Thing of Beauty (7 page)

Federal funds were pouring into the city: not just the dwindling urban renewal money sent to save all municipalities, but additional dollars earmarked to spruce up Philadelphia for the upcoming bicentennial celebration. Graduates of the pioneering Restaurant School were turning the previously tasteless town into a culinary capital. The local music scene, moribund since Dick Clark had moved
American Bandstand
west in the sixties after a payola scandal, was soaring again. Even the city’s newest sports franchise, the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, was showing great promise. The city was beginning to look exciting, sound exciting, even taste exciting.

Their platform shoes clomping on the historic red brick sidewalks and cobblestone streets, Gia and Karen would set off to shop. First they walked down Chestnut, in and out of the new boutiques like The Hen’s Den and The Horse You Rode In On, as well as Dan’s Shoes, which sold the most outrageous footwear in Philadelphia. After a while they got
to know some of the store owners—or at least be recognized by them—just as they did in the record and poster shops. Both the newer, independent record stores—which made as much money selling bongs and rolling papers as music—and the more established Sam Goodys had to be shopped. It was hours of letting your fingers do the walking through the bins of alphabetically sorted rock albums: searching for obscure import versions of Bowie’s earlier releases and for records by the other stars of what was now a genre known as glitter-rock.

A well-informed Bowie kid needed a lot of information, and it wasn’t available in mainstream newspapers, magazines or TV news reports. To these media, rock music was still basically for children. So the musical minutiae had to be gleaned from the pages of “alternative” publications. There were rock tabloids like
Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy
and the local
Drummer
, and magazines like
Creem
and
Circus
, which at least
attempted
to employ standard journalistic techniques in covering pop culture. And there were glossy magazines like
Hit Parade
, which, like most fanzines, were mostly pictures to be cut out and affixed to bedroom walls and notebooks. While schoolbooks held little interest for her, Gia pored over these publications for details.

Appreciating Bowie meant more than memorizing lyrics, liner notes and David-news flashes. You had to understand the world he had packaged for mass consumption to speak the language. You had to know about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, the first rock band ever to sing about homosexuals and heroin, and you had to know about pop artist Andy Warhol, who made the Velvets the toast of a downtown Manhattan club you had to know about called Max’s Kansas City. You had to know about the rivalry between Bowie and Marc Bolan of T. Rex, and how Bowie had rescued Mott the Hoople from obscurity by giving them his song “All the Young Dudes.” And you had to know about the Rolling Stones—not because of their venerated position in the history of rock but because Bowie had recorded their “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” And the Stones’s recent number one single “Angie” was supposedly a love song from Mick Jagger to Bowie’s wife—or to Bowie himself.

To get to the rest of the stores they liked, Gia and Karen would walk up across Broad Street through the more expensive part of town. This was where Nan Duskin and Bonwit Teller sold the clothes their mothers hoped they would one day wear. Between the stores were the fancy restaurants and hotels, and the salons of the top hairstyle superstars—like Julius Scissor, Vincent Pileggi, Mister Paul and Barry Leonard, the Crimper—where the “looks” from the pages of the fashion magazines were dispensed to those who knew to ask.

The very center of Center City was where the wives of old and new money alike went to indulge themselves, asking for as much daring in their do’s as they could socially afford. It was not New York—nothing in Philadelphia ever was, a fact that Philadelphians rarely allowed themselves to forget. But a sufficiently high level of regional fabulousness was available to those who wanted to separate themselves from the fuddy-duddies: those who the trendy cutters sneeringly referred to as “the wash-and-set ladies.” The top shops in Philadelphia didn’t set any trends—that was done in New York, Paris and London—but they were the fashion franchisees licensed to dispense them.

Just beyond the toniest shopping and salons was Sansom Street, the city’s original bohemian enclave. The street’s rebirth had begun in the mid-sixties, supposedly as a Philadelphia version of London’s Carnaby Street, and it maintained a foppish air even after some of the mod, fashiony shops were replaced with hippie and glitter-rock stores. But Sansom Street was more than just stores. It was a
scene
, the site of the city’s first stationary freak show of painted hippies, outlaw bikers and drag queens. Those extremes made the street a place where Philadelphia’s traditionally powerless—the young, the black, the female, the homosexual-could feel powerful, or at least relatively safe in numbers.

In recent years, Sansom Street had also begun to attract tourists: little kids from the suburbs and the Northeast who came in on Saturdays to gawk at the interracial couples publicly kissing, the men holding hands with other men, the latest tattoos. Entrepreneurs seized the moment by carving a mini-mall, Sansom Village, out of spaces on the standard, store-lined shopping block. It was suddenly possible to comparison
shop for items that were once impossible to find anywhere. There was Stosh’s Hide, the leather store; Mr. Tickle’s, the poster shop; boutiques like Picadilly’s, Dreams, Distant Drummer and the Pants Pub; as well as the Alice’s Restaurant ice cream parlor, which had to change its name to Alice’s Restaurant of Pennsylvania because someone else had already franchised the title of the Arlo Guthrie song.

The commercialization had taken its toll. The hippies and art students who settled the area were certain that if thirteen-year-olds knew about Sansom Street, it had clearly passed the point of hip exclusivity. The developers of Sansom Village were actually trying to clone another site in the Northeast. But the street had been reborn with the recent opening of a restaurant and nightclub called Artemis. The cuisine at Artemis was the sort of college gourmet fare of elaborate burgers, French onion soup and spinach salad that was beginning to find a niche between fast food and fine dining. The decor was simple wood walls and butcher-block tables. But it was what the owner referred to as the “bouillabaisse of people” that made the place unusual. Artemis was one of the first establishments that attracted crowds that were white and black, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, straight and gay, young and not-so-young, sports fans and art aficionados. It was where local heroes met for drinks: it was the one place that out-of-towners—businessmen from Texas or fledgling rock stars from London—simply
had to go
while in Philadelphia. It had a supper crowd, which even Gia and Karen could join, and a glitzy late night party scene. Artemis was where girls like Gia and Karen dreamed about dancing the night away.

In the evening, Gia and Karen would ride the El train—or, if it seemed too late, the bus—back to the Northeast. Gia didn’t really have a curfew that anyone was going to enforce, but Karen had to be home.

Karen’s rebelliousness did not include ignoring her parents’ wishes. Her mother and father—a bookkeeper and an auto mechanic—cringed at her outfits, and twinged with each plucked eyebrow hair. But they sort of understood what was going on. Mrs. Karuza would sometimes recall her girlhood fascination with Frank Sinatra, and suggest that
perhaps Karen was going through a similar, if more colorful, phase. And besides, her grades were good.

Gia—who Karen’s father called “Danny,” because her haircut reminded him of Daniel Boone’s cap—was a different story. She was an incredibly loyal friend to Karen and had a very endearing, little girl side. But something about her was unsettling. She was, if nothing else, a constant reminder of how normal their daughter with the clothes from Mars really was.

The mommy-daughter relationship between Gia and Kathleen was far from perfect, but at least they finally
had
a relationship. And even though Gia flaunted her disinterest in Henry and Kathleen’s house rules, “the girls” were, in some ways, “the girls” again. They would go shopping together occasionally or go out for lunch. “We would talk, and Gia wanted to know everything about my marriage to her father,” Kathleen recalled. “And I told her everything. She knew in explicit detail all the things about Joe I didn’t like. She knew about his sense of humor. She knew the ins and outs of our sexual relationship. I thought he had a lot of fetishes. He couldn’t be in a loving situation, he always needed me dressed up. If I was Mrs. Mommy in my nightgown, he had no interest. If we went to dinner he expected, you know, a
payback
.” Kathleen also explained the gruesome details of her last year of marriage: her suicide attempt, where she really had been when she disappeared for several weeks.

In return for her mother’s openness, Gia divulged one of
her
most closely held secrets: she had been sexually abused when she was six years old. Gia said that a teenage boy down the street from their old house—a member of a large family the Carangi boys often played with—had been her abuser. The abuse had occurred only once, but she was traumatized by the incident. She worried silently, as abused children often do, whether the violation made her a “bad girl.” And she lived in fear that someone might violate her again—a fear that could manifest itself in many different ways.

Gia told Kathleen about how uncomfortable she had sometimes felt after the divorce living with her father and
brothers. Sometimes late at night, when Joe Carangi returned from work and everyone was asleep, he would wander around his home and look in on his kids. “Gia told me he would come into her room in the middle of the night and sit on her bed,” Kathleen recalled. “Nothing ever happened, but she was uncomfortable. She’d wake up and he would be beside her, staring at her.”

But all these heart-to-heart talks did not really clear the air, or convince Gia that her parents were better off apart. Nor did they lay the groundwork for coping with the adolescent traumas to come.

Drugs and alcohol were two of Kathleen’s biggest concerns. She had recently driven by Lincoln when Gia hadn’t come home from school and found the fourteen-year-old passed out on the front lawn from a lunchtime vodka chugalug contest. “She picked her up every day after that,” recalled Karen Karuza. “Drove up in her big white Cadillac, with her fur coat and big blond hair. She gave us all rides home.”

Henry was also getting tired of the spent joints he kept finding in the front yard, which led him and Gia to have frequent arguments about drugs. “I’m totally against drugs, one hundred percent,” Henry explained, “but then Gia would come back at me because I drank. She’d say drinking was the same thing. I’d say, but when a person drinks they don’t do it to get drunk. When a person does drugs, they do it to get high, to escape. When a person drinks, they do it just to drink, not to get drunk. It’s not the intent when they start out. Maybe they
get
drunk, or maybe they get a little high. But how many times do they get high when they drink compared to the times that they don’t? But with drugs, you do it to get high. Not too many people I know drink to get a high.”

Abused substances had always been a big issue between Gia and Henry. “From the beginning, she confronted him about drinking,” Kathleen recalled. “It was a big joke. The first time she met him, he had stopped on the way home and had a couple of drinks. She started imitating him—just the way he held his keys in his hand, and the way he walked after he had a few drinks. Henry’s not an alcoholic or anything,
but he drinks a little too much socially. I say he has a problem; he says he doesn’t.

“But Gia was just disrespectful to him about it. Once, Gia and Michael grew marijuana plants on the TV. Henry was into plants at the time, and the big joke was that he was really admiring this marijuana plant, not knowing what it was. I finally made them get rid of it because it showed such a lack of respect for him.

“I also had a big problem with her taking drugs, but you couldn’t stop her. She would go into my bathroom in the back of the apartment, open the window and smoke pot. Then she’d spray perfume all over.”

Gia tried to point out that her mother, like most mothers in America, wasn’t exactly drug-free. “Gia told me about her mom taking diet pills to lose weight,” recalled one high school friend, “and she would get mad at me when I did diet pills. I was always obsessed with my weight and always did diet pills to get weight off me. She’d say, ‘I love you just the way you are.’ But, I think it bothered her mostly because of her mom. From what she told me, her mom took a lot of diet pills. To us, she was like a speed freak, really.”

“I was
strictly legit, “
Kathleen said. “Over the years I’ve been on diet pills. But, I’ve always taken legitimate drugs and never taken the amount that was prescribed. I don’t want to become drug dependent, and I always felt like the doctor was giving me more than I possibly needed. I also took some kind of tranquilizer for a short period of time because I noticed that traffic was really bothering me. One doctor prescribed Quaaludes, and I would be so nervous taking them. I would announce I was taking a Quaalude and the kids would roll on the floor laughing, ‘Oh, Mom’s taking a
Quaalude!’ “

But it wasn’t long before Kathleen Sperr was wishing that drugs and alcohol were her biggest child-rearing concern. While cleaning Gia’s bedroom one day, Kathleen began going through her daughter’s dresser drawers. It was something she did periodically, seeking incriminating evidence of pot and pills. If she got caught snooping, she usually explained that she was “looking for a phone number.” This time she found something so shocking to her that she didn’t even bother to apologize for the search. It was an emotional
letter Gia had written to a girl. It didn’t take much reading between the lines to realize that Gia was upset because the girl had spurned her romantic advances.