On the Thursday evening after it happened I sat at Charlie’s on Broadway meeting some new people. I said I couldn’t remember the last time four famous people died in one day. Which where the other two, everyone asked. Why, Sky Saxon and Johnny Hart, I said.
I found only one man who knew of Sky Saxon. I found a few who knew Johnny Hart. I found one guy who’d grown up in the same county as Johnny Hart.
Except Johnny Hart has been dead about two years. The mistake was all mine and I spread it all down the line that night. All mine.
But I like to think of it as the Reality Distortion Field surrounding Him (a concept brought on admittedly by dosages of Japanese giant robot anime) flaring in one final colossal shimmer, scrambling quantum errors into surrounding data. A huge ripple pulse shaking even us down at the bottom of the pond.
The death of Michael J. Jackson, age 50, twice divorced, father of three, didn’t seem to push the world past that one heavy shimmer. Granted I don’t keep a TV at home and don’t hear the radio, but 9/11, the only thing I’ve got to compare this with, played as two boot-kicks and a head-bash to an easily-mugged nation. With Michael, I don’t even see Him on the cover of the scandal rags. “Rolling Stone” put the Jonas Brothers up front. The Jonas Brothers were approximately not born when Michael put “Billie Jean” everywhere on everyone—we watched it on video in marching band class, even–so anyone who hadn’t heard/seen it could reasonably face the question, “Have you been living on Mars?” That was 1983 and we thought we could spot the Martians.
Twenty-six years later a white woman on the 66 bus complains of the heat. Her tongue hangs out between sentences. A black man in a hand-painted jacket and a walking boot cast limps onto a corner. “Bud weiser,” two words, reads the front right panel of his jacket. “The king of beers” reads the back. He carries a wooden tablet reading “I know you 1970.” In 1970 the Jackson 5 had three singles go to Number One on the Billboard chart.
A black kid at the supermarket, white t-shirt, big sneakers, asks me “You think orange-flavored ice cream is good?”
“Could be. I mostly stick to the frozen yogurt.”
“What’s ‘artificial flavors’ mean?”
“That means the flavor is synthetic. It doesn’t come from a real fruit.”
A pause. “That mean it tastes worse?”
“No, no…it just isn’t, real.”
The kid goes along having picked orange over chocolate. With nobody speaking out loud about Michael I’m figuring a synthetic orange metaphor works as well as any. He was a man who must have gone to bed and woke up not knowing what he was. Or was he? Maybe He always felt Himself inside whatever he’d sculpted Himself into.
I doubt that. I think you can feel His fragility, feel His disease, to borrow a line from the diseased-himself John Lennon, through Michael’s increasingly sporadic interview footage. But then again His first wife Lisa Marie Presley, after that divorce, said and I quote, “It’s unfortunate that not a lot of people know who he really is. He doesn’t let anybody see it.”
Some realness would have helped. The summation of the man as a phenomenon to me anyway: endgame of the Bucharest Concert, the HBO special. I came in on the end of I think an MTV re-broadcast, and Michael-wise at least I never really left. “Heal The World,” second-to-last song, one dopey hope after another although stringing them together like that admittedly takes a wing and a prayer and water-walking confidence, and admittedly furthermore after this many repetitions I’m probably singing it in my sleep, I just don’t have anyone to let me know. He brings out the children, not His Children specifically since they hadn’t yet made the scene, but children, representing all races colors creeds and, I’m thinking, the more colorful the native costume the flashier for the flashbulbs.
Back out go the kids, having gathered around Him and the hem of His garment. Should you sense a certain Christlike vision through this you’re hardly wrong, although unlike the forced Riefenstahl-isms (and equally forced denials of same) for his “HIStory” promo film, this deification doesn’t thump down like oven-baked bricks. It’s fluid: He opens His arms in cruciform benediction and the lights underscore and embellish Him and chiming tones open “Man In The Mirror.”
That’s His call to sure-enough roll-up-your-sleeves Heal The World, demanding, where “Heal The World” itself supplicated. “A willow deeply scarred,” He pronounces the Soul Of The World (though I always heard it “Oh where indeed is God?”), and this song trumps the last one by sinking a shunt into gospel, some time-honored amen gravitas. “MAKE THAT CHANGE!!!” exhorts the chorus, and after awhile everything drops out except the chorus. The chorus goes on forever. I don’t mind. Nobody minds. Admittedly-doctored crowd shots show Bucharest youth getting carried away and carried off on stretchers when they can no longer sing along. “I Love YOU!!!” He bellows like he has to remind himself to stress the last syllable.
And finally He flies away in a jet pack over the heads of the Exhausted Faithful. Okay, thanks to Wikipedia and an obsessive mindset I happen to know that that the real Michael disappears during the stunt set-up and a man named Kinnie Gibson flew the jet pack in question. But He wanted you to think He flies into the clouds. Just like, right, for you history buffs, a little man with a littler mustache once flew down from the clouds 793 or so miles from Bucharest.
But He didn’t want you to know any history without the first three letters capitalized. He built monuments to Himself and bought a replica of King Tut’s tomb and told Martin Bashir “I would like to live forever.”
And wouldn’t anybody? On one of the YouTube postings of Bucharest, though, “Man” cuts off before the lift-off. Just crowd noise, buzz, shutdown. Showing metaphorically at least that only the most anally assiduous planners, get to pick their very last heartbeat. Most of us, however prepared or not for death, experience it on death’s messy terms.
At this point I’m going to tell you to hug someone or kiss someone when s/he’s not expecting it, to open a door for a little old lady or even a big one. Give somebody directions, whatever kind. Or, okay, here’s a hard one—go up to a bum, somebody stinking of the street, and ask him or her what’s new. Talk, but listen. That one scares me, frankly. He said He wanted such things. But ultimately He would not come down from His scaffold and let other people play with His toys. We have to Live The Word, no matter who He is who preaches it. If we don’t, we get very hot and very dry. If we do that maybe His song survives and His shortsightedness goes into the ground.
Or into the sky.
– Andrew Hamlin
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Also in the Michael Jackson Suite at EastPortlandBlog.com:
Tribute to Michael Jackson From Patrick Stump of Fallout Boy
Brazilian Cab Driver Impersonates Michael Jackson Spectacularly
On the Occasion of Michael Jackson’s Death, by Andrew Hamlin
Smells Like Rockin’ Robin (Nirvana vs The Jackson 5) – A Mashup
Michael Jackson – Thriller (A Cappella)
Three Year Old Dances to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean
New song for 2011 – Michael Jackson – Hollywood Tonight
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