Teenage Wildlife
Teenage Wildlife Jessica Berger In high school, I believed that David Bowie wasn’t human, that he was one of the otherworldly beings or personas he’d long adapted. An alien, an aristocratic vampire, a goblin king, an immortal. Had there been a time before him? I didn’t know of one. Would there be a time after him? Surely, I thought, that was not possible. I would tell my friends as much, try to explain to them what it was that drew me to him, what it was that resonated with me like no rock star, no public figure, no person, no spiritual presence ever David Bowie had. I would cut out pictures to glue to magnets that could decorate my locker and on weekends my friends would watch Labyrinth, innocently, with bags of Doritos and jokes “Teenage Wildlife” about “the bulge,” only to return to English class on Monday morning and pass the opening Scary Monsters verses of “Magic Dance” back and forth at the most inappropriate moments. They (and Super Creeps) entertained this, treated it like a quirk, one of those temporary fixations we all seemed to go through in those days. But where other people had their Moulin Rouge!, their post-punk 09/1980 band of choice, their cardboard stand-up of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Bowie was something RCA Records other. If you’d asked me then, I don’t know that I could tell you what it was that Bowie signified. I was in love with him in some way, certainly, it’s easy to fall in love with an image when you’re fifteen, sixteen, especially when that image comes packaged as an idea, as a possibility for something you didn’t know was possible.
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