The Curious Case of Michael Joseph Jackson

Have you heard the news? Michael Jackson died. I needed a few days to get some perspective and sort out some very mixed feelings about this. Of course, the first feeling was disbelief. Michael Jackson? Dead? No, like most people, I didn't think he'd live to a ripe old age. As frail and sickly as he was, I didn't think he'd be eating the corn mash in a Mickey Mouse themed nursing home one day. At the same time, I didn't think his time to die would come so soon. Michael Jackson was one of those celebrities I took for granted. The kind I thought would always be around, occupying space like an old sofa. Like Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, and Ed McMahon before him, he was celebrity background noise. You knew his best days were behind him, but you couldn't picture him being gone either. Yeah, he got weird at the end of his life. Weird-looking. But in retrospect, I put him into this Liberace/Carol Channing/Siegfried & Roy category. A flashy and weird dude, but he was still Michael Jackson. To hear that he was dead was surreal. Cardiac arrest? What?

The next feeling I had was one of deep sadness. I'm 40, so I was in high school when MJ hit it big with Thriller. To say he exploded is a vast understatement. Before Thriller, I have a vague recollection of songs from Off the Wall, the kind I'd hear in the summertime on my Dad's Motorola transistor radio while he was painting the garage doors. Rock With You, Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', Human Nature, P.Y.T. All amazing songs. All classics. But I didn't associate them with Michael Jackson. They were just songs I liked. But in the 80s, with the advent of MTV, which used to play music videos, Michael became HUGE. First there was Billie Jean and the video that is still one of my favorites.


Then the moon walk. The beaded white glove. Then came Beat It. Then Thriller, and the rest was history. For us, the 80s adolescents, his videos were EVENTS. They were Broadway shows captured in 5 minutes. When MTV announced a new premiere video from Michael Jackson, you stopped what you were doing -- you put down the Battleship, the whiffle ball and bat -- and you went to watch it. Seeing Thriller for the first time was like watching a freaky movie, with all those dancing zombies and special effects, and Vincent Price, and then him at the end, looking at the camera with those yellow cat eyes. It hadn't been done before and hasn't been done since. (As an aside, that's when I first started thinking he was taking a weird turn. People begin whispering that he had this weird fascination with the occult. Right after that, he started hanging out with Bubbles the chimp, Brooke Shields, and Emmanuel Lewis. Bizarre.)

Sure, looking back, a lot of it probably seems hokey. Especially if you weren't alive then, or were just a kid. But to some of us, at that time of our lives, Michael Jackson was fucking cool. The moonwalk was cool. His glove was cool. All of it. The guy moved like no one we'd ever seen. And it didn't matter if you were into hard rock, like AC/DC, or the New Wave stuff, Flock of Seagulls, Men at Work, Human League, no matter what music you favored, you still liked Michael Jackson. You made a place for his music.

That's the Michael Jackson I remember. The one I choose to remember. And when I heard he was dead, it made me really sad. Sad for a lost part of my life that his music was a part of. Sad for another chip away at my mortality, a feeling that was compounded by Farrah Fawcett's death the same day. Sad for the tragic arc of Michael Jackson's life and what he ended up becoming, a grown man who, because he suffered so much as a child, transparently tried to re-create his childhood in middle age. He became a man in remarkable denial, oblivious to the world around him, a world that doesn't tolerate 45 year-old men sleeping with children, innocent or not. Through delusion, denial, or something else, he didn't seem to care what the world thought. He loved children and surrounded himself with them anyway. Maybe because they were the only people he could relate to. Maybe because he saw in their innocence a small part of himself that he wanted to reclaim. Maybe it was something more sordid, though that was never proven. I'd like to think the stories about him weren't true, that he wasn't capable of what he was accused of. If in fact the stories are not true, then he's an even more tragic figure -- someone who actually tried to do well and befriend children in need, help them bear their cancer more easily and make their lives better, only to be betrayed by some out of greed. And it may have destroyed him, stripping him of his reputation, his dignity, and his health. If the stories are true, then he should have been in jail a long time ago, and there are a lot of people who didn't do their jobs to put him there, including friends and family who should have stepped in and stopped it. That none of the above happened makes me seriously question the veracity of the people who accused him of pedophilia and other misbehavior. I see slimy parents who smelled a payday. Maybe that's what I want to see because the alternative is too disgusting to consider. Either way, the problems he encountered at the end of his life are not what I choose to remember about him. I'd rather focus on the positive aspects of his life, what he contributed, and what he left to the world. Judging from the posthumous testaments that are being paid to him in every corner of the planet, including a famous Filipino jail, he left us a lot. Music, joy, and idealism for a better world.

As things are going though, Michael's becoming another Elvis, another Marilyn Monroe. A tragic celebrity eaten up by fame, plagued by pills, and dying under suspicious circumstances. The parallels between MJ and Elvis -- whom he reportedly was afraid of becoming -- are striking. There are two Elvises that people remember. The youthful Elvis, strikingly handsome, strong, and sexy, with the high cheekbones and shaking hips. Then there's the old, fat Elvis, the one addicted to drugs who shot up a television, sweat a lot, and threw scarves to screaming middle-aged women in Vegas. The one the impersonators favor. Thankyaverymussssh... The one he was when he died.

There were two Michaels, too. Three actually. The little kid, smiling, happy, innocent, and slightly robotic, having been trained with a belt by his abusive father, Joe Jackson (Have you heard about his new record company? It's gonna be huge!) Then there was the teenage/20s Michael, a legend at his peak, snarlin', moonwalkin', high-kickin', yelpin', SHAMM-OWN!!! HEE-HEE-HEE!!! True-skinned. Handsome. Strong. Picking up an award from President Reagan in Blueblocker shades and a dark blue Sgt. Pepper soldier's uniform with gold trim and epaulets. Then there's the older Michael, who was nothing short of a creepy Kabuki doll. The Michael with the ghost mask and alien eyes, the oversized lips, cleft chin, and thrice worked over nose. All of it manufactured to specification. The Michael with the stringy haired wig. Rumors he was bald, that he wore white makeup to cover up his vitiligo. Rumors he was a man in perpetual pain, a man who managed to find a doctor to give him a dangerous anaesthetic just so he could sleep. The Michael he was when he died.

Like old Elvis, old Michael was not the best Michael, not the one people want to remember. Not the one I want to remember. Celebrities that big, who fly that high, always crash the hardest. And when they do, it's never pretty, it's a bomb going off and we feel the reverberations for months, sometimes years. There are people who still think Elvis is alive.

Once celebrities -- legends -- die, two things happen. First, there's an outpouring of feeling from people over what's been lost and an appreciation for what the person accomplished in life. The one thing Joe Jackson has said right since his son's death is that he wished Michael could have seen the outpouring of positive feelings for him when he was still alive. But that's not how it works. When he was still alive, Michael Jackson was a beyond-weird 50 year-old man who slept with kids, buried himself in financial debt, and hooked himself on prescription drugs. Now that he's dead, he's suddenly become a tragic figure whom no one appreciated. He's never been more popular. His CDs and songs are at the top of the charts. They're flying off the shelves. Death not only makes you more popular, it can make you richer. Isn't this world fucked up?

The second thing that happens when legends die is that people gather like vultures to pick at their bones. They tear open the person's life like a dissected cat in biology class and examine it, organ by organ. They suck the marrow out of every piece of the person. Decades later, they're still doing it to Marilyn Monroe. Shit, Megan Fox has a tattoo of Marilyn on her forearm. Does anyone even know anything about Marilyn the person, instead of Marilyn the caricature? Does anyone care? The same thing is happening already with MJ, and given the strange second half of his life, he's all the more ripe for morbid fascination. Suddenly the things that he kept secret for so long are being shown in stark relief. The scars on his face. The holes in his body. The baldness. The skin problems. We're going to learn more about Michael Jackson in the next few weeks than we ever wanted to know. We have already. Once we're shown all the things he tried to keep secret, maybe we'll have a little more sympathy for Michael Jackson the human being and appreciate all the more the things he overcame and the beautiful music he left us.