You Never Told Me of Your Other Faces: David Bowie and Self-Invention, 1983

      In July of 1983-- the year that Let's Dance was released, David Bowie's most successful album then or afterward--I awaited what would be one of four sold-out performances at Philadelphia's charmless Spectrum stadium. Freshly transfigured for the so-called Serious Moonlight tour, Bowie was in the midst of his greatest career success, and, except for Michael Jackson, no one was bigger. It was the year of Thriller and Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues, R.E.M.'s debut Murmur and Elvis Costello's Punch the Clock. John Lennon was two years dead, Sting had tired of the Police, and Madonna wasn't yet the Material Girl who'd define the '80's. Without cable in those days, I'd catch MTV at a friend's, watching Cyndi Lauper chirp that girls just wanted to have fun, in a video that, like the times, was all motion and garish color, an impossible, exhilarating flight into mere surface.
        With two films--The Hunger and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence--released the same year as Let's Dance, Bowie's success in different fields had produced a synergy, the kind of groundswell publicists like to call "momentum."  With a second British Invasion decisively underway, fuelled in part by MTV, then still a thrilling novelty, followers like Culture Club wore Bowie's influence on their sleeve--their clothes and eyeshadow as well--prompting new appreciation for Bowie's place in art rock history; clearly, the singer had come a long way since he'd first surfaced in the '60's. A child born "out of wedlock" whose half-brother was schizophrenic, he'd fled working-class Brixton in an ever changing guise: forced to forfeit his real name when the shortest of the Monkees, Davy Jones, became famous first, David Jones became David Bowie, a Kinks or Anthony Newley clone, then, by 1969, Britain's answer to Bob Dylan when "Space Oddity" served the U.K. as the first moon landing's soundtrack, its strum a haunting counterpoint to sand and crater.  Even as the '60's waned, Bowie's identity was fluid, his true face still elusive, while his penchant for self-invention would fascinate or disturb for years to come.
        Among those fascinated in the summer of '83, I lived in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, a Main Line town outside of Philly, in a third-floor rented room that let me look down on the neighbors. It was the only way I could look down. At twenty-three I'd ended my second year as a grad student in English--sometimes I even turned in papers--but, mostly, I wrote poems, filling up several notebooks, copying lines then crossing them out, clacking out quirky stanzas on an electric typewriter. To paraphrase Elvis Costello, every day I wrote the book, blowing or brushing away eraser dust stuck to corrasable paper, mailing envelopes stamped with postage my student loans had paid for. But these dreams of publication came to nothing for long months, and every afternoon that I found a returned submission in my hands, I wondered how much time I'd wasted, how much I had left to waste, and why the grail of a scholar's life now offered only bitter dregs.
        What, I wondered, had gone wrong? Only the previous year, Jim Anders, my best friend at the time--blue-eyed, strikingly handsome, with dark brown curly hair--had turned in a paper called "The Dissociation of Dissociation"; the next semester, he'd flunked out, though we continued to be close. It was he, with girlfriend Carla, who'd acquired the Bowie tickets. Jim had found a calling in his talents as a cook and now worked in the restaurant business, an industry that offered him no lack of female company. Jim had promised, eyebrow arched, to fix me up with Carla's friend, a prospect that right then both frightened and elated me: since graduating from college I'd had no steady girlfriend (usually, none at all), those golden years fading further into the past. Why couldn't I bounce back? That summer, of all the lines I knew by heart from Bowie's canon, "Don't let me hear you say life's/taking you nowhere" was, to my regret, the most fitting at the time.
       In many ways, mine was the typical post-adolescent slump but, also, something more: that summer capped an identity crisis forged ten years before, when my mother Betty had sat me down and revealed I was adopted. It's hard to convey the depth of such a shift in cosmic axis, shattering at the time and insidious in its aftershocks. Her sister Elaine was my real mother, but, worse, "Uncle" Don--a towering know-it-all--was my biological father (he and Elaine had not yet wed by the time that I was born, faced with the stubborn obstacle of Elaine's still-undissolved first marriage). Only a few months earlier, I'd  discovered David Bowie, Space Oddity's U. S. re-release reviewed in Long Island's Newsday. As I sat across from Betty, tears falling down her face, the kitchen bright with April sunlight, I felt a lot as I imagined Major Tom would feel: cast adrift in starry darkness, floating helplessly in space.

        Now, for only the second time, I'd see Major Tom himself, or whoever Bowie was this year--not Ziggy Stardust, ageless, genderless, post-apocalyptic spaceman, nor the cocaine-ravaged crooner of his Station to Station phase, but a new face even his intimates had only seldom glimpsed: David Bowie, Normal Guy, millionaire superstar and father, who'd left the edgy soundscapes of 1980's Scary Monsters for a "modern big band sound" of genuine saxophones and horns. You had to already love his music to notice that of a mere eight songs, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" had originated on a soundtrack; that a faster, weirder "China Girl" had graced Iggy Pop's The Idiot (Pop's seminal Bowie collaboration); or that Duncan Browne and Peter Godwin's standout "Criminal World" had opened their band Metro's all-but-forgotten debut, its lyrics now mildly sanitized for Bowie's mass-market ambitions. Like the loyal fan I imagined myself to be, I should've been happy that Major Tom was now a worldwide success, but, instead, I felt uneasy--as if the public and mass media had conspired to reward him only at the evidence of his decline.
      Maybe only I had noticed. Let's Dance sounded great--most reviews were filled with praise--each track polished and imaginatively arranged; even the lyrics were good, all despite the nagging doubt I couldn't quite identify. It was the same feeling I got when I retrieved from the day's mail some short note from Elaine (close to Easter, perhaps, or Christmas), with a photo of her and Don with both their sons on some occasion--the sons they'd had after marriage, sons they hadn't given away--on Long Island, or in St. Croix, swimmers' bodies tanned and fit. By the summer of '83, Betty was dead almost six years; Carmine, my adoptive dad, was now a widower and plumber who held no hope of retirement, let alone a paid vacation. I remembered he'd worked for Don during layoffs in the '70's but having completed several jobs for only five dollars an hour (even then a paltry wage) he'd outlived his usefulness, and at that point my father Don chose to fire my father Carmine, having expanded his thriving business at a fraction of the cost.

        The night of the concert, I sat in the back of Jim's mid-'60's Mercedes, not a classic at the time but merely a good used car; Carla, blonde hair cropped, talked and smiled as we drove, Jim cracked his usual put-downs at her or my expense, Bowie sang out from the tape deck, and I felt the kind of hope no single evening can sustain.
        Carla's friend was beautiful, or so she seemed that night: the heavy dark green door clamped shut, and there she was, right next to me, brown hair swinging past her back, her perfume strong, her own smell stronger. Her life's ambition was to photograph rock stars for Rolling Stone, though her camera didn't look like one professionals would use--but what did I know about photography? She and Carla laughed in greeting, Jim applied his usual charm, while Lisa asked offhandedly, within five minutes of joining us, would I re-tie her halter top?
        It was, to my chagrin, the last thing she would ask of me. I must have sounded flustered, fumbled some fundamental small talk, or showed no clear proficiency in firmly tying knots, but long before we'd reached the Spectrum, I knew the night was lost: Lisa felt not the slightest tingle of romantic interest and, worse, refused to spare, unlike most trapped on failed dates, even the faintest effort to sustain a polite exchange. From the moment we left the car to the moment we took our seats in a mezzanine so high the distant stage looked like a postcard, Lisa wound her path away from anywhere I could approach, her distaste for me consuming and complete.
        To no avail, Jim tried to joke me out of my despair, Carla and Lisa seated together, talking--mercifully--out of earshot. And, suddenly, applause exploding, David Bowie took the stage (had there been an opening act?) further away than I'd first seen him on the Station to Station tour, Thin White Duke in a black waistcoat at the Nassau Coliseum. Now, he'd reversed the image: dressed in a white suit that looked blue, hair gleaming platinum, Bowie swayed, tilting the mic stand, flanked by figures in columns of light--flashing gold, then red, then blue--who harmonized, "We could be 'heroes'..." to an audience in darkness.
        What went wrong?  I wondered. And what else, up on stage, felt spectacularly off kilter? Intuitively I knew: of all his incarnations, brave, bisexual, or bizarre, this new mask was least honest: Bowie in 1983 had stripped himself of all pretension, a stance that struck me even then as a pretension less persuasive. The public "David Bowie" was someone David Jones had made, twisted into shape, renamed, and yet, beyond all flux, someone oddly genuine, image resculpted and revised but fashioned from the same concerns: Aladdin Sane ("a lad insane") who feared his brother's slide toward madness, the Cracked Actor who shrank from old age and the fading of his powers, the musician who dubbed his publisher "Bewlay Brothers Music" with thoughts of the same half-brother who, alive the night of the concert, would by 1985 escape his hospital's confinement to die a suicide beneath a London train. As Bowie sang obliquely in 1971, not of some invented person but of someone that he loved,  "Now my brother lies upon the rocks/he could be dead, he could be not," the end Bowie foresaw both troubling and inevitable.
        But to praise the singer's masks is to choose our own reflection: who we are, or hope to be, our dreams revealed by what we praise. The night's rejection aside, why was I disappointed, really? That Bowie could so deftly shatter and reconstruct a self was my own dilemma writ large: his identity was fluid, but controlled, at least on stage, while my failed, flailing self conveyed uncertainty and doubt. Bowie had conquered; I had lost. He commanded; I turned back, and no effort at glib diversions, spoken aloud or set to verse, could bring sufficient clarity to an identity so blurred. At twenty-three, I was a stranger to myself and friends, my adoption an awkward secret, my whole life built on a lie. Even my name was false, one neither chosen nor freely given, but an amalgam of the name Elaine required that I carry and the surname of the man who'd offered me his love and home.
       Only years later would I recognize this classic adoptive crisis, this need to live, and fear of living what are, essentially, two lives. One life the world approves--that of grateful foster child who rightly banishes the past--but the shadow-life he might have led but for abandonment still trails below the surface, acknowledged or denied. One life is built on love, a shared past, and security, the other on ambivalence, biology, and grief, but neither is whole enough to exist without the other. Only by reconciling these lives can an adopted person thrive. Bowie wasn't even adopted, yet he'd mastered a self-invention that, so far, eluded me. As I would one day need to do, he'd transcended his beginnings: left the working class behind, swallowed his grief for those he'd lost, and emerged the stronger for it.  Yet, for Bowie, this wasn't enough: he mocked his own self-reinvention by refusing to stop there--indeed, by making metamorphosis the mark of his career. He knew: the moment he held the grail, hero and quest would lose all interest; it was the classic arc of many a star's decline into irrelevance. But Bowie was smart: like the Beatles, he'd destroy one public mask, only to reappear months later in some surprising incarnation. The risk was high--a new face, after all, might prove his own undoing--yet so, too, were the rewards when he succeeded.
        By contrast, my own quest had stalled before it had begun. That summer night, leaving the Spectrum, stars visible in the sky, I wondered what future lay ahead--for me, for all of us? Some nights I could imagine Reagan's lasers orbiting, a shield to keep the free world safe, their bright beams shooting down stray missiles-- fruitless and ridiculous, both the attack and the defense. It was hard for me to believe in a Starman "waiting in the sky," some sympathetic god or alien who "knows it's all worthwhile." So much more sensible, I thought, just to wait for the final fallout--for the Panic in Detroit, for the Diamond Dogs' arrival--or, simply, to float away in perfect blackness.
        Lisa, to my knowledge, took no photographs that night--none satisfactory, at least, despite each mad dash to the stage. Back in the Mercedes, Carla turned, again, to Jim: we had to park at the hotel Lisa insisted was Bowie's; there, with patience and a keen eye, she planned to snap his photo on the short walk between limousine and revolving door. That walk never took place, though the waiting, it seemed, was endless, the wet streets empty of celebrity but not, then, of the homeless, their numbers growing every year. Soon, even Jim lost patience, so we drove to a South Street club, Lisa pouting all the way, the dynamics of the night refusing to relax their grip. In the end we felt a shared relief when Lisa finally left us to hurry up the sidewalk to her house.
       I stretched out in the back seat to feel the motion of the journey, soothed at last by solitude and eager to escape. How fast could I make my mind go blank? Months from now, David Bowie would falter on his newfound pinnacle, attempting to imitate the success of the Let's Dance formula--imitate, not reinvent, the very tactic he'd long avoided. 1984's Tonight would rely on old songs written with Iggy, cover tunes and collaborations, but would fail to ignite despite a modest hit in "Blue Jean." In most ways, this was good: the artist would need another mask, and though some lean years lay ahead, he'd rediscover his full talent with the marvelous 1. Outside, the '90's CD that would stand with Bowie's best. In retrospect, Let's Dance is less impressive for its music than for Bowie's impersonation of a more conventional star, a performance so convincing he fooled the record-buying public into believing him less interesting than he was.
        That night, had I thought of it, I'd probably have asked: could I hope to do the same--persuade the people I valued, even a reader here and there, that a coherent person stood behind the mask?

        We three turned onto the Schuylkill Expressway, a cool breeze blowing through the window, boathouses outlined in gold lights along the dark river below. Jim and Carla talked together, sometimes calling back to me as I passed in and out of sleep, their voices merging with my parents': the same soft laughter shared, the rise and fall of intonations, It must have been moonglow/way up in the blue...some memory of Betty salvaged from unconsciousness.  But the evening's awkwardness hadn't ended yet. In only a few moments, the car trembling over side streets, streetlamps passing overhead, the couple's conversation done, I'd feel rough pavement bump the car, open my eyes and glimpse the sky but not the back of Carla's head--vanished, I realized, below the front seat's outline, my friend Jim admirably controlled as the car ground to a halt, a silence lasting for long minutes between the stilling of the engine, the driver's near-inaudible moan, and Carla's smiling reappearance at his side.