my 38 years with the king

My 38 Years With the King

 

I was soaked. Knowing 60-70% of the moves was not enough, so I slid to the corner of the stage, and just stopped and looked up. He loomed above me, spinning, moving with reptilian quickness and precision, but with the sort of grace and presence that very, very occasionally makes us believe that humans are more than just flesh and bone.

 

It was enough to watch and remember what had been forgotten, but I still didn't understand, still wouldn't remember why it meant something to me.

 

The slightly weird way I heard the news should have started to clue me in. The kid that works in the management office at my apartment complex told me. He shares my name, except he's black, and young, and still believes. Young, but still, when he told me that Michael Jackson had died, his voice was heavy and low, but not with the eager bite of TMZ gossip, nor the simple, uncontemplated excitement of Something Big happening. It was with the kind of sadness that echoed a tiny loss of hope, because no matter what, some piece would be missing from his future.

 

I went into my place, and turned on the television. The big grey, plastic high-def Sony failed to remind me of the old wooden-cabinet Zenith that lit up a dark apartment when I was not quite three, spraying musical joy and light out of a corner -five kids in colorful clothing, the youngest almost ten years older than me, but still clearly a kid. For a child scared of the dark, my memory is only of warmth and understanding and happiness, of joyful music and a single amazing voice.  The sound, the dancing, the feel, are all still there in my memory. The thing is, that's all there is. I don't remember my mother or father being there. But I don't remember feeling alone.

 

Here in 2009, I went for CNN, but punched the numbers in wrong and got MSNBC. I watched, and listened, but my own foolish little battle distracted me, drowned out the cautious and not-so-cautious speculation and time-filling editorializing. Part of me felt distant from it, and I felt sad and guilty for that. Part of me wanted to cry, but felt that would be wrong. When Stevie Ray Vaughan died, I cried, because he belonged to this city, and it belonged to him. When Paul Newman died last year, I cried, remembering that smile that couldn't be acted, that he could not have faked, that old Luke smile. 

 

But at first, I had no tears for Michael Jackson. I felt it wasn't my right, because I didn't want to just jump on some bandwagon of mob emotion. But I also knew it then, I knew that I had left him behind, somewhere, that same somewhere that I left something of myself and my own dreams. And I suspect that I am not alone in that loss.

 

I watched until I realized they had nothing more to say. Incidentally, Keith Olberman has truly become a caricature of a journalist, and while I share his hatred of stupidity and therefore Bill O'Reilly, he just really needs to... stop.

 

After the night so many years ago that I saw the Jackson 5 on television, life happened. My parents worked hard, and we lived in the country, away from other kids and convenient babysitters, so I was alone a lot. The television remained my constant companion, but the memories of it in all the intervening time are so different. Cartoons. Reruns. Movies. Baseball. The big Zenith was always on through my single-digit years during the 1970's, because it was better than the silence, and better than being alone, but in retrospect, other than Star Trek reruns, my pre-cable television sucked for a long time. And, while it still took a little of loneliness' sting, at best it still left life just... dull.

 

In the early 1980's, thanks to my parents' fear of busing, my naiveté and lack of socialization would collide, with not merely junior high, but junior high in Westlake, where I went beyond not-fitting-in and straight to singularly iconic punching bag. I know, today, thinking back over it all, putting each life, his and mine, in the context of the other, that I was fortunate, because, after a good deal of his own relative silence, Michael roared back to the rescue with Thriller. At about the same time, my parents finally broke down and bought into the world of cable television, and between MTV (after he beat down their walls), radio, and a friend's copy on cassette tape, played on a Radio Shack tape recorder I carried around in a duffle bag all summer, I had a lifeline.

 

I know I was not the only kid in America, or the world, practicing his moves in front of his parents' full-length mirror. I was not the only kid that felt the raw joy of the music like a barrage of happy punches to the gut. I also know that I was not the only kid who could get it right, and believed it said something about him, that yeah, maybe he was special, because he could sing, he could dance, he could do some small measure of the things that the biggest star in the world could do. I also know that I was not the only kid who never pulled those moves, flashed that smile, sang out loud in the light of day.

 

Then, Michael's life, or our realization of it, changed, too, and in an undoubtedly sad and disturbing way, it continued to mean something to me.

 

As the Thriller supernova continued to expand, we all began to see the flipside, the concomitant crushing pressure in the supermassive star that was Michael Jackson. Because, of course, supernovae are the inevitable consequence for stars so bright and massive that they collapse.

 

This was before the "weirdness", before the allegations, before he bought the Elephant Man's bones, the Beatles' Holy Works, or chimpanzees. And the crush, the pressure, the mass, was not all his - it came from the millions of inescapable screaming fans and the unrelenting media. Where his ability and heart were the sources of his light and power, the outside world suddenly began piling on to a life that had been just as unnatural and unheard of as his soaring voice and infallible moves.

 

A few years later, after Bad came out, and after "The Last Emperor" came out in 1987, and the weirdness and faceshifting had begun in earnest, I came to a realization that has stuck with me ever since and been my continuing mantra when confronted with the more sordid details of his life - Michael Jackson had lived a childhood and young life that was unmatched in its weirdness, unnaturalness, and solitude by anyone other than a couple of child emperors.

 

But before that, in my teenage years, when poor self-esteem was otherwise reinforced, Michael provided me with a secret role model, and with a sort of hope for my life. For my itch, my need for me to sing and live music that my parents say was obvious from before I was three, for my need to be somebody, he was the first and the ultimate blueprint, and unlike other aloof role models, he made me believe in the possibilities. To this day, I can and want to sing higher than people expect. I want to move. When I dance, it may not be great, but it's in that very Michael mix of sharpness and fluidity. And, watching him the other night, I realized there was something else.

 

At times, certainly during my teenage years, like some smiling, moonwalking messiah, he did it all for me. His successes were possibilities for me, his failures and isolation allowed me to relate to him. I'm not calling him a god, not a real messiah. He was just this kid, right? But he was very much some amazing trinity: a creative power to move the heart; a human with an unusual power to accomplish good in the world; and just a human being, a kid, even. A kid that was put in a position where he almost had to choose to trade so much of his humanity to be those other two things, to be more than just a kid, just another light flickering on and off.

 

In the later years, he brought a lot on himself. I hate that, but it's true, and I don't want to overlook that, even if I doubt and flat-out rationally disbelieve some of the claims made against him. If he had abused a kid, nothing excuses it, absolves it. The questions he left make it all so much harder, so much more unclear. For now, I believe what I believe. Still, regardless, everyone has to concede that he had made choices for his life. But the world did, too. And he took the beatings, in a very public way.

 

In all those scandals and allegations, and in my own failures and straying from my own path, in the shifting and mutation of popular music, and in the arguable decline of his creative power, I left Michael Jackson, and what he'd meant to me, behind. 

 

I am 40 now. I never did electrify the crowd with my moves, the leg-whip, the spin into a pop-up onto the toes. I never grabbed a full breath and shoved back the shaking and fear and raised my voice to sing until these last couple of years. My own sort of megalomania, my belief in and hope for what I thought I should have been declined even as Michael's sales figures did. I feel so much now that I'm not doing anything but waiting through the days. Waiting for the next job, waiting for the next love, waiting for the next chance that I might let slip like I'd done others. More importantly, I wait to be... me. The everlasting kid that can sing, that can move, that could be somebody, that would try to save the world if he could get all the moves right, just get a clean shot.

 

But that's not the way it works. We're not in Neverland, and none of us are so magic that we don't make mistakes.

 

Friday night, soaked in sweat from an hour of dancing hidden in a crowd that had gathered to celebrate Michael Jackson's music, I looked up and saw another lonely kid, someone else who fell short, moving and singing with the passion of a man struggling too late to capture the childhood he'd never known; fighting to recapture one of the greatest successes the music world has ever known; fighting, like so many of us to make the others see who was really inside; and taking us all with him as far as he could.

 

Power and emotion and need streamed from him like electrons from a Zenith cathode ray tube in a dark room in 1972, and finally, tears came. I closed my eyes, treasuring the pressure of wet warmth against my eyelids. I felt myself at the front of the stage, my sneakers somehow gliding smoothly on the plywood. I kicked a leg out, whipped it left to right, screamed "WHOOOO!", and danced, not alone, not unseen.