Explaining Michael Jackson

The images on the TV were so surreal to Tink yesterday that at one point she put her hand on my arm – as if frightened, because she was – and asked, “Why does he look like that?”

“Because he was really sad,” I told her. “And really sick.”

How can you explain Michael Jackson to a 4-year-old? A 4-year-old who wasn’t in your suburban living room when the world first saw him moonwalk, his sequinned socks making tracks across the TV screen? How do you explain the artist with an otherworldly talent who began to look like an alien in aviators? The grade-school kid who convincingly sang about grownup heterosexual love but never seemed to experience it as an adult? The abuse survivor who mourned the childhood he never had by constructing an alternate fantasy reality and calling it Neverland? A businessman smart enough to buy the Beatles catalog of songs but so stupid that he told Martin Bashir that inviting children into your bed is the most loving thing a human being can do?

I couldn’t watch it anymore yesterday, just like I decided years ago I couldn’t watch anymore. I couldn’t watch the bizarre surgical transformation into some unholy Diana Ross-LaToya hybrid, him dangling a baby over a balcony, kissing Lisa Marie Presley, shuffling into a courthouse in his pajama bottoms. All that was missing were the Kleenex boxes on his feet. 

He wasn’t always that way, I told Tink, bringing up You Tube.

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It’s also hard to explain to a nonwhite child born in this century that it wasn’t so long ago that white people didn’t listen to black music. That I and millions of others tore down a color barrier with our worship of Michael Jackson. White kids rapping is still a recent phenomenon in the history of pop music.

The synthy, drum machiney opening of “Billie Jean” made the hair on my arms stand up. It did so again yesterday. Watch this, I told Tink – the sidewalk’s going to light up underneath his feet. 

It was the music first – I didn’t even know it was Michael Jackson, whom I last remembered as a black man, in a tuxedo and Afro, when I first heard “Billie Jean” – and later it was his delicate features and the dancing as if his limbs were made of rubber bands that made me swoon. He was 24 at this point but with his slim frame and vocal hiccups delivered in that soprano, no one would describe him as a man. A few years later, after the mania was over, I took my first psychology class and learned that pop idols provide nonthreatening, nonsexual crushes for young teens. Which explained why I loved the girly songs like “She’s Out of My Life” and “Say Say Say” and completely lost interest by the time “Bad” was released.

A consuming love for a singer or pop band is usually the first interest a child has that is truly independent of his or her parents’ influence, and it thrives on parental disapproval. But in 1983, Michael Jackson was an pop act the whole family could love. He was wholesome and free of scandal. He went on dates with Webster and Brooke Shields, America’s favorite virgin. When my parents had the hardwood floors in their bedroom redone, they delayed moving the furniture back in by a day so my father and brother could practice moonwalking.

But it was I who talked and thought about Michael Jackson nonstop, clipping photos and articles from the arts and entertainment tab in my hometown paper, a section I’d eventually work for, becoming its first female editor.  

I bought my first pair of black loafers in 1983. Rather, there was no peace at 12 Century Drive until loafers were purchased. I too wore them with pink socks. My father even helped me shine a penny from my birth year with Brasso. That one went in the left shoe while a 1983 penny went in the right. I had read Michael did that.

I remember MTV’s debut broadcast of the extended “Thriller” video was to be at midnight on a night I happened to be babysitting. I told the parents before they left that I wasn’t leaving until I saw it – our houses were less than a block apart BUT COULD YOU IMAGINE HOW MUCH I’D MISS AS I DASHED THROUGH THE THREE BACKYARDS THAT SEPARATED US? – so they were free to stay out late. They returned home early; not to watch Michael but to watch me make a fool of myself. They were not disappointed.

I now understand why my mother was so exasperated with the shrieks and scrambles to the stereo’s volume knob whenever I heard Michael Jackson. It wouldn’t have been that long ago that she and some friend named Mary Ellen or Mary Jo traded notes in school signed “Mrs. Paul McCartney” and “Mrs. George Harrison.” (My mom was Mrs. Harrison. Yes, that’s right – if it weren’t for this Mary Ellen ‘ho, it would be me and not Gwyneth hanging out with Stella McCartney right now.) So that wasn’t annoyance with my behavior but her own re-lived embarrassment, over and over and over, since “Thriller” was in the Top 10 for something like 80 weeks.

At 8 o’clock the night of the American Music Awards in January 1984 – one of those awards shows he swept – I went to turn the TV. Only it didn’t come on. The TV broke on the night Michael Jackson would be singing and dancing and thanking his fans. I unraveled in sobs and I think I even began to hash out a suicide plan to escape a searing pain I had never known before my parents and brother stopped laughing long enough to plug the TV back in.

My love for Michael Jackson ran its course organically. Later I’d hear about the hyperbaric oxygen chamber, the Jesus Juice and the tawdry, possibly criminal allegations … I’d read these things almost forgetting it was the same person. He had become a monster.

Even more years later came Hank Stuever’s piece in the Washington Post, a ridiculously brilliant piece of writing about a life turned ridiculously tragic. (Read #10.) It was clear then that Jackson was as sick and freakish as he was talented. We all knew this was going to end badly. No one could picture him as an octogenarian in gray extensions (or was that a wig the ghoulish Jacko had been wearing?) in a rocking chair. The pathetic figure deteriorating under the weight of stratospheric fame was a victim of his own gifts: He could attract a throng of millions but was excruciatingly lonely; he grew up in the most cutthroat business but remained heartbreakingly naive. The very act of speaking seemed to cause pain to this fragile, wounded soul. 

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Just the way I want her to go to summer camp or go through a horse phase, I hope someday Tink becomes deliriously, irrationally crazy about some singer or the members of a band, to the point where her father and I can’t take another breathlessly delivered recounting of his family’s blue-collar roots or the moment he was discovered. I want her to experience the rite of passage that is pop music fanaticism. I want her to believe someone knows what she’s feeling and can communicate with her in a way her parents likely won’t be able to. Will posters even exist once she’s a teen? Can you even buy them now?

I only hope her musical crush is truly worthy and not some marginally talented fabrication like New Kids on the Block or Jonas Brothers. I hope she’s as lucky as I was. I want her, when the object of her obsession dies and that day becomes a cultural mile marker for her generation, to feel that she had a part in making history.

Because, just as Hank Stuever wrote, he did – sang and danced! On TV.

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