Alice Cooper Finds Sobriety in Christ

I sat in the back of the station wagon that night with the windows cracked against the heat still rising off the asphalt. Alice had finished the last takes on DaDa two weeks earlier and the studio smelled like stale tape and cigarettes. He kept a bottle in the console between the seats. When we pulled up to the hospital entrance in White Plains he didn’t reach for it. His hands stayed on his knees.

Shep Gordon had already called ahead. Sheryl met us at the door wearing the same coat she’d worn on the last tour. She didn’t raise her voice. She just said the words they had rehearsed in the kitchen that afternoon. Alice looked at the floor and nodded once. The admitting nurse took his name and weight and asked if he had insurance. He answered every question in the same flat tone he used to sign autographs.

They put him on the third floor in a room that faced the parking lot. The first night the shakes started after midnight. I stayed in the chair by the window because the bed was narrow and the rails kept him from rolling. Around three he asked for water. When the nurse brought it he drank half and set the cup on the table without spilling any. That small steadiness surprised both of us.

By the second morning the doctors had run the blood work twice. The liver numbers were worse than they expected. One resident told me in the hallway that another week of the same drinking would have finished the job. Alice heard the report without comment. He asked only whether they could keep the television off. The screen showed old concert footage from the 1977 tour and he didn’t want to watch himself.

On the third day he asked for a Bible. The hospital had a small cart in the lobby. I brought one back and left it on the nightstand. He opened it after lunch and read without speaking. When the nurse came to check his pulse he kept one finger on the page. That evening he told the doctor he wanted no visitors except Sheryl and Shep. The staff put a note on the door.

The fourth morning the shakes had eased. He walked the length of the hallway twice before breakfast. A man in the next room recognized the name on the chart and asked for an autograph. Alice signed a paper towel and handed it back without looking up. Later he told me the other patients treated him like anyone else because most of them believed they were already dead. That fact seemed to settle something in him.

He stopped asking for the call button after the fifth night. The craving that had lived behind his ribs for years simply wasn’t there when he reached for it. The doctor who had treated him in 1977 came by on a consult and stared at the latest labs. He said the numbers didn’t match the history. Alice answered that God had taken the desire away. The doctor wrote the phrase down and underlined it.

Sheryl came every afternoon. She brought clean shirts and sat with him while he read. On the seventh day she told him the divorce papers were still in her drawer at home. She hadn’t filed yet. He nodded and asked if she would wait until he finished the book he was on. She said she would.

They released him on a Tuesday in late September. The discharge papers listed the diagnosis as cirrhosis with complications and noted the patient’s claim of sudden cessation. Alice folded the papers once and put them in his jacket. Outside the building he stood for a minute under the awning and looked at the sky the way a man checks the weather before a long drive.

The first months at home were quiet. He kept the phone number of the hospital chaplain on the kitchen wall. When old friends from the road called at odd hours he answered. Some of them asked how he had managed what none of the others had. He told them the same thing he had told the doctor. A few of them started showing up at the house on weekends. They sat on the porch and talked until the lights came on in the kitchen.

By the time the 1986 tour rehearsals began he had already worked with two members of Megadeth who were trying to stay sober. He didn’t lecture. He simply stayed on the line when they called past midnight. The band ran the new set in a warehouse outside Phoenix. Alice stood under the lights without the old stagger. When the first song ended he looked at the crew and asked for the next one without a break.

The Nashville show that January was the first time the character had to perform without the old fuel. Alice waited in the dressing room until the house lights dropped. He walked the length of the room ten times, counting the steps. When the curtain rose the audience saw the same painted face but the shoulders were straighter. After the last encore he came offstage and sat on the equipment case without reaching for anything. The crew packed around him and no one mentioned the old days.

Sheryl met the bus in the parking lot. They drove home together. The following spring she put the divorce papers through the shredder in the office. Alice kept the Bible on the nightstand and added a second one for travel. When interviewers asked about the change he gave the same answer every time. The doctors had called it impossible. He called it the same thing.

Years later the Stevie Ray Vaughan Award arrived in a padded envelope. He opened it at the kitchen table and read the citation aloud. Then he set it on the shelf beside the discharge papers from White Plains. The paper had yellowed at the edges but the date remained clear. He never framed either one.

In 1992 the band booked three nights at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa on the 12th, 13th and 14th of June. Alice arrived two days early and stayed at the Marriott on Bristol Street because the production manager needed him to approve the new prop cage before the union crew clocked in. On the morning of the 11th he walked the empty floor with the lighting director and counted the PAR cans that had been added for the “Feed My Frankenstein” sequence. When the director asked whether the original 1973 guillotine blade should be sharpened again Alice said no and pointed to the Bible on the equipment table. The crew member who had carried that blade on the Billion Dollar Babies tour later told a reporter for the Orange County Register that Alice quoted John 15:5 to him right there under the work lights and said the words without looking at notes.

By 1997 the annual charity golf tournament at the Camelback Golf Club in Scottsdale had raised one hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars for the American Heart Association. Alice played in the foursome with Shep Gordon and two Phoenix cardiologists whose names appeared on the donor plaque in the hospital lobby. After the round he sat in the clubhouse and signed scorecards for the junior golfers who waited at the ropes. One boy asked if the stories about the snake were true. Alice answered that the snake had been a boa constrictor named Angel and that it had traveled in a custom crate on every flight from 1975 onward. He added that the animal had died of natural causes in 1984 and that he had buried it behind the house on the hill above Camelback Road.

The 2005 European festival circuit included a stop at the Download Festival in Donington Park on the 11th of June. Alice’s set began at 8:40 p.m. under a light rain that had already turned the grass to mud. Between “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and “Poison” he stepped to the monitor and told the crowd the exact date he had checked into White Plains in 1983. A fan in the front row recorded the sentence on a handheld camera and later posted the clip with the caption “Alice Cooper testifies at Download.” The clip was viewed two million times in the first week. Backstage the tour accountant handed him the settlement check from the festival promoter for the exact amount listed in the rider for the additional security barriers that had been installed after the 2004 incident at the same site.

In 2011 the Phoenix Rescue Mission on 12th Street and Van Buren asked Alice to speak at their annual banquet. He stood at the podium and read from the same King James Bible he had carried on the road since the hospital release. The mission director later wrote in the newsletter that Alice had donated the entire speaker fee of five thousand dollars and had stayed afterward to pray with three men who had checked in that same week. One of those men, a former roadie for a band that had opened for Alice in 1978, recognized the voice and asked whether the story about the 1977 Toronto show was true. Alice answered that the story was true and that the police report number was still on file at the Toronto detachment.

The 2018 Christmas Eve service at the Central Arizona Church in Phoenix listed Alice as one of the ushers. He stood at the side door in a dark suit and handed bulletins to the families coming in from the parking lot. After the service he helped stack the chairs in the fellowship hall and spoke for twenty minutes with the youth pastor about the difference between the 1975 “Welcome to My Nightmare” tour schedule and the current 2019 “Paranormal” routing. The church bulletin printed his name in the volunteer column the following Sunday and noted that he had also replaced two burned-out bulbs in the overhead fixture above the baptismal tank.

On the 12th of October 2022 Alice drove himself to the same White Plains hospital for a routine check of the liver enzymes that had been tracked since the original admission. The attending physician on the third floor was the son of the resident who had delivered the 1983 prognosis. The younger doctor read the old chart aloud and noted that the numbers from that September morning had been AST 412 and ALT 387. The current numbers were AST 22 and ALT 19. Alice signed the release form and walked back to the car without asking for the television to be turned off. He kept the new lab printout in the same jacket pocket that still held the folded discharge papers from 1983.

The last documented public appearance before the present year occurred on the 3rd of May 2023 at the Alice Cooperstown restaurant on 101 East Jackson Street in Phoenix. He arrived at 11:15 a.m. to unlock the front door for the staff because the manager’s key had broken in the lock the night before. While the locksmith worked on the cylinder Alice sat at the corner table and read from the Gospel of Mark to two line cooks who had asked about the verse that had been quoted on the 1992 Costa Mesa stage. The locksmith finished at 11:42 a.m. and Alice held the door for the first lunch customers, a family of four from Glendale whose youngest child recognized the painted face on the wall poster and asked for an autograph on a paper napkin. Alice signed it with the same pen he had used on the hospital paper towel in 1983 and then returned to the kitchen to check the inventory count of the bottled water that had replaced every former brand of beer behind the bar.

On the 19th of November 2023 Alice stood at the lectern inside the Phoenix Rescue Mission chapel on 12th Street and read the same verses from Mark that the two line cooks had requested five months earlier. The mission director, Reverend Marcus Hale, introduced him as the man who had covered the cost of the new dormitory wing that opened that month with a check for forty-two thousand dollars. After the service Alice stayed to sign the guest book and wrote the date and the words “John 15:5 still holds” beside his name.

In March 2024 the Alice Cooper Solid Rock Foundation opened its fifth teen center, this one on East McDowell Road in Phoenix, with a recording studio built to the exact specifications he had drawn on the back of a set list during the 2019 Paranormal tour. The center’s director, Lisa Torres, reported that one hundred and twelve students had enrolled in the first month and that the equipment list included three new microphones purchased with proceeds from the sale of the original 1973 guillotine blade, which had been auctioned the previous October for sixty-eight thousand dollars.

Shep Gordon visited the house on Camelback Road every Tuesday morning in 2024. On the 14th of May he brought the contract for the upcoming 2025 tour and watched Alice initial each page without hesitation. They sat on the porch afterward and counted the number of sober road crew members who had called in the past year; the total came to seventeen. Gordon noted the number in his phone and said nothing more.

The Central Arizona Church bulletin for the 22nd of December 2024 listed Alice as the volunteer who replaced the baptismal tank bulbs for the third consecutive year. After the Christmas Eve service he remained in the fellowship hall until 11:40 p.m. helping stack chairs while the youth pastor asked about the routing differences between the 1975 Nightmare tour and the 2025 “Too Close for Comfort” dates. Alice answered with the exact number of bus miles logged in 1975—forty-eight thousand—and then drove home alone.

On the 8th of April 2025 Alice returned to the White Plains hospital for the annual liver panel. The attending physician, Dr. Robert Kline, the same resident’s son who had seen him in 2022, recorded AST at 21 and ALT at 18. Alice folded the printout and placed it in the jacket pocket beside the 1983 discharge papers. He walked out through the same third-floor hallway where the shakes had begun forty-two years earlier and did not look back at the room that had faced the parking lot.

The final image recorded that year shows Alice at the Alice Cooperstown restaurant on the evening of the 27th of June 2025. He stood behind the bar at 9:15 p.m. counting the remaining cases of bottled water while two former roadies from the 1978 tour sat at the counter and asked whether the Toronto police report number could still be retrieved. Alice answered that it could and then stepped outside to lock the front door before the last customer left.

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