Thing of Beauty (5 page)

But, like all suburbs, the idealized Northeast had really only lasted through the first generation of its postwar inhabitants. Those first striving settlers were the ones who had seen the Northeast as the best of both worlds. Their vast numbers—and the predictable difference between parents who worked hard to earn what they had and children who just
had
—slowly turned the Northeast into what some perceived as the
worst
of both worlds. It had neither architectural nor natural beauty. Its citizens had neither the true street smarts of the city nor the true safety of the pristine suburbs; they seemed informed neither by time-honored wisdom nor by up-to-the-minute thinking. To cynical outsiders—who assumed the “mall culture” was a small but controllable cancer on the America body politic—the Northeast came to embody how quickly the newly manufactured middle-class dream could turn nightmarish.

An incident at Abraham Lincoln High School—Kathleen’s alma mater, where both Joey and Michael Carangi were students—typified the vast differences between the generation that had built the Northeast and the one about to inherit it. The drugs of choice in the early seventies were still marijuana and LSD, but suddenly Lincoln High was being flooded with phenobarbital pills. It wasn’t just an unusually large supply of sedatives working its way through normal drug distribution
Channels. There were suddenly just phenobarbs
everywhere.
Kids had pocketfuls of them; they were toting around bottles that contained not ten or twenty pills but a thousand. Students were throwing them across the 107 Lunchroom like confetti, swallowing them like candy.

There were scares, overdoses, investigations. Eventually, there was police action; over a dozen Lincoln students were arrested, many at a teen dance at the Jardel community center at Cottman and Penway. The story made the evening news and was covered by all the newspapers—especially when the source of the phenobarbital pills was discovered. They hadn’t been clandestinely manufactured in some shack in rural Bucks County. Nobody had robbed a drugstore or broken into nearby Byberry State Hospital and stolen all the inmates’ sedatives. The pills had been discovered by students in medical kits in a forgotten Civil Defense bomb shelter, located in the
basement of Lincoln High itself.

It was anyone’s guess what authorities in the 1950s had imagined that high school students might do with thirty-four thousand downers if the bomb got dropped.

K
aren Karuza was a sight to behold, especially in the setting of a drab high school classroom. If the fourteen-year-old had antennae protruding from her high forehead, instead of just the space where her eyebrows had been, she couldn’t have stood out more among the flannel-shirted boys and peasantbloused girls. In her glittering stretch pants and platform shoes, her brightly dyed hair nearly glowing and her multicolored fingernails sweeping rainbows when she talked, Karen decked the halls of Lincoln. The fact that she was one of the brightest students in the ninth grade only added to the mystery of her physical mutation from yet another Polish-Catholic Northeast girl into one of
them.
Lincoln had large ramps between floors instead of stairs, and each major clique in the school claimed a ramp as its exclusive territory. But there was no incline for the kids who looked “outrageous” like Karen Karuza. They found each other in different ways.

One day Karen was walking out of a classroom when she encountered a vision as startling as herself. It was a girl her age but taller, wearing a quilted red satin jumpsuit and shiny red boots with black platforms. She wore her thick hair cropped short and shaggy in the back. It looked like a coon-skin cap had been glued to her scalp.

The girl made eye contact and awkwardly approached her.
At first, Karen flinched: not long before, she had been sucker-punched and knocked off her platform shoes by a female classmate who considered the way she dressed a personal affront. But this girl simply shoved an envelope into Karen’s hand and galloped away. Inside the envelope was a picture postcard of David Bowie. Scrawled on the reverse side was “because you remind me of Angie”—which any fan would recognize as a reference to Bowie’s wife.

The next day the tall girl was waiting outside Karen’s classroom again. And she continued to come back every day after that. Before long the two were friends, and their relationship—and outfits—were topics of constant comment and speculation among the students at Lincoln. They were the women who fell to earth.

Karen Karuza’s pal was the new and reproved Gia: now identifiable only by certain physical features—the broad lips and tiny nose, the thick hair and perpetually bitten fingernails—as the spoiled little girl whose life had been leveled by the separation, and eventual bitter divorce, of her parents. Some of the changes in her had been the standard ones brought on by adolescence: the spurt in lanky height and the very beginnings of a curvy figure.

But other changes were attributable to the sheer volume of weirdness she had endured and, in a way, perpetuated. A year after she moved out, Gia’s mother married Henry Sperr, in a private ceremony that the children were told about only
after
it happened. Gia didn’t know her new stepfather, but she disliked him on general principle. She was envious of the way Henry monopolized her mother’s attention. And after hearing her father’s jealous rage, she decided that Henry was the sole reason for the dissolution of her parents’ relationship. No matter how often Kathleen tried to explain the irreconcilable problems she had with Joe, Gia continued to see Henry Sperr as the main obstacle to her parents’ reunion.

In fact, just the opposite was true: Gia was the only thing that remained between Kathleen and Joe. The boys had sided completely with their father and showed no interest in being part of their mother’s new life. But Gia continued to exploit whatever connections remained between
her parents by yanking at their heart-and-purse strings, an emotional exercise made both simpler and more complicated when she chose that newest form of home life: Divorce-Dual Residency. Gia maintained a bedroom in her father’s home. But she officially moved in with her mother, or her “mommy,” as she always referred to her, and her stepfather, who she referred to as Henry if she referred to him at all.

The three of them shared a small, two-bedroom duplex just a few blocks from the Carangi home. And suddenly child support, scarcely mentioned at the time of the divorce, became an issue. Kathleen and Henry did not have the kind of money Joe Carangi did. Henry had just begun free-lancing as an accountant and financial adviser, and building a client base took time. It seemed only fair that Joe pay them something—especially since the original divorce settlement had not favored Kathleen.

“I ended up walking away from everything,” she recalled. “I gave away quite a bit. I didn’t fight him for anything I might have been entitled to, and those businesses were very healthy. But Pennsylvania didn’t have no-fault divorce then. A woman leaving had no rights at all. When I originally moved out, he co-signed a lease for an apartment because he thought it was temporary. When it started sinking in that this was for keeps, he started giving me trouble. I wanted out so bad, I told my lawyer I just didn’t care.”

An amount of child support was agreed upon, along with a payment schedule, but Joe rarely kept to either. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. In a way, it seemed he even liked it when Kathleen stormed into the restaurant screaming about money if he was a day late. It was like a little soap opera all the Carangi men could watch.

“I remember one day Kathleen came in yelling about something,” said Dan 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 she
announced 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 municipality and suburb, a certain number of people heard Bowie—or his character, Ziggy—speaking to whatever it was that made them feel different: their sexuality, their intellectual aspirations, their disaffection, their rebelliousness. It was mass marketing to those who wanted to be separate from the masses. And since Philadelphia had been among the first American cities to embrace the bisexual Barnum of rock, his cult of personality had grown particularly strong in the Delaware Valley. His fall 1972 shows were such a huge success that when he returned in February of 1973, local promoters were able to sell out seven nights at the Tower Theater, where audiences showed up in outfits that rivaled those worn by Bowie and his band, turning the whole scene into a rock ‘n’ roll performance art piece with a 3,072-member cast. When Bowie then announced his retirement
from performance in July of that year, his marketed mystique was solidified.

“He was a genuine guru, a rock star who seemed to hold some secrets in a way that nobody really expected of, say, the Beatles,” recalled Matt Damsker, Philadelphia’s reigning rock critic at the time. “Everyone was so caught up in the shared moment, and Bowie represented somebody so mysterious and so calculatedly brilliant. There was a power to his very best music that suggested a lot of withheld information: it seemed that if you got close to him, he might dispense it to you. He seemed to have a political and metaphysical program in mind. These weren’t stupid kids. They weren’t into Bowie just because they were bored with everything else. They were caught up in something that was pretty broad in its implications.”

Bowie himself would recall of the time, “I never ever thought my songs would help anybody think or know anything. Yet it did seem that at that time there were an awful lot of people who were feeling a similar way. They were starting to feel alienated from society, especially the breakdown of the family as we’d known it in the forties, fifties and especially the sixties, when it really started crumbling. Then, in the seventies, people in my age group felt disinclined to be a part of society. It was really hard to convince oneself that you
were
a part of society. [The feeling was] here we are, without our families, totally out of our heads, and we don’t know where on earth we are. That was the feeling of the early seventies—nobody knew
where
they were.”

For Gia, Bowie and adolescence would be interchangeable. Her first haircut since the age of eight—and the first time she ever chose her own hairstyle—was the bushy Bowie cut. It was executed by Nadine at Bonwit Tellers, almost perfectly replicating Bowie’s look on the
Pin-Ups
cover photograph. “She went from this beautiful long hair to this
Bowie
hairdo,” Kathleen recalled. “I couldn’t stand it. I avoided seeing her for two weeks.”