Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Soon I couldn’t afford to get drunk. One evening I was lying in bed waiting for the inevitable phone call that Cindy had been killed in a car crash at an intersection in Kansas when my mother came into my room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s wrapped in a paper bag. She placed it on top of my dresser like it was poison and she said that if I told my father she gave it to me he would kill her. It was the saddest, sweetest thing she ever did. She couldn’t bear to see me that way and she didn’t know what else to do to help me.

I dreamed of car accidents, Cindy’s and my own. I woke up sweating and vomiting and got drunk again. I tried to stop breathing, hold my breath and cease to exist. I got angry. I wanted to destroy the world. I wanted to make them wish they had never heard of me. I knew I couldn’t go any lower than what I already had become laying in that bed, so it didn’t matter what I did. I had been through hell. People laughed at me. I ruined my health. I lived through a thousand backstage backstabbing scenes. I shared my life and love and laundry with seven other people in three years.

I thought, Fuck you all. You will not stop me. You want to see me dead? Would I sell any albums if the next time I got a chance I hung myself by the neck and choked to death in front of 50,000 people? Is that what it would take to make it? If so, the hell with you. I’ll do it.

CHAPTER 11

It was heaven. It was bliss. It was only $250 a month. It was a white, five-bedroom farmhouse in the lush green countryside of Michigan, and it was all ours. Not even the state penal camp, which was across the road, or the roadie who OD’d the day we moved in there could dampen our enthusiasm for our new home. We had been on the road for eight months by the time we settled at the Pontiac farm that August, and it was a miracle we were still together at all.

The day before New Year’s Eve in Phoenix, visions of suicide dancing in my head, we got a job. New Year’s Eve is the hardest time to book a band because every two-bit club in the country wants live entertainment for New Year’s. If a club owner waits as long as Thanksgiving to book he’ll be stuck with whatever’s left over. If you wait long enough, let’s say until Christmas, you might even have to hire the Alice Cooper group. Good old Ziggy came up with $2,700 worth of plane tickets, and on New Year’s Eve we flew off to Toronto for a job at a place called the Rock Pile.

Once we were back on the road we managed to keep rolling, first to Detroit, where I was able to pick up Cindy. We spent January in a series of flophouses, February in Canada, shivering under mounds of blankets and catching a million colds, and March in the back seat of a ‘65 Chevy station wagon zigzagging around the countyside, playing $500 jobs. In Cincinnati, at a club called the Black Dome, we heard about a vacant fraternity house for rent from the club’s manager, Ronnie Volz. He introduced us to one of the fraternity brothers, Buff, who rented us the top two floors of the building, including six bedrooms and two dormitory-style bathrooms for $150 a month.

We spent what seemed like all summer, painting, building and patching, clearing out trash and old books. It wasn’t the same as the John Phillip Law house in LA but at least we had a permanent home. One night we were writing music in the attic when a kid in cutoff Bermuda shorts and a Phi-Ep T-shirt came stumbling into the room with two suitcases. He was so upset to find us living there, in the redecorated house, we had to give him a warm Pabst Blue Ribbon and a heat massage to calm him down.

Like Jack Crow, Buff had no authority to rent us the house. But unlike Jack, who kept the money for himself, Buff had been saving the rent for the brotherhood. That didn’t mean they were happy to have us there. As more of them returned to the house from vacations we handed out more warm Pabst.

At first the fraternity guys, God-fearing Republicans all of them, tried to live amiably with us; they stayed downstairs and we hid in the attic. They even admired our capacity for liquor, and they developed an air of determined acceptance; they were going to prove they were too tough for us to freak them out. It wasn’t as easy for the jocks. Guys that depended on superficial proof of masculinity like athletes were terrified of us. The jocks didn’t think we were gay — we had too many girls with us for that — but they were offended by our makeup and clothes. It made them nervous. It was almost as if they were jealous, and I didn’t blame them. I ask you, what normal boy growing up in the sixties didn’t want to dress up a little and feel guilty about it. We moved out of there quickly before one of them took a swing at us or we got raped in the shower. We got a three-week gig at a small hotel in Ann Arbor for $500 a week plus room and board. When we arrived at the door we found that Ashley Pandel managed the bar.