Chapter 7

Life in Los Angeles seemed to change overnight for us. With a recording contract
and sudden legitimacy, we moved into a whole new circuit of people. The rock
world exploded for us. We got to meet everybody on the LA scene. We moved up a
few rungs on the social ladder to boot; we were invited to parties given by rich
people instead of dope dealers and hippies, and when we passed out at night we
slept on Beverly Hills carpeting instead of dirty wooden floors.
	Without exception I think everybody I met in rock and roll was a groupie
on one level or another. The rock music business was built on idol worship, and
it was filled to brimming with insecure, sexually maladjusted, lonely people who
wanted to live also in the limelight. You know, you don't have to fuck anybody
to be a groupie. To some people, just breathing the same electric air was enough
to get them off. Groupies come in all ages, sex, and professions. I never met a
record company president who wasn't somebody's fan, and I never met a musician
who didn't think he was a star.
	Everybody knows about the kind of groupies you run into backstage or
hanging around hotel lobbies. These are common C-level groupies; dirty,
emotionally crippled, tragic girls and boys who burn themselves out using drugs
as fuel and fuck anybody who ever set foot on the stage, down to the last
roadie. These kids are there for sex. They want to incorporate you, take part of
your stardom away with them, even if it's only a fee drops of semen. These kids
hardly ever worked or went to school. These were drug dealers mostly, and lived
in a twilight world of dingy dressing rooms and third-rate musicians. They
needed to be abused. They begged for it on many levels, and these were the kind
of kids the chambermaid found in the morning, tied to hotel beds with dead fish
inserted in their vaginas, or half conscious from bad drugs or too much booze.
	C-level groupies are often nymphomaniacs, and when you tell them to get
out or leave you alone, it starts a lot of trouble. Somehow each and every time
they sleep with a musician they make themselves believe it's going to be
forever, and when it's over in an hour they're hysterical. Of course the C-level
groupies are the most fun to be with, you better believe it! Basically I think
that C-level groupies are the most honest of the bunch. At least you both know
what they're there for. In the back of their heads they know who they are and
their place in society. They sure know their way around the blue vein,
penis-wise.
	B-level groupies always went out of their way to put down the C-levelers.
They despised the lower class of groupies because they saw reflected in them the
worst side of themselves. B-level groupies usually supported themselves
legitimately, which sets them apart from the wandering gypsy kind. Most of them
worked in the music business itself, as secretaries in record companies and
booking offices and publicists. An efficient publicist is always a groupie in
rock and roll. These B-levelers wanted sex, too, God knows, but not just a
one-night stand. This plateau of idol worshipers wanted to possess you, have you
around as a companion. They were the most difficult to deal with, too, because
they didn't want to go home in the morning.
	A-level groupies were famous themselves, and if not famous, at least
successful in their own right. Their bunch was comprised of actors, motion
picture executives, writers, talent scouts and other rock stars. It's an example
of why Gregg Allman married Cher. It's why I once watched the president of the
largest record company in America trip over himself to get to say hello to Mick
Jagger in Orsini's restaurant. No matter how much of a star you become, there's
always somebody who's a bigger star.
	I fell in love with a B-level groupie. I met her at a party and didn't
get around to genital insertion for two months, but I loved her with a passion
that was only topped by my high school affair with Mimi Hicki. Her name was
Marlene Mabel and she was a secretary at A&M records from El Monte who gave
excellent head. What's more, she never bothered me when I didn't want to see
her. I never had to fuck her or call her up. She just gave me blow jobs. She
worked during the week and came by on weekends, swinging her long, tweezerlike
legs out of a white convertible Comet, bringing along with her a can of tuna,
five dollars in cash (because she loved me, too) and a bottle of gin.
	We spent idyllic Saturday nights dangling our feet in the pool and
talking about rock and roll trivia before we'd retire to my room for
festivities. One night, as I watched Marlene's white legs distort and curve as
she dangled them under the blue water, I happened to mention that I could never
get married, that it would interfere in my career. She got hysterical. She threw
the bottle of gin in the pool and then jumped in after it. She stood there in
the water, her mascara running down her cheeks, her mouth curved into a big
lump, crying, "I spent two months of my life with you and I've been had! Had!
What do you mean, "You're not getting married'?"
	She went on like that for an hour. Here I had violated her head any
number of times, and I had no intention of making her a legal woman. Not even to
go all the way with her! She walked out on me and I never saw her again.
	Not long after I met Susan Cochran. They called her Susan Starfucker, and
she had attained this fame as far north as San Francisco, where she gave birth
to the child of a famous bass player when she was fourteen and as far south as
Puerto Vallarta, where she ran off with the lead singer of an English rock group
who was hooked on morphine and had to kick. Her baby was four years old, and
Susan still looked only fourteen herself. I had never seen a girl as beautiful
or sexy before in my life, so elegant and confident. I found it unbelievable
that she was going out with me. I was no star, and everybody knew Susan only
fucked stars.
	With a groupie like Susan there was no fooling around with fellatio.
While a leggy little secretary from the valley might have put up with some pop
star's idiosyncrasies, Susan's whole mission was sex. I either took the big
plunge or none at all. I made an agreement with Susan. I made her promise, on
her word of honor, that she would give up fucking other rock stars while she was
with me. In return, I'd try to cut down on my drinking, for Susan had become a
crusader for healthy living since her stay in Puerto Vallarta while her rock
star kicked morphine.
	Glen had also fallen in love. Her name was Ginny, and she was a tall,
auburn-haired girl who worshiped Glen. She talked constantly, a great deal about
rock and roll, and when she wasn't theorizing about the Rolling Stones she was
very giggly, walking around the house like she was stoned, dropping off globs of
giggles and laughter here and there.
	Ginny and Glen shared a glass-enclosed porch on one side of the house
that Glen had quickly boarded up so that he could live in perpetual darkness and
sleep when he wanted. The glass and tile ceiling made the porch a giant echo
chamber, and as soon as Ginny and Glen started fucking, everybody in the house
knew it. A ghostlike chant echoed from the porch as Ginny built to an orgasm.
She always chanted one word, a word she seemed to get stuck on like a phonograph
needle skipping. Usually it was "shooting," which she must found erotic or
descriptive. I'd be alseep in my dungeon (I was attracted to dark, damp places)
when suddenly a deep groaning would come up over the house and soon we were all
chanting in unison with her, waiting for release, "Shootin'', shootin',
shootin'."
	Living with a rock band you get used to not having any privacy. Privacy
is something you don't even think about in a rock band. It's not even part of
your dreams you stock away for when you become famous. You dream of mansions and
boats and houses but never of privacy. My most personal moments were often
reduced to public spectacles and it didn't even occur to me that it was a
bizarre way to live. Eventually it became quite common to see people fucking and
masturbating or going to the toilet.
 	Dennis had his own bedroom for the first time since we had moved out of
Phoenix, but he never told any of the girls about it. He had filled a walk-in
closet in the hallway with mattresses, and when he invited visiting groupies to
his room he took them into the closet. His strategy was that if he took a girl
in there she'd have to be in bed. There was nowhere else.
	My bedroom was in the dungeon of the house. Many years ago it had been
used as a speakeasy, and there was actually a panel in the living room that
became a door when a little buzzer was pushed on the other side. Behind the door
a flight of stone steps led down to a stone-walled cellar where the walls were
painted, all-too-realistically I was afraid, with signatures and dates: "Whitey
- 1926"; Dora and Dolores - 28."
	Mike enlarged his family, too. He got a puppy as a gift the first week we
moved into the house.
	Glen's girlfriend, Ginny, brought her own dog when she moved in, and
suddenly the house was a kennel. The two dogs would shit all over the place, and
Jack would show up in the morning for a crap patrol. He'd call the two dog
owners into the living room and demand a cleanup. A marathon argument would
ensue.
	"That's Yo-yo's shit."
	"No it's not, man. I'm telling you that's your dogshit and you have to
clean it up like a man, man. What a baby, man. It's a little piece of shit.
What's the big deal. Clean it up."
	"That's the point, man. It's a little piece of shit, and my dog shits
bigger. And browner, too, man. I'm telling you. Honest!"
	Michael was head over heels about Suzi Cream Cheese. She had gumdrop
eyes, a big heart, the mind of a stockbroker and the soul of a hustler. She
trusted no one. To Suzi Cream Cheese the world at large was a narc. Suzi had
mastered the art of double-talk, not just the mumbling of disconnected words,
but the grave intonations that went along with it. She gave the impression she
understood something very deep and at the heart of the matter that you were
obviously not getting. She was famous for being eccentric, the only purebred
Warhol person I met in LA.
	Suzi Cream Cheese lived for a time in a log cabin stuck in the woods
behind Frank Zappa's house, and the day before our big contract signing, Mike
and I snuck over there like two kids disobeying daddy's orders. We spent the
evening watching Miss Christine, Suzi, and Pamela bounce off the walls, all very
nutty and charming. We left the cabin near dawn to find the van on a steep
incline, the windshield frosted over with a thick layer of ice. I sat inside
while Mike wiped hard on the windshield with a rag. I guess he wiped a little to
hard. The van started to roll backwards down the hill with me inside and crashed
into Zappa's fourteen-thousand-dollar sports car. Mike ran down the hill after
the van and jumped in just as the lights went on all over the house. Zappa ran
out after us and chased us down the road in his bare feet.
	We were sick with fear for two days, especially when Zappa's office
called that afternoon to say the contact signing was postponed. We waited for
him to call back and cancel altogether, but the following day, as scheduled, we
put our signatures on the dotted line. Either he never knew it was us who
wrecked his car or he never cared.
	In November of 1971 [1968 I guess it's meant to be] we recorded our first
album, Pretties For You. For a week straight we arrived at the studio and played
through every song five or six times with Herbie Cohen and Zappa working over
the levels in the control room. We thought we were just getting down to
business, ready to lay the bed tracks and experiment, when Zappa walked out of
the glass-enclosed booth and said, "Okay. Your album will be ready next
Thursday."
	I said, "There are a few mistakes in that stuff. We weren't even ready to
record," but he just patted me on the shoulder and said, "Not to worry. Not to
worry. We'll work everything out in the mix."
	We didn't see or hear the album until five months later.
	Nighttime was scene-making time for me in LA. Nobody would pay fifty
cents to see us perform but we were first on party guest lists. Instant
celebrities. No fuss, no waiting. Just add recording contract to one rock group
and stir. We met literally thousands of people at these parties.
	We had, unfortunately, the reputation of being the ultra-gay band in Los
Angeles, and there were a few people who took the initiative to find out the
truth and get to know us better. People who did, and got to know us and what we
were about, often became entangled in our madness, possessed with the concept of
Alice Cooper, and wound up deeply involved in our lives for years to come.
	I was at one of those parties lurking in the kitchen. Kitchen lurking was
my favorite pastime. It was compulsion motivated purely by greedy hunger.
Parties were the best place to eat. You could fill up while you were there and
usually find something in the kitchen to take away with you.
	I was rifling through a pantry, tucking away a can of tuna fish into a
tablecloth I wore as a shirt, when I realized a man was watching me. With great
bravado I looked up, walked over to a can opener and opened the can. I ate a
piece of tuna with my fingers and sized up the intruder: blond, impish face,
sleepy and glassy eyes. I offered some tuna to him and he said, "I'm too drunk
to swallow."
	His name was Ashley Pandel, and he was not the host but just another
interloper making the rounds of Los Angeles parties. He understood immediately
what I was doing, went straight to the refrigerator and got out the eggs. "You
should always take eggs," he said. "The protein is good for you."
	"It's too hard to sneak eggs out," I said. He seemed baffled by this for
a moment, then he belched and stumbled backwards a step. "No, there are lots of
places for eggs." He held two and looked around his jeans and T-shirt for a good
place to secret them. The kitchen door opened and we were joined by a couple in
their early thirties who busily went to the cabinets and found a supply of paper
cups and napkin with familiar ease. Ashley took the eggs and hid them under his
arms in his armpits. He stood there blinking at the people with his arms hoisted
a few inches away from his sides like he was about to levitate. By the time they
left the kitchen we were both laughing so hard that he cracked the eggs, and
yolk was running down the sides of his shirt.
	Ashley Pandel became a regular at our house on the hill and a close
friend of the group. Although we would drift apart the coming year, he would
rejoin our group of merry men in 1971. As my personal publicist he became
responsible for much of the press and press reception that Alice Cooper was
given through 1974, when he retired from rock and roll, richer than ever, to
open Ashley's Restaurant on Fifth Avenue in New York, where he nightly throws
baccanalian brawls for the rock industry with eggs under his arms.
	Shep and Joey finally got us a job, which was a small miracle in its own
way. They knew nothing at all about rock and roll. They were learning as they
went along, and not quickly either. This first booking was at an army base in
Denver. As much as Shep swears he did not get the idea out of Gypsy, he billed
us as "Alice Cooper and the Hollywood Blondes." He actually hired four topless
go-go dancers from a strip joint to go out to Denver with us and dance on either
side of the stage.
	I couldn't believe Shep and Joey would subject us to the kind of reaction
we knew we'd provoke at an army base. We were seething. Shep thought the topless
go-go dancers would balance out the show; if the army guys hated us they'd still
have tits and ass to look at. I was so drunk when we got to Denver I couldn't
even stand straight. After two minutes of playing the army guys were on their
feet shouting, "Stop it! You stink! Go Home!" and I yelled, "What do you want
from me? What do you want from my life?" hanging on my microphone stand for
support.

	Except for an odd club date here and there, we spent our days lolling
about the glamorous new house waiting for stardom to pop in on us, or partying
at the Landmark Hotel. There was always something extraordinary going on at the
Landmark, always a mystery to unravel, an adventure to be had. The Landmark was
primarily a rock and roll hotel, a very hip place to live just on the brink of
shabbiness and notoriety.
	The carpeting in the hallways was worn out, not by people going to their
rooms, but by people wandering, stalking the corridors of the hotel like a
tunnel of love. Fresh young women would arrive there every day. They were
usually from the suburbs, round-hipped girls with ex-husbands and unused passion
who wanted to explore the thrilling mile-a-minute world of rock and roll. These
girls were sucked into the Landmark like they were  being ingested into a huge
machine, into the lobby where they checked in, and then, within two months,
pulled from apartment to apartment, getting whatever life-force they started
with draining out of them by the powerful and magic natives who lived behind the
closed doors.
	The Landmark was a gold mine if you were postpecting for heavy egos,
heavy personalities, heavy drugs and heavy sex. People sold everything from
marijuana to cut-rate airplane tickets there. It was scam city. Hustlers row. It
attracted all sorts of restless people on the make, by the hotels' very demands
"transients." Janis Joplin lived and died there. The Chamber Brothers lived
there. The Jefferson Airplane stayed there. Somehow, for a summer, the Ohio
State football team lived there. (Maybe they said they were the Ohio State
football team so they could get laid. It sure did help.) And eventually I lived
there, too.
	If you did not allow yourself to get drawn into the draining whirlpool of
the hotel, if you had no need for any of its attractions except for pure
amusement, the Landmark could be fun. Indeed, it was wonderful. Susan Starfucker
kept a one-room apartment there where she raised her child. Susan did not like
the bedroom I had, down in the dungeon, and even though I had contributed my
coffin to the band's prop department and now slept on a real mattress, Susan
wanted me to stay with her, at the Landmark, where her daughter was.
	Shep introduced me to Janis Joplin by the pool one day. She had played
the Monterey Pop Festival the year before, and was just beginning to face the
hurdles of stardom. Janis warmed to me immediately, probably because of my
clothes.
	"Did you ever see tits like these, man?" she asked me one day at the
pool. Her breasts were covered with a layer of suntan lotion and sweat. I told
her they were the best tits I had ever seen and she found the hysterically
funny. Everybody was so spaced out on drugs at the Landmark that people found
strange things very funny all the time.
	"You wanna sleep with these tits, Cooper? Maybe these tits and another
pair, too? Does that scare you, man?" she hacked out between gales of laughter.
	I told her I loved tits. I told her they were my preference.
	"You're kidding. All you guys say you like chicks, but when the lights go
out you're all sucking cock. That's all right, though. When the lights go out
all the chicks are sucking cunt."
	It was two or three weeks later (Janis had been in and out of the
Landmark and on the road) when I saw her again, this time very anxious to set
her straight about my sexuality.
	"Listen, baby, I didn't mean to upset your ego or anything," she said.
"It's absolutely cool with me if you ball other guys, man. I mean after all. . .
."
	"No, I mean it. Honestly. All of us are straight. We all like girls.
That's all there was in Phoenix. WE brought the only faggots out there with us."
	Janis eyed my skinny body from behind eyes that looked like the bottom of
shot glasses.
	"I'll give you a chance to prove it. You come by my room tonight and I'll
give you a chance to prove it."
	I never got to sleep with Janis, but along with Jim Morrison, Janis had
one of the greatest influences on my drinking habits. She got me off wine and
onto Southern Comfort, which was eventually to lead to Seagram's VO, my constant
friend and traveling companion. I did go to Janis' room that night and many
other nights, but all we ever did was polish off bottles of Southern Comfort and
laugh. Then in the midst of a drunken slur she'd excuse herself and ask me to
leave. I always left right away, without much questioning, because I sensed some
sort of panic settling over her at those times. (Anyway, she could beat me up -
she was a lot bigger than me.)
	I would run into her sometimes when she was stoned on heroin, her eyes
dull mirrors, her body limp and ashen white. She'd be stumbling down the hallway
being held up by a friend and I would rush off in the other direction, too
depressed by the sight to face her. 
	One night I was in her room while Janis pretended to read my tarot cards,
impishly predicting a tragic future "for a strange boy with a girl's name," and
I saw a suitcase sail by her second-storey window. When I told her, she laughed
and said I was drunk. Ten minutes further into my murky future there were two
feet dangling outside the window and we both jumped us as the feet kicked in a
pane of glass. Janis ran up to the window and started tugging on the feet,
yelling, "Oh, you fucking bastard, get out of here!"
	I ran up the firesteps and banged on the door to the apartment above
Janis'. Three guys from the Ohio State football team opened the door, dressed in
their underwear. The room behind them was a mess. One bruiser immediately pushed
down very hard on my right shoulder with his hand and said, "Whataya want?" I
told him somebody was dangling out a window, but I must have had the wrong room.
He slammed the door on my face.
	I rushed back down to Janis' where I was going to look out the window
expecting to see somebody lying dead on the pavement. Instead Janis and the
dangler were sitting on the bed swigging Southern Comfort. Four other panes of
glass had been kicked in and Janis pulled him through the window. He was holding
a dirty, bloody towel to one foot which was leaking blood into the Landmark's
wafer-thin blue carpeting.
	I don't know how or why that scene occurred at the Landmark. An evening
at the Landmark was filled with chaotic segments of wonder: a girl giving birth
on the sofa in the lobby, drowning in the pool, rape, sodomy demonstrations. All
of this, for me, was pervaded with the presence of Susan Starfucker and her
daughter Eva. Eva, the child of the nameless rock musician, was a dolt. I
usually get along well with children - we have the same sensitivity - but I
couldn't warm up to Eva. She was a red-faced, cranky four-year-old, who had the
misfortune of being brought up at the Landmark Hotel. Eva, when she wasn't
throwing temper tantrums, spoke with the vocabulary of a ten-year-old and
painted her fingernails Groupie Green.
	Susan Starfucker was covetous of every moment I spent with Janis Joplin.
It wasn't that she was jealous of Janis, but Janis would get me drunk enough to
only want to roll into the sack and go to sleep. Susan would cry and scream at
me when I knocked on her door at four A.M. looking for bed and head. She looked
just like Eva when she cried like that. She told me that getting drunk with
Janis was just as good as being unfaithful. I couldn't see how these things were
parallel, but Susan said that if I got drunk with Janis our mutual celibacy vow
was off.
	On the nights I was too drunk to get home, too drunk to face Susan, and
in need of cover, I slept in the back seat of cars in the musty concrete garage
beneath the hotel. I woke up many a morning wedged between dirty ashtrays and
Naugahyde seats. My alarm clock was usually somebody banging on the window of
their car, "Hey, creep, get out of the fucking car." Once I woke up and found
Glen sleeping in the front seat of the same car by coincidence.
	My relationship with Susan Starfucker came to an abrupt end that spring.
I actually believed that Susan wasn't sleeping with anybody else, even on her
nights off. She reinforced this belief by constantly reminding that she had
thrown away her address book. An address book to a groupie is like the key to
heaven! Her address book was thrown up to me at many points in our relationship.
"Here you are, too drunk! Too drunk to fuck and I threw away my address book!
Threw it away! My whole life, all those numbers, for you, and show up with a
belly full of booze and a limp dick!"
	One night Susan went down to the lobby to get a pack of cigarettes and
there on the dresser, in full view, was her infamous little black book. I went
through it and found not only names and numbers of every musician in LA, but
dates and scoring. I was smitten. My love, the starfucker, was unfaithful. I was
sure I was filled with disease. How could Susan do this to me?
	When she got back to the room we had a terrible fight. In pleaded with
her to give me an explanation, tell me it wasn't the truth, but she couldn't
believe my melodrama. She said I was becoming to serious.
	"Too serious?" I shouted. (Probably the only time I can remember myself
shouting.) "I'm probably a walking incubator for every venereal disease in LA. I
thought I itched funny!  How could you?"
	I scooped up all the records I had loaned her and left her with Eva. I
went to the garage, crawled into the back seat of an old Cadillac Shep had
purchased the day before, and cried myself to sleep on my Laura Nyro albums.