Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

My grandfather, Thurmond, and his wife, Birdie May, lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Thurmond was a telegraph operator for the railroad in his spare time. In his full time he was a minister and president of the Church of Jesus Christ, which he presided over for sixty-three years until his death in 1974. My dad had two older brothers, Lonson, and Vincent, affectionately known to the Detroit bar circuit as Lefty and Jocko, who were dedicated church members until they were teenagers. Then they bolted, went into the “real world” and made Thurmond angry as hell at them. By the time my dad was a teenager he was out of it, too.

My mother, Ella, was from Tennessee, from a family of hillbillies named McCart who were one-quarter full-blooded Sioux Indians. Her mother died when she was twelve years old, and she turned to the Pentacostal church for solace. But when it came time to go up to the alter and “speak in tongues” the spirit never came to her. It was a form of religious impotency, I guess. She met my dad in Detroit at the end of the war. My older sister Nickie was born in 1946, named after the man who introduced my parents. I was named after Uncle Vince and Damon Runyon.

The year I was born my parents scraped together a little money and rushed me off to Los Angeles where the weather would be better for asthma, but before I was a year old the earthquakes and Republicans sent us scurrying back to Detroit for cover. I was able to stick it out for two winters in Detroit before my bronchial tubes started to go and when I was three years old we went off again, this time to Phoenix.

Phoenix was just a little tourist town at the time. My dad always said that if you went there with any money it was your fault and if you left there with any money it was their fault. They sent us home penniless after a year or so, and we braved it out in Detroit again for five years.

Havenhurst Elementary School was a drag. Mrs. Hainey, my fifth grade teacher, tried to teach me how to write longhand and crippled two of my fingers permanently. I also had an aunt who taught in Havenhurst named Verdie McCart, but she was killed by her son, Howard the Ax Murderer. They found her one day with an ax down the middle of her skull and Howard still standing there watching her rot. Verdie also had a grandson my age who I played with. He made his dog deaf by screaming dirty words in its ears.

I fell in love for the first time in the third grade with a girl named Karen Love, and I sent her a love letter that said, “I know you’re not the most beautiful girl in the world and I’m the best you can do.”

We were poor. My dad could never make ends meet. He took any kind of work he could get, driving a cab or selling used cars. He was a terrible used-car salesman, because he couldn’t lie. He’d always to the customer just what was wrong with the car and how far back the odometer had been turned. One month he made four hundred dollars and we celebrated for a week. When I was eight years old got one Christmas gift, an eight-dollar tan sweater. I remember always sitting in the back seat of a turquoise Plymouth from 1952 only because they were demonstrators and we could buy them real cheap. They all smelled like the fleabag in Toledo.

We were content, I guess, but far from happy. We were floundering, and even as little kids my sister Nickie and I felt it. Life was grating, like the lubricant missing to make things smoother. I knew something was wrong because my parents fought constantly, and I knew the insensity of their arguements was caused by something much deeper than the lamp I had broken of the size of my father’s paychecks.

My dad started drinking then, not that he was an alcoholic, or my sister and I were even aware of it until he told us many years later. But he needed to “have a little glow on” to help meet people in the used-car lot and deal with problems. He felt his life was slipping, that everything around him was a little out of control. So he kept a flask inside his jacket pocket, and when no one was looking he snuck into the men’s room and would take a belt to steady his nerves.

I began to get mischievous around that time. My relationship with Nickie couldn’t have been more cutthroat. Never was there a brother who was as inventive and intent on torturing a sister. I’d sneak into my mother’s room and steal a dollar from her purse, spend half of it and put the change in Nickie’s drawer. Nickie always got the blame and they would punish her by making her stand by the back door, watching me taunt her in the back yard until one day in a fit of frustration she kicked through the glass panels. I locked myself in car trunks, and once when I was left was a neighbor, I crawled into her woodshed and terrorized her with knives until my mother came and hauled me away.