From BLYTH, Ontario
July 25th, 2010
Okay, so yes, I’m away at the Blyth Festival again. Okay, so yes, that means I’m legally contracted to post about cows and pigs and country life; rep theatre and homemade jam; pies* and the lack of eligible cock around. (As opposed to cow and pig.)
*I wasn’t using “pie” as a euphemism for “vagina” there, by the way. I really did mean baked goods. It just happens to work on that level, too. (Bonus joke!)
However.
I don’t know if you guys have heard about this but…Michael Jackson died. A year ago. Oh, wait, what’s that - Michael who? Oh, he was this entertainer, he was really neat, you might be able to find a clip or two on the internet. Of course, he was never truly recognized and never achieved the success he might have, because he was black. If he’d been a white guy, “Michael Jackson” might have been a household name, or at least he might have had a hit or two, rather than dying in obscurity, almost completely unknown but to a group of prisoners in the Philippines that liked his dancing for some reason.
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(TAKE TWO…for real this time)
I promised one year ago, just after we all heard, to devote an issue of The Tourist to the gloved one. As I said at the time, I just wasn’t ready.
But now I am. Here goes.
At first we just friends. Or rather, he was a friend of my mother’s. It was her copy of Off The Wall that I would take out, unfold carefully and talk to. “Michael,” I’d say, “my socks never look that white. How do you do it?” I’d wonder at his flexibility, being capable of bending all the way in two like that. I’d listen to his groovy songs and try to dance, which I hadn’t quite figured out yet, but he was teaching me. Sometimes I’d fall down. Oh, we’d LAUGH! What fun!
I remember when we fell in love. It was Christmas, 1983. Michael had been away awhile. I’d moved on to other friends; he’d been working. I wasn’t angry, but we’d drifted. And then somebody, God bless them (Uncle Steve?), gave me Thriller as a gift. I unwrapped it and gasped. There he was, looking at me again. Different nose but those same old beautiful brown Michael eyes. He smiled. I smiled. Something was different. I was older now. Nearly nine. Practically a woman.
There, in front of the Christmas tree in our Scarborough living room, family shouting festively around me, I sat blushing as new Michael and the new me regarded one another. I felt shy. My noisy, laughing family may not have noticed the sparks suddenly flying, but I was embarrassed that they might. And suddenly I just couldn’t stand all these people being everywhere. We needed to be alone. We went up to my room.
I sat on the carpet and Michael sat in front of me. I unfolded him and laughed. “There you are again, showing off your flexibility!”
He just giggled, playing with his baby tiger, Lisa, whom (he told me now) he had named after me. It had been the record company’s idea to have him pose with a cute, cuddly tiger cub in a ploy to show fans his sensitive side, as Michael was (for obvious reasons) always in danger of being pegged as “too macho”. But the cub had grown on him, particularly after he’d taken her on the road to keep him company on his latest tour.
It was there that he’d given her my name and would spend late nights confiding in her all his deepest, most private thoughts, pretending she was me. “But Michael,” I asked, “Why didn’t you just call me?”
“I wanted to,” he said. “But I know you’re busy with school and everything. I remembered you were in Mrs Thielking’s class this year, and we all know how tough that is. I just didn’t want to bother you. Congrats on all your track and field ribbons, by the way,” he said, gesturing to where they were tacked up on the wall. “Oh, Michael, I just think of you and I jump higher, run faster, go that extra kilometre - as we say here in Canada. I’m always picturing you out there on the sidelines, cheering me on.”
“I am. I cheer you on within my heart.”
I took down my high jump ribbon, my first of what would be a short but distinguished career, and I pinned it to his chest. “Ouch,” he said. So then I pinned it to his shirt instead. I held a finger to his beautiful forehead.
“Remember, Michael, wherever you are, no matter how far apart we may be…I’ll be right here.”
(NOT THE MOST FLATTERING PICTURES OF ME)
He took off one of his gloves and gave it to me. At first I wouldn’t take it, knowing how cold his hands always were. But he insisted.
“You’re such a P.Y.T.,” he told me.
“A what? What’s that?”
“Track eight," he said. “You’ll see.”
“Eight! My lucky number!”
“How could I forget?”
There were so many more things I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him all about Kim and Hansa and Mangala and Anita and all my other awesome friends. About last year, when red-haired Brandy had moved into town and bullied me and taken all those friends away and made grade three a living hell. How I’d beat her up and won them back. Wanted to show him pictures I’d drawn, stories I was working on. (Oh MY GOD, he hadn’t met my dog yet, Toby! Dad got him from the pound, surprised me!) I wanted to show him my moves.
But as the needle touched down on the record and he started to sing, I fell silent. Michael sang. And sang and sang. And sometimes Paul McCartney sang. I listened and we looked at one another. And it was good.
I should have known it couldn’t last.
THE POSTER
With Michael gone for months on end, I had only his recordings and occasional TV appearances as reminders. When he debuted the moonwalk on Motown 25, I was watching. Okay, everybody was watching. The next day at recess, as my classmates were trying it out, I just watched and smiled. Michael had tried to teach it to me many times. If he had failed, what chance did these clowns have? When he won those eight - eight! My number, again! - 1984 Grammys, I was at home, wearing the other glove. He had wanted me, not Brooke Shields, on his arm that night, but I had a geography project due the next day. I had all my friends over for the broadcast of the Thriller video. They gasped and danced and screamed; I cried. I missed him so.
Alas, there were no intertubes to be tubed at the time, and all I could do was hang around Nancy’s door and catch the occasional peek. Eventually she took pity on me and told me she would consider selling it. I made an offer of jelly beans and laundry folding. She held firm at twenty dollars. At the time, that was eight weekly allowances for me. (My allowance always being the going rate of a movie; this was in the days of Two-fifty Tuesdays).
I scrimped and saved and forwent movies with my friends for two whole months. One happy allowance day the transaction was made: I eagerly handed over my hard-saved quarters and two dollar bills; the poster was rolled up and delivered into my shakey little hands. By now it was edge-frayed and faded and everyone was saying Michael was gay. But it wasn’t until somewhat later that I realized that the store price of posters was eight dollars and that my sis had pocketed a tidy one hundred percent plus profit for a poster she didn’t want anymore. Clever girl.
When he would visit, it was lovely, just like old times. But those visits were seldom and we couldn’t help but drift apart. He had the Jackson Five Victory Tour, I had Speech Arts and volleyball. And in the spirit of total disclosure, there were other men, I must confess. Nigel Brown and I went so far as to hold hands, about which Michael never knew, but I had strayed all the same.
NAZEER PAREKH AND THE THRILLER JACKET
My friend and schoolmate, Naz, had a similar experience to my poster ordeal when he begged and begged his parents for a Michael-style red pleather Thriller jacket. They said, again and again, “Don’t be ridiculous", but eventually gave in when he met them halfway with his paper route money.
Little did I know how tragic, for me, would be the day when Nazeer finally showed up at school in the jacket. By this time, scorn for Michael had gotten vicious in the Grey Owl Junior Public schoolyard. He was lame, he was a loser, he was SO GAY.
And did I defend Michael as staunchly as I had the myth of Santa Claus only a year or two before, popping Michael Haynes in the nose for saying Santa wasn’t real? No, friends, I am ashamed to say. I took the easy, coward’s route, making a show of laughing with the others before leaving Naz to the wolves. Shaking my head that he didn’t know better, I retreated into the background. I turned my back on Nazeer just as they were tearing the arms and zippers from his coat and pooing on him, and just then noticed a shadowy figure on the other side of the chainlink schoolyard fence. The backlit halo of a jericurl caught my eye. I saw the glow of silver socks, the glint of a so-familiar glove, and as he turned away I caught sight of a single tear rolling down my poor, sweet Michael’s face.
I called out his name once, feebly, but I knew that what he’d witnessed had been unforgivable. A terrible betrayal. I had lost him, maybe forever. I stood there stunned, and could only watch him walk away.
I wrote letter upon letter, for years, pleading for forgiveness. Michael eventually responded with a hit single.
Somehow, Michael eventually found it in his heart to accept me into his life again. He was in his “Man In The Mirror”/“Heal the World” period and it had affected him deeply. He wanted to let go of old grudges and move on. But he would always keep me at a distance. We were friends but didn’t dance. There was talk, but little laughter. Liz never trusted me and she was a big influence. But after what I’d done I was grateful to be in his life at all and was content to visit Neverland now and then and give Bubbles his baths. Now and then Michael would almost forget himself and it would be like old times…but that was mostly when we’d been drinking, or eating Pixie Stix.
And then there was the time that Michael took all those painkillers and married Lisa Marie Presley by accident, thinking she was me. I was there; he thought I was Diana Ross. I could have stopped it but my pride got in the way. (Plus I was kind of enjoying being Diana Ross for a day. Who wouldn’t? Now if only I could make my hair go like that.) But it hurt, I won’t lie. Especially because he’d taken the last of the painkillers and there were none left for me.
Things between us would never be the same. Visits became fewer and fewer, and more and more sad. I didn’t deal well with his legal troubles, and he didn’t seem to understand how hard theatre school can be.
When news came through that Michael had died I was working on a play in Gananoque, Ontario. All I could do was sit, stunned, in front of the TV like everyone else. And that, after all, was all I deserved.
So where does that leave me, Dear Reader? Alone, getting older, and full of regret. We never had our wedding on the Moon. We never had our honeymoon at Disney World. Sure, I force everyone to listen to, REALLY listen to, Man In The Mirror every New Year’s Eve…but did I ever actually tell him how I felt, how desperately I still loved him after all these years? No, I kept it all inside, kept it inside and let him fall apart and bleach himself and shrink his nose smaller and smaller, until like some pathetic symbol of all his and my romantic possibility, it caved in and disappeared altogether.
It leaves me here, Dear Reader, talking to you. And while you’re very lovely, you’ll never moonwalk through my heart like Michael did. No one ever will.
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