Parenting: The Death
of Michael Jackson
by Joyce Maynard
It was the winter of 1984, and we didn’t get much television reception
in the small New Hampshire farmhouse at the end of a dead end dirt road
where I made my home at the time, with my husband and our three young
children. But there was MTV at the home of the babysitter to whom I brought
my son Charlie, and that was the season Michael Jackson released his Thriller
video. They must have played those fourteen minutes ten times a day back
then. And so my son, who had identified himself, already, as a person
in love with rhythm and dancing, was not yet out of diapers when he became
a Michael Jackson fan.
Charlie knew every beat of that dance, and recreated it nightly in our living room, our kitchen, anyplace. In the car, he banged out “Beat It”, and at home he sang “Billie Jean” for his baby brother, when he cried, though none of us, myself included, had a clue what the lyrics meant.
For his birthday that March, someone had sent us a life-sized decal of Michael Jackson’s face, meant to be soaked in water and applied to a T-shirt, but at some point when I was busy with the baby, and Charlie was impatient to get on with the project, his six-year-old sister had gone ahead and placed the moistened decal directly on the skin of her brother’s stomach, so that the not-quite-smiling image of a young black superstar covered nearly the entire belly of my blonde-haired two-year-old. It didn’t wash off, so all that spring, when I took him to swimming lessons at the Y, there was Michael Jackson’s face bobbing in the water, though as the weeks went by, it gradually peeled away, in a manner that eerily foreshadowed what actually happened to Jackson’s real face over the years that followed.
I was a crazy mother in certain ways, no doubt -- part of that generation for whom the experience of seeing, live, the performers we love took on huge significance. Something possessed me, then, to get us tickets for the Thriller tour that summer, Michael Jackson’s final round of performances with his brothers. This meant driving six hours to the Meadowlands, in New Jersey -- me and my husband and our daughter, and Charlie. I left our infant son with friends, and a supply of expressed breast milk to get him through our roughly fifteen-hour absence. As I say, I was a crazy mother.
Or, not entirely. Twenty five years later, Charlie -- now a hip hop artist who dances as much as he sings, when he performs -- tells me that concert, with its wild pyrotechnics, represents his earliest childhood memory. He remembers the smoke and laser beams, and Jackson as we saw him when he first appeared on the stage, wearing a suit of armor and holding a sword aloft. Now and then during the show, Michael would exhort the audience to provide a line of whatever song he was singing, and always, when he did, my children, almost as if in some altered state, called them out. “You’re out of my life and it cuts like a knife,” Charlie whispered. Whatever he made of that, he knew the words.
We all know the story of what happened, in the years that followed that glorious time. The brothers who had seemed so connected they moved as a single unit on the stage moved apart. Later came the marriage to Lisa Marie, the baby dangled over the hotel balcony, the accusations of sexual abuse, the settlement, the trial, the infamous television interview, and the ghostly and unrecognizable face of Michael as he had recreated himself to be, drifting through Neverland, talking about the childhood he never had, the father who, as we now know, was beating him nightly throughout his childhood.
My son chose not to explore this part of Michael Jackson’s story. He knew his childhood hero was in free-fall, but -- more so, perhaps, than he might have, with some other hero or icon, encountered at a less impressionable age -- what he held onto was the music and the dancing, and he never stopped loving or being inspired by those things.
Charlie never stopped dancing either. For years he was the one boy at the Lynnette School of Dance in Keene, New Hampshire -- cast in the role of the romantic hero in every year’s recital. Aladdin one June. The Jungle boy, the next.
He overcame the challenge of his rural New Hampshire origins and, in his twenties, became a rapper and a hip hop artist -- his pantheon expanding to include James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner, Tupac. Michael Jackson was old now -- fifty. Still, for my son, and so many others, he remained in a class by himself -- the one who, if he didn’t precisely start it all, brought a certain kind of musical performance and showmanship to a level never known before, and inspired a generation as nobody else could have. When I watched the latest video from Charlie’s band -- that opens with a robot, moving in a distinctly Jackson-like style -- I knew who he was thinking of.
I actually had a little dream that my son and I might travel to London together this summer, to take in Michael Jackson’s big farewell concert there, time and money got in the way -- though most of all, probably, what made the trip impossible were the demands for a young man of living his own life (and the fact that even with the lure of Michael Jackson tickets, a trip with one’s mother does not hold the same appeal for a twenty seven year old as it does, for a two year old). And anyway, Charlie was busy up on the stage himself now, not in the audience any more.
Hearing the news, last night, of Michael Jackson’s death, on the eve of that tour, I felt a wave of sadness as great as I might have registered over the death of a friend, and that was so not simply in spite of all the tragic and terrible parts of Michael Jackson’s story but, in part , because of them. This morning, watching footage of the beautiful and staggeringly gifted little boy he used to be, singing “I’ll Be There” up on stage with his brothers, I considered how it would have been for my own young sons, if they’d done their dancing and singing not in our kitchen, but in front of ten thousand screaming fans, and grown up flying jets and accumulating platinum records and millions of dollars with no idea what to spend them on but chess sets nobody was ever likely to actually play with.
If it has been hard for me to reconcile my admiration for Michael Jackson’s music with my feelings about how he appeared to live his life, it was not so hard for Charlie to keep on loving Michael Jackson.
My son grew up at the end of a dead end dirt road in New Hampshire, and discovered his passion watching a video on MTV in his babysitter’s living room.
Michael Jackson grew up on a stage. It was the part that happened, when the show was over, for which he lacked any choreography or direction, and there he faltered as spectacularly as he triumphed under the lights.
He’s out of our life and it cuts like a knife. That much is so.
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