Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

People down on the streets knew Bowie was up in
the Hills. Groupies came and went, along with
dealers, hustlers and hangers-on. “I had certainly
collected a motley crew of people who would keep
turning up at the house. A lot of dealers. Real scum,”
he recalled. Strangers at the door. “Women coming
and going,” Hughes says. “A lot of sex and
debauchery going on. We were going for it. My
dealer was always at the house. We never ran out of
cocaine.”
“I paid with the worst manic depression of my life,”
Bowie has said. “My psyche went through the roof, it
just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating twentyfour
hours a day … I felt like I’d fallen into the bowels
of the earth.”
Occasionally, David would reach out to people
from his past who had recently been
excommunicated, former MainMan employees like
Tony Zanetta and Cherry Vanilla. According to his
old Arts Lab co -founder Mary Finnegan, there are
reports that he even rang Chimi Rinpoche, his
Buddhism instructor. “When he was having a very
rough time in L.A., he apparently phoned Chimi,”
says Finnegan. “He told Chimi he was in deep
trouble and asked would he come out and talk to
him. Chimi said no. He said, ‘If you want to talk to me
you come to me; I don’t go to you.’”
Angie was in London with their son during this
time and received several desperate phone calls,
some frightening enough for her to book a flight. “He
sounded like he might just as well have been off in