With All Respect

By 1981 I had fallen into a dark crowd. I was no longer interested in the rock scene but had no other social connections and found myself wondering why I was in the Mudd Club at 4:00 am with enough stimulants in me to make Aleister Crowley proud, blathering to people I cared nothing about, and taking home women whose names I’ve forgotten, if I ever knew them. Not a golden age. Boredom, lack of purpose, and the souless drift made up a few months of my mid-twenties. I was not making music, was spending money, and lacked true friends. Yet Colin Wilson appeared once again. At a party at David Bowie’s loft in mid-town, the king held court, discoursing on all and sundry. The occult came up as a topic; Bowie had predelictions in that area. He went on about witchcraft and an acquaintance mentioned that I knew all about this stuff: I read Colin Wilson.

“Colin Wilson?” Ziggy Stardust said. “Yes. He goes around at night and traces pentagrams on people’s doorsteps.” Was he joking? “Yes, he draws down the ectoplasm of dead Nazis and fashions homunculi.”

Bowie was a skinny, shivery man and he may just have remembered that not too long ago during a brief flame up of our past passion, Lulu and I conversed with him at the Mudd Club. He asked her back to his place, very gentlemanly-like. Not me. I was gratified that she passed him up, and stuck with me. Could this brief episode have stuck with him? In any case, I took him at his word and pointed out that he was wrong.

“Wilson isn’t into that sort of thing,” I said.

“Oh yes he is. I know for a fact that he heads a coven in Cornwall.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No. It’s true.”

“I doubt it, David.”

This carried on for a few more volleys. Then the thin white duke wearied of my obstinancy. A sight gesture of the hand and his two female body guards appeared, like Thumper and Bambi in Diamonds are Forever. “David is a bit tired now,” Thumper said. “Perhaps it’s time you left,” added Bambi. Perhaps it was.