Boys Pants, Half Off

The King is dead. Michael Jackson, the putative King of Pop, or King of the confused, depending on your point of view, died yesterday at the age of 50. His death occurred, how else, under confusing and “mysterious” circumstances with rumors of drug abuse rife, although actual science has not yet had the opportunity to establish the facts. There was an immediate outpouring of grief from virtually every corner of the globe, with intellectual luminaries like Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor and Imelda Marcos expressing shock and grief at the performer’s passing. There was no word how the 12 year-old boys of the world were receiving the news.

Before I proceed, I must disclose that I may be one of the few people in the world who does not actually possess any of Michael Jackson’s music, having neither purchased nor pirated any of it over the years. I do not deny having sometimes listened to it at parties or in other people’s cars, or perhaps having watched the videos on MTV from time to time, and I am not disputing Michael Jacksons’ talent. He and his family’s music were just never my cup of tea, just like Slayer and Toby Keith are not in my collection. However, I do think that the idea that the world has lost the greatness of a Mozart or Enrico Caruso is a bit overblown. The truest enjoyment I got from Michael Jackson’s music ironically came from Weird Al’s parodies of songs like Beat It and Bad.

But this reflection is not about me; although of course it is about me and the fact that Michael Jackson was an ineffable part of my world from Cub Scouts on. He was born just two years before I was and was a national pop icon well before I made it out of grade school. My friends had his posters on their walls, even in cracker racist Georgia, and everybody was unconsciously singing “ABC, 1-2-3, Do, Re, Mi” under their breath for months in 1970. Being a Zombie movie addict, I have secretly enjoyed the Thriller music video for over two decades now. The video was made by prominent Hollywood director John Landis who, by the way, directed Innocent Blood (one of the most under-rated vampire movies of the modern era) as well as The Blues Brothers, Animal House and An American Werewolf in London. Michael Jackson was, I am somewhat pained to say, bigger than the Beatles when the Beatles were big.

Of course, as time went on things slowly started to get weird and Michael began to mutate into Greta Garbo. I have read all sorts of speculation about what exactly was going on with his appearance, and what was going on in his head, but there can be no doubt that there was a deliberate and significant effort to alter his looks which went well beyond the typical Hollywood vanity surgery. Then there were all the tabloid reports about sleeping in oxygen tents and buying The Elephant Man’s skeleton and a hundred other really odd things for a popular R&B singer to be doing. Then came accusations of child molestation on an industrial scale, some even supported by his sister La Toya, for what that’s worth, and then civil lawsuits and criminal trials. While Jackson was never convicted of any crimes, he did pay one of his accusers 22 million dollars in a legal settlement with no admission of guilt, as if you could pay anybody 22 million dollars and still have anybody believe you hadn’t done anything wrong.

Whatever the facts are, it became clear to any normal person that Michael Jackson was no normal person. At an absolute minimum, he exercised abysmal judgment, inappropriately sought companionship from the emotionally immature and failed to understand how vulnerable he was making himself through his behavior. At worst, he was a calculating, manipulative serial child molester who bought his way out of the consequences of his behavior. Either way, his life was not the fairytale in Neverland that fame and fortune are supposed to be. All of his talent and musical accomplishments and all the truly good things he did for the less fortunate are eclipsed in the minds of many by the public parody of himself that he ultimately became, and, as the facts surrounding his death become clearer by the minute, it appears that his life may have been cut dramatically short by his on-going, desperate struggle to never grow up.

Perhaps I should leave it there; I am, after all, just a humble wormhole repairman and no expert on Michael Jackson, nor really even a big fan, but I must concede that news of his death has affected me in a fundamental way. It occurs to me that if fame and fortune and the adulation of billions are not enough to guarantee happiness, what is? If the best selling record album of all time cannot protect you against persistent ridicule, what can? If expensive security and virtual isolation cannot keep descriptions of your penis from being broadcast on the evening news, what does? If perhaps the most universally popular entertainer in the history of the world can die at the age of 50, emaciated and looking like a disfigured ghoul while demented and full of pain killers, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I have reached the point in my life where people that have always been there are beginning to disappear. Michael Jackson is like that famous third cousin I never actually met but everyone would talk about at family reunions; he is one of the people that have accompanied me to this point. The thought of how and when I will join the legions of the passed is impossible to completely escape and it begs a more urgent consideration of what the hell I am doing here, and, perhaps more importantly, what I should be doing here, while I am still here. It appears that Michael Jackson may still have been struggling with those very same questions when oblivion overtook him. May he rest in peace.