Chapter Two

I believe one day they'll find a chemical substance in people who are
entertainers, a chemical substance that drives them to entertain, to be
different, to be more. That chemical makes me play the game. It makes me want to
be the most individual person in the world. If I even start to become close to
what everyone else accepts as normal, I have to change it.
	You see, the most important thing in the world is to be selfish about
yourself, about where you are in life and who you are. It makes for healthy
competition. In order to become the ultimate individual in this society you have
to care a lot about yourself. Professionally, I am first is my credo. This is my
life, and I must come out on top, getting the things I want, when I want them.
On a personal level I m exactly the opposite. A sure touch. An easy sell. They
have to watch me so I don't give my shirt away on the street. I don't know how
to say no to anybody about anything. I worry about being selfish on a
professional level because I don't like to hurt people, but that's a
responsibility you take on if you ant to keep the public's eye.
	Who am I? I'm a villain. An anti-hero. If I was a kid, Alice Cooper would
be my hero. I always liked villains. I adored Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney. I
always wanted Godzilla to completely wipe out all those Japanese in Tokyo. I
always rooted for the wolfman to gobble up the girls who roamed misty parks in
London. For me the villain was the hero, the underdog. I understood the villain.
I understood the problems the Boston Strangler faced. Was W. C. Fields a good
guy? He was a philanderer, and he hated little kids!
	The most important thing about my whole life is to be the most different.
I always had to do the opposite of what was expected. I refuse to be a blur that
passes through everyone's life. I refuse to be anonymous. The world must know
I'm here. Maybe that's megalomania, but I fear mediocrity more than death, and
it's my fear of mediocrity that made me do things differently than anything
anyone ever expected.
	It's not the way I started out. There was every good reason that I might
have grown up Mr. Anybody with a regular job, wife and three kids. From the
moment my mother spewed me out (February 4, 1948) I was the world's biggest
goody-goody. Mr. Square. Straight and narrow. I led the most unsophisticated
life in the world.
	I was born Vincent Damon Furnier in a hospital they call the "Butcher's
Palace" in Detroit and I was lucky I made it out of there because a lot of
people didn't. They didn't do such a bad job on me, except that I was born with
eczema (which means I looked like a two-day-old pizza stepped on by football
cleats), and infantile asthma. The asthma was hereditary, but I think the eczema
was a sign, like the mark of Cain. My dad, Ether Moroni Furnier (a Mormon name),
also had asthma. The Furniers brought these bad tubes with them all the way from
France, where in some distant way I was related to General Lafayette (the French
will all be delighted to know.)
	My grandfather, Thurmond, and his wife, Birdie May, lived in Allentown,
Pennsylvania, where Thurmond was a telegraph operator for the railroad in his
spare time. In his full time he was a minister and president of the Church of
Jesus Christ, which he presided over for sixty-three years until his death in
1974. My dad had two older brothers, Lonson, and Vincent, affectionately known
to the Detroit bar circuit as Lefty and Jocko, who were dedicated church members
until they were teenagers. Then they bolted, went into the "real world" and made
Thurmond angry as hell at them. By the time my dad was a teenager he was out of
it, too.
	My mother, Ella, was from Tennessee, from a family of hillbillies named
McCart who were one-quarter full-blooded Sioux Indians. Her mother died when she
was twelve years old, and she turned to the Pentacostal church for solace. But
when it came time to go up to the alter and "speak in tongues" the spirit never
came to her. It was a form of religious impotency, I guess. She met my dad in
Detroit at the end of the war. My older sister Nickie was born in 1946, named
after the man who introduced my parents. I was named after Uncle Vince and Damon
Runyon.
	The year I was born my parents scraped together a little money and rushed
me off to Los Angeles where the weather would be better for asthma, but before I
was a year old the earthquakes and Republicans sent us scurrying back to Detroit
for cover. I was able to stick it out for two winters in Detroit before my
bronchial tubes started to go and when I was three years old we went off again,
this time to Phoenix.
	Phoenix was just a little tourist town at the time. My dad always said
that if you went there with any money it was your fault and if you left there
with any money it was their fault. They sent us home penniless after a year or
so, and we braved it out in Detroit again for five years. 
	Havenhurst Elementary School was a drag. Mrs. Hainey, my fifth grade
teacher, tried to teach me how to write longhand and crippled two of my fingers
permanently. I also had an aunt who taught in Havenhurst named Verdie McCart,
but she was killed by her son, Howard the Ax Murderer. They found her one day
with an ax down the middle of her skull and Howard still standing there watching
her rot. Verdie also had a grandson my age who I played with. He made his dog
deaf by screaming dirty words in its ears.
	I fell in love for the first time in the third grade with a girl named
Karen Love, and I sent her a love letter that said, "I know you're not the most
beautiful girl in the world and I'm the best you can do."
	We were poor. My dad could never make ends meet. He took any kind of work
he could get, driving a cab or selling used cars. He was a terrible used-car
salesman, because he couldn't lie. He'd always to the customer just what was
wrong with the car and how far back the odometer had been turned. One month he
made four hundred dollars and we celebrated for a week. When I was eight years
old got one Christmas gift, an eight-dollar tan sweater. I remember always
sitting in the back seat of a turquoise Plymouth from 1952 only because they
were demonstrators and we could buy them real cheap. They all smelled like the
fleabag in Toledo.
	We were content, I guess, but far from happy. We were floundering, and
even as little kids my sister Nickie and I felt it. Life was grating, like the
lubricant missing to make things smoother. I knew something was wrong because my
parents fought constantly, and I knew the insensity of their arguements was
caused by something much deeper than the lamp I had broken of the size of my
father's paychecks.
	My dad started drinking then, not that he was an alcoholic, or my sister
and I were even aware of it until he told us many years later. But he needed to
"have a little glow on" to help meet people in the used-car lot and deal with
problems. He felt his life was slipping, that everything around him was a little
out of control. So he kept a flask inside his jacket pocket, and when no one was
looking he snuck into the men's room and would take a belt to steady his nerves.
	I began to get mischievous around that time. My relationship with Nickie
couldn't have been more cutthroat. Never was there a brother who was as
inventive and intent on torturing a sister. I'd sneak into my mother's room and
steal a dollar from her purse, spend half of it and put the change in Nickie's
drawer. Nickie always got the blame and they would punish her by making her
stand by the back door, watching me taunt her in the back yard until one day in
a fit of frustration she kicked through the glass panels. I locked myself in car
trunks, and once when I was left was a neighbor, I crawled into her woodshed and
terrorized her with knives until my mother came and hauled me away.
	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.
	The church was suddenly everything to us, a religion, a social life, a
new family. My father's devotion was inspiring. It affected my mother so deeply
that within a month she stood up in church one day and asked to be baptized. My
father did the same things a few weeks later, and after that our lives changed
completely. A real conversion took place in all of us, my father the most
dramatically. He stopped everything bad he was doing - cold turkey. He stopped
it all, from booze to tobacco. He was incredibly strong and determined, and the
entire family had renewed respect for him.
	From then on I was in church with my father seven days a week! God, you
wouldn't believe it. We studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon backward and
forward. I even had entire scriptures memorized. In a year I was a religious
whiz kid. We went to every sort of meeting and church conference or social even
in the West. Soon we knew ministers and church members from all the neighboring
states and made little pilgrimages on the weekends.
	At one conference we met a minister from Ohio who was doing missionary
work with the Indians in Arizona, and he invited us to spend a Sunday with him
on an Apache reservation. The way the Indians lived shocked us. They lay in
filth out in the desert, living in pitiful cardboard shacks called Wikiaks. The
children were all naked, and bloated from hunger and disease. There was no
medical treatment for them at all, and when we set up a breadline to feed them I
saw my father cry for the first time.
	Back in Los Angeles Dad had several dreams that told him he would be
called for the ministry, and after speaking to the church congregation about his
dreams and the Apaches, they asked to ordain him.
	I was submerged even deeper in religion during the preperation for my
father's ordination. When the other kids stayed home because the lessons were
too deep, too obscure for a child to understand, my father would bring me. I
went to the doctrine meetings with him and the other men who aspired to be
ministers. I watched my dad transform himself, through God and the church, into
a totally happy, self-sufficient human being. He ordained in April 1961 when he
was thirty-four years old and I was thirteen.
	He immediately wanted to move to Arizona to continue his missionary work
with the Apaches. The church people in LA admired his zest but thought the move
rather foolish. My father couldn't buy a job in Phoenix at the time and our
church doesn't have a paid ministry. But there was no stopping him. In May we
moved to a little trailer camp in Phoenix and started work with the Indians.
	I had a whole new sexual awakening the first night we moved to Phoenix.
We all got new linen and pillows, and my old battered feather pillow was
replaced with a juicy, humpable foam rubber model. That night in bed I hugged
the pillow against me and suddenly there was music and fireworks. It was Love
American Style. I was madly in love with my pillow for a year. I was jealous if
anybody touched it or fluffed it. I masturbated with it several times a day and
eventually it was so stiff it would crack if I had put my head down on it. To
this day I find sheets and pillows an enormous turn on, and I'm still a heavy
wet dreamer.
	My father made the rounds looking for a job every day, but nobody wanted
a draftsman. Nobody even wanted a used-car salesman or a cab driver. Our savings
began to dwindle and Dad got discouraged again. His depression was contagious
and everyone in the family was suffering from a good dose of it. 
	Still, every weekend we'd drive the one hundred and fifty miles outside
of Phoenix to the St. Carlos Mission, which my father helped establish. We fed
the Indians, and at night while my father preached to them I sat around the fire
with Indian kids, using my BB gun to pick off tarantulas that came to eat the
desert moths fluttering around the flames.
	On the Fourth of July, only two months after we had moved to Phoenix,
there was a huge celebration at a church member's home, and when I got home to
my pillow, instead of fucking it, I threw up two quarts of lasagna on it. My
mother chalked it up to spicy cooking. Later on in the night my stomach hurt
unbearably, and possessed with the fear that I would be carried to the doctor's
office for an injection, I kept my mouth shut and suffered through the pain.
	Two days later I was throwing up every hour, which I hid from my mother
be sneaking into the bathroom in the back of the trailer and turning the water
on full force to cover up the sounds of my retching. Eventually she got
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?"