take me into the kitchen and fill me with beer and sandwiches. After a month of this I got up enough nerve to ask her if I could take some sandwiches home with me for dinner, and I eventually would up feeding the whole group. It probably would have gone on forever except that she began to talk to the other neighbors and told them she was giving Tiny Tim piano lessons. They all told her they knew positively that Tiny Tim didn’t live in Topanga Canyon.
One day Troy Donahue came by to hang through the hole, and he told us that he had been driving up the hill when a lady in a white Chevy flagged him over and asked if he was really Troy Donahue. She told him that she gave piano lessons to Tiny Tim and would he like piano lessons, too. He told her that Tiny Tim lived in New York, but she insisted he lived on the hill and pointed out our house.
Troy had confused her enough to make her come up to the house later that night where she found the house full of people in a drunken stupor. We kept up the Tiny Tim ruse for a while, but Russ Tamblyn, who lived nearby and visited often, slipped and called me Alice. At that point my piano teacher who was so confused and so disappointed that I wasn’t Tiny Tim but Alice Somebody that she started to weep and ran out the door. I showed up for my piano lesson the next day at my regular time, guilt stricken and wanting to make amends, but she refused to give me another lesson if I wasn’t Tiny Tim. She did give me a beer, however, and continued to feed the group a couple of times a week.
We had another sponsor in Topanga Canyon named Norma Bloom, a huge Valkyrian blonde who was secretly bald under her long blond wig. Well, at least she thought it was a secret. Norma turned up at the house one day, uninvited saying she had heard that a rock band lived there, and she just loved rock and roll, and could we teach her about it. We all explained it wasn’t a teachable thing, that it was intangible, and all she could do was listen to it, but what was it she really wanted to learn?
“I heard that musicians do it differently,” she said.
“That depends if you’re plugged into an amplifier,” I told her. Dennis couldn’t believe what he was hearing and danced around behind her back, picking at her wig like a mosquito.
“I know how to do it like Chuck Berry,” I told her.
“Was he a rock musician?” Norma asked.
Norma was filled with handy little tricks of survival. She could cook up a meal from wild plants growing in the canyon, and knew several techniques for shoplifting when things got really desperate. She even gave us a recipe for rock soup, which, as it s name implies, was soup made from a rock boiled in water and vegatables. The odd thing about rock soup was that it was delicious.
There were probably two or three girls in between my first and Norma Bloom, but I had never seen a naked girl who was as big as Norma. Everything about her was giant, her bones, her tits, even the wide pink nipples that each had a long blond hair growing out of them. I was fascinated with her cunt, which like her head (although I never saw her head) was hairless.
This barren state made it easy for me to get involved in a physiological examination that I never quite gotten into before. I spent an hour on the floor with her legs looped over the side of the coffin — practically giving her an internal examination. I’m sure it couldn’t have been too exciting, not that I was trying to be, but Norma kept squealing in delight. When I finally got around to fucking her she was near delirious from all the attention she was getting and probably didn’t realize that I was rather disconcerted because she was so big inside, too. I sloshed around in there for another hour, getting sore and bored, and I finally stopped to get some newspaper to line the coffin in because it was getting sopping wet when she called it quits. Norma came around almost every day for a month or so, and under strict orders from the group she always brought food, mostly pies that she had baked herself. Norma and I continued to have one of those lazy afternoon romances, where I would adventure into teh dark inner cavern of her loins and lose myself for an hour or two.
Norma was convinced our house was haunted and thought it would be a great idea to contact one of the ghosts. I mentioned this to Merry Cornwell at the Cheetah, who said that Jim Morrison and David Crosby had been talking about having a seance for a longtime. I promised to find the medium if Merry arranged everything else, and asked Norma if she thought she could raise the dead for some rock stars.
The only reason we went to all this trouble, by the way, was to get to meet Morrison’s record producer, Paul Rothchild, who was one of the hottest names in the music industry. We would do anything to get a producer over to the house, and I always felt like Gale Storm on My Little Margie when I got involved in these schemes.
The night of the seance Norma came by, and we helped her spray paint a pentacle on the floor of the basement. Jim Morrison had already been told that the circle was inlaid marble in the basement and that the house had a national reputation for being haunted. Near midnight Morrison showed up with his producer, Paul Rothschild, David Crosby and Arther Lee, one of my favorite musicans.
For the next two hours Norma put on a fascinating show of summoning up a spirit and pretending to be possessed. It ran a little thin after a couple of hours, and Mike Bruce and I started giving each other peace signals in the candlelight breaking everybody up. Finally Morrison started scraping the paint off the floor with his boots and stopped the whole thing.
“This is painted! This pentacle is painted!” he started shouting.
“You guys shouldn’t have done this,” Crosby said to us gravely.”This isn’t the type of thing mortal people should fool around with.”
“But I’m not mortal,” I told him. “I’m actually a 14th century witch. I died just last Good Friday again on the freeway…” But Crosby wasn’t listening, and Morrison had climbed out of the hole in the ceiling, past my coffin and outside, where he took off his boots covered with paint from the pentacle and threw them down the hill in a fit of anger.
I saw Morrison the next day on Sunset Boulevard talking to the hippies. He was still barefoot, and when he saw me I rushed over to him and explained about the night before. When he heard we went through all that craziness just to get to meet him and Rothschild he loved it. He called me “Lucy” (from “I Love…”) the rest of the day. He put his arm around me and we walked into a shoe store where he bought another pair of boots. After that we became much closer. When he was in LA, and I didn’t have a job, I’d go over to his house where there was plenty of food. We’d drink until we passed out, and I’d crawl under a sofa and sleep until morning. I remember waking up there one day and hearing somebody say, “Who’s the skinny guy in the beaded top under the couch?” Morrison said, “Oh, that’s just Alice Cooper.”
I cared little about food. I had no appetite when I was sober and what little money I had was too precious to spend on solids. By midevening though I’d get to dizzy from hunger and usually scrape together fifty cents to go to Canter’s delicatessen for a bowl of matzoh ball soup.
I met the GTOs at Cander’s for the first time. The GTOs were the first organized groupies and GTO stood for many things: Girls Together Outrageously, Girls Together Occasionally, Girls Together Only, and Girls Together Often. The five or six of them, Miss Christine, Miss Pamela, Suzi Cream Cheese, and Miss Lucy had started a rock band, but they were more of a mixed-media event than musicians. People just got off on them. They were a trip to be with. At the time we met, one of them was testing how far she could abuse her body with drugs. There was also a boyfriend who took so much amphetamine his bones had disolved, and he slumped in chairs like a rolled sock. Miss Pamela was a smiling open-faced girl who looked just like Ginger Rogers. I met Miss Christine, the GTO I was to fall madly in love with, across a bowl of shared matzoh ball soup. She was one of the skinniest girls I ever met, and she made me look muscular.
When she teased out her frizzy, mousy-brown hair, she looked like a used Q-Tip.
The GTOs were close friends with Frank Zappa. In 1969 Frank Zappa was still a teen hero. He was my teen hero at least, and Zappa really just about supported the GTOs. There wasn’t a zanier entourage in existance. Miss Christine was practically his social secretary, and after much begging and cojoling she promised me an audience with Frank. One night Miss Christine took me to a party and Zappa was there sitting on a sofa drinking wine, his mustache bigger than life. The moment we met we hit it off. Zappa had never been a huge commercial success himself. He was regarded unofficially as a drug freak, a nut, but that wasn’t the case at all. Zany, maybe, but he never touched drugs and he was the straighest, strictest businessman I ever dealt with. He told me that he was starting his own record company and looking for acts to sign, especially comedy and psychedelic acts that nobody else would take a chance on. I asked if he would come hear us at the Cheetah, but he put me off saying he was too busy, but I didn’t take no for an answer. As the party went on and he got drunker, I got more insistent. Finally he said, “All right. Come by in the morning and I’ll listen.”
I suppose he meant we should bring a tape, or maybe he forgot the next day was Sunday. Miss Christine let
