Thing of Beauty by Stephen Fried Read Free Book Online Page A

rock concerts. They weren’t from around here. She got a Bowie haircut and that changed her personality completely. She seemed like a sweet, young little kid before, and then afterward … well, you know it probably had something to do with the drugs. She would be disrespectful, she would be constantly fighting, just over nothing. And she’d be very rebellious. You’d say, ‘Be home at ten o’clock,’ and she’d come home the next day.”
    But that was the way it was for many of the kids caught up in the glitter crowd, some of whom had yet to actually
see
this creature David Bowie perform. They viewed Bowie—not just his records and his image, but the whole scene he was musically documenting—as the doorkeeper to a new world that really was brave.
    Joe McDevit was converted at The Tunnel at Cottmann and Bustleton, where teen dances were held on Saturday nights. It was there that the blond, broad-shouldered forklift operator—a seventeen-year-old Catholic school dropout—was first inspired by a friend with a Bowie-do and a rhinestone shirt.
    “Next thing I knew, I shaved my eyebrows off, hit the sewing machine to make glitter clothes and found out about this man in Hialeah, Florida, who made custom platform shoes,” McDevit recalled. “I sent him a tracing of my foot and ordered a pair with eleven-inch heels and eight-inch platforms, navy blue with silver lightning bolts down theside. They came in the mail, a hundred five dollars—I had to work two weeks to pay for them. In a matter of weeks, I went from a normal kid who played baseball at the local field to parading around in full drag. Suddenly, I was bisexual. I had a steady girlfriend, and my boyfriends were all neighborhood kids who played on the baseball team.”
    McDevit’s first Bowie concert was also his debut to the Delaware Valley’s David throng as a fanatic to be reckoned with. “We camped out for a week for tickets,” McDevit recalled. “And I had a friend of mine whip up a silver lamé space suit, with a blue lamé jock strap attached to the jacket. I remember waiting for Bowie to come on stage for
my
entrance. I felt so special. He was on stage singing and I walked down the aisle. They put the spotlight on me and I started throwing kisses.” On that night, Joe McDevit became “Joey Bowie.”
    For others, the evolution was less theatrical. “The way I remember it,” recalled one friend of Gia’s, “I was a little kid watching
The Brady Bunch
one day and the next day I was in a bar with a Quaalude, even though I was only fourteen. It was just a very crazy time to be in high school. I remember staying out all night on a weeknight and then hailing a cab to take me straight to school from the clubs.”
    The Bowie crowd at Lincoln, though small, quickly developed its own hierarchy and heroes. Although it was mostly girls—a male took a much higher risk coming to school wearing makeup—the leader of the pack was Ronnie Johnson, * a sixteen-year-old dead ringer for Bowie. Ronnie wasn’t so much the ultimate Bowie fanatic. Ronnie Johnson
was
David Bowie—or as close as you could get and still have a locker at Lincoln. He designed and sewed his own Bowie-inspired clothes: did his own embroidery, affixed his own sequins. He combed the high fashion magazines for the latest trends in hair, makeup and clothing. He understood that Bowie’s outfits, extraterrestrial to girls who shopped inmalls, were merely the most futuristic designs of top European and Oriental dressmakers.
    Ronnie and Gia immediately hit it off. When they saw each other, Gia made it a point to bite Ronnie, as a sign of playfully outrageous affection. Besides Bowie, they shared the bond of emotional, broken homes. “His father left the family when he was like three,” recalled one of Johnson’s high school friends. “And his mother was this
wild
woman, a waitress at the diner.”
    And Ronnie and Gia had something else in common. The Bowie kids did a lot of sexual posturing.