Pulphead: Essays (15 page)

“I have to say, those were the good old days,” he rambles on. “I love those songs, those were magic moments, with all my brothers, including Jermaine.” (The Jackson family’s penchant for high passive-aggression at watershed moments is extraordinary; at Michael’s funeral, Jermaine will say: “I was his voice and his backbone, I had his back.” And then, as if remembering to thank his agent, “So did the family.”)

“Those were good songs,” Michael says. “I like those songs a lot, but especially, I like”—his voice fades from the mike for a second, ramifying the liveness till the meters almost spike—“the new songs.”

Uncontrollable shrieking. He’s grabbing the mike stand like James Brown used to grab it, like if it had a neck he’d be choking it. People in the seats are yelling, “‘Billie Jean’! ‘Billie Jean’!”

I won’t cloud the uniqueness of what he does next with words except to mention one potentially missable (because it’s so obvious) aspect: that he does it so entirely alone. The stage is profoundly empty. Silhouettes of the orchestra members are clapping back in the dark. But unless you count the dazzling glove—conceived, according to one source, to hide the advancing vitiligo that discolors his left hand—Michael holds only one prop: a black hat. He tosses that away almost immediately. Stage, dancer, spotlight. The microphone isn’t even on. He snatches it back from the stand as if from the hands of a maddening child.

With a mime’s tools he proceeds to do possibly the most captivating thing a person’s ever been captured doing onstage. Richard Pryor, who was not in any account I have ever read a suck-up, approaches Michael afterward and says simply, “That was the greatest performance I’ve ever seen.” Fred Astaire calls him “the greatest living natural dancer.”

Michael tells
Ebony
, “I remember doing the performance so clearly, and I remember that I was so upset with myself, ’cause it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted it to be more.” It’s said he intended to hold the crouching en pointe at the end of the moonwalk longer. But if you watch, he falls off his toes, when he falls, in perfect time, and makes it part of the turn. Much as, closer to the end, he wipes sweat from under his nose in time.

The intensity behind his face looks unbearable.

Quincy always tells him, “Smelly … get out of the way and leave room so that God can walk in.”

A god moves through him. The god enters, the god leaves.

*   *   *

It’s odd to write about a person knowing he may have been, but not if he was, a serial child molester. Whether or not Michael did it, the suggestion of it shadowed him for so long and finally killed his soul. It’s said that toward the end, he was having himself put under—with the same anesthesia that may have finished him—not for hours but for days. As though being snuffed. Witnesses to his body on the morgue table report that his prosthetic nose was missing. There were only holes in his face. A mummy. Two separate complete autopsies: they cut him to pieces. As of this writing, no one outside the Jackson camp knows for certain the whereabouts of his body.

I have read a stack of books about him in the past month, more than I ever imagined I would—though not more than I wanted. He warrants and will no doubt one day receive a serious, objective biography: all the great cultural strains of American music came together in him. We have yet to accept that his very racial in-betweenness made him more and not less of an essential figure in our tradition. He grasped this and used it. His marriage to Elvis’s daughter was in part an art piece.

Of all those books, the one that troubles and sticks with me is the celebrity journalist Ian Halperin’s
Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson
. Most famous for a book and movie suggesting dubiously that Kurt Cobain’s suicide was a disguised murder, Halperin is not an ideal source but neither is he a useless one. Indeed, he accurately predicted Michael’s death six months before it happened and seems to have burrowed his way into the Jackson world in several places.

In the beginning, Halperin claims, he’d set out mainly to prove that Michael had sexually molested young boys and used his money to get away with it. I believe him about this original motivation, since any such proof would have generated the most sensational publicity, sold the most copies, and so on. But Halperin finds, in the end, after exhaustively pursuing leads, that every so-called thread of evidence becomes a rope of sand. Somebody, even if it’s a family member, wants money, or has accused other people before, or is patently insane. It usually comes down to a tale someone else knows about an alleged secret payoff. Meanwhile, you have these boys, like Macaulay Culkin (whom Michael was once accused of fondling), who have come forth and stated that nothing untoward ever happened with Michael. When he stood trial and got off, that was a just verdict.

That’s the first half of the Halperin Thesis. The second half is that Michael was a fully functioning gay man, who took secret male lovers his entire adult life. Halperin says he met two of them and saw pictures of one with Michael. They were young but perfectly legal. One told Halperin that Michael was an insatiable bottom.

As for Michael’s interest in children, it’s hard to imagine that lacking an erotic dimension of some kind, but it may well have been thoroughly nonsexual. Michael was a frozen adolescent—about the age of those first dreamy striped-sweater years in California—and he wanted to hang out with the people he saw as his peers. Have pillow fights, call each other doo-doo head. It’s creepy as hell, if you like, but victimless. It would make him—in rough clinical terms—a partial passive fixated pedophile. Not a crime yet, not until they get the mind-reader machines going.

I don’t ask that you agree with Halperin, merely that you admit, as I feel compelled to do, that the psychological picture he conjures up is not less and perhaps just slightly more plausible than the one in which Michael uses Neverland Ranch as a spiderweb, luring boys to his bed. If you’re like me, you’ve been subconsciously presuming the latter to be basically the case for most of your life. But there’s a good chance it was never true and that Michael loved children with a weird but not immoral love.

If you want a disturbing thought experiment, allow these—I won’t say facts, but feasibility structures—let them digest, and then go back again to Martin Bashir’s 2003 documentary. There’s no point adding here to the demonization of Bashir for having more or less manipulated Michael through kindness into declaring himself a complete Fruit of the Loom–collecting fiend, especially when you consider that Bashir was representing us fairly well in the ideas he appears to have carried regarding Michael, that it was probably true about him and kids.

But when you put on the not-so glasses and watch, and see Michael protesting his innocence, asking, “What’s wrong with sharing love?” as he holds hands with that twelve-year-old cancer survivor—or many years earlier, in that strange self-released statement, where he describes with barely suppressed rage the humiliation of having his penis examined by the police—dammit if the whole life doesn’t look a lot different. There appears to exist a nondismissible chance that Michael was some kind of martyr.

We won’t pity him. That he embraced his own destiny, knowing beforehand how fame would warp him, is precisely what frees us to revere him.

We have, in any case, a pathology of pathologization in this country. It’s a bourgeois disease, and we do right to call bullshit on it. We moan that Michael changed his face out of self-loathing. He may have loved what he became.

Ebony
caught up with him in Africa in the nineties. He had just been crowned king of Sani by villagers in the Ivory Coast. “You know I don’t give interviews,” he tells Robert E. Johnson there in the village. “You’re the only person I trust to give interviews to: Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation is sound and that it’s not just random sound, that it’s music.”

May they have been his last thoughts.

THE FINAL COMEBACK OF AXL ROSE

1.

He is from nowhere.

That sounds coyly rhetorical—in this day and age, it’s even a boast: socioeconomic code for “I went to a second-tier school and had no connections and made all this money myself.”

I don’t mean it that way. I mean he is from nowhere. Given the relevant maps and a pointer, I know I could convince even the most exacting minds that when the vast and blood-soaked jigsaw puzzle that is this country’s regional scheme coalesced into more or less its present configuration after the Civil War, somebody dropped a piece, which left a void, and they called the void “central Indiana.” I’m not trying to say there’s no there there. I’m trying to say there’s no there. Think about it; get systematic on it. What’s the most nowhere part of America? The Midwest, right? But once you get into the Midwest, you find that each of the different nowherenesses has laid claim to its own somewhereness. There are the lonely plains in Iowa. In Michigan there’s a Gordon Lightfoot song. Ohio has its very blandness and averageness, faintly comical, to cling to. All of them have something. But now I invite you to close your eyes, and when I say “Indiana” … blue screen, no? And we are speaking only of Indiana generally, which includes southern Indiana, where I grew up, and northern Indiana, which touches a Great Lake. We have not even narrowed it down to central Indiana. Central Indiana? That’s like, “Where are you?” I’m nowhere. “Go there.”

When I asked Jeff Strange, a morning-rock DJ in Lafayette, how he thought about this part of the world—for instance, did he think of it as the South? After all, it’s a Klan hot spot (which can be read as a somewhat desperate affectation); or did he think of it as the Midwest, or what—you know what he told me? He said, “Some people here would call it ‘the region.’”

William Bruce Rose, Jr.; William Bruce Bailey; Bill Bailey; William Rose; Axl Rose; W. Axl Rose.

That’s where he’s from. Bear that in mind.

2.

On May 15, he came out in jeans and a black leather jacket and giant black sunglasses, all lens, that made him look like a wasp-man. We had been waiting so long, in both years and hours. It was the third of the four comeback shows in New York, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. It was after eleven o’clock. The doors had opened at seven o’clock. The opening act had been off by eight-thirty. There’d already been fights on the floor, and it didn’t feel like the room could get any more wound up without some type of event. I was next to a really nice woman from New Jersey, a hairdresser, who told me her husband “did pyro” for Bon Jovi. She kept texting one of her husband’s friends, who was “doing pyro” for this show, and asking him, “When’s it gonna start?” And he’d text back, “We haven’t even gone inside.” I said to her at one point, “Have you ever seen a crowd this pumped up before a show?” She goes, “Yeah, they get this pumped up every night before Bon Jovi.”

Then he was there. And apologies to the nice woman, but people do not go that nuts when Bon Jovi appears. People were: Going. Nuts. He is not a tall man—I doubt even the heels of his boots (red leather) put him over five feet ten. He walked toward us with stalking, cartoonish pugnaciousness.

All anybody talks about with Axl anymore is his strange new appearance, but it is hard to get past the unusual impression he makes. To me he looks like he’s wearing an Axl Rose mask. He looks like a man I saw eating by himself at a truck stop in Monteagle, Tennessee, at two o’clock in the morning about twelve years ago. He looks increasingly like the albino reggae legend Yellowman. His mane evokes a gathering of strawberry-red intricately braided hempen fibers, the sharply twisted ends of which have been punched, individually, a half inch into his scalp. His chest hair is the color of a new penny. With the wasp-man sunglasses and the braids and the goatee, he reminds one of the monster in
Predator
, or of that monster’s wife on its home planet. When he first came onto the scene, he often looked, in photographs, like a beautiful, slender, redheaded twenty-year-old girl. Now he has thickened through the middle—muscly thickness, not the lard-ass thickness of some years back. He grabs his package tightly, and his package is huge. Only reporting. Now he plants his feet apart. “You know where you are?” he asks, and we bellow that we do, we do know, but he tells us anyway. “You’re in the jungle, baby,” he says, and then he tells us that we are going to die.

He must be pleased, not only at the extreme way that we are freaking out to see him but also at the age range on view: there are hipsters who were probably born around the time
Appetite
got released, all the way up to aging heads who’ve handed in their giant rock hair for grizzled rattails, with plenty of microgenerations in between. But why should I even find this worth remarking? The readers of
Teen
magazine, less than one year ago, put him at number two (behind “Grandparents”) on the list of the “100 Coolest Old People” … Axl Rose, who hasn’t released a legitimate recording in thirteen years and who, during that time, turned into an almost Howard Hughes–like character—only ordering in, transmitting sporadic promises that a new album, titled
Chinese Democracy
, was about to drop, making occasional startling appearances at sporting events and fashion shows, stuff like that—looking a little feral, a little lost, looking not unlike a man who’s been given his first day’s unsupervised leave from a state facility. Now he has returned. The guitarists dig in, the drummer starts his I-Am-BUil-DINg-UP-TO-THE!-
VERSE!
pounding section, and at the risk of revealing certain weaknesses of taste on my own part, I have to say, the sinister perfection of that opening riff has aged not a day.