me.
I was sick to my stomach with anxiety. I couldn’t face Phoenix like that, finished, defeated. When I woke in the mornings I locked the bedroom door and got drunk so I could go back to sleep. I locked out my parents and Cindy and Phoenix. I wanted to die. I tried to figure out how to kill myself, but the thought was preposterous. I wasn’t about to give anybody the satisfaction. Nothing more could have been wrong.
I didn’t even have the pleasure of sleeping with Cindy in my parents’ house. They never would have put up with it under their roof, so Cindy slept on the sofa in the living room, and we had four-in-the-morning trysts in the guest bathroom.
P.S. Cindy got pregnant.
Where was I going to get the money for an abortion? Think of it. An alcoholic son of a minister who everybody thinks is a sex-change is having suicidal fantasies because his girl friend got pregnant in the bathtub.
It was the ultimate soap opera. Rodney in Peyton Place couldn’t have gotten into so much trouble. Life in a low-budget movie, I tell you!
Dick Christian talked his sister Bonnie into driving Cindy to Detroit where she knew an abortionist and could borrow money from friends. I felt like a real shit.
Believe me, I didn’t feel bad about the abortion itself; a situation like that is exactly why abortions are so important. Having a child at that moment would have been the worst thing in the world for all of us. I felt bad because she had to drive cross-country with no money, and I was no support at all. Cindy took off to Detroit with Bonnie, and I laid in my bed fantasizing they would be killed in a car crash. I was so down it was disgusting and I hated myself for it. I thought everything was my fault.
Soon I couldn’t afford to get drunk. One evening I was lying in bed waiting for the inevitable phone call that Cindy had been killed in a car crash at an intersection in Kansas when my mother came into my room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s wrapped in a paper bag. She placed it on top of my dresser like it was poison and she said that if I told my father she gave it to me he would kill her. It was the saddest, sweetest thing she ever did. She couldn’t bear to see me that way and she didn’t know what else to do to help me.
I dreamed of car accidents, Cindy’s and my own. I woke up sweating and vomiting and got drunk again. I tried to stop breathing, hold my breath and cease to exist. I got angry. I wanted to destroy the world. I wanted to make them wish they had never heard of me. I knew I couldn’t go any lower than what I already had become laying in that bed, so it didn’t matter what I did. I had been through hell. People laughed at me. I ruined my health. I lived through a thousand backstage backstabbing scenes. I shared my life and love and laundry with seven other people in three years.
I thought, Fuck you all. You will not stop me. You want to see me dead? Would I sell any albums if the next time I got a chance I hung myself by the neck and choked to death in front of 50,000 people? Is that what it would take to make it? If so, the hell with you. I’ll do it.
CHAPTER 11
It was heaven. It was bliss. It was only $250 a month. It was a white, five-bedroom farmhouse in the lush green countryside of Michigan, and it was all ours. Not even the state penal camp, which was across the road, or the roadie who OD’d the day we moved in there could dampen our enthusiasm for our new home. We had been on the road for eight months by the time we settled at the Pontiac farm that August, and it was a miracle we were still together at all.
The day before New Year’s Eve in Phoenix, visions of suicide dancing in my head, we got a job. New Year’s Eve is the hardest time to book a band because every two-bit club in the country wants live entertainment for New Year’s. If a club owner waits as long as Thanksgiving to book he’ll be stuck with whatever’s left over. If you wait long enough, let’s say until Christmas, you might even have to hire the Alice Cooper group. Good old Ziggy came up with $2,700 worth of plane tickets, and on New Year’s Eve we flew off to Toronto for a job at a place called the Rock Pile.
Once we were back on the road we managed to keep rolling, first to Detroit, where I was able to pick up Cindy. We spent January in a series of flophouses, February in Canada, shivering under mounds of blankets and catching a million colds, and March in the back seat of a ‘65 Chevy station wagon zigzagging around the countyside, playing $500 jobs. In Cincinnati, at a club called the Black Dome, we heard about a vacant fraternity house for rent from the club’s manager, Ronnie Volz. He introduced us to one of the fraternity brothers, Buff, who rented us the top two floors of the building, including six bedrooms and two dormitory-style bathrooms for $150 a month.
We spent what seemed like all summer, painting, building and patching, clearing out trash and old books. It wasn’t the same as the John Phillip Law house in LA but at least we had a permanent home. One night we were writing music in the attic when a kid in cutoff Bermuda shorts and a Phi-Ep T-shirt came stumbling into the room with two suitcases. He was so upset to find us living there, in the redecorated house, we had to give him a warm Pabst Blue Ribbon and a heat massage to calm him down.
Like Jack Crow, Buff had no authority to rent us the house. But unlike Jack, who kept the money for himself, Buff had been saving the rent for the brotherhood. That didn’t mean they were happy to have us there. As more of them returned to the house from vacations we handed out more warm Pabst.
At first the fraternity guys, God-fearing Republicans all of them, tried to live amiably with us; they stayed downstairs and we hid in the attic. They even admired our capacity for liquor, and they developed an air of determined acceptance; they were going to prove they were too tough for us to freak them out. It wasn’t as easy for the jocks. Guys that depended on superficial proof of masculinity like athletes were terrified of us. The jocks didn’t think we were gay — we had too many girls with us for that — but they were offended by our makeup and clothes. It made them nervous. It was almost as if they were jealous, and I didn’t blame them. I ask you, what normal boy growing up in the sixties didn’t want to dress up a little and feel guilty about it. We moved out of there quickly before one of them took a swing at us or we got raped in the shower. We got a three-week gig at a small hotel in Ann Arbor for $500 a week plus room and board. When we arrived at the door we found that Ashley Pandel managed the bar.
Ashley knew the editor of the local underground paper, the Ann Arbor Argonaut, and although we didn’t realize he was initiating a service that he would perform several thousand times in the years to come, he set up an interview. It was the first and only time I participated in an orgy, and the only time I fucked a member of the press. There couldn’t have been a less erotic atmosphere than being locked in a stuffy hotel room with Neal, Glen and a fat, puffy girl who asked us the most inane questions: “Why do you dress like that?” “Is your name really Alice?” We knew right off that we weren’t going to be bothered with this idiocy, so we said, “Because we fucking please to, that’s why.” We were incredibly rude. She wrote it all down and asked her next question, and Glen said, “You cunt, I’d like to fuck you up the ass.” And she wrote that down, too. Finally, we started doing all the filthy things we were talking about. We each got millions of crabs. We should have known better. We should have seen them running down her legs. And she printed the interview, verbatim, in her newspaper. To this day that’s the funniest interview I ever did.
We also got a new roadie, Zipper, who had a strange expression on his face all the time, as if he had just thrown up. As a matter of fact, he often did throw up. It was the heroin that made him sick. We never even knew he had a habit until we found him dead from an OD the first day we moved into the farm in Pontiac. Cindy found him in the downstairs bathroom slumped over the edge of the bathtub like he was praying.
In April we played the Strawberry Fields Festival in Canada to an audience of 300,000 people. We did our usual act, but this time I lugged three big watermelons on stage and went after them with a hammer. Someone in the audience tossed a crutch on stage and I put the hammer aside and started hacking at the watermelons with the crutch. They burst open with a dull thud and I chopped and mashed at them until there were hundreds of mushy pieces all over the stage. Then I tossed it out all over the audience. I had already tossed watermelons and feathers and beer at audiences dozens of times and they all did the same thing, they moved back. But this group of dummies just sat there, wiping the pits out of their eyes with their hands. I unleashed two pillows of goose feathers on them, too, and soon the people in the first five rows were tarred and feathered with watermelon. Lots of people were shouting for me to stop, and the more they yelled the crazier I got onstage.
