Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

My bodyguard, Norm Klein, left me alone in the room one night, and I decided that when he came back, it would be funny if I was making love to the TV set in the middle of the floor. I lugged the thing off its frame and laid it on the floor and turned up the volume. There was a knock and the sound of a key and I dropped my pants and started humping the set with my ass to the door. The door opened and slammed shut. I waited there on the floor for a while, looking around at the empty room. After a few minutes of Love of Life playing into my groin, I heard a key in the door again and started humping. When I didn’t hear Norm laughing I turned around. The maid had come to the door first. She called the house detective who met Norm in the hallway. All three of them were standing there in shock watching me.

The most hideous moment on the tour happened in Evansville, Indiana. I was warming up with Eva Marie Snake in my bedroom, trying to get her used to my body temperature because her cage had been on the floor. Eva Marie Snake was nearly fifty pounds, the largest snake I ever worked with and up until that time a complete sweety.

She played on my arms and neek for a few minutes and then very determinedly coiled around my rib cage. I paid no attention and just rubbed her back for a while. She gave me a tiny squeeze just to let me know that she could love me to death if she felt like it, and I decided it was time for Eva Marie to go back to her cage until show time. I was just beginning to unravel her from my chest when she started to constrict. I called out for help once, but the cry caused me to take a breath, allowing Eva Marie to tighten her grip. In a small panic I stood up, balancing her fifty-pound weight around me, and walked into the living room. Norm Klein was watching TV, and when I pointed at the snake he just said, “Hi, Eva.” It dawned on him a moment later that the snake was constricting. We grabbed hold of her head and tried to pry her loose, but she was stronger than the two of us. Norm took out his pocket knife and cut her off me.

After two months on the road it was as if I had never been to Jamaica. I was right back in the hole. I fell down continuously but elegantly on stage, bruising myself and breaking bones. My falling looked professional, as if I had choreographed and rehearsed it for years, but it was a killing pace. Norm kept a towel by the side of my bed so I could throw up on something during the night. I dreamed every night of the moment in the morning when I would vomit, clearing my stomach and bronchial tubes, which had became clogged.

On it went for three months. The same hotel room. The same hotel, the same city in every state, the same reporter waiting for me outside my bedroom or down the hall. The same groupie — I swear it looked like the same groupie — in every town with smudged Alice Cooper eye makeup waiting to shoot LSD under her tongue with me.

I can’t tell you how hideous the monotony of it is. The repetition, the uprooting from one town to the next, the sweating, the waiting. Yet the moment I stepped up on the stage I was all right. I loved being up there. I lived for the giving and taking. It was the only thing that got me through the rest, especially the waiting. It makes me sick to my stomach, quite literally, to think about those hotel rooms. The wallpaper and plastic furniture haunt me like no other demons.

The rock star who kills himself or becomes a junkie is supposed to do it because of the strain of stardom. Well, there is no strain of stardom. Being famous can be dealt with. It’s the strain of the rock business. It’s the machinery that grinds you to a halt, keeping one step ahead of the public, on schedule, on tour, getting the next album out, doing promotion. It goes on forever. No days off. No time away. You have to work twenty-four hours a day to stay on top. Once you interrupt the flow you could be finished, over, a fifteen-minute star.

There’s some sort of disrespect for rock stars that makes them rebel. A rock star figures, “Well, I’m no Frank Sinatra and I’m never going to be treated like one, so I might as well do things my own way.” Then they go on taking their career as a joke. It’s so much easier to look down on yourself and get sloppy instead of trying to raise your standards and become a professional. If you take your own career as a joke then it becomes a joke. That’s not for me. Fred Astaire didn’t do that. He worked at his craft, and I wanted to work at mine. It’s that chemical in me that drove me on, and I knew that to exist by my terms and standards I had to become a total pro.