The King of Pop and the Story of our Lives

While we made dinner we watched the coverage. While we ate downstairs we watched it still -- why, I'm not quite sure. One "close friend" after another, one "journalistic expert" after another -- all insinuating more knowledge of and insight into Michael Jackson than is possible -- droned on and on about this puzzlingly odd little character who has been an entertainment phenomenon almost as long as I have been alive, and now just as puzzlingly had died just a handful of weeks before his 51st birthday.

Perhaps those numbers offer some explanation. Just short of two years younger than me, Michael Jackson has been a constant in my musical universe, from his "ABC's" days -- when he was still young enough to be learning his ABC's as well as sing about them -- through his "Thriller" stage, and then into his...well, ahem...strange phase. I never was puzzled about his financial prodigality; excessive, it was nonetheless rational. But I never could connect the prepubescent little guy whipping and spinning his way across the stage, belting out "I Want you Back" and "Stop, the love you save may be your own..." with the skin bleaching, face reshaping, veiled and reclusive oddity that he became.

But he was always there -- like the stars, themselves, orbiting nearer sometimes, almost but not quite out of view at others; almost forgotten one minute, and making headlines the next. Real fans, I suspect, were always carried along in the suspense of it all: "Did he have another Thriller in him?" "Would he and the brothers make one more tour together?" The rest of us would happily sing along when one of the hits would come on the radio, shake our heads at the next outlandish antic or headline, and then go back to whatever else we were doing. A familiarity, to be sure, and a fondness, of sorts, for the genius he had and the entertainer he used to be, but a healthy and respectable distance from the weirdness he had become.

Maybe that duality, itself, offers some of the explanation. I can't pretend to understand Michael Jackson. I don't know why he surgically recreated himself; don't know why he walked around in a virtual shroud. I don't know why he suspended his baby over the balcony rails, and only he and the boys know for sure what really went on at the ranch. One can speculate about the ramifications of constant celebrity oiled by excesses of money. Everyone recognizes the peril of flying too close to the flame -- or, to sustain the celestial metaphor, orbiting too close to the sun. And we can only swallow hard considering the role that we, the audience, play as symbiotic partners in the drama. But all of us, I think, have this sobering and humbling sense -- inarticulate, perhaps, but real -- that all the light and darkness, all the generosity and paranoia, all the desire for attention and also the reclusiveness; the winsome little boy and also the weird and disconcerting freak, writ so large and publicly in him is somehow resident, in greater and lesser degrees, in us. Lori often observes that we are a package -- a combination of more and lesser desirable parts. If Jackson's package was full of loud and spotlighted and exaggerated extremes, mine is different only in wattage, not in diversity. Ask my mother and she will tell you I was a pretty adorable little kid. Ask anyone who has known me since and they will acknowledge that I can likewise be pretty weird.

Goodnight, Michael. We've enjoyed the music. Now, rest in peace -- perhaps for the first time ever.