For Those Shackled by Conformity, Bowie Provided the Key

He was the Thin White Duke, the most glamorous man I’d ever seen. More glamorous than Bianca Jagger, and that was saying something in those Studio 54 years of excess, glimpsed as a child from the Midwest, eyes wide as pie pans gulping Andy Warholian nights and Yves Saint Laurent luxe fashion from Time and W’s pages.

He was also Ziggy Stardust, the oddest thing I’d ever set my mind to. With those damned Spiders from Mars. Defying gravity, and then some.

Mark Newell’s basement in University Heights, Ohio is where I first saw the pictures and albums of the impossibly thin man in the wild colors, the shiny fabrics, the fluorescent unnatural hair color. Mark was the by-product of another marriage washed out, living in low dollar exile, stuck with a kid belonging to a friend of his mothers who he had zero interest in, but had to deal with. In the tatters of Mark’s former life, Bowie was something we could share.

I couldn’t look away. I knew Fame from the radio with its stop-start beats, the bottom falling out of the song part way through, the high water flume of a vocal challenging the notion of faux notoriety that would become the 21st century’s drug of choice. But I wasn’t prepared for how odd — and thrilling — Bowie was. I had absolutely no reference point in my Midwestern childhood.

Bowie fascinated me in ways I couldn’t understand in a world of mommies in Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dresses drinking gallons of Paul Mason Chablis with the whispers of key parties and the local late night discos where the white powder wasn’t powdered sugar — or something I’d ever see.

Pointy teeth. Deathly pallor. Impossible grace in the way he moved. That was the beauty of Bowie, he transmuted everybody, everything — and transcended expectation, regimentation, how it’s done. He followed the art, he defined fashion, he created the waves and rolls that existed only inside his head. And what curls they were: Wave, Heroes, Let’s Dance, Scary Monsters as well as collaborators...