Mr. Pope's Balcony

All I've ever asked for is universal adoration. This is so much to ask?

All I have ever asked from life, because I emerged from adolescence with a sense of self-worth that the most powerful microscope in all microscopy couldn’t have detected, is the Pope’s balcony. That is, I wanted to be someone the mere sight of whom would make tens of thousands of people rhapsodic.

I took the photo. I didn’t design this cover.

I have fallen rather short of that ambition, but tonight, tonight, won’t be just any night. Tonight, for the first time in…is it decades now?…I will be the star of the show, a very, very special boy, at the launch of my book Peculiar to Mr. Bowie at a chic venue in London’s West End.

A little background. In February 1971, a dear friend whom cruel fate had made the West Coast publicist for the record company that was releasing Bowie’s records to no perceptible acclaim, asked if I would allow said company to fly me up to and accommodate me in San Francisco to interview the curly-haired young artiste. Would I ever! (I adored San Francisco, to which I’d made a succession of thumb-propelled (that is, hitchhiking) pilgrammages as a faux hippie in the late 1960s.)

I wrote up my interview for Rolling Stone, and sent them the photos I’d managed to take even though I barely knew which side of the camera to point at the subject in those days. I returned to Los Angeles on a Pacific Southwest Airlines (known for its stewardesses’ scandalously alluring uniforms) jet on which David and I seemed to be vying for the Whitest Knuckles award).

Many decades passed. For my blog Mendel Illness, I dashed off a reminiscence of my brief friendship with the man who became Ziggy Stardust and a succession of other much-beloved characters. Years later, a woman who’d once been the drummer for the Cramps, and latterly had become the queenpin of a boutique publishing and music empire, offered me bucks galore for permission to publish my wee reminiscence. Well, not exactly galore, but those subsisting on minuscule monthly Social Security payouts are easily impressed.

The last time I did a reading was in 2004, up in Norfolk, at a café whose patrons seemed considerably more interested in their croque monsieurs than in the sparkling prose in which my novel-posing-as-a-biography Waiting for Kate Bush abounded, and it didn’t feel very much at all like the Pope’s balcony. I got a little tongue-tied. I got a lot tongue-tied. The good news was that no one noticed.

I have begun suffering from the Irving Berlin Syndrome. As you of course are aware, the great composer ceased allowing himself to be photographed in the autumn of his years because he was afraid the photos would reveal what he’d come to look like. What if, to accompany my obituary, the newspapers publish a photo of me looking as I’ve come to look, a dilapidated old embarrassment bearing scant resemblance to the dashing C-list LA rock personality of many years past?

My band, with whom D. Bowie famously jammed on what had once been Charlie Chaplin’s soundstage two days after we returned from San Francisco, as photographed by Norman Seeff.

Tonight will be the first of three readings. My original inclination was to do each as a different character, beginning with The Old Timer, a grizzled one-time Nevada prospector who appears every now and again to torment Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling) with his raspy unintelligibility. Mrs. Mendelsohn mused that if I went ahead with this idea, she would divorce me.

Additionally, I have thought, because the truth is pretty boring, and all in the book anyway, that I might thrill the audience with brazen fabrications — that I might, for instance, relate having driven Bowie over to Oakland to meet with Black Panthers kingpin Huey Newton, who asked him to write “Oh! You Pretty Things” as a Panthers anthem-sort-of-thing. To this too Mrs. Mendelsohn declared, “Oh, no, you won’t!”

In the fullness of time, all will be revealed. Do buy several copies of the book, and order multiple prints of my famous photographs. And for God’s sake, become a paying subscriber. :-)

(Calm down, Mr. Pope’s Balcony. No one’s going to publish your obituary. You’ll be lucky if three people comment on your passing on Facebook.)

My cover design, from before the publisher retitled the book.

From my 2021 album Don Quixote and the Spiders From Spain.