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(Excerpt from Lick Me)
Chapter 15
Fame
Whatever had eroded their trust in Defries, the Bowies were clearly no longer
happy with him and the whole Mainman operation. Defries temporarily
quelled their anger by ensconcing them in a two-bedroom suite at New
York’s swank Sherry-Netherlands Hotel, where they managed to
run up around twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of room service
charges in a month. The Bowie-Defries affiliation continued out of
necessity for a while, but it was clear to everyone around them that
their whole Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker dynamic was disintegrating.
As was the Bowies’ marriage, it seemed.
David
liked my apartment on 20th Street, and he also liked
Norman Fisher’s coke, something for which he’d recently
acquired an insatiable appetite and for which I had, of course,
hooked him up. And since my days were winding down at Mainman, I
guess David felt comfortable getting high with me and opening up
about anything and everything that was on his mind. He spent many an
evening, often an all-nighter, sitting in one of my canary-yellow
enameled wicker chairs, doing lines, drinking milk (he never ate at
all during this period), and telling me one crazy story after another
-- Defries and Adolf Hitler were buddies . . . Lou Reed was the devil
. . .he himself was from another planet and was being held prisoner
on earth -- going on and on about power, symbols, communication,
music, the occult, Aleister Crowley, and Merlin the Magician. I
never did any of David’s coke (and, what’s more, he never
offered). I just sat there, smoked my pot, sipped my Café
Bustelo, and got totally into his rap. This was probably the period
when I was most in love with him.
Sometimes David would busy himself with my record collection -- Duke
Ellington’s Live at Newport and the Ohio Players’
Skin Tight among his favorite LPs. And occasionally he and I
would have sex in my mirrored, mosquito-netted, dycro-lit, pink-satin
bedroom, taking everything a bit further than we had that first time
in Boston, and utilizing the many new sex toys I’d since
acquired. One time, after I’d arranged for him to shop
privately at the new Yves Saint Laurent boutique on Madison Avenue
and get the most fabulous black wool overcoat, he came up the five
flights of stairs to my apartment, and fucked me without ever taking
off the coat and then left immediately to hang out with Mick Jagger.
Bowie liked my bedroom so much, he even brought Claudia Lennear and
Jean Millington (the other sister from Fanny) there for sex on
occasion. I didn’t participate, but I got off on how much he
appreciated the setting.
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