As an outsider kid, it was one more example of just how out of step I was. I watched as kids and their parents sang along to these songs in the very white, affluent suburban town I called home in Orange County, CA. I felt like there was something very wrong with me because I didn't "just love" Donny Osmond or Bread.
One day, while coming home from school on the bus, the bus driver had the radio on. I remember clearly the pain of the loneliness I was experiencing. As I sat there, with my head gently bouncing against the rattling bus window, a song came on- Space Oddity, by David Bowie. It captured my loneliness and isolation in a way no other song ever had. I remember that moment on the bus with absolute clarity. At that moment I realized that maybe, just maybe, there was someone out there who actually understood.
I was pretty isolated where I lived. It was months before I found myself near a record store. I didn't know who sang the song. I didn't know the name of it. All I knew was that I needed to have it. I gathered up my courage and went in and asked if they had that song "Major Tom." After some questioning, I was told it was called Space Oddity by David Bowie. They played it for me and I nearly burst into tears. I remember clearly it's cost--88 cents. I had .75 and hadn't thought of tax. I walked away without the single but that didn't really matter. I knew I wasn't alone.
I made it through middle school and in high school, gravitated toward the theater. I was still an outsider, and lonelier than ever. I had no one I could talk to about my feelings of attraction toward both boys and girls. I knew it must be wrong, so said nothing to anyone, isolating myself even further and became a target for bullying. I was miserable. Frequently, I thought of dying.
At a cast party, someone put on a new album--The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I sat straight up and listened intently. That voice! I remembered that voice! And that voice was singing about the very things I didn't even have the vocabulary to name. By then I had babysitting money and managed to get myself to the record store where I bought my own copy. I listened to it over and over, finding comfort in the lyrics and the creative freakishness that resonated so deeply within me.
I had one good friend at the time named Jim and he and I went over the lyrics endlessly. Jim's parents loathed me, certain I was a terrible influence on their son. They decided to send Jim back east to spend the summer with relatives. We didn't like the idea, which is why we ran away to San Francisco. We had no idea about the hippie scene there. We just knew that spending the summer together was a much better idea than spending the summer apart. We ended up in Berkeley.
One day, while walking along Telegraph Ave., I met Jerry-an artist selling his airbrushed t-shirts featuring Alpha Centauri and other space scenes. He was also a musician and we talked about Bowie and his music for hours on end. There were more of us!
Jim and I always intended to go back home in time for the start of school and so we did. Unfortunately, Jim's Mother's response to our return was to insist that in order to save Jim from my terrible influence, they must move out of town. Which they did--before their house even sold. We were forbidden to speak to one another. She kept their phone on lockdown and as time went by, we drifted apart.
As I mourned the absence of my only friend, I immersed myself into Bowie's music even more. It was my only solace to the despair and deep loneliness I was experiencing. I threw myself into school with the singleminded focus of someone whose boat had gone down and was swimming for a distant shore. I finished high school and headed for college, moving back to Berkeley.
I reconnected with Jerry and he introduced me to other musicians and artists--all who liked Bowie. I got a job in a record store and then interned at a radio station. Through it all, Bowie was my touchstone. I got to meet him through working at the radio station and it was definitely a peak moment.
Bowie's music never stopped reflecting the changes I myself was experiencing. Jerry and I never stopped talking about Bowie. His band always covered a song or two of Bowie's over the decades. He was nearly as excited hearing about my visit to the Bowie retrospective in London as I was to have attended it.
Jerry understood the lifeline Bowie's music had been for me. He grew up in an affluent part of Long Island and understood the pressures to conform and the pain experienced when you truly didn't fit in. Jerry understood me in a way no one else did. People often made assumptions about our friendship. We didn't care. He played at my wedding, I was in his. He was uncle to my kids. I'm fairy godmother to his daughter. We remained friends for 40 years. He was the one person who would have fully understood what David Bowie's death yesterday meant to me. We would be talking about it now. Except he died from cancer a year ago on January 13--a death I am still grieving.
As I absorb the news of Bowie's death, I find myself reflecting on all the times his music has saved me. I think about how important music has been my whole life, and wonder if that would have been the case if I hadn't connected with Bowie's so deeply. I reflect on the influence he had on the vast majority of my favorite musicians and bands. I am grateful to have fallen asleep to Blackstar (his latest album released just days ago). Now, although I grieve, instead of the loneliness and solitude I experienced as a youth, I join thousands and thousands of other outsiders like myself who grabbed the lifeline David Bowie provided, and feel grateful he brought me to shore.
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