suspicious about the toilet flushing so much and I began to crawl outside the trailer where they couldn’t hear me. Eventually I was in so much pain that I couldn’t even stand to get outside. My mother found me in a pool of vomit on my bedroom floor and in a belated state of panic they rushed me to a hospital.
There had been a dead cow on the Indian reservation we had visited that Independence Day, and I had poked around the carcass with a stick, although everyone warned me to stay away from it. The doctors at the hospital were convinced that I had picked up typhoid from the cow, and they put me in the infectious isolation ward. Another two days went by as my white blood count soared, and for a week I had lost weight like sugar in a rainstorm. Almost ten days after I got sick they decided to slice me open and check inside.
I was full of peritonitis. My insides were literally riddled with it. I was rotting away. They tried to move my intestines aside to find my appendix, but my guts were too infected and not solid enough to touch. My appendix had burst a good week before, but it was too late to do anything about it now. They sewed me up again, stuck draining tubes in me, and told my parents I would die.
My father couldn’t believe it. Why had God let him go to Phoenix to work with the Indians, step out on faith with no money, no job, and now take his son away from him? He thought it must be a trial, like Abraham.
The doctors pumped me full of morphine and even though I was in a deep dream world, constantly hallucinating, my parents sat by my bedside and read the Bible and comic books to me: “The sickness is not unto death but unto the glory of God.” I looked like I was ready for Hitler’s ovens. I dropped almost half my weight, weight that I was never to recover. I reached a low sixty-eight pounds. I didn’t even want to jerk off with my pillow.
A call went out to church members around the country for help. In Los Angeles the church people who ordained my dad prayed and fasted for me. Letters and cards arrived to the hospital by the dozens while my parents waited for the end to come.
I can’t offer any explanation as to why I lived except that it was a miracle. There is no doubt about it. It was a miracle that I pulled through — thanks to Jesus, and the church and the faith of everyone around me. Years later, whenever my father would tell this story to people they’d laugh.
“Why would the Lord save the life of Alice Cooper?”
CHAPTER 3
There’s nothing like a year in bed to wreck your life.
They fed me steak and liver by the pound to rebuild my strength, but I just lay there like I had swallowed forty Valiums. After four months in the gloomy trailer we moved to a small furnished house on Campbell Avenue. The next spring, when I was just about strong enough to walk, I went to Squaw Peak Elementary School. My mother lived in mortal fear that someone would punch me in the stomach and split me open while I lived in mortal fear that I was becoming a Mama’s Boy.
There’s nothing more depressing for a little kid than to be a semi-invalid and weak and scrawny. It took away all my spunk. I wondered why God was taking so long to make me well. I watched Nickie enviously as she played outside the house with the other kids. I spent my days on my back, in bed, watching TV.
Idle time and busy hands lead to a lot of jerking off, sometimes seven or eight times a day. I kept hard in the bathroom by reading Frederieks of Hollywood catalogs and jerked off with toilet paper tubes coated in Vaseline. I loved toilet paper tubes. I sulked in the kitchen when my mother’s roll of paper towels were getting low and I snuck into the bathroom and flushed unused sheets of toilet paper down the hatch so the roll would use up quicker.
Tubes gave way to jelly donuts. I had affairs with a whole series of pastry. It was messy and expensive, but it was worth it. It took a lot of preparation to have a jelly donut ready when I wanted it, and it confused my mother when I stopped encouraging her to buy toilet paper and wanted to stock up on bakery goods instead. Then there was always the problem of what to do with the impregnated donuts. Much of what my parents thought was unreserved generosity toward my sister Nickie was actually a hideous gesture I prefer not to think about.
My dad got a great job — top secret for the space program in an electronics factory, no less, as had been promised to him by God in a dream. Soon we were able to afford to move into a three-bedroom Spanish style house in a Phoenix suburb called Coral Gables. On the first anniversary of my appendix attack I was shipped back to the hospital, where they reopened the same spot and scooped out the remains of my appendix which had formed lesions on my intestines. The two operations left a Y-shaped scar ten inches long and a half-inch deep. I still tell everybody it’s a shark bite.
By the time I entered Cortez High School in the fall of 1962 I was a driven child. The television had been my only companion for a year. I wanted to have friends so badly it haunted me. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be known. I wanted to be somebody special, somebody healthy.
I was only ninety-eight pounds and had spent a year and a half hunched over in bed, which left a curvature of my spine and shoulders which could have put the hunchback of Notre Dame to shame. My teeth, instead of being broad and straight, were pointed and spaced. I carried on my face the cursed Furnier nose. I was not exactly a front-runner.
But I had crystal blue eyes and a dazzling smile. I had wit. Nobody in high school had as keen a sense of humor. I was so fast and funny I lobotomized people with one liners. Another kid doing the same thing would have been obnoxious, but I coolly measured what I said and how I said it with almost professional judgement. I was a diplomat. I had taste and restraint.
Cortez was brand-new the year I started to attend. It was built out on the middle of the desert, a compound of brick and cinder block buildings that could have just as easily been an army camp or a shopping center. The Cortez High School sign was a translucent bubble that stood on top of a pole like a movie theater marquee. The auditorium and cafeteria were the same room, and every Tuesday morning in Assembly I would have to hold my nose so the smell of five hundred pounds of lasagna cooking in the kichen didn’t make me nauseated.
Whatever else the school might have lacked, it had a terrific gymnasium and athletic field. I tried out for the baseball team and promised the coach I would gain weight, but the first day of practice somebody broke my nose with a far-flung bat and the season was over for me.
I went out for track. My first year I went out for the 440, which was a long, long sprint for a skinny sick kid. I found that although I didn’t have much speed I had tremendous endurance. The coach, Emmet Smith, who was a fellow church member, worked hard with me, and I turned out to be a dynamic long-distance runner and a track star. In September of my sophomore year I lettered in cross-country. The first race that I ran I had been running for several hours nonstop, and when I got back to the school I stopped dead in my tracks and passed out. It made the front page of the school paper and I was a hero.
“Psyching out” was a big thing on the track team, and we spent as much time thinking up psych outs as we did practicing. I wore red knee socks to drive everybody else crazy and sometimes I’d run with a top hat on. When the gun went off I would scream, “Yut-a-hey!” which is Indian for something. I did it for energy, just like a karate yell, and to psych out the other runners. “Yut-a-hey” really got to everybody except the Indians, who knew what “yut-a-hey” meant. They would hear that and tear out and smear us. Boy, those Indians were fast.
By my junior year I had the reputation of being the school jokester, and I got my own column on the Cortez Tip Sheet. Working on the Tip Sheet was supposed to be a faggy job, since the paper was run completely by girls. It was almost as bad as taking home economics instead of woodworking shop. All the guys who made fun of me were crazy; I was the only boy in a roomful of girls every day for an hour. It was sixty minutes of blissful sexual excitement, the perfect fuel for my nighttime fantasies. I even started dating around then, although for a good long while I wouldn’t do more than hold hands with the girl while walking home from a movie.
My column was called “Get Out of My Hair,” which I filled with revelations of tremendous consequence about the Beatles, track, homeroom classes, bad cafeteria food and unfair dress codes. I signed the poison pen column “Muscles McNasal” — a little self-conscious, I guess — and my by-line ran under a dazzlingly poor picture of me taken by the Tip Sheet photographer, Glen Buxton.
Glen Buxton joined the journalism class shortly after I did. Glen was motivated by the girls, too, only he thought that he was a ladies’ man. He wore a four-inch-high pompadour of greasy blond hair that he molded into shape every day like a little plaster-of-paris lump above his forehead. His putty-shaped nose seemed to have been gobbed on his face, punctuated by a thin, smiling slash of mouth which was usually wisecracking. Glen swaggered
