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

Bowie was bisexual so, at least in theory, they were, too: they cross-dressed, they cross-flirted. In practice, however, few of them did in private what they claimed to do in public. And some of them didn’t do anything at all. All of which made life that much more confusing for people like Gia and Ronnie, who, deep inside, suspected that they really were gay, and wanted to do something about it.
    The reinvented Gia who Karen Karuza met was still basically a quiet girl who did not yet possess great beauty. Still, there was something about her that drew attention and made people stare: even the severe Bowie haircut couldn’t dilute her visual appeal. Young men and women alike were stunned by the way she looked, her wicked grin, her perfectly squared shoulders, the utter fearlessness in her gait, the sad burn behind her wide eyes. She smoked Marlboros with cool distance and danced with abandon. At thirteen, she had already found in herself a seductive posture that made people want to break rules for her.
    Nobody knew her from conversation. A dispassionate “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” a laugh and a shrug were her responses to most situations. She was personably vague one-on-one, and even her closest relationships were shallow. She rarely shared personal details with anyone. “She never talked about her family life or anything,” recalled one friend. “You know how teenage girls whine and cry about their moms? She would
never
do it.”
    At fourteen, she was already becoming a sort of icon to those who saw her walking in the school hallways or working behind the counter in her father’s shop. She was a first crushfor many teenagers at Lincoln—male
and
female—and her shirt with the fabric hands wrapped around it would, years later, remain an indelible image of growing up in the early seventies. But she did what she could to defuse that sort of attention.
    “I was sitting in a class once,” recalled one close friend, “and I heard a voice yell, ‘Yo, Ellen.’ I looked out the window, toward the window of the
boys’ bathroom
across the courtyard, and there was Gia’s ass sticking out. She was a wild child.”
    “It was great at Lincoln,” Gia would later recount. “I guess they remember me because I used to chuck moons out the window all the time. It was real fun. Nobody knew my face, but they sure remember my ass.”
    But along with the outrageous antics were telling gestures of friendship and affection: the Bowie card, homemade cookies thrust into the hands of someone she barely knew, flowers and handwritten poems delivered to startled girls she hoped to woo. In most cases Gia was both wealthier and a few years younger than those she spent time with, so she often seemed to be trying especially hard to fit in. Her handwriting and spelling resembled that of a grade-schooler, even though she wrote incessantly, practicing her name or copying down lyrics to her favorite songs. She liked to give people silly nicknames and dropped dopey terms like “okie-dokie” into conversation. Her enthusiasms for anything from the sound of traffic to the pure junk-food joy of an oily steak sandwich suggested to her friends that Gia possessed some heightened sensitivity.
    Karen and Gia were in completely different programs at Lincoln. The only course they had in common was art, which was primarily an exercise in trying to make each class assignment fit a drawing of Bowie or an analysis of his lyrics. While Karen was college bound, Gia was struggling to pass the basic courses. She was the kind of student the school systems were seeing more of: kids who, a generation before, would probably have dropped out and gotten jobs because classrooms had nothing to offer them. Now, they just showed up for school: to fulfill parental dreams of having children who graduated the way they never had, or simplyto be baby-sat by the system. They were the ones who accurately answered “present” when roll was called.
    At Lincoln, a half-dozen or so girls