The Man Who Wasn’t There- the Disappearance of Michael Jackson

The last few days it’s become apparent that I’ll never get tired of replaying Michael Jackson’s Will you be There? The orchestral, gospel swell in this hymn of heartbreak and hope has long made it one of my favourites. But the number of times I’ve blasted it in the five days since MJ died borders on obsession. Maybe it’s the voice over that makes it feel like he is right here, talking with me- “In my darkest hour, in my deepest despair, will you still care? Will you be there?”

This underrated song showcases some Michael’s strongest vocals ever, building into full throttle, when he belts in scorching anguish, “Lift me up, lift me up…I get lonely sometimes, I get lonely…” The biggest celebrity in all of history was quite possibly the loneliest person who ever lived, an irony we will never wrap our heads around.

“I’m so confused, will you show to me you’ll be there for me?”

Most stars will be fucked up in ways that we will not, just as our peculiar neuroses will unlikely be the worries of Madonna. Child stars have their own little-girl-lost syndromes that few seem able to escape, even if their star was fleeting before the crash. Those who have gone on to become the biggest stars in the constellation of popdom live in a bizarre prison of abject isolation. Even as they are constantly surrounded with masses and outpourings of love and celebration, they have nothing of their own concrete, discreet identity on which to draw the strength to be taken from, watched, idolized, scrutinized.

For Michael, there was never anywhere to hide- since he could talk, he was charming the world with his cherub’s face, seducing the world with love songs and disco. In the man’s own words, he was a veteran by the time he hit puberty.

If you thought about it, you’d probably observe that your most lonely times aren’t when you are, in fact, alone, but when you feel misunderstood by your spouse, adrift from your friends. True or false, when you perceive they don’t want you or see what you are about, if you don’t feel their unconditional love, it doesn’t matter if the whole damn family is right beside you at dinner. It doesn’t matter if you have fifteen men asking you to marry them. My favourite spiritual writer and my teacher Thomas Moore wrote, “We may think we’re lonely because we have no friends, when the fact is we have no relationship to ourselves.”

This man from whom so much was taken, so much demanded, never turned on his fans. He always expressed his love for us, so long as we were outpouring love and not spewing hate. He loved us back until he cracked, and started to unpeel. Quite literally, as his featherweight body took up barely any space on this planet. The real Michael’s face was also disappearing. Everyone has always said it was about him not wanting to be black, or not wanting to be a man. Give me a break- Michael had no problem with being black. Saying, for the record, that he was proud, wasn’t just lip service. Many of his idols were black. The bleaching of the skin business was about far more than blackness, it was way more than skin deep. Seriously, what Oreo or drag queen ever tried to look like that?

What he experienced was way beyond racism, self-directed or otherwise. It was the feeling that he was a ghost, the feeling that he didn’t even fucking exist. One of the most eccentric people of all time, he became another iconic irony- for most eccentrics are not tortured, tormented people. They are totally content with themselves, indeed, so strong in their identity, that they truly don’t give a flying fig if their unusual habits aren’t socially sanctioned, or whether or not anyone sees them. There’s no need for validation.

Eccentricities that torment or haunt a person, that interfere with their functioning, may appear similar on the surface, yet their repercussions to the individual are very different. These we blanket as “mental illness” and no one would argue whether Michael Jackson was mentally ill. Michael Jackson was both- both eccentric and insane. It wasn’t owning a bunch of llamas or a bag of bones that made him mentally ill. It was his falling apart, coming undone, his fifty years of disappearing even as he was the most looked at, talked about man of this century, maybe ever.

No, this was another kind of plastic surgery sickness, a man whose mangled, artificial, paranoid, melting, self-destructing, disappearing insides were matched by his wrapping. This wasn’t just a simple drama of gay or straight. Or even, as one friend suggested, a woman who thought she was born into the wrong body. It’s not about black or white. It’s about a man perhaps more missing, more absent than anyone has ever been, and absent in public for all to see. For who is Michael Jackson? His guess is as good as mine.

Yet here’s a man who never stopped giving. He gave so much, he gave it all away. He performed with everything he had. He gave his money to make others happy or healthy. He did nothing on a small scale. Though his perceptions were absurd, and he had no idea about anything normal, he gave from a place of bewildered and devoted innocence. A vast naivety. He was totally clueless of the real world. He did not have adult emotions. His friendships were extremely eccentric, yet fiercely loyal.

“In my darkest hour, will you be there?” Two years after Dangerous was released, the first accusations of child molesting shocked the planet. By 2005, Michael was a character in science fiction. He wasn’t even real. Traipsing around the planet in a burka and Mardi Gras masks, hoping to be invisible, he shielded himself, too, with any drug that could numb the pain. I don’t think that the public persecution he endured, naked, exposed, terrified, in front of the whole damn world, was fair.

Even if he was guilty, I don’t think it was fair, not nearly. Grisly, extravagant serial killers are given far more discretion and dignity, even as they sit on the electric chair. We gleefully crucified this man, and that is sick whether he was as innocent as Jesus or not.

Michael just wanted to Heal the World, make it a better place, for you, for me, for the entire human race. He promised I’ll Be There. He said I Just Can’t Stop Loving You. He sang with pure and honest conviction, You Are Not Alone. (Another day has gone, I’m still all alone…) He encouraged us to Keep the Faith, don’t let nobody bring you down- you can climb the highest mountain…all you need is the will to want it and a little self esteem… He dedicated an album to his young friend, yes, one of the children, who was stabbed to death because he was black. He gave so much, and the nature of the beast meant we wanted more. And that’s completely normal, we tear down our idols in order to divide them into relics we can all have a piece of, there is simply not enough to go around, and yet after death, there is- like the old days of human sacrifice, the victim, sometimes complicit victim, becomes a god. He transcends his body through his memory, through her imagery, art, music.

But no celebrity or public figure was ever put on the trial of the century in this way, and nor were any criminals. In comparison, Karla Homolka was handled with fucking kid gloves by the court and the media, too, even though she appeared on video in full regalia of guilt. Though she murdered several young women and raped more, she now walks the streets somewhere, disguised and protected, with children of her own. What the fuck?

Nobody likes a child molester. But like vultures, we descended on a defenseless man. He begged us, “Please keep an open mind and let me have my day in court.” He wasn’t asking much of us. An alleged victim said, after reaching adulthood, that persecuting Michael Jackson ruined his life. He never said anything about the trauma of being raped ruining his life. He had to be cajoled, drugged, forced by his father before he finally mumbled that something untoward had taken place. Makes me think it never happened Yet Michael was forever after guilty in our eyes.

After all, he paid the family out, probably thinking it would make things easiest on the child. The kid was, after all, was being subjected to a public circus Michael knew all too well. Mikey wasn’t mature or sophisticated to see what repercussions this would have, WHAT IT WOULD LOOK LIKE. And so it was, that the public- the only thing that Michael Jackson ever had, turned on him.

No wonder the man who wasn’t there developed a persecution complex, became increasingly suspicious, paranoid, fearful, insane. He became a parody of himself.

The point is, no scandal has ever assassinated a celebrity the way this pedophile witch- hunt did. Britney Spears held her kid hostage for hours in the bathroom while she had a psychotic break, and it happened before our very eyes. Yet who wasn’t rooting for her after, for Britney to get better? To get the help she needed?

Some Michael fans made it very clear they believed he was innocent. Some turned away and let him have the privacy he needed. Some deferred judgement. But overwhelmingly, we turned on him. We shouted out “pedophile” instead of praying that he’d get help. We tirelessly ridiculed and derided him in popular culture at every possible chance we had. At some points he was as unpopular as he had been popular.

After the 1993 payoff incident, we somehow hoped every consecutive creation he’d make would suck. And sometimes we said it did, even if it didn’t. Some of us started to say ridiculous things like he had never really did anything for music, anyways. That we had never liked him. And so an endless barrage of greatest hits and number one albums flooded forth, with Michael desperately trying to remind us that we loved him, right, we loved him, remember?

In the public’s endless hunt for the ‘real Michael’ it was easy to forget the obvious- artists communicate through their work. He’d been telling us from the beginning. It was there all the time. From the very first solo album, Off the Wall, full of shiny disco, came the first revelations: It’s too high to get over, too low to get under, you’re stuck in the middle, and the pain is thunder, you’re a vegetable, and they hate you, you’re just a buffet, and they eat off you…

And of course, we meet Billie Jean again on Thriller- “the kid is not my son.” Michael has endless songs about the voracious maw of woman, the backstabbing bitch out to get him- Billie Jean, Dirty Diana, again on Blood on the Dance Floor, where Susie has literally tried to kill him. But these songs are no vindication of women- they are personifications of the violence he felt, the vulnerability and exposure.

And also Stranger in Moscow: How does it feel, how does it feel, when you’re alone, when you’re cold inside?

And Who Is It? “I am the damned, I am the dead, I am the agony inside the dying head, this is injustice, woe unto thee, I pray this punishment would have mercy on me…I can’t take it ‘cause I’m lonely…”

Or Morphine: “This won’t hurt you, before I put it in, close your eyes and count to ten…close your eyes and drift away…put all your trust in me…morphine …Demerol, oh God, he’s taking Demerol… “

They Don’t Really Care About Us: “I’m tired of bein’ the victim of hate, you’re raping me of my pride…all I wanna say is they don’t really care about us…”

His final solo studio album showed him at his most vulnerable and tragically desperate. In my mind, this album was way underrated, mainly because of the Jackson Freak Show that was overriding his work, but the lyrics were indeed, “full of grandiose desperation. It’s an excruciatingly self-referential place, worsened further by its namesake’s unmatched controversies and weirdnesses.” (Rolling Stone).

Where are the people who accused me? The ones who beat me down and bruised me? (Unbreakable)

And the very strange Thriller-esque lyrics to Threatened, featuring Rod Serling! This is judgement night, execution, slaughter, the devil, ghosts, this monster is torture, You can be sure of one thing, that’s fate, a human presence that you feel is strange, a monster that you can see disappear, a monster, the worst thing to fear.

During the struggle, they will pull us down, please, please, let’s use this chance to turn things around…together we’re invincible…(Invincible)

Lyrics from Privacy were loud and clear: Stop maliciously attacking my integrity. Ain’t the pictures enough, why do you go through so much, To get the story you need, so you can bury me? You’ve got the people confused, you tell the stories you choose, you try to get me to lose the man I really am…

Some of us might ask, well, then, why the hell wouldn’t a person so traumatized get out of the public eye? Britney, Michael, can’t they afford a private island? Must they court the paparazzi? Even Diana has been accused of masterfully manipulating them, getting high off of their presence. The answer is, perhaps. Maybe. But what if that is all someone has known? We stay in our shitty jobs. We stay with men who beat us. We keep smoking cigarettes or worse habits. We live in the town we were born in. We keep our religion of birth, most of the time. There was never a moment that Michael Jackson was anyone or anything else but ours, ours to worship or to humiliate as we chose.

In Marilyn Monroe’s words, “I knew I belonged to the public, because I had never belonged to anyone or anything else.”

The excesses of drugs and surgeries and exercise couldn’t fix anything, couldn’t mask a man becoming invisible in the most visible ways. On the eve of another comeback, a
comeback that acted as a plea for us to forgive him, him who may well have done nothing at all, the exhausted, emotionally bankrupt, mentally and physically ill Michael Jackson died. Whether it was drugs or anorexia or his heart that killed him, no matter- it was part of a longer process.

I find it all fucking heartbreaking. And though Princess Diana died because the driver had been drinking, we felt forever as if we had hounded her to death. But we didn’t learn. Because it’s okay to hound a child molester to death, to torment and torture a freak of nature, eyes without a face. He became hardly human. We drove Michael deeper and deeper into himself, but there wasn’t anyone there so there was nowhere to go. And so, he disappeared.

by Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net