Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

lues. When we got back, I emptied an entire bottle,
soaking my rabbity brown hair. I pulled off my shirt
and walked out to the golf course and found the
lemon tree that sometimes kept long drives from
braining us as we lay out on the chaise lounge, and
I baked my head. Every fifteen minutes or so, I’d
walk inside and see if I was starting to change.
Frustrated by the delay, I bit into the lemons,
puncturing them with my teeth, and squeezed them
onto my head like it was a fillet of sole. The lemon
juice stung my eyes and dried on my cheeks as I
reclined and let the chemical reaction take place. I
was convinced that by the time I opened my eyes, I
would have hair the hue of a baby chick’s ass. Just
like David Bowie’s. Instead, my hair looked brown
… with blotches of sickly orange scattered across
my injured and blistering skull. “Maybe you have to
wash it?” I reasoned to myself as I inspected myself
in the laundry room mirror. Something about the
chlorine in the water must certainly function as
some kind of activator. But the heat of the shower
spray and, later, the hair dryer only seemed to set
the Cheez Doodle–dust orange. Defeated, I
padded back into the kitchen, grabbed a Cel-Ray
soda and turned on the TV. Nina Blackwood was
announcing a video by the Tubes. I looked more
like her than I did before, which was no relief. Her
hair was terrible. MTV played “Let’s Dance”
constantly in the summer of ’83, as they would
“Modern Love” and “China Girl” later in the year.
Each time, I was reminded of the fact that I was not