He was the Thin White Duke, the most glamorous man I’d ever seen. More glamorous than Bianca Jagger, and that was saying something in those Studio 54 years of excess, glimpsed as a child from the Midwest, eyes wide as pie pans gulping Andy Warholian nights and Yves Saint Laurent luxe fashion from Time and W’s pages.

He was also Ziggy Stardust, the oddest thing I’d ever set my mind to. With those damned Spiders from Mars. Defying gravity, and then some.

Mark Newell’s basement in University Heights, Ohio is where I first saw the pictures and albums of the impossibly thin man in the wild colors, the shiny fabrics, the fluorescent unnatural hair color. Mark was the by-product of another marriage washed out, living in low dollar exile, stuck with a kid belonging to a friend of his mothers who he had zero interest in, but had to deal with. In the tatters of Mark’s former life, Bowie was something we could share.

I couldn’t look away. I knew Fame from the radio with its stop-start beats, the bottom falling out of the song part way through, the high water flume of a vocal challenging the notion of faux notoriety that would become the 21st century’s drug of choice. But I wasn’t prepared for how odd — and thrilling — Bowie was. I had absolutely no reference point in my Midwestern childhood.

Bowie fascinated me in ways I couldn’t understand in a world of mommies in Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dresses drinking gallons of Paul Mason Chablis with the whispers of key parties and the local late night discos where the white powder wasn’t powdered sugar — or something I’d ever see.

Pointy teeth. Deathly pallor. Impossible grace in the way he moved. That was the beauty of Bowie, he transmuted everybody, everything — and transcended expectation, regimentation, how it’s done. He followed the art, he defined fashion, he created the waves and rolls that existed only inside his head. And what curls they were: Wave, Heroes, Let’s Dance, Scary Monsters as well as collaborators ranging from Brian Eno, Lou Reed, Nile Rodgers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Queen, Tin Machine and the always gentlemanly sometimes Nashvillian Reeves Gabriel.

Heck, Mick and Keith even wrote a song about his equally androgynous then-wife Angie.

All fascinating, churning, changing, impossibly musical stuff. It swirled around my plaid skirt’n’knee socked world like a sparkly cloud of fairy dust, intoxicating me with the fumes of fabulous, the throbbing bass notes wobbling my knees and that soignee voice slicing between my ribs straight through to the wild child yearning to be free from the conveyor belts of social expectation and upwardly mobile aspiration.

In his platform boots, his unzipped jumpsuits, the high style close-cut Armani, the cutting edge leather trenches, he was more than a master of the universe, he knew galaxies — and he told those stories as The Man Who Fell To Earth.

It was always thus with Bowie. It was why I was transfixed beyond enchanted. Always the unexpected, yet something sweet, something to pull you in, something to make you dream or think or imagine other worlds beyond your own. And when you’re a kid sitting at a wooden chair and desk, reading the same ballpoint tattoos about Tisha + JB or the words to Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion like they’re Biblical talismans, Bowie truly was a siren’s call, a cry of “be what you will, be beautiful, be a freak.”

It was too much for me to immerse in. I would blow a fuse, buckle in a stairwell somewhere, collapse under a fabulosity I was too townie to handle. I knew that, knew it inside — and still I yearned.

For that was what Bowie promised. Whatever you were, however you were — freak, geek, gimp, weirdo, diva, glamazon, hipster — don’t be boring, obvious, tedious, average. Bowie helped me forsake the plan of Corporate Housewifery, the #1 cash crop of Shaker Heights, Ohio. I was marked as a good cut of material — championship golfer, already doing the chit-chat small talk grown-up cocktail circuit, as well as navigating Cleveland’s better restaurants and country clubs with my insatiable mother. Everything was seemingly in place for a good marriage, a fabulous life of the gentry. Yet, I could never take the bit in my mouth, to settle down and be grateful for chasing the streets with prep school boys, trips to Blossom Music Center and Richfield Coliseum as an observer.

I wanted closer, to touch it, to breathe the fumes of whatever made the songs come to life. I pined to be one of those beautiful bohemian girls in impossible shoes, swaying on the side of the stage, tossing knowing glances to the players, whispering behind a raised hand. But more than a courtesan, I wished to be a confidante, to know where the music came from. I wanted to see the court and spark, the machinations of creation, the hot blaze of the moments when it burns too bright. I wanted to seek, to find. I had no map, no clue, no notion of how to get there. All there was, was a hunger and scant few beacons. All I had to do was listen, and dream, think, believe I could — and keep moving to the possibilities.

David Bowie was potential without end, creation beyond limits. He followed his muse. He lived — after years surfing the gay demimonde, flaunting sexual convention and identity beyond androgyny to a brazen gender flip that gave the New York Dolls a design key — quietly, almost beyond the fray. To make art when it feels necessary. To express and be whole, to live and be present. It is an amazement to have that balance, that hunger, that realm.

Sitting here, as the small hand inches towards 4 a.m. in a cotton kimono with an East Indies print, a scavenged floral bone china plate from a second hand store littered with disaster brownie crumbs beside me, I am numb. This was the man who could sing The Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby, a clip I return to holiday season after holiday season to ground the Hallmark brokering in my own cultural imperative, survive a guest mash-up with Cher on her primetime ‘70s variety show, as well as be an embracer of Germanic Bauhaus culture, a space oddity, a scary monster, a conundrum and an artist.

I had thrilled when I watched/heard Blackstar released on his 69th birthday last Friday. It seemed like the ultimate gift for everyone involved. Like everything great about the iconic Brit, it challenged everything I knew. Textural, evoking jazz at its core, aurally engaging, the minor key drifts, the haunted vocals, it all suggests rapture, divinity and a world beyond imagination. But I had no idea it was to be his elegy.

And so Donny McCaslin’s saxophone chases me across this apocryphal final Bowie record, chases me through the night, driving me on, perhaps exorcising these doubts and ghosts before daylight breaks and there’s no turning back. It is hard sensing the ice floe melting out from beneath you, the berg breaking apart, drifting to sea — and yet, what else is there?

There is, as there’s always been, the music. Right now, that is more than plenty. And somehow, I think — no believe — that music will once again be more than enough to get me through. After all, it has saved my life over and over again. How can it fail me now?

Holly Gleason is a frequent visitor to the Vineyard and contributor to the Gazette. She is based in Nashville and during her career has written for nearly every music magazine including Rolling Stone, Spin, CREEM, The LA Times, New York Times, Oxford American and No Depression to name a few.