A Last Moment for The Man in the Mirror

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I KEEP TELLING MYSELF it’s over. That twisting stab of loss…that feeling that something beautiful has left forever. I repeat to myself that all energy just changes shape and trades places…that the joy and the movement and the sound and the love and connection will live on.

And then I open the news to read something or I hear his music or a certain song, or a memory comes rushing back unbidden, and I start weeping again.

I tell myself crying over a dead pop star is silly. Put that way, it is. I read a post or two by somewhat detached or angry or above-it-all bloggers telling us we are wrapped up in celebrity culture. I say the same thing all the time, you know. It’s true.

And then I remember his eyes, and how he could radiate his excitement or fear or happiness to millions of people so well…and of how I have been one of them for over 30 years.

I play back my life in my mind and his music is in so many scenes and they keep coming to me, even when I think I’ve remembered them all.

ABC, 123 when I was so young I had no idea who was singing it. Wouldn’t put that one together until years later. I heard that in a sunny room at Ayrlawn Elementary, I may have been in 3rd grade. Or 4th.

In Gaithersburg, playing at some kid’s house I can’t even remember. I can’t remember that kid’s name, his face, or what we did. But I remember hearing Rockin’ Robin. It was so bright and happy…unlike the general playlist in my house…songs there felt deeper, stirring, full of exhortations for social justice. Fraught with angers I didn’t fully understand, but yet connected to far more than a happy boy singing about birds. That song was for a neighbor’s house, another world.

In Miami, looking at his smile and glowing socks on the back of Off the Wall…for hours. As the record played. She’s Out of My Life where his voice breaks and you feel that vulnerability and wide open love that could pour from his heart. Smiling years later when Eddie Murphy parodied it…but “parodied” with crazy respect. That’s what Michael meant to (some of) us…you couldn’t even mock him without loving him.

You Wanna Be Startin’ Something on my walkman, on tape, on cassette. Over and over. Mouthing Mama se mama sa ma mah coo sa and knowing the magic of the words as just another way to speak the magic that moved the bones.

Darker, then. Thriller. The video that shook the world. Or at least, the US. The one that played with guise, with transformation, with demons. That video was so huge the local Jamesway had it playing from sets in front of the store.

Beat It, which fused a true connection to my own spirit and gave me words I understood, words I used for fuel to refuse to be silent or quiet when they kick you and they beat you and they tell you it’s fair. Because they will. And they do.

I told you about the Thriller shirt I wore to school. It’s a good metaphor for what it meant at times to carry with you a visible love of MJ’s music for the later years. I wore that shirt to a school that had about 3 black people in it. From elementary to High School…three in the whole system. It was a school in rural NY, where I moved to from Miami (where Cubans, blacks, Haitians and so on were the majority). At the upstate NY school they thought of me as Puerto Rican when I first got there…cuz to them it was pretty much the same thing as Mexican. I have no idea how many Latino people were there, maybe a few. But no presence, no political unity, no student groups, nothing like that. So it was a pretty white school. And to tell you the truth, looking back at my life, I guess I bonded to a lot of artists who were POC during that time, and in that place. Part of it was natural, as I just love hearing/playing/dancing to music that is rhythm-strong.

Anyway, when I wore my Michael Jackson T to school (I was about 14), it earned me at least one solid punch and the query as to whether  I was a “fag”—something my adoptive father used to like to ask from time to time, too. But I walked into that one. And I knew I was. As I wrote already, it wasn’t a cool move or anything to wear that shirt. No retro/anti/hipster-type statement to that at all. Rock was cool, there and then, and Thriller was current, not retro. Iron Maiden, Ozzy, Van Halen. MJ was simply seen as a freak. Then again…I’m still playing MJ and never bothered  even briefly considering going back to any HS Reunions, so….

Jam, about ten years later as I drove faster than I probably should have behind black windows, hand on the stick, MJ blasting through kickers in the back. Scream, and during many nights of a nadir, Who Is It?

And I guess I didn’t realize how important all of that was in my life…until the person who was behind that music left this plane. I guess I didn’t realize how important it was to me that he kept making music…and that the demons lurking about him and peeking out of his eyes here and there not win the battle he was thrown into as only a child.

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

And then I’m crying again.

And like I said yesterday, I’m not even sure over what.

Death? Bad endings? Comebacks denied? Cruelty? Child abuse? Self loathing? An insatiable desire to be seen, to be loved? Seeing that desire become destructive? Crying for the misunderstood misfits among us? My past? Myself? For the world’s frenzied hunger for that which we can build up onto a pedestal so that, then, we may climb up screaming and shrieking, to clamor ever closer, close enough to finally touch, to smell, to shred, to fling from those starry  heights so that we may for a moment stand even higher than our collective exalted?

They didn’t want me so they made me a star
—John Lennon

All of it, I guess. More. Dunno.

So many words I write, and yet I wonder if I can ever get any closer than my friend Kai, who put it so well, and with not too many words. So well it started me off on a jag that lasted well into the night, where I raised my glass to Michael and his soul, again and again, until I fell into a dreamless state of sleep.

Kai wrote:

“For me, and me alone, the word that comes to my mind when I think about Michael Jackson is “innocence”. To me, Michael was an innocent in a corrupt world. the world’s ugliness twisted him into a beast. he didn’t like it here anymore.”

Michael. Soul that was known as Michael Jackson: you will live on forever. In our minds, our memories, our hearts, our hips, our hats, our stories, our music. Rest in peace. Rest in joy. Fly onward, fueled and borne up by all the best parts of your being, now freed from the caustic, cutting, crippling, crazied chains of this world.

Gone Too Soon

Like a comet blazing ‘cross the evening sky
Gone too soon…

Like a rainbow fading in the twinkling of an eye
Gone too soon

Shiny and sparkly and splendidly bright
Here one day, gone one night

Like the loss of sunlight on a cloudy afternoon
Gone too soon

Like a castle built upon a sandy beach
Gone too soon

Like a perfect flower that is just beyond your reach
Gone too soon

Born to amuse, to inspire, to delight
Here one day, gone one night

Like a sunset dying with the rising of the moon
Gone too soon…
Gone too soon.

Michael Jackson RIP | 1958 – Forever