Let Me Tell You About Me and David Bowie
I was probably 12 when my Aunt Rita took me and my cousins to Books-A-Million in Tallahassee, and rummaging through a discount bin I found a David Bowie biography with a black and white cover. I think I was probably looking for dirty jokes books and this one proved to be nothing but. In the few minutes I was standing there, I learned what a menage a trois was as he described all the games he and Iman loved to play with people.
In my late 20s, there was a six month period where every single morning I began the day by turning on Under Pressure as loud as possible at the same moment I was shooting opioids and then getting into the hottest shower I could stand to blast my head clear of cobwebs, before heading to work at a church.
At the end of the six months the romance of it all turned dark so I stopped listening, but a year later, when I went to kick, in complete isolation with almost no one knowing what I was doing or how much pain I was in (walking to the church up a long hill every morning, reflecting on Golgotha), Under Pressure measured my steps along College Avenue from Franklin to the top of what felt like a mountain.
During that period and ever since, when Under Pressure comes on and people start dancing, I kind of laugh to myself that “I think I might own this one.”
I don’t say Trickster: I say Bowie.
I don’t say Glam: I say Bowie.
David Bowie taught me a different hat could change the whole world.
Fist bump to the stars, mate.
