No. 409  |  June 23, 2013   DC RealTalk   Catechism   Study   The Church   Christian Living   COVER   A Preacher's Confession   Zion   Donate

Neverland

What Michael Taught Us

Possibilities and Convictions

I used to be a boy. I went to lots of sleepovers, several boys crashing on the floor. No doors were ever locked. No alarms were ever set. Family members, most annoyingly little sisters, regularly trafficked in and out of the crowded barracks, and absolutely no thought of anything sexual ever played any role whatsoever. Had Jackson bedded dozens of 12-year old girls, I have to speculate not even his fame would have saved him. That’s the double-standard. That Jackson’s retard act, his shy, dysfunctional retreat from adulthood, created at least the possibility that he was telling the truth, that no harm was being done to all those young boys. But, what is typically left out of any discussion of child molestation or statutory rape is the many, many cases in which the victim not only did not suffer but actually orchestrated the experience. What was so shocking about the film Towelhead wasn’t the statutory rape of the film’s pubescent subject but how she herself unwittingly pursued her adult deflowerer and seduced him. Like a teenage witch suddenly discovering her strange powers, she discovered a sexuality she neither understood nor completely controlled. Her dufus of a dad was no help and the neighbor, played to creepy perfection by the otherwise noble Aaron Eckhart, found himself suddenly caught in the gravitational pull of the young girl’s budding allure. Which isn’t to excuse Eckhart but to explain how Jackson could possibly run dozens of boys through his bedroom for 40 or so years and only face two major public accusations. Some of those boys may have liked it. Some of the boys wanted things to happen between them. Some were too frightened to tell. Some were afraid Michael wouldn't be their friend if they didn't give in to him. Or—least likely of all—nothing ever happened to any of them.

Of course, some were paid off. Part of the sad legacy of Jackson’s death will be, first and foremost, the Jackson family, who have demonstrated themselves to be easily as tacky as your typical Appalachian white trash, fussing over who gets the dishes. Michael was their cash cow, as only Janet has successfully defined herself outside of Havenhurst, the family compound in Encino, California. Most everyone else has amassed a fortune and spent a fortune. I’m quite certain Michael was paying all the bills at Encino for his mother’s sake. Amidst the certain squabbling and lawsuits there will someday emerge a public accounting of just how many checks Jackson wrote to how many parents of how many young boys over the years. The amount of money will be staggering. Our own selfishness, in choosing to idolize a guy we knew—I mean, we knew—was perpetrating evil will likely, hopefully convict us. Michael Jackson was a genius. An amazingly gifted entertainer whose gifts overshadowed a very troubled, very sad soul. And, by not holding him accountable, in the end it is we who are just as guilty of Jackson’s sin and of Jackson’s blood. We knew the guy was still hooked on painkillers. We knew he was still fellating and sodomizing little boys. We knew the guy was going down the drain. But he was too powerful for anybody to step in and intervene.

Hours after his death, movers were seen crating and removing personal items from Jackson’s rented home. His family claimed to not know who hired these movers, what they were taking or where it might be going. I could speculate Jackson’s most trusted staff rightly knew the family, the police, the media would be all over that house. It would be a shameful legacy for anyone to discover items that would have been deeply private if not illegal to possess. Tapes and books and toys and perhaps souvenirs of decades of heinous sin we all made excuses for.

The King: Jackson beneath major airbrushing, nostril prosthesis and wig.

Time On His Hands

CBS played an old video of a young Michael explaining how Diana Ross discovered the group and brought them to Berry Gordy, which was a complete lie. A lesser Motown star, Bobby Taylor, caught the Jacksons’ lounge act and arranged an audition for Gordy who was reluctant to see them, Gordy not being interested in kid acts. But, once Gordy saw how talented the family was, he immediately signed them, then cooked up the story about Ross, Motown’s biggest star (who has, from that day to this, never once “discovered” another act) having discovered them. In other words, Michael Jackson was coached to lie. He lied about his age, claiming to be three years younger than he actually was, lied about having been discovered by Ross, and from then to now, has lied repeatedly about most everything. As I said in my previous essay, Jackson was a guy who just lied. He lied every day. Lying was not a problem for him. He wasn’t particularly evil about it, that’s just what he’d been conditioned to do: lie.

But we should believe him when he tells us he never touched those boys.

Although deep in debt (rumored at $400 million), Jackson was hardly broke. The UK concerts alone could have restructured and wiped out most of his debt. A successful comeback album would have propelled him back to the top again. If he’d just lose the cartoon music (despite Jackson's conspiracy claims, I believe it was the childish clankity-clank of Unbreakable that tanked his final release, 2001's Invincible) and the bloated syrupy/preachy crap. If he’d get back to basics and take his producers off the leash, yeah, he might have risen to dominate music again. Let’s face it, music is pretty lame these days. There’s not a whole lot to challenge a truly engaged Jackson. But Jackson, as we all knew, was a fog-headed addict. He wasn’t terribly interested in making music so much as making money to keep himself afloat. I have no idea if Jackson simply burned out, as artists tend to do, or if his growing addictions simply fogged his mind to the point where his main concern at any given moment was how to score more pain killers. That a musical genius does not make. Ironically, Jackson is now poised to make the comeback in death he could not muster in life. There is most surely an album out there being prepped for release, as well as hundreds if not thousands of tracks locked in a vault or on a hard drive somewhere. The Havenhurst crew, accustomed as they are to Michael's financial support, will undoubtedly release Jackson albums with some regularity for years to come--something Michael himself either could not or did not do. Some may be phenomenal--music he shelved for ridiculous reasons (like a rumored suite of tracks produced by Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, shelved because Michael was insulted by Jermaine's dis record Word To The Bad, produced by Edmonds). I've no doubt Jackson's next release--hopefully an unmolested release of the CD he was surely prepping for his comeback tour--will be a monster hit. Film footage from the Jacksons' Victory tour--a planned theatrical release shelved because of squabbling among the Jackson brothers--may also finally see the light of day. Epic's MJ box set--an incredible retrospective released, bizarrely, during the nadir of Jackson's popularity, the 2005 trial--may get a nip and tuck and re-released. There'll be the good, the bad, and the ugly as everyone rushes to cash in on Jackson's demise. Jackson himself will, likely, skyrocket to fame. Not on the strength of who he is so much as who he was--glamorized and heavily retouched photos, whitewashed biographies, sanitized memorials. In death, he will once again become the playfully innocent man-child we used to welcome in our homes.

In the end, Michael Jackson was a monster. Perhaps a monster of his own creation, perhaps a monster we created by lavishing him with our love and worship and royalties. But he was a monster. Let me put it another way: when I was a kid, I didn’t have a lot of babysitters. My sister and I usually stayed with my grandma. But we did occasionally, for one reason or another, stay with a sitter, usually some half-wit teenage girl. There weren’t many of them, but I can’t remember a single one who didn’t molest me. Oh, in little ways, nothing even remotely close to what Jackson’s been accused of, but overly intimate play, making a game of it. Letting me touch her. Teenage girls are curious about boys, and boys, even at a young age, are curious about girls. The fondling and bath time play never got reported because, hey, I liked it. I was a boy, and these were usually attractive, giggly teenage girls. I knew they’d catch hell if I told anybody. Was I damaged by this? Gosh, I hope not. Do I approve of such behavior? Absolutely not. But, this kind of stuff does go on. And I’m not even Michael Jackson. Only an incredible and self-serving naïveté could possibly convince us that, of the perhaps hundreds of boys brought to Jackson’s bedroom, he never sexually engaged a single one of them. Thus, even if he abused even one, he—and by extension, all of us who admired him and enjoyed his art—are guilty of them all.

During his last 60 Minutes interview with the late Ed Bradley, Jackson continued to deny having engaged in any sexual activity with young boys while defending his practice of sleeping with them. Then he began insisting that he’d love everyone as Jesus commanded before launching into mangled, invented quotes of Jesus Christ, Whom, I presume, Jackson knew little or nothing about. All that time on his hands, all those books in his house, and so far as I can tell, he never bothered to read a bible. Which is, in and of itself, the most tragic part about all of this.

The last fifteen years of Jackson’s life were a tragic spiral. Immediately upon his death, all of the surreal, histrionic nut jobs he routinely surrounded himself with rushed for the nearest news camera. You can’t urn on a TV in these first few days without seeing some pontificating mouth breather giving us yet more “inside” information on Jackson and his world. And this is, finally, his legacy: the family he’d been supporting for four decades now going into The Michael Jackson business while humiliating him at every possible turn. These folks will surely start churning out Michael Jackson albums with a regularity that may surpass even the much-deader Tupac Shaqur as they ride Jackson’s corpse all the way to the bank. Meanwhile the parade of sycophants will march on, these fat, pimply wide-eyed mousketeers leaping out of tiny clown cars and rushing for the nearest camera. This dearth of simple dignity is Jackson’s reward for decades of drug-induced surrealism..

Dangerous: In full manic swing, Jackson dangles Blanket.

HIStory in Spiral

Whatever else happened in Holmby, it is not beyond reason to suspect Michael—either purposefully or passively—was ultimately responsible for his own exit. Jackson was reported to have been upbeat and in high spirits mere hours before his untimely passing, but the truth of addicts is most especially true of Michael himself: addicts lie. And Jackson had been lying to almost everyone he’d ever met for a very, very long time. A troubled, lost, lonely individual, in both physical and emotional pain, drowning in debt, exhausted, paranoid and training hard to keep up with dancers half his age, Jackson hadn't recorded much in the way of even mildly interesting music in more than fifteen years (including the stillborn HIStory, it's shockingly lackluster remix CD Blood On The Dance Floor (wherein Jackson sorted through dozens of fairly compelling remixes of the boring HIStory stuff and chose the lamest ones to collect for the CD), at least two-thirds of Invincible and the spectacularly wrongheaded, embarrassing duo remixes on the limp Thriller 25th Anniversary Edition). His musical judgment is, from all evidence, nonexistent. I have no reason, none, to expect his rumored forthcoming album would be any better. Jackson was huffing and puffing through CBS’ 40th Anniversary tribute which, sadly for Jackson, aired the day before 911. How much moreso had eight additional years of inactivity and drug abuse impacted his frail body? The sold-out 50-date comeback tour he was preparing himself for was, possibly, his only hope. And it’s just as possible he knew he wasn’t ready, he couldn’t go 50 rounds and he couldn’t perch himself onstage in a chair like a bloated Elvis. Most of the songs in 2001’s Invincible were pitched well below Michael’s former glorious alto, and Usher mopped the floor with him at his own tribute concert. Jackson was rumored to have had a fractured vertebrae in his back, which would certainly make performing pure agony for him. Michael was a wheezing, aging prizefighter who’d stayed too long in the ring—and that was nearly eight years ago. Among the many, many theories being floated out there was the inherent possibility that Michael knew, likely from the beginning, that he’d never finish that tour. That he’d been doing what he’s always done—lying. Perhaps first and foremost to himself. That the end of Neverland—not the ranch but the vision in Jackson’s head—loomed large was certainly true. In the final analysis, it was likely reality, not pain, that Jackson was medicating himself from. And that, quite possibly, it wasn’t drugs so much as truth that killed him.

Reporting alleged "details" from the coroner's sealed autopsy report, The UK Sun reported the singer weighed only 133 pounds, was bald (they allege he'd been wearing wigs, which might explain the unnatural hairline of many of his more recent photos), had partially-dissolved pills in his stomach and four injection sites around his heart. The conventional wisdom at the time was Conrad Murray, Jackson's live-in doctor, dosed Jackson with Demerol and, either before or after, high doses of OxyContin (NBC News reported neither drug were found in his home). The compound effect of the drugs likely slowed his heartbeat and suppressed his breathing. By the time Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson’s live-in cardiologist, found him lying in his bed, the singer was likely already dead. Everything else may likely have been about Dr. Murray trying to save his own skin. The useless and pointless CPR, the begrudging 911 call and his insistence the paramedics not pronounce the singer at Jackson’s rented Holmby Hills estate but transport him to UCLA Medical Center—all of that was simply for appearances. Jackson's fate had been sealed before the doctor ever found him. And this is Jackson's sad legacy, that he died the way he lived: lying. Jackson was, simply, a guy who lied about most everything. A subsequent disclosure by Murray had him admitting to administering an unfathomable sequence of sedatives in an alleged effort to wean Jackson off the surgical anesthetic Propofol, which Murray ultimately administered to Jackson anyway before leaving the room to make a phone call (patients' heartbeat and other vitals must be monitored at all times when under surgical anesthesia). All of which is likely to earn Murray a reckless homicide charge in Jackson’s death.

In the end, of course, the question should be, “Did Michael Jackson know Jesus?” From all available evidence, one might conclude that he did not, but only God knows what occurred between Jackson and Himself in those final moments. We can only pray that, as the circus now begins, that, somewhere among Jackson’s twisted legacy, some kernel of truth might emerge, some lesson learned.

More Michael Jackson Essays

Christopher J. Priest
28 June 2009/1 November 2009
editor@praisenet.org
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No. 409  |  June 23, 2013   DC RealTalk   Catechism   Study   The Church   Christian Living   COVER   A Preacher's Confession   Zion   Donate