Thing of Beauty (6 page)

Gia’s first experimentations with makeup were definitely not done to make her look more womanly. She and her Aunt Nancy spent an afternoon singing along to Bowie records and perfecting a red lightning bolt from Gia’s hairline
to her cheek, like the one on the cover of the just-released
Aladdin Sane.
Among the first clothes Gia bought for herself
by herself
were red platform boots, a white shirt decorated with black hands that appeared to be wrapped around her upper body, and a feather boa. The red satin jumpsuit had been handmade by her mother as a gesture to befriend this gawky space creature that had once been her adoring daughter.

Even Gia’s handwriting was affected. She began dotting her
i’s
with circles and signing her notes and letters “Love on Ya!” It was the same way Bowie had scrawled his handwritten liner notes on
Pin-Ups
.

To her parents, Gia seemed to have been transformed overnight after attending a Bowie show. “She got involved with rock concerts,
okay
?” her stepfather, Henry Sperr, recalled. “And a bunch of people who went to 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 the
side. 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 in
malls, 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. 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 crush
for 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 simply
to 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 would sit on the grassy lawn outside the 107 Lunchroom and smoke what teachers might have even believed were hand-rolled cigarettes. A girl nicknamed Cricket sometimes brought a guitar and played; another girl had a bulky tape deck and recorded their conversations. One of the group’s leaders was Ellen Moon,* who shared her school locker with Gia because it was closer to the lunchroom: their Bowie-bedecked compartment was immortalized in the high school yearbook. There was usually only a joint or two to pass around, and marijuana in 1973 was rarely as potent as the industrial-strength pot the late seventies would produce. But the lunchtime ritual—followed by the Marlboros that everyone smoked—would produce a pleasant, giggly buzz that took the edge off the rest of the day. For those who bothered to wait for lunchtime to get high, grades in courses with afternoon classes were often markedly lower than those scheduled in the morning.

Gia was often counted upon to provide the marijuana, because her brother Michael happened to be one of the school’s better pot connections. In the subtle sociological delineations of the schoolyard, this made both of them slightly different from their peers. The distribution system for pot was very simple and, generally, very friendly. At the top were layers of “real dealers”—who actually knew people even
they
thought of as criminals. The pot dealers sold to several layers of middlekids who paid for what they used themselves—and made a little profit, as well—by selling to their peers.

Since pot was such a social drug, many people got high but never really bought. When it appeared at social events, everyone was happy to smoke someone else’s, but many weren’t prepared to spend their own money—or felt uneasy about being so deliberate about getting high. Even though a lot of people used pot, there was still a difference between those who just smoked and those who bought. The buyers were taking a bigger risk if they ever were caught: they were also placing themselves in a position of both power and frustration. “We were amazed at Gia’s ability to get pot, even during the worst dry spells,” recalled one member of
the 107 Lunch bunch. “But, actually, sometimes she became paranoid and thought people were using her. She said we only wanted her around for pot.”

On Saturdays, Karen and Gia would go downtown, walking over to Frankford Avenue in the morning to catch the elevated train. The Frankford El was the most convenient way to Center City from the Northeast. Its route was also a trip up and down the socioeconomic scale. Each stop closer to the city was in a poorer neighborhood, and from the point where a rider was afforded the most spectacular view—with the expansive Ben Franklin Bridge on one side and the skyline on the other—the train dove underground into the middle of one of the city’s most bombed-out sections. It then headed up Market Street East, a once-posh commercial district that was now all discount record stores, head shops and porno theaters, still awaiting a promised “urban mall” development that was supposed to save the area. The girls got off at Thirteenth Street, the stop that shared an underground walkway with the John Wanamaker’s store, the traditional refuge of the refined Philadelphia lady.

As soon as they stepped off the train, the girls rushed to light up their Marlboros. But before their shopping began, Karen and Gia had to stop at the recently opened Center City branch of Hoagie City at Twelfth and Chestnut. There they received soda, sandwiches and other sustenance.

“Dad, I need twenty-five dollars,” Gia would begin.

“What do you want this for?” her father would ask, wiping the oil and tomato seeds off his hands with his apron before hugging his daughter.

“C’mon, Dad, really, I need twenty-five dollars.”

“Didn’t I just give you money?” he asked, in the soft voice he had passed on to all his children. “Didn’t you bring any money with you?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, c’mon, how about twenty-five dollars? I gotta get stuff.”

No matter how tough he got with her—it varied with how busy he was—the end of the time-honored family ritual was always the same. He always gave Gia money, just like he always put his hand up to check when Gia would joke,
“Dad, the toupee’s crooked,” when he was on his way out the door for a date. But before they left, the girls had to eat. “Okay, let me make you a hoagie,” he would begin. And on the subject of feeding, he was always firm. If it was nice out, they went up to the apartment Gia’s father was redoing upstairs and ate at the open window, watching people go by and occasionally dropping a pickle round on a passerby’s head.

With money in hand, the two girls would set out to do Center City. Downtown Philadelphia was not very large—only twenty blocks by twenty-five blocks. But the area was in the midst of a rebirth, and any one of the city’s better shopping streets could end up taking a whole afternoon.

The city was blossoming, in spite of the neomilitary reign of police-chief-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo. Like the rest of the country, Philadelphia was feeling the economic impact of the baby boom. Woodstock graduates were reclaiming the urban areas their parents had fled for suburbia and starting businesses that provided the products and services
they
wanted. And a few purely local phenomena were helping transform the dowdy town with its legendary inferiority complex about nearby New York into a place that might actually attract its
own
tourists.