoes. Finally the hall phone rang at my hotel and it was Cindy. She was calling to invite me to an all-night motorcycle movie, and before I could even tell her I couldn’t afford the admission, she said she would pay for it because she knew I was broke.

What a romantic time! We told each other our astrological signs (neither one of us believed in them) and spent the night in a dark theater that smelled of urine, pretending to watch the motorcycle movies, and drank two pints of Southern Comfort. At two in the morning an old man rang a little hand bell and asked that everybody move to one side of the thaeter so he could mop the urine off the floors.

I didn’t want to spend the night in the theater, but taking Cindy to bed was a major problem. Cindy, as it turned out, didn’t live in the house filled with antiques where we met her, but at home with her mother and policeman father. There were at least five of us in my hotel room, and it took me a full day of making deals and cajoling (I paid Neal one dollar to get out) to arrange to have my room empty at eleven o’clock the next night.

Getting Cindy there without making it look like we were on a time schedule took real finesse. When we arrived there were still some stragglers laying around on the beds and I had to round them all up and get them out while Cindy stood in the hallway and watched.

It took me half an hour to get up the courage to kiss her, and by the time we laid down on the bed people started barging back into the room. Cindy lay there looking at the ceiling, choking back laughter as I begged Glen and Dennis “Not yet! Not yet! Five more minutes!” I hadn’t even taken my shoes off in two hours.

Our early romance was pure Shakespearean tragedy. Cindy and I had been dating for three weeks, and she had never seen me perform. We had a gig coming up in the beginning of August and I wanted to be terrific for her. I had a pair of pink suede high-heeled shoes, with a broken strap that needed fixing, that I wore with a pink velvet suit that my mother had made for me and shipped to Detroit. I wore a white ruffled shirt underneath it and I looked like a wafer. The night before the show Cindy took my shoes home to have them fixed, and I gave her my favorite necklace, a combination of rhinestone and big orange balls, to wear to the show.

Cindy thought the necklace was hideous, and hid it in the toe of my pink shoe on her way out of her parents’ house going to the club to see the show. She gave the pink shoes to a roadie who brought them backstage to me. When I put them on I found the necklace. I thought she jilted me. I thought she was returning the necklace and never wanted to see me again. I was insanely heartbroken. When the time came to go on stage I did the wildest, most frustrated show I ever put on. I weaved and drooled around the stage like a madman and actually wept when I sang “Nobody Likes Me.” Out in the audience Cindy was having some second thoughts about me. Who was this animal on the stage? she thought. Which was the real Alice? We had been together three weeks and I still undressed under the sheets with the lights off; the Alice on stage was a brash maniac.

Yet she understood me, this strange skinny singer in makeup who kep a coffee can next to the bed to throw up into during the night. Cindy stuck. She stuck through that summer when we shared a can of tuna fish between us as our daily food, and she stuck for a good long time after.

Cindy said she wasn’t much impressed that I’m a rock musician. It never mattered, rich or poor, who I was or what I did. She says I make her laugh.

I’ll never marry. There are three things I have absolutely no use for:

marriage, funerals and underwear. Marriage is an insult. Does getting that official piece of paper mean you love somebody more? Why does anybody need the state or government involved in their love life? It’s almost as stupid as funerals. Why would you want to see somebody you loved dead? So Cindy and I set up our own rules and ethics, and our relationship lasted and weathered six years of stress and travel that would have easily destroyed a relationship bound by document.