Missing Michael

When a childhood icon dies, it can bring up more feelings than idol worship


Today, the verdict in the wrongful death suit brought by Michael Jackson's family was reached, and concert promoter AEG was found not responsible for Jackson's death. We brought this piece out of the archives, written for ELLE.com the day after he died.

Someone called out the TMZ headline in our office around 4:30 yesterday afternoon, and I bee-lined for our editor-in-chief's office, knowing she would have the same inclination I did: Get the TV on stat!

Phew, CNN has him in the hospital. But then, wait, there are reports he's been there for quite some time. And the status hasn't changed from cardiac arrest to stable. And the family is en route to the hospital. Oh, God. They have to wait until they all get there before any announcement can be made, don't they?

It was forming before my eyes—that very important moment you'll be asked about in time, my generation's Elvis and Lennon question: What were you doing when Michael Jackson died?

Last night, I got into heated debates with several friends—the same debates, I'm sure, being had the world over—arguing "deeply wounded victim" versus "loathsome pervert," "genius icon" versus "respected has-been"—arguments that, in my mind, were at bottom challenging MJ's place in an elite pantheon of prodigious artists—and, well, the very idea that everyone in the world should give a damn that the King of Pop is gone. The steady stream of music pumping from apartment windows, and out of bars, and from cars driving by—and, my personal favorite, "Pretty Young Thing" blasting and co-mingling with the Middle Eastern aromas from the food cart on 50th and 7th Avenue—might just be the thousand-word picture in favor of the theory that the man who died could be the most important pop-musical talent of the 20th century.

When I was eight, I came across, in a pile of my older brother's Cars, R.E.M., and Police tapes, this man lying across an album cover in a white suit. I was beyond curious. What was Thriller, and why did my brother, who, as far as I was concerned, was the arbiter of all things cool in music, have this on his bedroom floor? I put in the tape, and before I was a minute into "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' ," I was tapping and thumping and snapping and eating up the beats, rhythms, tempos, lyrics, everything. I knew why he had it. Soon everything MJ seeped its way from the racks of our mall's N.R.M. into the halls of my elementary school. Our Mean Girls–style ostracizing depended on whether or not you had a pleather bag with a scripted Michael Jackson stamped onto it. The boys at lunchtime, clad in red leather coats, moonwalked their way into the hearts of swooning Ola-wannabe's. And if you weren't at Annie Buzzelli's slumber party, you didn't get to sit with 14 other girls in the attic, in the dark, watching, for the first time and on laser disc, the video about the making of the Thriller video. We were googly-eyed and mesmerized and in love and prayed to the celebrity heavens that one day he might be our husband and serenade us and love us back. Lost on all of these wide-eyed, pajama-clad preteens of course, was what we were actually witnessing or hearing or feeling—the seismic cultural shift that was erupting beneath us.

When I called to commiserate with my brother, I couldn't help but be disappointed that he was watching tennis with his six-year old daughter. What?! Why wasn't he digging through his boxes in the basement? Digging deep and finding and dusting off that Thriller album and then sitting her down to explain who this man was, what he did, his influence, his unparalleled contributions to the music industry? To MTV, for God's sake! Why wasn't he explaining to her what those girls at the slumber party couldn't quite intellectualize at the time: that this racial-barrier-breaking pop mastermind who died was the best thing that ever happened to music? And he was in our lifetime. Our generation. He was ours!

My mother told me that my brother didn't actually seem to care too much. I have yet to confirm this with him, but I suspect—beyond the obvious not-relevant-in-my-busy-life excuse—that there could be something darker. It's the thing that's competing with the celebration of Michael, the thing that reminds us how creeped out we get when we see aerial shots of Neverland, or how we've squirmed at the sight of his ever-changing facial landscape, or that thing (dammit) that takes us back to the early '80s when we sat on the couch watching the Grammy award show and got a strange feeling in the pit of our stomachs when we saw him carrying around Emmanuelle Lewis. It's the thing that Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth stubbornly wouldn't let go of this morning on the TV circuit—even though she does like his music. It's all those allegations, and settled out-of-court cases, and the trial, and the stories that all seemed to point to one summation: Michael Jackson was a bad man.

The media has beaten to death the paradox that was Michael Jackson. And a lot of people, like me, have had to reconcile their conflicting personal feelings about this man. They had to figure out, through their heartache and disgust over his strange, erratic, inappropriate, and troubled life, if there's a way to preserve the feeling that underlies why I ran to tell my boss, who started her career at Rolling Stone, the reason I defended MJ to friends that night, the reason I called my brother, the reason I was calling Maureen Orth a bitch and telling her to get off my television screen, even though deep down I knew why she was reminding us, the reason I will always remember where I was and what I was doing—that feeling that I so badly want to watch old footage of We Are The World and old videos and listen to his albums, as I'm doing right now, and know that our Elvis and Lennon lives on the way a King of Pop should: untouched, unblemished, and perfect. Sort of the way I want to reflect on all my childhood memories.

This Is A Developing Story

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