The feeling of sunrise in Cork—the way the air was damp and fresh, shaking, all too aware of the panic of nighttime, liminal and lined with edges of gold—went best with Bowie. Some mornings he listened to “Heroes,” and he thought about what he had never been. On other mornings, he put on “Let’s Dance” and drank cup after cup of shitty instant coffee before heading down across Saint Patrick Street to scrub the sticky floors of the club he’d been writhing in four hours before.

Rainy days and it was “Bring Me the Disco King,” and he thought about taking a knife to the inside of his arm. When the flat was freezing with cold in a wet way which felt like falling into the sea, he played “My Death,” which was Jacques Brel, but Bowie lived and died it. And “Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud” was what he played when he first took another man into himself and wanted to scream out to his father and his past and those blue eyes.

He’d had enough of silence.

But most of all, that first year was marked by an almost orgiastic adherence to Bowie’s sepulchral warning—the desired brevity of his life, an anticipated early end by twenty-five.

He didn’t think he would make it, not even that far. He figured there was nothing much to live for at eighteen, anyway, other than one more drink, one more fuck, a few more cups of coffee, trad nights with American exchange students grinding in the corners, balancing on the rock wall across from The Thirsty Scholar at three in the morning and itching, always, to jump into the water and melt the fuck away.

And now, at thirty-seven, he was still very much alive—his blood pumped through him, and his brain was sparking in manic fury and discontent, and his skin felt like ice. He had a job, a respectable one, and he had a smooth face which no one could read. He had an ex-wife and a child, an aging mother who had never really loved him but who was maybe trying her best now. He was usually sober. He played music at an acceptable volume.

He was back in his childhood home. Managing it, and his money, and making it all look good.

As the Beaumonts had always done. At least until his father had fleeced half of Baltimore. But he was reclaiming that name, that heritage, even as he hated it.