you’re stuck in the middle

I remember it well.  I was with my dad, step mom, and my cousin Zach who staying with us at the time.  We were looking through the compartment at the bottom of the T.V. stand which was crammed full with LPs, VHS tapes, and plastic trays that held audio cassettes.  I had one of the trays  on my lap and was pulling out the different tapes, bemused by the images of a time unknown to me.  Suddenly I came to a tape that for reasons still unknown to me grabbed me more than the others.  I pulled it out and asked about it’s contents.  I was told it was Michael Jackson.  My life quickly became consumed by that name.

It started with “late night” listens to Thriller that were meant to lull me as I went to bed.  Instead I found myself getting up from my bunk bed and heading over to the karaoke machine I used as a stereo in my room to flip the tape and get more of my fix.  Bad was the first CD I ever personally owned, given to me by the Easter bunny.  Soon enough I had what could best be described as a shrine devoted to him on a plastic shelving unit on wheels.  I had VHS tapes with each new video or TV appearance tacked on.  I even remember bossing my friend Neeman around as I dictated my proposed choreography for a video I wanted to enter into a MTV contest to create a video for Who Is It?, the first aspirations of being a director I can remember

But ultimately Michael Jackson, the public persona and not the person, gave me much more than a childhood obsession.  He also changed the way I looked at the world.  Suddenly, at the age of 7, my hero was dethroned, and the world was made a much more complicated place.  Not only was the adult world so certain that he was a bad person, but his supposed crime, which I understood for the most part, was a direct violation of the trust I and countless other children had for him.  This is the man that had turned into a car to protect those kids from Joe Pesci.  How was it possible?

My initial reaction was to go on the defense.  I would become very upset when I heard people talking poorly of him.  I even made the doomed decision to portray Michael in a talent show the local T.V. station was putting on.  Imagine a fat white kid in Iowa in a black hat with wig, unbuttoned silk shirt, and white sequenced glove dancing and lip-syncing to The Way You Make Me Feel less than a year after the scandal.

Still deep down I always knew there was a chance he actually was guilty.  I was just afraid to admit it because it was simply too much for my 8 year old world view.  Not that I had some delusion that the world was perfect, but Michael was supposed to be different.  I had seen the VH1 movie.  I knew he had a tough child hood too, and had even sang to rats, but was still able to become Michal Jackson.  He was a pillar of hope.  He was like Batman, who donned my bed spread, but real.

So when I heard he died today I had very mixed emotions.  I was upset, but not sad.  I was bothered though by the fact that I wasn’t sad.  I wished that I could be that naive 6 year old again who could really believe in someone without any kind of qualifiers.  Perhaps in the true spirit of Michael, I wanted nothing more than to be able to slip back under Batman into that bunk bed and enjoy the pure bliss of The Girl Is My Mine.  But I can’t and so my memories of Michael will always be biter sweet.  Everyone has to grow up sometimes, but who would have thought it’d be Michael Jackson to push me, and I’m sure countless others, into the confusing abyss of adulthood.