Experiencing David Bowie by Ian Chapman

Author:Ian Chapman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

“Oi, Chapman!” came the aggressive yell. Oh no! I’d ventured too close to the rugby pavilion on my way out of school. When would I ever learn! Feigning having not heard a thing—extremely unlikely though that clearly was—I put my head down and increased my walking speed. “Chapman!” came another call, more aggressive than the first. “You’d better stop, or else!” With a mental sigh, I stopped. Experience had told me that outrunning rugby players was not my forte. Next minute, there they were. Three Neanderthals were crowding around me, smirking as they circled. Knuckle-draggers. Zeppelin fans, for sure. And there I was, with no bananas in my bag that I could toss into a nearby bush while I made my getaway. Now don’t get me wrong, I had nothing against Led Zeppelin. In fact I liked them a lot. But in my high school the battle lines were drawn very clearly and if you were an overt Bowie fan like myself, with rooster cut and all, the twain could never meet. The heavy rock boys would make sure of that.

What would it be this time? A bit of a smack around? A knee in the nuts? The tired old ritual of opening my bag, strewing its contents around, and then throwing my books or my lunchbox onto the pavilion roof?

“What’s that?” one of them demanded, pointing at the badge pinned to my schoolbag with a finger the size of a sausage. Actually, it may have been a sausage.

“Nothing,” I mumbled, eyes down.

“It doesn’t look like nothing to me,” he responded, which was fair enough under the circumstances because it was something, clearly.

I pulled my schoolbag close to me. Big mistake. The next minute, six hairy-knuckled hands were ripping it from my scrawny frame. I fought back momentarily but pointlessly, and quickly found myself on my back on the ground. While one primate held my bag, another roughly pulled the badge from it and held it before his ugly, squinty eyes.

Now, I should point out that in New Zealand in 1973 you could not buy rock ’n’ roll badges from just anywhere—in fact you’d be hard-pressed to buy them anywhere—and so I had sent off to England a mail-order form via airmail, reverently clipped out of the back pages of an NME magazine. To my great excitement, three Bowie badges had duly arrived in our letterbox three months later. One was a picture of Bowie performing live as Ziggy Stardust, the second was the reissued black-and-white front cover of The Man Who Sold the World, and the third, my favorite, featured the Aladdin Sane album cover. It was Aladdin Sane that the missing link was now holding aloft in his furry hand.

“David Bowie!” he shrieked, putting on a mincing, taunting voice on Bowie’s surname. “What a bloody poofter he is! What have you got him on your bag for?”

I said nothing, hoping with all my being that a sudden unexpected surge of evolution would wipe the three of them off the face of the earth before my eyes.

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