Michael Joseph Jackson

It’s June 25th, Thursday evening, nearly 6pm. I have Friday off of work, and I get to leave for my long weekend in just a few minutes. From across the aisle of cubicles I hear someone shout “Michael Jackson died?!?” in a tone of disbelief. All day the talk around the water cooler has been of Farah Fawcett’s passing, and earlier in the week Ed McMahon. Immediately my mind tries to process this and says “that’s not even funny!” but just to make sure what I heard is false I open a browser and check MSNBC. In big red letters at the top of the page it says “Michael Jackson suffered heart attack”. I immediately click on the link and do not find any evidence of his passing. I knew it was a poorly timed joke based on all the recent celebrity deaths, I just knew it! Already around me the wisecracks have started about problems with CPR because of his nose. How can anyone joke at a time like this? We’re talking about one of the most influential musical artists of my generation being on the verge of death, and that’s funny how…? My phone is on silent, but I see it light up saying I’m getting a call from my Mother. I answer, already knowing why she’s calling. “Did you hear about Michael?” she asks with a quivering voice. Yes, my brother is also named Michael Joseph (and my sister Lisa Marie, btw), but I know which Michael she’s talking about. I tell her I have and we sit there a moment in silence, phones pressed to our ears, our voices lost by the words we don’t want to have to say. It’s now past 6 o’clock, I should have already left work, I’m meeting friends at La Carreta. As soon as I get into the car I tune into a news station on XM. They are hesitant to report his passing, but everything that I’ve read & heard seems to be indicating just that. I can’t believe it. I call Joel in a state of shock. He’s already at the restaurant drinking at the bar with Pat. He repeats what I’ve told him out loud 4 or 5 times “Michael Jackson’s dead? He’s dead? Are you sure?” I feel the same way. I feel like I’m lying to him, telling him a blasphemous falsehood that will be proven a cruel and elaborate prank at some later time. He gets the attention of the bartender “Turn on the news, Michael Jackson died!” A crowd gathers at the bar and he lets me go. I then call my ex Sully who’s living in Arizona. I know it’s only afternoon there, and he’s still at work. Does he know? He’s one of the few people I know who isn’t afraid to admit MJ is one of his favorite artists, regardless of all the bad press he’s got over the years. At clubs he’d request his songs & impersonate his moves; he’d use his hat as a prop and go all out in his impromptu performance, much to the delight of his friends and strangers alike. He doesn’t answer his phone, and I can’t bring myself to leave a message with the sad news. I wouldn’t deliver the news of a friend or family members passing in that manner. At La Carreta we have a drink for Farrah and Michael, all the while my brain says “you’re going through the motions for a lie, it’s not true, it’s not true, he’s not gone”.

Later in the night I visit Burgundy’s. It’s karaoke night and within minutes of arriving two guys are on stage singing Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me”. A kid I went to highschool with is swaying drunk at a table shouting “Michael Jackson died tonight! Have a drink for Michael!” I want to shake him. It seems so disrespectful, but I also understand he likely doesn’t mean any disrespect. Despite all this, it still isn’t real to me. I don’t subscribe to cable TV. I can’t watch the news like every other American and see scrolling reports across the bottom of the screen, or thoughts from celebrities on how he shaped their lives and careers.

While in the dressing room at Zoe & Co. on Friday afternoon I get a text from Caitlin. “Chris said “Michael Jackson should die every day” because the radio stations are playing all his music”. That night Elyssa and I go to goth night at TT the Bears. Typically the music is a blend of Depeche Mode, Portishead, Combichrist, and other similar “goth” or “alternative” artists. We're standing at the bar for only a few minutes when the DJ plays Thriller. I scramble for my camera and put it to video mode. The club is too dark to actually see anything, but the moment is unreal and I feel like I need to document it. Of all the times I’ve been to TT’s not once can I recall them playing Michael Jackson. Later in the night they play Billy Jean and Beat It. Driving to Salem on Saturday I browse through my pre-programmed XM stations. One of the stations has been replaced with a Michael Jackson Tribute channel (62, if you’re interested). I call my parents to let them know. Michael Jackson has got to be my mom’s favorite musician, hands down. I sincerely worry about how she’s coping. At night I’ve got a birthday bonfire to go to for Amy at Teresa & Carlton’s house. I stay for a couple of hours, but then have to leave for another birthday party at McGarvey’s. I go into the house to say goodbye and they have MJ playing in the kitchen. I haven’t been drinking, and I lean towards social awkwardness when I’m around people I don’t know well while I’m sober. The room is full of strangers except for Amy, Teresa, and Elyssa. Something about the music sets off my feet moving without my thinking and next thing I know I’m doing the moonwalk as if possessed. I’m not gonna lie, Michael was a huge inspiration for me as a child learning to dance. My mom was absolutely infatuated with him, and every video released was such a colossal presentation that the importance of being like Mike was not lost on me. I feel like a fool after my fancy footwork outburst, but Teresa seems pleased and begs me to do it again. At last all those years in front of the mirror in slippery-bottomed shoes has paid off! We later arrive at McGarvey’s. Sam is outside smoking at the back entrance. He tells us we just missed him and Sean singing The Way You Make Me Feel and it was epic. The night ends with the typically empty dance floor fully packed by all our friends dancing to Wanna Be Startin’ Something (or was it P.Y.T.?). Walking into the parking garage to leave Elyssa busts out with “The way you make-a me feel!” which starts a duet between us that sounds pretty fantastic with the acoustics of the concrete. Once in the car the XM pops on, already at channel 62. The windows go down, the moon roof opens, and we blast MJ all the way to McDonalds, singing at the top of our lungs. Caitlin knows all the words to Leave Me Alone, and I’m deeply impressed.



My earliest musical childhood memory involves Michael Jackson. I remember being at The Mall of New Hampshire in early 1984. This was back when it had water fountains and brick benches and floors, with a giant fish tank bar in the ‘McDonald’s Restaurant’. It was still winter because I remember there being snow on the ground. I was with my parents, my newborn sister in her stroller. We were in Record Town, when it was located where CVS or that nail salon is now, and Best Buy was Lechmere. My Dad helped me shuffle through the 45’s to get the Thriller single. Walking out of the store towards Lechmere I recall strutting proudly because I was allowed to hold the plastic bag with my new record in it. I remember my parents telling me to be careful I didn’t break it, don’t swing the bag or drag it on the ground. I carried my precious cargo gingerly, I couldn’t wait to get home and play it on my own hand-me-down record player from my Auntie Donna. It was a special thing for me to get my very own Michael Jackson album because before if I wanted to listen to him I had to ask my parents to put Thriller on the big adult record player that I wasn’t allowed to touch. I’d settle into my beanbag on the floor of the living room with the album cover propped in front of me and I’d pose like Michael, reclined on my side. I liked to listen to Human Nature at night in the dark. I’d stare out the window at the sky or close my eyes because the synthesizers and beat to me sounded like what stars looked like. I can’t really explain that any better, but that’s how my child mind connected it. I vividly remember being in my Aunt Linda’s Honda, her shifting the gears of the standard transmission getting on I-93 south in Londonderry. Human Nature came on the radio and I told her “this is my favorite song”. I was still only three years old, and she probably thought it was a cute announcement for a child that age to make, but she agreed with me that it was pretty great.

Annually, around Halloween, MTV would air the Thriller Special. They'd show the “making of” with all the make-up effects, costumes, choreography, dancers, & actors. They’d show Michael putting in the yellow contacts with tears rolling down his cheeks. And then they’d show the music video. My family would gather around the TV, turning the lights off. It was always an anxious excitement because I knew I’d get scared at the end when the zombies tried breaking into the house, but I loved every minute of it. My parents were fairly young when they had me, and hip to popular music, so MTV was always on in my house. I was entranced by the light up sidewalk in the Billie Jean video. My neighbor and friend Lindsey and I would play in her yard in the summer, asking her mom if we could use her car for our games. We’d reenact the video The Way You Make Me Feel, and I always wanted to be the pretty girl being pursued through the car by Michael. I practiced spins, standing on my toes, the moonwalk. I studied the dance moves from Thriller and Beat It. I taught myself how to moonwalk in roller skates, even. My second grade class was all atwitter when the Bad video was released. Our music teacher indulged us in conversation about MJ's videos, commenting on the similarities of Beat It to West Side Story. What seemed like an eternity later we were back at it again, buzzing about Michael’s upcoming video release of Black or White with Home Alone’s Macaulay Culkin. My family gathered once more around the television, watching the build-up to the video itself. I stared in amazement at the end when one person turned into another of a different ethnicity or gender right before my eyes. All they had to do was shrug their shoulders and turn their head. That became yet another dance move in my arsenal of ganked Michael-isms. A made-for-TV biography of Michael's life was released sometime around then and my parents allowed us to stay up late on a school night to watch it. The kind of emphasis my Mom put on knowing his background and life story was akin to what another parent might put on choosing a college or knowing your country's history; he was that important in my household. When Mariah Carey sang I'll Be There on her MTV Unplugged special it was my Mother who firmly advised me that she was singing a Jackson 5 song, that Michael sang it first, and he sang it better. SVW sampled Human Nature and some of my fondest childhood memories were stirred by the beat. They could have been yodeling garbage and I still would have been elated. It was around that time that the child molestation charges came out. By then his music was being replaced by ‘grunge’ artists, and it became uncool as a junior high student to like anything about pop music, nevermind an alleged child molester. None the less, I still secretly enjoyed it when the Scream video was released, and desperately wanted to look like his sister Janet did in all her videos from her self-titled album. Over the years as news reports became increasingly more negative and MJ's appearance became more and more alien his music and maybe even Michael himself seemed to become somewhat irrelevant. I made a playlist for MySpace last year including Human Nature, P.Y.T., and Wanna Be Startin' Something. I reviewed it again later only to delete any of his songs out of embarrassment. I couldn't get past the fact that I might be supporting a pedophile, as much as I've never wanted to believe that. My mothers stance on the issue has never wavered: "He never touched those boys. He's had a troubled life." I remember watching the Martin Bashir interview with her and wisecracking my way through it. It was uncomfortable to watch, and I still don't understand where he was coming from, but my mom stood by him till the end, a true blue fan.

Reading comments on an essay about his life and death (http://kieselaymon.com/?p=1175) I came across one that truly resonated with me. It said: "For me finding out that Michael Jackson died is like finding out that Florida doesn’t exist: something I never conceptualized, imagined, or considered plausible. I just assumed that Michael would outlive me." Strangely, I felt exactly the same, and it took me a while to recognize the error in that logic. I'm 20 years younger than Michael. He's a figure, an icon, who's always been there, larger than life, someone who's kept on truckin' despite everything he's been dealt. To be taken down by a heart attack, something so utterly human and weak... well, it's almost too much for me to wrap my head around. The reality of this loss didn't truly sink in until today. I'm brought to tears watching Janet speak at the BET awards, and listening to his songs. I'm tearful, but thankful for the memories and joy he gave me, my family, and so many others. What other current artist can say they brought together a family time and time again for over two decades? For me, Michael was part of my family and he will be sorely missed.