That's Gia Carangi. She was called the world's first super model and up-ended the industry back in the late 70's when all they promoted were tall, thin ash blonde women. Gia shows up as a stark opposite and threw those models off the magazine covers left and right. She was also one of the very few models who used little or no makeup whatsoever, she didn't need it. If you get that famous that fast, the notable photographers like Richard Avedon beg you for a shoot.
However, growing up in shitty circumstances like she did, learning and enjoying being feral as an early teen didn't help her in adulthood. She was raised in a crazy household and that doesn't teach you about how to anchor your life to some secure point nor find a harbor in a storm. So, get real rich and famous as a young adult and knowing nothing of how to navigate life, you smash up on the rocks quickly.
Before Gia discovered drugs while in NYC people said was a charm to be around. No negativity or darkness. However, the drug usage grew (lastly heroin) and due to this and a host of other problems, she became too unreliable, too erratic to be employed in the fashion business. Her bouts of anger, storming out of photo sessions or not even showing up at all wasn't helping her career along much. The photographers began to complain of the track marks on her arms and tried to touch them up in the developing room. It wasn't long after when no one would hire her.
She burnt through her cash and ended up homeless in NYC's shooting galleries. Feeling sick one day, she goes to the hospital and after a bunch of tests, she was found positive for the AIDs virus from sharing needles. This was the mid 80s when this diagnosis was a death sentence.
She died in 1986 and from what those saw who visited her then, she was emaciated and covered head to toe in those skin cancers AIDs patients were prone too. It was months later that the fashion industry had learned of her passing and just one photographer friend from then, sent a Mass card to her parents. Otherwise the business did nothing to remember her.
To replace the mega bucks Carangi used to bring into the agencies and recreate that “look,” they found Cindy Crawford and the fashion world dubbed her, “Baby Gia.”
Angelina Jolie played Gia in a biopic and said about her character: "When she's free and just being herself, she's unbelievable; that's the tragedy of Gia's story. You think, 'God, Gia didn't need drugs -- she was a drug.'"
**
I'll have to be careful about how I write this next story and the reason why is that you're not so supposed to speak ill of the dead or disparage their reputation. So I'll have to tread carefully but tell the truth as well as I can. Yes, the person I will speak of is dead and has been so for over 20 year now I believe. I'll call her Gia.
Since I'm an awful stalker on Google looking up people I used to know, I looked up Gia and she didn't exist. So I put a search through Google images and the first picture that showed up shocked me. I swore it was Gia. The picture linked to a Facebook account that was open and I hit it up.
It was Gia's daughter. I had found out at Gia's death that she had two kids but that's all I knew. The girl on the Facebook page looked like a ghost I knew from long ago. This spectre I saw was a near clone of Gia from then. Spooooky! I never bothered “friending” because all I had were the ugly stories about her Mom.
**
I briefly hung at “Horton's Lot” by the Teknor Apex Chemical complex as a late teen. More truthfully, I was pestered and dragged to hang there by J, who for some reason liked those kids. They all were your real lower blue class types. Their parents worked in shit factory jobs then and because they and their kids were closer to “the street,” they were rougher and more prone to pound the shit out of each other, including the girls.
J. and I show up one night at the lot and Gia (16), Eric(19) and Sue (17) hop into my car and we take off to drive around aimlessly. I had known Eric from the lot but not the two girls. So after a bunch of “Hi's” we talk and listen to the radio. The two girls were pretty in their own right but Gia had something else...a cuteness...a personality that was very engaging. Her heart was in the right place and that can make a girl look even prettier. It's that freshness anyone has, before life beats the shit out of you. Hopeful, full of energy and showed promise. I knew many teens then who were already wrung through wringer and were too soon ruined. But not Gia. Not yet.
Eric and Gia were in the back seat and from the conversation I figured out they were a couple. I had learned that as Gia was trying to hold Eric to a promise he'd “buy her those earrings” she saw at the flea market.
“That's it! Hold him to it!” yells Sue from the front seat to them. Girls must stick together you know! For about thirty minutes the chatter from the back seat is typical teen couple shit, arguing somewhat with protestations of love seconds later.
After a bit, the back seat gets real quiet and I turn my head around to see what's gone wrong. I then see Gia's head slowly bobbing up and down on Eric's lap and I quickly turn my head back to driving. Whoops!, I shouldn't have seen that I think. Sue had turned around too but kept watching.
“Wow, this chick Gia doesn't care at all, and neither does this Sue.” I thought.
A few months go by and I get to know the two girls better. Gia was a pure goofball personality wise. It was a nice goofball mind you, nothing that would suggest malice at all. I figured there was some mental damage along the way that made her ditzy silly. But the problem with that is that there was plenty of pot, coke and pills then and if she took any of those at all, her ditzyness was raised 300%. That also made her an easy target for the boys as well. When the beer and pot made her brains run out of her ears, her panties ran off too. Apparently, the girls of that little clique at Horton's Lot didn't really care that she was like this. Your lower classes start early when it comes to anything “adult.” To add to that, we were just out of the 70s where shctupping anyone you wanted was fine.
I was there at the Lot for a few months when I started to hear my inner smoke detector going off. The boys at that lot were far too willing to be pre-criminals and I could see where this was going to lead, graduated criminals with degrees from the ACI. I didn't want to be associated with this and as the old saying goes, 'You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.' So I stopped going there.
No loss. I wasn't about to caught up in their little petty conspiracies and car thefts. Also, I had turned myself into Mr. College Kid by then and that was the path I wanted to follow.
But, on occasion, we'd drive by there and stop for a few minutes because someone from our original haunt in Slater Park had wanted to go and one night I saw Gia again.
She was high as shit. She had shaved one side of her head down to crew cut style and swept the rest of her long hair over the other side into this puffed up 80s style. She wore torn jean cut-off shorts and her tee shirt was tied up into a mid riff. She was bouncing from car to car, sloppy drunk. When she had some to ours I was already outside, leaning against the hood
“Ronnnnnny!” She had remembered me. I got the hug and sloppy lush's kiss and she had asked me how I was and all that. Before I could get her into a conversation, she had seen something shiny over there and ran off. She still possessed that nice open hearted innocence in her but she was a mess. Life, I guess, even in her state, had not made her bitter and ugly yet. Or perhaps she was too numb to notice anyways. Perhaps she wanted it that way.
By my car, on the side walk against the fence, were three girls I had remembered who still hung at the Lot. After Gia had run off the girls made their pronouncements to themselves.
“Fuck...what a pig!” “Wonder what different kinds of DNA will be in her stomach tonight?” “God...she's sooo disgusting!” The panel of judges ruled her as a bonafide skank and this, coming from girls, is solid sentence of social death.
This, coming from real lower class girls who lost their virginity by early 15 and who could beat on a Pawtucket cop w/o any reservation if need be. That's a heavy judgment when your condemned by them!
Those girls could tell I had heard that and one says, “You haven't been here in a while...you know what Gia's doing now?” I'm asked.
“Her Mom threw her out of the house....she's been fuckin' n' suckin' guys for a places to live now...the last one let her sleep in his car only!”
Then a couple of years go by w/o seeing her.
**
J. who used to bug me to go to Horton's Lot to begin with, now had a small apartment on Barton St. He was in a longish process of leaving RI anyways so our crew didn't visit him much. He was on his way. But one night he had gotten ahold of me and said Gia was just recently staying with him.
Gia and I were alone in my car as J. had gone back inside. She looks at me and asks, “Do you have a washing machine and dryer...J doesn't and this building doesn't either.” Gia's entire life was in a Hefty bag she had thrown in the back seat of my Nova.
I thought about it...and gave in.
She looked haggard now for a 20 year old. Her hair was a bit greasy and you could see the skull pushing through her face a bit. She had lost quite a bit of weight when she had no reason to begin with. She just looked plain worn out and tired. That bouncy ditz I knew were replaced by a look in the eye I've seen in schizophrenics, it's a wolf's look that's always on guard, ready to spot any danger at anytime and ready to flee, or pounce. Those stupid jokes she used to tell weren't needed as they no longer served her, that was substituted by hard core survival duplicity and strategy. Life had sure changed her these past years.
She tells me to leave and blow off J., to just leave him at his apartment.
“He thinks he's gonna get some but fuck that!' she tells me. I guess she was tired of that as well and had an ounce of dignity left.
We get to my house and I sneak her in, then down stairs and she starts dumping her clothing into the machine. She then walked away from me over by the furnace to block my view but I can see somewhat. She pulls off her tee shirt and quickly puts on as far too large sweat shirt I had for her. When she pulled that shirt, I saw her stomach and it had about 6-8 largish mosquito bites with bruising all around them. What was weird was that the mosquito that bit her loved Euclidean geometry, a nice straight line of them.
It hit me what those marks were. “Well, at least she ain't mainlining it.” I thought.
The wash took a couple of hours so we took off driving and I hear about her life, as she told it but it was full of lies and horseshit, trying to cover up what a mess it was now. I didn't bother to extract the truth out of her, what was the point? I let her ramble on.
We get back and collect her stuff and she says to go back to J's house and I drop her off there.
Another five years go by.
Snippets of her life came to us in dribs and drabs. She was living in the shittier parts of Providence. I heard nothing more till around 1999.
**
Rhode Island is a small town. You will hear about people you haven't seen in decades eventually. Since I was friends with the EMT crews on Pawtucket's fire department, I'd hear all sorts of weird stories and on rare occasions of calls these guys went on where we knew the person.
I was talking to D and we were hitting old memories when I mentioned Gia.
“Oh, shit..I was on that call.” D says.
“What call?” I had no idea where this was going.
“Ok...we get a call that two kids were across the street from their home, telling their neighbor's that 'Mom won't wake up.' So the neighbor shrewdly kept the kids at his house and he goes across the street. He was the one who called.”
“We found her in her bed, dead as a door nail. The cops and medical examiner have to come so we wait and when they arrive, they find out who she was...I swear, they knew what to look for and they found it, needles, pills, heroin and the works.” Like I said, in RI, your life is known by all.
I say, “Wow, she finally did it! Straight down!”
“Not really,” D goes on, “her life went to total shit and she got into a rehab program, managed to get off of it, get a job, rent that house and got her kids back from the state. What the medical examiner suspects, she fell off the wagon, got the drugs and shot herself to the moon. She fucked up dosing herself.”
She was 28.
Since it was the Pawtucket FD that went on that call, I asked D. “Where was this house? I didn't know she was back in Pawtucket again.”
“Hell, it's three blocks from YOU...Over by Beverage Hill...It's a good area, a nice house too, clean inside, lawn cut and all.”
I had no idea she was less than a half mile from me, or that she had gone that way.
**
It's been years since I used to sneak back to Gia's daughter's Facebook page just to look her photos, all grown up at 22. “You have Mom's face...you're Gia.” I'd say to myself. After a bit I stopped looking, you process stuff from the past and move on. It's what we all do.
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