Read Thing of Beauty for Free Online Page B

Carangi, “and Gia and I were sitting there. I said to Kathleen, ‘Hey, how’s that guy of yours with the hole in his neck?’ Gia just laughed and laughed.”
    The war between the families had not abated with the remarriage. “My one sister, my older sister, I
know
would invite Joe to dinner and she
never
invited me to dinner,”said Kathleen. “I got the message that they all thought Joe was having such a bad time—because he played on it. And a great deal of the time, I didn’t want to listen to them, so I didn’t stay in touch.
    “Joe put me down all the time—in front of the kids, too—which was totally wrong. He would curse me out. I finally put Henry on the phone and then he stopped that. Henry can be
very
intimidating.”
    Henry Sperr was trying to be a good sport about it, but having a teenager around the house was not exactly what he had bargained for. He was accustomed to leading an active social life, and assumed Kathleen would join him. Soon after they got married, Kathleen announced that she wanted to have another child, which he definitely didn’t favor. Having Gia move in was a little more palatable, but it still meant changes he hadn’t planned on.
    The biggest problem was rules: Gia wasn’t accustomed to having any. And it was an uphill battle to get a fourteen-year-old to abide by more restrictive regulations than she had when she was twelve. Besides, now that Gia had two homes, there was really no bottom line to the demands made by her mother and stepfather. “As long as you live under my roof,” wasn’t much of a threat when another roof was readily available. Especially when Henry found himself caught between two parents who weren’t very good at sticking to their own edicts. If it had been up to Henry alone, the heads of the household would have prevailed. But Gia wasn’t really Henry’s to discipline. He did so occasionally out of sheer frustration: “One time we were all together—the father, too—and Gia started on her mother,” he recalled. “I finally just grabbed Gia, picked her up and threw her in the car myself.” But generally, it wasn’t appropriate for the stepfather to play the heavy—even if the real father was unwilling and the real mother unable to be a strong parent.
    And Kathleen
was
unable. Perhaps it was her sense of guilt over leaving Gia when she was eleven. Or perhaps Gia was just stronger and more resourceful than Kathleen. For whatever reason, Kathleen couldn’t stay mad at her daughter long enough to really discipline her. When sheannounced a punishment, it was rarely carried out. And sometimes Kathleen’s social life kept her out so late that she and Henry weren’t home to receive a phone call that Gia was going to be late. It was almost as if Kathleen wanted motherhood to be a nine-to-five job with frequent vacations, and she simply refused to work overtime.
    In the midst of all this, Gia found David Bowie. By 1973, being a “Bowie kid” was an act of individual rebellion complete with its own thriving subcultural support group. The club of trailblazers had already been formed, the glittery dress code had been established and the “outrageousness is next to godliness” ethos was set in stone. Bowie’s 1972 concept album,
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
(and the ensuing U.S. tour and
Rolling Stone
cover story) had made him an international phenomenon. But he had been recording in England since 1966, and he had been wearing dresses on album covers and publicly declaring his bi-or-homo-sexuality (depending on how the presence of his wife Angie was interpreted) since 1971.
Ziggy
was simply the most successful packaging of twenty-six-year-old Bowie’s basic themes: alienation, androgyny, otherworldliness, production values. And his highly theatrical act was the perfect innovation in a rock concert business where demand for showmanship was outpacing supply.
    There were Bowie kids all over America and England. In every