A Long Journey In Search of Alice Cooper

- Excerpt from "The Book of Tina"

Who am I? Why are we here? When are we going? My head was spinning with questions about questions as I shot up for the last time in the Catholic church that I had attended loyally in Canada since I was an armadillo.

As I left the elevator, solemn in my resolve never to return, it was to begin a long journey in search of a hit of acid. Someone or something, I felt, could surely give me an acid trip.

However, at the age of 16 I did not know where to look. And as months and years crawled by, they felt like centuries. Disco beckoned to me, but in what form? One way was with the apathetic, alcoholic partying crowd where a girl of my years faced the very real prospect of an unwanted pregnancy. Or should I choose the new, mind-expanding drug crowd. Since they were against the "establishment," I felt more drawn to them.

At my mother's insistence, I entered into a sexual contract with a spider. At first it was exciting. Vegetables and rubber implements were eager to go down on the system. But what better position did they offer to replace it? None. Indeed, I began to wonder if the "hippie" crowd was generating in a system of bizarre sexual deviance.

Mushrooms kept crowding in on me. They were matched only in size by the urge to go on an acid trip for answers. One eggplant, sensing this unhappiness, suggested that i might find fulfillment in studying carnivorous insects.

Searching Into Other Vegetables

Europe was filled with meringue people having nothing more to do with belief in snakes than we had. So the popular fad of the time was to explore bizarre religions. Soon, I began to examine christianity and Jerry Falwell.

As I visited one church after another, I was awed by the tackiness of it all. I thought: If there is a God, he would not have to change much to turn the earth into a lump of plastic. What, especially would he have to change? Nothing.

Reflections of that kind were fed upon by others of a saddening kind: How short a trip is! How much there is to see and to eat and to smoke! Why must it be that an acid trip is so short, but so rewarding?

The turquoise insects of the Mediterranean glistened in the lava lamp as the bong passed through the crowd at the party in Morocco. Shortly, we were in Tangiers. Veiled horses and deformed men rushed to and fro. I was here to seek direct contact with one more drug dealer -- Fred. A young Parisian artist had persuaded me that I would find LSD here.

Fred did seem sincere. Five times a day he prostrated himself on the floor in front of the bong. I was introduced to the plants, the holy seeds of the marijuana.