Garden, gawking at the building and counting winos asleep on the sidewalk.
Shep had a surprise waiting in New York, although I can tell you we weren’t happy about it. His name was Billy. Billy was another in a series of road managers that Shep seemed to find for us under rocks, or in brothels, or in Billy’s case, fresh out of military prison. He was waiting for Shep in the busy lobby of the Allison Hotel in Greenwich Village, grinning and sweating as he pumped our arms up and down.
Billy’s job, by its very nature, was only for losers. Road managers were unpaid, overworked dolts who got nothing out of the job except room and board. There was always the promise of Easy Street when things got good, but who would have put their future in our hands? S o we were mothered and corralled by an astounding collection of ex-junkies, junkies, ex-prizefighters and loafers.
Billy had been arrested in the marines for stealing a radio, I believe. I don’t remember the details except that Shep picked him up on his way out of military prison on the occasion of his dishonourable discharge. Billy took the job, in part, because he didn’t think handling a rock group would be much different than handling a bunch of guys in the marines. Boy, was he wrong.
I made it up to the hotel room first and took choice of the beds, a matter of great importance and dispute between us. When I saw the room, an oilcloth and wallpapered cubicle, I knew I would get the crabs. I was waiting for my roommates, Neal and Glen, when I met the first of the drag queens.
I had been courted by drag queens before in LA, but in New York they latch on to us like we were the Welcome Wagon from Max Factor. It was almost as if some sort of alarm system was set off in transvestite bars all over the city, sending them swishing up to the Allison where they lined the hallways and lobbies for three days.
When I heard the knock I thought it was Glen and Neal. I never expected to see a transvestite outside the door. I think I screamed a little, like aargh! I even tried to slam the door in his face, but he stuck his foot in the doorjamb and said, “Oh, baby, have I been waiting for you!”
The elevator hall opened across the hall and Neal and Glen got out. Neal had a girl with big tits on his arm.
“Alice found a girlfriend already,” he said.
“Alice!” the drag queen repeated blissfully. “Alice. I love it, love it, love it to death. Where’d you get a name like Alice?”
We all walked into the room together and the drag queen started a monologue about New York when Glen howled, “Where’s my guitar? Where’s my guitar?” He tossed suitcases aside, looked under the bed and in the bathroom. He ran out into the hallway banging on doors, screaming for Billy to come help him. Billy ran out into the hall in his underwear with a girl in bra and panties trailing him.
“Where’s my guitar?” Glen screamed. “My thousand-dollar Les Paul is missing. My pink Les Paul! I gave it to you fifteen minutes ago!”
“Well,” Billy asked him, blinking, “was it on the elevator with the other stuff?” There was no consoling Glen. He ran up and down all the floors of the hotel knocking on doors and cursing. He ranted and screamed and fired Billy, which Billy paid no attention to.
The next day, in order to play the Felt Forum, Glen had to rent a guitar, and he said it knocked his performance off. Not that anyone would have noticed. The crowd at the Forum acted as if nobody was on the stage. They didn’t seem to mind us very much, and that was encouraging. I’d call it “silent fascination.” When it was over there was light applause, but at least no booing.
The gig we really cared about in New York was at Steve Paul’s Scene. Like the Hullabaloo Club in Los Angeles, the Scene attracted a music business crowd, and that was important to us, but more important than that, the Scene attracted the media. Like Max’s Kansas City after it, it was the headquarters for pop culture and the avant-garde in New York. Steve Paul’s own reputation as a trend-setter had made the club into the enormous power it was, and Paul was hardly twenty-three at the time.
The Scene was ominous physically, a murky little club where instead of suntans and surfers, like we were used to in LA, we found greenish complexions and ageing hipsters hiding behind sunglasses. The audience at the Scene was like the audience at the Felt Forum grown up. They were immovably blase. The ice melting in their glasses was the only indication they had body temperature.
We got on stage and made our noise and beat each other up and turned on a fire extinguisher and they didn’t raise an eyebrow. These people had lived through Warhol and Lou Reed and Theater of the Ridiculous for centuries. Alice Cooper? Thirteenth-century witch? Go home, little boys.
We didn’t even know we had bombed at first. We were so excited about being in New York we didn’t know what hit us. All we cared about for the first two days was getting laid and finding Glen’s guitar. Glen had a lead. Two junkies in the lobby of the hotel told him the Puerto Rican elevator operator was clipping and selling it in Harlem. Glen called Shep and Shep decided it was more likely we could get the guitar back if we confronted the guy ourselves instead of calling the police.
The next afternoon Shep, Glen, Billy and I got into the elevator in the lobby and asked for our floor. When we stopped at our landing Billy put his hand over the grating and asked the guy to wait a minute. It was hot and sticky in there as the four of us stared at the man in the corner. We had a prearranged plan, and I didn’t know what I was doing there except maybe to add some moral support. We just stared at the guy. I figured maybe we were psyching him out.
After an uncomfortable minute there was a soft
The elevator operator pulled back the grating yanked down the crossbar and let us into the hallway. We scurried down the hall, looking over our shoulder as the man stepped into the hallway to watch us file into my room, still holding the switchblade by his side.
We checked out of the Allison an hour later and moved into the Hotel Edgar around the corner for safety. But at the Hotel Edgar there were just as perilous dangers: lice and rats. I spent my entire allowance on Pyrinate A-200 that week. I bathed with it two or three times a day, as did we all. At night, when we got sweaty in the clubs, the place reeked of it. I don’t know how humans could bear to come near us let alone those little crabs.
The rats at the Edgar were as big as dogs. I dreamed nightly they were eating me in my sleep. I walked into the room one day and found a rat dragging a half of a cream cheese and bagel sandwich across the room. Jesus, they were strong! There was also the most incredible faggot camped out in front of my room for two days. Whenever I came back to the hotel he would be lying on the floor of the hallway downed out of his mind on pills, “Come on, Alice, you can be guy for one night.”
It was so obnoxious to find him unconscious in front of my door that Neal and I went berserk one night. We dragged him into the room, tossed him in the tub filled with Pyrinate and cockroaches and turned on the shower. He began pulling off his wet clothes which we helped him tear to shreds. He was crying, “Oh, you’re so mean!” the whole time, but he had a tremendous hard-on. We tossed him out the door and poured a bottle of ketchup over him.
The next day Shep hired two limousines to take us to Philadelphia. Two sisters with silicon tits turned out to see Neal and Mike off and I had an entourage of drag queens on the sidewalk which looked like a meeting of the New York Mah-Jongg association. We left our luggage in the lobby of the Edgar, joking about lightning striking twice, and took our fans to the corner for egg creams. When we got back to the hotel, Glen’s suitcase of clothes had been stolen.
Our time in Philadelphia was spent worrying about the Scene. What could we do in New York to get their attention? Should we offend them? Maybe go out there and slap them around a little to bring them to?
The next night in the middle of my first number I broke a glass. I walked out into the audience and knocked it off a table. Most people thought it was an accident, but when a second and third broke a few minutes later they knew it was no joke. I began to smash bottles and glasses all over the room. Table of people burst up all over the place as I attacked their drinks. They called Steve Paul in from the front steps where he sat all night and he stopped the show. He refused to let us go back on until I swore I wouldn’t break any more glasses, but I lied. The second show I turned over an entire table. Steve Paul was furious but that’s why the place was called the Scene. Anybody who had ever been there talked about it, and even Steve Paul couldn’t stop telling his friends.
When we got back to new York from our gig in Philadelphia we moved into the Chelsea hotel, which is just a New York version of the Landmark. The Landmark was Disneyland compared to the Chelsea. I met more leather and
