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 around the journalism
room all afternoon smelling from photographic developer, an unlit cigarette
between his lips, and whispered to the girls, "Call me G.B., sweetheart." The
fact of the matter was Glen couldn't get laid at sixteen if his life depended on
it, and his tough guy act was just as limp.
	Glen and I became friends basically because he was forbidden. Cortez was
a school of goody-goody kids. There was no juvenile delinquency in our clean
American Phoenix suburb and Glen was considered a tough kid. His swagger and
unlit cigarette was as close as we got to what the principal, George Buckley,
called "negative influences on the community." Buckley, who was a well-known
community leader in Phoenix, a Mormon elder and member of the draft board, was
obsessed with uncovering "negative influences on the community." My friendship
with Glen soon tainted me. Glen was suspended from school a half a dozen times
for long hair and smoking in the bathroom, and when Buckley saw me walking
around the Cortez campus with him I was automatically put on his suspicious
character list.
	In the fall of my junior year I got shafted with the job of organizing
the Letterman's talent show. My biggest problem was that nobody had any talent.
Nobody even deluded themselves. I put up signs all over the school and all I
found was a freshman who wanted to do magic tricks. I called a meeting in the
locker room before a track meet one day and asked for suggestions.
	"All right," I said, clapping my hands together to get their attention,
"who wants to do what in the talent show?"
	"Let's put Dunaway in a dress and have him sing 'I Enjoy Being a Girl,'"
John Speer said. John Speer loved to torture Dennis Dunaway. Speer was a senior,
a tall well-built eighteen-year-old with a good mid-western face. He was a scene
queen. He had to be the center of attraction and everything had to be his way,
which he usually achieved because he was long-winded and determined not to fail.
He brayed at people, donkeylike, insistent.
	Dennis Dunaway was exactly the opposite and Speer hated him because of
it. Dennis was my height and almost as skinny, with deep set, moist brown eyes.
Speer was frantic and impulsive, Dennis lethargic and good-natured, like a
farmer in Iowa. He had the slowest heartbeat on the team, a good advantage for a
runner, but he was so very retiring sometimes we didn't think he could have had
more than two heartbeats a day. His placidness drove John Speer nuts, but all of
Speer's venom just splattered on Dennis' impenetrable hide.
	"C'mon. How about if we all sing?" I said. We had been making up parodies
of Beatle songs as we ran around the track: "We beat you, yeah, yeah, yeah," or
"Last night I ran three laps for my coach." But nobody was listening to me. John
Speer was hovering over Dennis Dunaway like the Angel of Death, trying to get
him angry. I stepped between them and Speer pushed me aside.
	"Listen, Dunaway, I want to make a deal with you. Whoever wins this meet
doesn't say one word to the loser. I know it's going to be a big deal if I beat
you, but I won't say nothing to you if I win, and if I lose you don't say
nothing to me."
	Dennis just sat there nodding, and I forgot about the talent show until
after the meet. John Speer beat Dennis. At the last minute he took over in an
incredible sprint. When they got back to the lockers Speer was screaming, "Ha!
What's the matter with Dunaway? Didn't win the meet, did you? Huh, old slow
poke?"
	Dennis couldn't have cared less. As he was getting dressed, he said to
me, "You want somebody to sing  with you? I'll do it." Speer was at his side
instantly "Sing what? Track songs? Is that what you're gonna do? Make it look
like you're the big track stars? Not without me, buddy. I represent the track
team around here."
	That's how it started. I convinced Glen Buxton, who already played
guitar, to join Dennis and John, and along with the track coach, Emmet Smith, we
formed the Earwigs. An earwig is a water scorpion. If you step on one, it
releases a terrible stink, and if one gets in your ear it'll chew right through
the ear drum, get into your brain, and drive you crazy.
	The night of the Letterman's talent show we got dressed up in our track
suits and long Dynel wigs. Save for Glen, none of us knew how to play any
instruments, so we faked it. We all stood on the stage in the
cafeteria/auditorium, singing Beatle parodies feeling like idiots. During the
last number we arranged for three girls to rush on stage and scream, "Earwigs!
Earwigs!"
	We caused an uproar in the school, mostly because we were so bad, but I
loved the sudden attention. Everybody was talking about it. People complimented
me the next day for having the guts to do it, and girls started talking to me
who never before would have anything to do with the skinny guy with the big nose
from the track team. It stimulated my entertaining chemicals like never before.
I got hooked on the limelight. That's why I went into rock and roll. For fame
and sex. I wanted more and more from that night on. To this day coach Emmet
Smith hasn't forgiven himself for letting me taste that moment. 
	Everybody in school was overjoyed with out new-found fame. There were, of
course, the Balducci Brothers. These geeks were the school's tough Mexican
family, and Rubin Balducci was like the Phoenix Godfather. Rubin and his
brothers weighed two hundred pounds apiece, and when they pulled up at school
every day in a little blue Corvair we used to stand outside in the parking lot
to watch the car scrape into the parking lot two inches off the ground.
	Rubin had an odd sense of humor. He was always doing things like shaking
your hand and then squeezing it real hard until he made you get down on your
knees in pain or climb into a garbage can to get him to stop. Then he'd laugh a
deep "ho, ho, ho" like a demented Santa Claus.
	After Rubin saw us in the Letterman's show he wouldn't leave us alone at
school. He tripped me in the hallways, pulled at my hair, and once led me around
the campus by holding tight onto my nose until Mr. Buckley caught him doing it
and made him stop. Somehow I got the blame and wound up coming to school an hour
early for a week for punishment.
	One afternoon I walked by Rubin in the parking lot and patted him on the
back as I said, "Hiya, Balducci!" There was sand and cement under his feet and
his legs slid out from under him. His ass seemed to twist up over his head as he
hit the ground. When the tremors died down I knew I was dead. Suddenly I heard,
"Ho ho ho! Hohohohohohohohoho. Hohohohohoho. You mean that little guy's the only
guy who ever knocked me down?"
	After that he always protected me.
	Over the year, we taught ourselves how to play instruments and changed
our name to the Spiders. We learned all our songs from Yardbirds and Rolling
Stones albums which we had to play several hundred times each to figure out the
chords.
	Although there were some personnel changes for the first two years, the
line-up settled to John Speer on drums, Dennis on bass guitar, Glen Buxton on
lead guitar, and a friend of Glen's, John Tatum, on rhythm guitar. I didn't want
to play an instrument. I knew I wasn't a musician. I was a front man. An
entertainer. 
	I don't know what we expected from the band. Certainly not to make money,
and believe me, we didn't. We played anywhere they would let us: parties, the
community swimming pool, pizza parlors, the school cafeteria. We played our
first gig at a party. A pimpled. ugly girl named Lisa Hawks gave a sweet sixteen
party and she couldn't get anybody to come, so her mother hired the Spiders fro
twenty bucks. 
	We spent the summer of 1965 playing in the "Battle of the Bands." A
battle of the Bands was basically a volume contest held in the parking lots of
shopping centers all around Phoenix. Every two-bit garage group like us turned
up to compete with honking cars, screaming kids and the brutal summer heat. We
developed some stage style and even began to play our Yardbirds songs with some
ability and by the end of the summer the Spiders were winning every Battle of
the Bands we entered. In September we were invited to audition for an ex-disc
jockey named Jack Curtis who ran a teen club the VIP Lounge. Curtis hired us,
not just for an evening, but as the house band.
	The deal that Jack Curtis gave us was quite good for a group that hadn't
been playing more than a year. We had steady employment at $500 a weekend and
Curtis even sponsored the recording of a single on his own label. It was called
"Why Don't You Love Me?" and Curtis pressed fifty copies of it. The group bought
twenty-five of them and the rest rotted in a phoenix record store. 
	My sudden elevation to professional standing brought along with it the
fruits of stardom: women. My great high school flame was Mimi Hicki. I loved
Mimi because she was built like a Corvette. She had  conically pointy tits and
blue eyes. My zipper got hard whenever I looked at her. The year before I met
her father had been killed in a car accident on his way to a corner store for a
pack of cigarettes. Since then Mimi wouldn't let her boyfriends out of her
sight, and I loved every minute of the attention.
	We were, of course, both virgins, but I was allowed to sneak feels in the
back seat of a car or behind the garage where we'd get sticky and dusty from
grappling on the desert. I wrestled with her tits and stuck my tongue down her
throat, praying that one day she would loosen up and forget herself, letting her
hand touch the general area of my crotch, which was so hard most of the time it
must have torn holes in her clothing. Toward the end of my last year in high
school she eventually let me get into her panties - but that didn't mean she
made it easy by removing any clothing. I had to somehow get my hand under her
skirt without lifting it up too high and then bend my arm so it could slide down
her panties and I could get my hand on her crotch. "This can't be right," I
thought. "How can this be any fun?" The first time I actually felt her thatch I
shot my load instantly, wracking myself with convulsions as I turned into a
helpless blob of gelatin in Mimi's lap. Mimi had never seen this happen before,
but she was going to get used to it.
	"Are you all right?" she asked me in the darkness with my hand twisted
inside her clothing.
	"Sure, sure," I lied. "It's just my asthma." One night we were laying
between two amplifiers in the back of a station wagon outside the VIP Club. She
had a special treat for me: she popped a tit. First one, then the other, right
out from under my letter jacket and her pink mohair sweater. I almost knocked
her bubble hairdo right off her head getting my hands on them, stuffing them
into my mouth like bologna sandwiches. I thought this was the prelude to
actually getting to see and touch and smell and taste that forbidden thatch of
hair.
	"I'm letting you do this because it's the last time," Millie told me.
	"I can't hear you," I thought, "my mouth's full of tit."
	"Vince, honey. This is kind of a goodbye treat, because my mother says I
can't see you anymore."
	I knew that Mimi's mother hated me, hated that I was in a rock band,
hated the people in the band too, but I had never been simply banished from
anyone's life before. I stopped eating just long enough to ask her why. 
	"Because of your hair. My mother thinks it's disgusting, that you're
turning into a queer or something." 
	I would have gladly offered Mrs. Hicki a vivid display of my masculinity
if Mimi would have opened my fly for me, but her objections really worried me
because Mrs. Hicki wasn't the only person who didn't like my hair. Mr. Buckley,
the principal of the school, was not delighted to see how long my hair had grown
when I returned to school for my senior year, and told me not to come back until
I got a haircut. I sat in front of a mirror while my mother stood behind me
gingerly trimming my hair while I howled in pain.
	The Jan Murray road show of Bye-Bye Birdie was booked into the Phoenix
Star Theater in November, and by making slight alterations in the story line the
plot was about a whole rock band called "Birdy." The producers used a local rock
group in every city to cut down on expenses and raise the community interest in
the show. When they got into town someone contacted Jack Curtis, and he
recommended us. We went into rehearsals just three weeks before the show opened.
	I was thrown out of school the second time on the day of opening night.
My hair wasn't even that long - just over my collar - but Buckley had a whole
year to think about long hair at the draft board, and he was obsessed by it. My
mother went to speak to him and explained what he already knew. My father was a
minister, I was a good kid, a fair student, and I needed my hair long because I
was a professional. (Hah!) I was even in Bye-Bye Birdie. But Buckley wouldn't
hear of it. Long hair was a symbol of rebellion he told her. A symptom of
disease. I was suspended from school until after the show when I took another
trim.
	In the spring semester, just before I was about to graduate, Buckley
threw me out of school several more times, bringing my total suspensions to
eight. But by spring, Buckley wasn't the only one complaining.
	I was still going to church with my family every week. The band wouldn't
even take Wednesday night jobs because it was church night. I was, after all,
the minister's son and I liked going to church. The church members didn't like
it though. They not only objected to my hair, they objected to rock and roll and
everything that went along with it - people who smoked tobacco (and maybe more)
and drank liquor (and maybe worse).
	The church members were subtle.
	"Cut your hair, girlie!"
	"Are you a fairy?"
	"When are you going to get a dress, Vincie?"
	They tortured me in the tackiest, most adolescent ways for months. They
alluded I was doing something sacrilegious. I just kept my mouth shut, but it
wasn't easy. 
	My parents had their own opinions about my hair. They came to my rescue
all the time in church and in school, but at home it was a different story. My
mother is an outspoken woman, and she believed in my individualism and that I
had the right to wear my hair as long as I liked. After all, I was a
professional, and she knew I was a faithful church member. In reality, what was
the big deal about my hair? I wasn't killing chickens.
	But at home we had tremendous fights.
	"I don't want you to get a haircut just for the church people," she
finally told me. "But it makes your father very uncomfortable. The church
members bring it up to him all the time and it's very embarrassing. He won't ask
you to cut it either, for his sake, so the decision is up to you."
	I stopped going to church. It was very confusing. I was hurt and angry.
It was bewildering. I knew more about religion than most of them. I believed
with more conviction than most of them. That I was even walking around was a
miracle. I knew about God. God is inside you when you're at your ultimate best,
when you work to achieve godliness. It's a state of mind, that's all. Very
nearly the same state of mind as when you're at the worst with the devil. What
the fuck did my hair or rock and roll have to do with what I felt inside of me?
	People can be so cruel without even knowing it. I wasn't even Alice
Cooper then. It was just Vince Furnier they were torturing.
	When I left the church my senior year of high school it was the last time
I ever set foot in one.
	I left a lot behind the summer of 1966. Cortez, Mr. Muckley, the church.
John Tatum left the group. The Spiders had developed into a band of rebels,
dressed in scruffy T-shirts and shoulder-length hair, and Tatum didn't like the
image. We were a very image-conscious bunch. I don't think we played as well as
we dressed the parts, since acting like you were in a rock band was just as
important at the time as playing music.
	We advertised for another guitarist and expected hundreds of calls, but
only one person contacted us. His name was Michael Bruce, and he had been in a
Beatle band called the Trolls. The Trolls were called a Beatle band because at
the time nobody was playing original music. We were all "copy" bands. The
Spiders were the best copy band for the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds material;
the Trolls played great Beatle music. The only problem with Mike Bruce was his
image. Michael was short and broad-beamed. What could have been a finely layered
body of muscles was always just beyond that in the realm of beefiness. But he
moved and thought with his groin, and although not a pretty boy, he was handsome
because he believed in himself physically.
	Michael, for instance, is the type of guy who touches himself a lot. Not
an obvious jock scratch like you might see watching the NFL on TV. Michael's
hands would gracefully fall to his crotch or a nipple and hover there. You never
knew if he just rested his hands in funny places or he was actually coddling his
balls.
	He has, to his credit, nice blue eyes, and because we had no choice, we
hired him. John Tatum sold him a dirty pair of pants he had worn on stage for
five dollars, and Mike let his hair grow long.
	We went to Tucson the summer of 1966 and recorded another single for Jack
Curtis called "Don't Blow Your Mind," which we wrote.
	Recording wasn't an easy chore for us. We had no idea of what we were
doing. There wasn't even a producer around, just us and the engineer. Se we
played our parts in unison and came up with a version of the song that sounded
like we were all stuffed into a phone booth.
	Jock Curtis got them to play it on KFIF in Tucson and the station
received hundreds of phone calls requesting the song, most of them placed long
distance from Phoenix by our families. The first time I heard myself on the
radio I was washing my car in the driveway of our house. I couldn't believe it
was me. It was familiar but foreign, like meeting a twin. After the first
adrenaline rush I got very nonplussed about it. Whenever the song would play on
the radio I'd switch to another station as if I hadn't heard it. "Don't Blow
Your Mind" became the number three song on the KFIF play list.
	In September I entered Glendale Community College as an art major. I
wasn't bad either. I painted almost every day, dark pictures of unsmiling
people, which was odd because outwardly I was a happy, carefree person, and I
think I felt that inside, too.
	I had saved $2,700 to but a new 1966 Fairlane GT with a 390-horsepower
engine. It was yellow with a black racing strip, and it got four miles to a
gallon. American teenagers have to have cars. I think it should be made a legal
requirement, like a four-wheel education. It's part of American life, like
crabgrass or television. Part of your growing-up happens in a car. The people
I've met who didn't have cars in their lives are social cripples. I almost feel
un-American for not losing my virginity in the back seat of a souped-up '59
Chevy.
	I pushed that car as much as I drove it. It cost so much to pay for it
that I never had the money for gas. When it was only three months old Glen and I
were tooling down the highway and I suddenly realized I was driving into the
side of a green station wagon. My 390-horsepower engine crumbled in a loud
explosion. I had this terrible sinking feeling when I realized that woman behind
the steering wheel of the other car was crying. She jumped out the door and
started punching me in the head yelling, "You moron, you could have killed me."
There were flames coming out of my engine, and I stood shoveling dirt on it with
my hands while she hit me and shouted.
	Glen was hopping around by the side of the road holding his toe, which
was broken when he smashed it against the dashboard because his feet were almost
up on the windshield when the accident happened. (It wasn't my fault. She only
had her driving permit for three days and she made an illegal left turn.) The
experience was so awful I've never driven a car since and never bothered to
renew my license.
	Glendale Community College was an ugly expanse of cinder block and
desert, hot and lifeless. All the action was in the air-conditioned cafeteria
where the band and I set up camp at a long table in the middle of the room.
Anybody who came near us was ripped to pieces with wisecracks. We had no mercy,
this red-blooded American rock band, and sent many a flat-chested girl heading
for the ladies' room in hysterics. It was into this den that three more
important people came into my life, completing what was  to become the Alice
Cooper band.
	We were all seated around Formica clubhouse one day when a limbering guy
sat down at the table with his lunch, pulled out a cap pistol and shot us all
dead. This was Mike Allen, who also distinguished himself by carrying a Man From
Uncle badge and ID card. Glen said to him, "You're a crazy motherfucker," and
Mike Allen laughed a lot. Mike became our amp-boy - which is what we called the
big guy who carried the equipment for us skinny guys. He signed on with us and
stayed for the next four years.
	It turned out that Mike Allen had a wealth of unused and unwanted
knowledge stored up in his head. While at first we thought his six-foot six-inch
frame was only good enough to carry our equipment, it turned out he knew a
million disconnected facts. It was like we were a rock and roll Star Trek and he
was Dr. Spock. He knew the amperage of amplifier fuses and who pitched for
Brooklyn in the 1950 World Series. He could also explain the embolism, if
anybody ever wanted him to, and sometimes he offered little facts just to make
conversation. He had gone to St. Mary's High School in Phoenix, a parochial
factory that was enough to estrange anybody from the real world. He was very
square actually, like me.
	Mike Allen never swore or drank or used drugs the entire time I knew him.
He was the cleanest living guy in the world. He was a virgin. He said he wanted
to save it for his wife. I used to say, "Mike, the first time you get her you're
gonna blow her up." But he was serious about it, even years later on the road
when girls used to try to rape him and deflower him. His ultimate idol was John
Wayne. He really wanted to be just like him!
	Years later, when wee were to lose him somewhere in the web of touring
and travel, Mike Allen returned to Phoenix and became a nurse. Within a year of
getting his nursing degree he invented a mechanical respiratory system, patented
it and sold the rights for two million dollars.
	I met Dick Christian not long after Mike Allen. Dick was drawn to us in
much the same way Mike had been. He called us the "Outsides Convention" because
he said we reeked of sarcasm and unrest. Dick knew a lot about sarcasm and
unrest. Like us he was not quite in step with the rest of Glendale Community
College. His parents had sent him to a Jesuit prep school to curb "emotional
outbursts." It was an ironic cure.
	Dick probably understood alienation better than anyone I have ever met.
That, sparked with imagination and guts, made him a loyal and understanding
friend. He was handsome, tall, curly hair, and knew when and how to be a phony.
	Dick became our unofficial manager. We really didn't want him to manage
us because we needed someone with experience, but he was always there helping,
plugging along anyway, dressing up in ties and jackets to try to intimidate club
owners to pay us without too much trouble.
	One night in the VIP club I was introduced to a young man I vaguely
remember seeing at Cortez - vaguely only because he appearance had changed so
much. His name was Charlie Carnal, and although this was only 1966 he had
already evolved into a 1970's glitter freak. His hair was shoulder-length on the
right side of his head and cut in a crew-cut on the left, like somebody had hit
him down the middle with a cleaver. He had an enormous handlebar moustache - on
both sides - a tremendous perpetual grin, and wore costumes - not clothing -
that made him look like he had stumbled out of a neighborhood theater production
of Alice in Wonderland.
	Charlie rustled us up our first black lights. He turned up at the VIP
with a ten-foot color wheel, one of those giant hypnotic discs that he turned in
the back with a crank. It sounds corny now, but that was how our effects
started. I was just as excited by black lights and hypno-wheels as I am with my
latest $400,000 gimmick. Charlie Carnal signed on with the group and stayed with
us for five years. He was eventually cut in as an equal partner as his lighting
effects became more important.
	By spring of my freshman year my thoughts turned not to love but west, to
Los Angeles. We had done just about everything we could do in Arizona. We played
every city, school, and dive with a stage. We were, in fact, famous in Phoenix,
which to me was the worst kind of compliment. College was boring, and rock and
roll was fun. In order to go one step further we needed a record deal, and we
knew that the only way to get one was in LA.
	Armed with a few dozen posters of the Spiders (in which we looked like
five hungry, hairy orphans) and some "Don't Blow Your Mind" singles, Dick
Christian went off to the glittery city on the sea to get us auditions with
record companies.
	He never quite made it to the record companies. As soon as he got to LA
he stopped into a bar on Sunset Boulevard to have a beer. A tall, blond woman
shuffled up next to him. Dick swore she was as exact ringer for Kim Novak. Dick
had been a Novak freak ever since he saw her in Bell, Book and Candle. He
fantasized when he was fifteen about being a warlock to Novak's witch while he
jerked off.
	She took Dick home with her. There was a lot of heavy tongues and feels,
with "Kim Novak" keeping Dick's hands away from the secret thatch. After forty
minutes of trying, Dick got her dress off and found that his cock wasn't the
only hard one in the room.
	"Kim Novak" explained that she (he) often picked up young guys in bars,
took them home and made out with them for a while, and when the guys were hot
enough so it didn't matter, she (he) let them in on the joke. She (he) insisted
that all of the guys were horny enough at that point to fuck her (him) anyway,
and that Dick should go right ahead with what he was doing. But Dick didn't have
the heart, or the hard-on, and thanked her and left.
	It was the craziest thing I had ever heard! And I thought I was weird! LA
sounded so crazy, so otherworldly. I couldn't wait to go! It wasn't that I
wanted to meet a drag queen - it was that I wanted to live in a society where
one could exist.