Chapter Ten

There wasn't a promoter in the country who would have us on stage. After the
chicken incident we had a dual reputation: not only were we bad, we were
dangerous. We were a treat to the music business. We would give rock and roll a
bad name. The reaction was the same everywhere, from record company executives
to other musicians. They were outraged. We obviously didn't belong. What the
fuck was a band doing dressing up in drag and killing chickens? Anything for a
buck?
	Janis Joplin's manager, Albert Grossman, let it be known that he wouldn't
let us onstage with her. We went to Washington, D.C., for a concert and the
Grateful Dead refused to let us use their sound system. Grace Slick insisted we
be allowed to go on or she and Jefferson Airplane would refuse to play.
	Alan Strahl didn't even want the headache of handling us anymore. He was
thinking about retiring and moving to Jamaica. He didn't need to break his ass
peddling a rock group that everybody hated. He handled the most expensive and
prestigious groups in the country, and Alice Cooper was making him lose his
credibility. One promoter told him he could take all of IFA's rock acts and
shove them if he had to book Alice Cooper as an opening act as part of the
package deal. That's a ten-million-dollar shove and a lot of bad vibes. 
	When we went back to Los Angeles for the first time in seven months the
John Phillip Law house was full of strange people, a rock group called the Doak
Savages, and all our belongings were gone. We had been moved out. Jack had been
fired. He had told John Phillip Law that we had moved out seven months ago and
pocketed the rent money ever since.
	We moved instead into three furnished rooms at 2001 North Ivar, in
Hollywood. The rooms were dumpy and depressing, with two double beds in each
room that we had to share. It was a long way from the pop star house and
swimming pool and a hard homecoming.
	Alan Strahl finally found a promoter who had never heard of us and needed
an inexpensive rock band to open a new coliseum in Las Vegas. Las Vegas seemed
the least likely place for us to play, but it was $1,500 for the night and not a
long drive from LA. It turned out we were opening the show for "A Group Called
Smith." They were a family act, like the King Family, and they had scores of
children who locked themselves in the dressing room when they saw us coming. The
audience loathed us.
	The only possible shot left for us was to come up with a hit album, which
we had as much chance of doing at that time as going to the moon. First of all,
Zappa wasn't anxious to spend money recording again. He had no interest in us
anymore. I lost contact with Zappa at that point. He was a terrific friend but a
mean businessman. As things got progressively sticky, I ducked out and let Shep
and Joey handle him. We hired our own producer, David Briggs, and finally
recorded a second LP, Easy Action, with Herbie Cohen sitting in as executive
producer. The record went very badly. We had poor material and no enthusiasm. By
the time we got to the final mix I knew it was all over for us. On a penniless
Thanksgiving morning Cindy arrived from Detroit and my parents came in from
Phoenix. We ate turkey in the spooky room at 2001 North Ivar and my mother's
eyes filled with tears when she saw how I lived and the way I looked. In the
beginning of December Shep and Joey left for New York, to stay there
indefinitely. They stopped paying rent for us at 2001 North Ivar. We all packed
it in and went home to Phoenix.
	I told everyone we had taken a month off before we started a
cross-country tour. I told everyone from Jack Curtis to old schoolteachers that
Easy Action would soon be a hit record, and they all nodded and clucked. My
parents went along with me, but they knew I was lying. Nickie didn't know what
to say. She avoided looking me in the eye for a week. I brought Cindy home with
me which didn't make my parents happy. Now that it was over - this business of
being a rock star - Cindy should have been over, too, they thought.
	Nickie said that gossip in Phoenix was buzzing that the five of us had
come home. The story was we had all become drug freaks, and me a sex-change. LA
had ruined us. The church members couldn't wait to get a look at 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.