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The alien that saved my life

Bowie and the strange children

By Billie Gold Published 4 years ago 7 min read
Third Place in Behind the Beat Challenge
9

I was at my show after a singing gig the other day and someone said that I looked just like David Bowie. They are wrong of course, the only thing I have in common with the late great David Bowie is being short haired, slim, and that I can sing. What that statement meant to me and what she actually saw was something far more meaningful than she could ever imagine. Bowie encapsulated masculine and feminine simultaneously, chaotically, and perfectly. He stood for every oddball in the school yard, everyone who thought they weren't actually meant to be on this planet, and everyone who believed so viciously in their art that they would constantly break the rules to do it. And if she saw one ounce of that in me, then I was already doing what the song that sparked my desire to live again told me to do.

When I was a small girl my mum showed me an old photo album, her most coveted possession (my mum is obsessed with photographs, when she moved recently we had to load a car full of just albums), and in it were some portraits of people that I had never seen before, rock stars of the new romantic period, Goddesses like Grace Jones, severe looking women like Annie Lennox, and at the very back, with a big gold circle on his forehead, was David Bowie. From that moment on I had to know everything, I became obsessed with his music, stealing tapes from her private collection and playing it on my Walkman (the kind that skips constantly through very worn and thin headphones), and in that collection was a mix tape from the master himself. I came from a poor single parent family, and was an only child with an exceptionally loving but exceptionally neurotic mother, I may as well have come from another family, on the other side of the world we were so different but she connected with her alien child nonetheless thanks to our love of music, and by the time that senior school had started I was already oversexed, over imaginative, and completely and fundamentally strange. Bowie once said

“I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human, I felt very puny as a human, I thought Fuck that, I want to be a superhuman”, to this day that’s how I think about my life rightly or wrongly, I don't much care what I end up doing, as long as it leaved a big scorching mark that others can look to in their time of need like I did with him. I watched Labyrinth over and over, and wanted so badly for some magical door to open up in this universe, because to me, there had to be something else, something other than the reality that we lived in and all the secrets of the world would be told to the select few.

By the time senior school had rolled around I had developed something which was to be the cause of one hospitalization, memory loss, and countless hurdles to overcome throughout my adult life. Anorexia had taken hold of me and whittles me down to 5”8 and 6 stone, I still went about my life as if nothing was different, I played in a band (doing David Bowie covers obviously) and had boyfriends, we went to gigs where the music would be so loud that it would make your ears ring for days, but I came home, and listened to one song only.

“Rock and roll suicide” by Bowie. The song was my private injection of health, I hid my illness for a very long time, and I remember distinctly putting the headphones over my head, pressing play over my labored breathing, and hearing him say,

“Oh no love, youre not alone

No matter what or who you've been

No matter when or where you've seen

All the knives seem to lacerate your brain

I've had my share, now I'll help you with the pain

You're not alone”

That was the first (not the last) time that that song would save my life. Every time I heard it, it was like Id had a full meal, I could function again, he understood me, and my happy exterior could be a little more real, for a little more time. It gave me the power to fight, and eventually I came to terms with what I had, and began to manage what I was.

Gradually I came to terms with my illness, and even though to this day I’ll relapse from time to time, I have found the best way to heal my body is to heal my soul first, so I’ll put in my headphones, hear David telling me that I’m wonderful, and then slowly, I’ll believe him.

I always felt like an alien, and my sexual identity living in a town that I grew up in was always an additive to the hotchpotch of unanswered questions in my brain. I was oversexed young, but my family was incredibly conservative. Sex was never spoken about (much less gay sex, my grandparents held gay people responsible for all the wrongs of the world and yet were avid fans of George Michael, go figure) and every time a same sex couple were on the telly it would go straight off to a chorus of disgusted noises and discussion about how wrong it all was. My private stash of gender fucked media in my bedroom kept me sane, strong women like Grace Jones were on my walls, and men like David were who my adolescent brain fantasized about. As with a lot of gay people I would come out much, MUCH later, and my family set me up for a normal life of socially acceptable straightness, on the path to getting married and having babies. I gave in to a certain extent, I got a job working as a croupier, which always seemed like it was stuck in 1985 no matter what year it was, drugs and parties were everywhere, and my singing career was distanced and kept private, until I met John (name changed to protect the guilty).

I wont write about him because to be quite honest he doesn't deserve the keyboard strokes, what I will tell you however that after I got that man out of my life, you had better believe that I blasted Bowie as loud as I could, whilst sitting on the kitchen floor in my pants with a celebratory bottle of old mulled wine (in March) plucked from the top of the fridge. The song gave me what no one I knew could ever give me, peace in the chaos. I came out that day, fully embraced my gayness, my strangeness, and my love for people. I shaved my head, fell in love with a woman and started singing again, all the colour flooded back into my life with the first two bars and David proclaiming

“Time takes a cigarette”. There have been plenty of times when I have simply wanted to call it a day and die young like my father, by something deep inside me told me that if I do that, how am I supposed to be seen by the other ones, the younger ones. I wanted to be the person that kept them alive too like Bowie had done for me. Music creates a riot when there is only the quiet of being alone and scared, which is exactly why from that moment on I made it my personal mission to be as loud as I could, no longer abused, sick and scared. Much later on when I started my singing career again Id learn that being on the entertainment scene as an out and proud androgynous lesbian woman really does make a difference, it really does make people seen. In this community, being different isn't something that's kept under the table and not talked about, its blown up, painted and put on display as a show of defiance, just like he did.

We are in a new era of gender expression, I am forever grateful to Bowie for keeping me and others alive when normalcy was sent to snuff us out. We don’t always have to know why things happen, just be curious about what will happen next. I have his words tattooed on my soul “I don't know where I’m going from here, but I can promise you it wont be boring”.

humanity
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About the Creator

Billie Gold

A human woman, apparently

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