Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

By the time I was nine years old we were really having a rough time of it. My father didn’t know what he wanted to do. The last five years had been torture for him and my mother. It always seemed like he was behind the eight ball, weighted down with one problem after another. His nipping at the bottle worried him. His brother Lonson would call each week from Los Angeles and beg us to come out there. My father had been trained as a design draftsman in the Navy, and Lonson was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where there was a job available for him. Lonson had even rejoined the church, and was very contented in Los Angeles. So Dad promised himself that he could try Los Angeles again, and if things began to work out, he would return to the church and dedicate himself to God.

For two weeks we sprawled on sofas and mattresses across the floor in Lonson’s living room. Finally Lonson took my father out to lunch with two men from the Jet Propulsion Lab. Dad came home and told us that Lonson had an expense account! Money that doesn’t cost anything! Lonson drank four martinis during lunch and the bill came to twenty-four dollars. We were awed, even more awed when Lonson’s friends gave my father a job the next day as a draftsman in research and development in the space program. The day he started working we began to commute to a local branch of the Church of Jesus Christ in San Fernando Valley.

Puberty was a very confusing time for me. I was startled into puberty because I had no warning it was coming. I had no premonition my bald little dick would suddenly sprout a garden of pubic hair and mysterious life-giving substance would emerge if the right buttons were pushed.

The winter of my eleventh year I found myself inexplicably drawn to advertisements in the back of the Ladies’ Home Journal that were headlined ENLARGE YOUR BREASTS. I’d get a very warm feeling when I looked at the before and after pictures and didn’t exactly know why. I wondered, What is happening to me?

It was around that time, in the yard of church, that a skinny little boy named Edward Satriano explained in very authoritative voice to a group guzzling lemonade that a woman had a auxiliary hole in her body about three inches below her navel, nestled in a thatch of hair. In order to reproduce a man would insert his penis and pee.

I was flabbergasted and terrified. First of all I didn’t see how that kind of stuff could be any fun at all. It didn’t give me the same sort of thrill I got from breast-enlarging advertisements. And more important, my things was broken! Everytime I got an erection my little boy’s pecker would swing up to a ninety-degree salute, and whenever I tried to push it down to a right angle, in practice for peeing into a woman, naturally it hurt like hell, and I couldn’t pee. I thought my life was over.

I spent hours in the bathroom and in bed trying to bend my erection back. At night I would tear an old T-shirt apart and make a sling for my hard on, tying one end to my knee in hopes I could bend it into the right position. I went to sleep in pain every night, torturing myself and my penis into submission.

My parents never told me about the facts of life. They never even mentioned it. It wasn’t because they were religious, but because they were chicken. I don’t know why they found it embarrassing. I think it’s a great topic for exploration with children. Not only should sex education be taught in schools, but they should have guest lecturers, including prostitutes and perverts, to explain to the kids exactly what it’s all about. We’d probably all be so much better adjusted. My own parents put it off from year to year, until eventually my sister Nickie and I were too old for a talk with them and we had to find out for ourselves.

I had my first date with a girl named Melanie Mapes who had the biggest knockers of any thirteen-year-old girl that ever sat up. I was two years younger than she and not old enough at the time to use Melanie for fantasy material, but years later her memory warmed me on lonely nights. Melanie modeled children’s underwear in the Sears Roebuck catalog. She looked like an infant Raquel Welch. When my mother wasn’t home, I would invite Melanie over to play sex Monopoly. Instead of passing go and collecting two hundred dollars, I had the option of fondling her boobs. I didn’t even know what to do with them. When it was her turn to pass go she always opted to collect two hundred dollars, which I thought was reasonable, because I didn’t have any boobs.