We Can Be Heroes

When David Bowie first popped into my consciousness, he was hanging near a sunlit doorway in a dive bar, playing guitar in white gloves and inviting me to dance. I was 9 years old, watching MTV. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, with his golden hair and golden tan and an elegant voice that crooned, “Because my love for you would break my heart in two.” My heart is broken at the news of his death.

Little did I know then that Bowie had soared toward stardom as a bony, snaggle-toothed redhead wearing a dress. I loved him anyway. I loved him even more.

Bowie was in his 20s when he wrote Ziggy Stardust, and he spoke to me at that same age. Ziggy was my anthem, an odd escape from the grief of losing my mother, of raising my sister, of feeling like the rug had been ripped out from under me. Yes, there was a lot of gender-bending, a lot of theater and a lot of kick-ass ’70s guitar on that album—but there was also a deeper message for me and so many of his fans. “You’re too old to lose it, too young to choose it,” he sang on the closing track, “Rock & Roll Suicide.” By the end of the song he was pleading with us, “You’re not alone! Gimme your hands cause you’re wonderful!”

From then on, he was my hero. His voice was the voice that moved me. I loved his quirkiness, his intelligence, his boundary-pushing way of being exactly himself and then something else altogether. He was a true artist—an actor, a painter, a playwright, a songwriter and of course a rock legend of the first order. There will be many moving tributes to him in the coming days to shine a light on his influence and his monumental body of work. I’m glad for that. David Bowie was an otherworldly force in pop culture, and just about as interesting as a human being can be.

He embodied Walt Whitman’s idea of containing multitudes—a person full of contradictions and perhaps none at all. He was an overexposed rock god with all the trappings and then deeply private—at turns the androgynous waif, the lady-killer, the loving family man. He was savvy at business and experimental in his art. He approached every project with intellectual and emotional depth, but never took himself too seriously. Through his spectacular and ever-changing artifice, he was always sincere.

He was a British New Yorker who renamed himself after an American knife; who started a society for long-haired people when he was a teenager; who went to mime school; who played a vampire and an alien on film and the Elephant Man on Broadway; who came through the hell of drug addiction and taught us we could be the heroes of our own stories. He innovated and collaborated and stole from the best. He searched for more right up until the end.

I didn’t know him personally, but that hardly matters. I knew his art, and that revealed so much—his fear, his loneliness, his longing, his spirituality, his love. How many of us can say we have been that brave in our lives?

“Look up here, I’m in heaven,” he told us in his new song, “Lazarus,” released just two days before he died. He was a prophetic presence and a man dreamed up by a higher power. He rose from the ashes himself a time or too. Just not this time.

Mr. Bowie, you have been a light in my life. I hope you are floating far above the moon. And may God’s love be with you.

“Don’t you just love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really, really long poem about everything.”

—David Bowie

Originally posted on Berdey.com