Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (17 page)

It was like he had a musical soundtrack in his head, running all the time. We’d be driving along and he’d just start humming a melody or beatboxing some percussion. In the days after, you’d hear him working it out in his head. No words, just sounds. It was almost
like it wasn’t something he was doing consciously; it just happened. He told us that sometimes complete songs would just come to him, the melody, the lyrics, every instrumental part. He couldn’t get the beat out of his head until he’d worked it out. It just took him over entirely. That’s when you’d hear him in the studio late at night.

Bill:
When you heard him in there? It was something you wanted to tell the world, especially if it was music that you knew nobody had ever heard before. Sometimes he’d play his old music and just dance to it. Other times he’d be working on a new track or a new melody. You wanted to grab your cell phone and call someone and say, “Yo, I’m listening to Michael Jackson singing right now. Like,
right now
.” But you couldn’t.

Javon:
He would turn it up
loud
. Loud to the point where you’d be wondering if he was going to wake up the kids. You could tell he was pouring all his anger and frustration and energy into his dance moves and his music. Sometimes it would go on all night. I’d be on graveyard shifts, and he’d have that light on in his room till dawn. I’d think to myself, “When does he actually sleep?” I was working all these hours and I was dog tired, and he was in there wide awake.

Some nights, you’d think maybe he fell asleep with the lamp on, but then you’d see the kitchen light come on and you knew he was still up. That happened a lot. He was up at night more than he wasn’t. If I worked the graveyard shift three times a week, three times a week Mr. Jackson would be up on my watch. If he turned in early and the light went off, it would almost come as a surprise.

But you always knew when he was sleeping well, because when you got to work in the morning, he’d be real engaging, real friendly. He’d come out before breakfast just to say hello. Then there would be times that he would go two or three days without communicating
with us at all, like when Feldman left. We started getting used to it. Like, “Okay, he’s going through his quiet stage again.”

Bill:
When he was in good spirits, we did what we could to keep him in good spirits. When he went into that quiet mode, or a loneliness stage, we knew. We felt it. Plenty of times, start of the day he’d jump into the car, happy and smiling and animated. “Morning! Everybody sleep well?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I slept like a baby.”

Other times, he’d get in the car, wouldn’t say a word. We’d know something was wrong. He’d got a phone call. Some kind of bad news. Something. We’d drive for a little bit. There would be total silence for ten minutes, twenty minutes. Then, out of nowhere, real soft: “Why don’t they just leave me alone?”

Javon:
There were many nights when he’d call and say he wanted to drive down to the Strip. Those evenings were not planned; a mood would just strike him. He’d call Grace and tell her to come over to watch the kids, and once they were asleep, he’d come down, jump into the ride, and we’d roll out.

“Anywhere in particular, sir?”

“No, just drive. I want to look at the lights.”

We’d drive from the Sahara all the way to the Tropicana, bust a U-turn and head back the way we came. Sometimes he’d want to stop and see the water show at the Bellagio or the volcano at Treasure Island. But mostly we’d just circle around the Strip about six or seven times. He wouldn’t say much; we wouldn’t say much, either. We’d just drive slow. He’d crack the window a little bit, look at the lights, look out at the people. We must have done that at least twenty or thirty times.

There was one time we passed the big sign for Cirque du Soleil’s
Love
show at the Mirage, the one based on the songs of the
Beatles, which Mr. Jackson owned the rights to. He saw the sign for it and said, “When did that start?”

I said, “That’s been here for at least two or three months now.”

He said, “What? Nobody asked me about that. They didn’t get my permission for that.” He was livid. He said, “I have to make some phone calls.” Then he asked Bill to make arrangements so he could go see the show. We went. He said it was okay.

Bill:
What he really wanted to be able to do was get out and walk around, so we had to figure out a disguise for him. “I’ve tried everything,” he said. “I’ve been through two- to three-hour makeup sessions not to be recognized, but people always recognize me.”

That’s when I came up with the idea for the motorcycle helmet. We’d dress him up like a biker from head to toe and he could wear a motorcycle helmet with a tinted visor. He said he had never done that before. It would draw stares, but nobody would know it was him, and there are plenty of stranger things to see out on the Strip on a Saturday night. So I said, “Let’s go for it.”

That outfit must have cost about six hundred dollars, from the jacket to the pants to the boots. We drove down, parked at the Bellagio, he put the helmet on, and we walked. We kept our distance to give him space. We didn’t wanna bring attention to him by our presence. Javon and I both had street clothes on. No earpieces. We just strolled. We walked from the Bellagio to the Excalibur, maybe six or seven blocks, which are long blocks on the Strip, maybe about a mile and a half. It was hot as hell out there. He must have been burning up in that thing. Every few minutes, I’d ask him, “You all right, sir?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine.”

After we’d walked all the way down, Javon went back to get the car. We sat on a bench, and he came and picked us up. Mr. Jackson got in the car. When he took that helmet off, sweat just poured down his face. But aside from the heat, he loved it. He
was almost giddy about it. “Nobody knew who I was!” He was amazed at that. It was very therapeutic for him. He said, “I needed that. I just needed to get out of the house and go for a walk.”

Javon:
One night, we were driving home from the Strip, and there was this on-ramp for the freeway that we had to pass to get back to the house. We were stopped at a red light by this ramp, and right off the road there was a homeless man and woman. They were arguing with each other about something. The man was sitting and the woman was standing with a sign; it’s the kind of thing you see all the time out here, people with signs that say “Homeless, Please Help.” Vegas is a hard town. You get caught up in gambling and all that? It’ll ruin you.

Bill:
Mr. Jackson saw these people and said, “Why are these people out there?”

“Those are homeless people, sir.”

He was like, “Really? Wow.”

He told Javon to pull over. We pulled over to the curb and we just watched for a minute. Mr. Jackson saw all the other cars passing by, and he asked, “Why isn’t anybody helping them? Why isn’t anybody stopping?” Then he said to Javon, “Call the woman over to the car.”

Javon rolled down his window, waved her over. When she got to the car, Mr. Jackson rolled his window down just a little bit and said, “What’s your name?”

“Amanda,” she said.

They talked for a bit. He wanted to know her story. He asked her where she was from, where’s her family at. She said she used to be a dancer, a showgirl. Then I heard him reaching around in the backseat for something. I heard the sound of paper. He was pulling out money. He pulled out three one-hundred-dollar bills, gave them to her and said, “Here. Take this.”

She was floored. She was almost crying, saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Javon:
After he gave her the money, she backed up a few steps and I started to drive off. The guy that had been sitting near her got up, came over to her, and tried to snatch the money away. She pulled back, but he kept trying to grab it from her and they started fighting again. She started yelling, “No! This is mine!”

Mr. Jackson saw that and said, “No, no, no! Javon, stop the car. Pull back over.”

I pulled back over, he leaned back out of the window and called the man over this time, saying, “Don’t do that! Here, I’ve got something for you too.” He pulled out another three hundred dollars and gave it to the man. The lady started crying, like she’d been saved.

Bill:
He told them to use the money for food. “Get something nourishing,” he said. “Don’t get any drugs.”

“No, sir!” they said. “No, sir!” They were both gushing with thank-yous and God-bless-yous when all of a sudden the man stopped and looked in the car window and said, “Are you Michael Jackson?”

“No. No, I’m not.”

I turned to the backseat. “Are you ready to go, sir?”

“Yeah, I’m ready,” he said. And we pulled off. As we were driving, Mr. Jackson said, “Are there a lot of people like that in Vegas?”

“Yeah,” I said. “There are parts of Vegas where a lot of homeless people live.”

“Really? Can we go there?”

I hesitated a moment. “You want to go there tonight, sir? Tonight wouldn’t be a good time.”

“No, no,” he said. “We can go another day. I just want to see.”

The bad part of Vegas is on the north side, Main Street and Las Vegas Boulevard, over by Cashman Field. When he mentioned going there, I was hoping he’d forget about it. Sometimes when he made unusual requests, things I knew weren’t feasible or just weren’t a good idea, I’d wait a bit before following up, to see if he’d drop it. Sometimes he would. If he reminded me again, I knew he was very serious. This time, he remembered. A couple days later, he came to me and said, “When are we going to go to that side of town?”

“What side of town is that, sir?”

“Where the homeless people are.”

“We can go there today.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

So we took him to the other side of town, about twenty minutes from the house. We headed north up Main Street, and all of these people were out. You could hear in his voice that he was shocked that all of these people out here were homeless. He couldn’t believe it. “It’s just amazing,” he said. “This country is so rich and these people are poor and living on the street.”

He asked Javon to pull over, so we pulled over. I was a little antsy. I wasn’t cool pulling over in a nice car with all these people around. We sat there on the side of the road for a bit. Then Mr. Jackson said, “I want to give them something.”

I thought he meant he wanted to get out of the car. I said, “I don’t think it’d be a good idea to go out there, sir.”

He said, “No, no, no. I’ll pass it out of the window.”

He cracked the window and started waving people over. He had a fanny pack he was wearing. He opened it up and the whole thing was stuffed full of cash. They would come to the window and he would pass out a hundred-dollar bill through the crack in the window to each one. One thing I noticed was that he was trying to catch the attention of the women. He wanted to make sure they were the ones who got the money. He was like, “Come here. No, no, no. You. You come here.” A lot of men got money too, but
I could hear him singling the women out of the crowd, calling them forward. People started lining up outside his window, like it was an ATM.

Javon:
He gave away so much he ran out, and he got upset with himself. He was saying he should have brought more. We started to see another side of him, his compassion for others, and it was kind of amazing. There was no media out there, no cameras. There was only a crack in the window, so no one could tell it was him. It was just something that he wanted to do.

After that, we went and handed out food to the homeless a number of times. He’d say, “Me and the kids are not going to eat this. Let’s take this down and give it away.” One time, he wanted the kids to come with us and see it, so we brought them along.

Bill:
He read the Bible a lot. Oftentimes, if he answered the door for some reason, he would have a Bible in his hand and his reading glasses on. That was common. I remember he’d say things like “God bless you” to fans, but he always used “Jehovah” when talking to the kids, like, “Jehovah wouldn’t like that.” There were these merchandising people who used to call him all the time to put his name and his image on slot machines. He wouldn’t do it because of his religion. He’d say, “No, Jehovah wouldn’t like that.” But they’ve got Michael Jackson slot machines now. I see them all the time. Every hotel in Vegas has those same slot machines he said he did not want. Somebody signed off on it.

Javon:
His favorite thing to do was go to the movies. He loved taking the kids, especially to the big action blockbusters like
Spider-Man
or
Transformers
. There’s a big multiplex at the Palms, which is where we’d usually go. We’d call a day or so beforehand, talk to the manager, and they’d set aside a screen for a private viewing. The only time it was a problem was for
Spider-Man 3
. He wanted to go on
opening day. We called the manager, and she said she didn’t think they could close down a theater on short notice for opening day. Mr. Jackson said that was fine; he wanted to see it with a big crowd anyway. Sometimes he liked watching things with an audience. Whenever he wanted to do that, I’d go in and save the seats. Then we’d wait for the previews to start and the lights to go down, and Bill would radio me that he was walking in with Mr. Jackson and the kids. I’d light up my phone and let them know where I was at. They’d come and sit down, and me and Bill would walk out and stand by the door.