Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (18 page)

Bill:
Any time we went to the movies, he insisted on bringing spray butter and hot sauce for the popcorn.
Had
to have them.
Would not
start the movie without them. Sometimes we’d get to the theater, and I’d be thinking that Javon had brought the spray butter and hot sauce, and Javon was thinking that I’d brought the spray butter and hot sauce. When we realized our mistake, one of us would have to run to the store to pick them up. Sometimes we’d have the managers hold the movie until we could get the spray butter and hot sauce safely delivered.

I don’t care what anybody says about Michael Jackson trying to act like or turn himself into a white man. Anybody who insists on taking his own spray butter and hot sauce to a movie theater? That man is black, ghetto, and hood.

Javon:
He had these particular fixations. Once he wanted something, he wanted it, period. There was no getting that thought out of his mind. He’d point to something and say, “I want that.” That meant, Make it happen. Didn’t matter what obstacles there were, how difficult it was to get. Just make it happen.

When
Spider-Man 3
was out, we were driving on Spring Mountain Road. We passed a Burger King and they had a promotion going on. They had these life-sized Spider-Man figurines
attached to the lampposts outside of the store. Mr. Jackson said, “Javon, you see that? I need one of those. Stop the car.”

I pulled the car over. Mr. Jackson said, “Do you think you could get up there and get that?”

This was in the middle of the day on a major street, in broad daylight. I said, “Sir, I don’t think that would be a smart idea.”

“I think you can do it,” he said. “I think you can.”

“Sir, I don’t think so.”

“You look like you don’t want to do it.”

“I kinda really don’t, sir.”

“Well, do you think you could come back and get it?”

“I can try. But I still don’t think it would be a good idea.”

But he wanted that Spider-Man figurine. There was nothing I could tell him. I tried to go back at night and get it. I was up there, trying to jimmy it down with this little knife, cut the strings from the pole, but it was way too high. I would have needed an eight-foot ladder. It was crazy. I went home and told him it was a no go. He was really disappointed. He said, “Can you do some research to see where I can buy one?” We did. We couldn’t find it.

Bill:
He wasn’t used to being told no. This one time, his attorney called me up and said, “Bill, Mr. Jackson is upset because he said that you yelled at him.”

That was another thing about him. He didn’t deal well with confrontation. He’d never tell you directly that you’d upset him. You’d just get a call. I know, because I made a lot of those calls myself, telling people, “Mr. Jackson didn’t like when you did such and such.” So I got this call from his attorney saying I’d yelled at him. And maybe I had, but it was only because he’d asked for something that was impossible. There were times Javon was off handling something, and Mr. Jackson wanted to go somewhere with just me, him, and three kids, with no pre-detail. I didn’t feel comfortable with that. I didn’t feel it was safe. So I told him no. We
told him no a few times. Sometimes he respected us for telling him no. Sometimes he really didn’t like it.

I’m sure at one time, at the height of his fame, he’d snap his fingers and things would magically happen for him. And he honestly felt that the world just operated that way. He’d go into a store, pull a piece of candy off the shelf, open it up, throw the wrapper down, and eat it. Like, don’t even worry about it. He also had a thing for umbrellas. We went to a store once, we were in a Staples, and he went by this rack of umbrellas, pulled one out, took the tag off, popped the thing open. We walked around the store like that. And he wasn’t stealing. He’d grab the candy, pop the umbrella, and say something like, “Make sure I pay for this.”

Javon:
There was a helicopter flight simulator at FAO Schwarz. Blanket loved to ride in it. We were shopping one day, and Mr. Jackson said, “I want that. Find out how much that is.” Me and Bill were like, what? This thing was the size of an actual helicopter cockpit. I don’t think it was even for sale. It was just a ride they had for kids to play with in the store. We asked the manager, who said it cost something like $75,000. But this thing was so big, you couldn’t even get it inside a house. Fortunately he kind of dropped it after a few days. We just got used to those kinds of requests.

Bill:
The thing he wanted most was the thing he couldn’t have. There was a house in Vegas that he’d wanted for years, going back long before we worked for him. It was this sprawling estate, right off Durango near the Spanish Trail Country Club, this massive place owned by some Middle Eastern prince who’d built it but never actually lived in it. It was the largest estate, I believe, in all of Las Vegas. Mr. Jackson always wanted to go and visit that house. He was constantly talking to realtors about buying it.

We set up a number of appointments to go see it. The caretaker for the property would meet us at the front gate and let us in.
The first time I was in that house, I walked around with my jaw on the floor. Indoor pool. Walls painted in gold leaf. A kitchen like you’d find in a hotel. It was amazing. Mr. Jackson and the kids went around the grounds like they had been there before, almost like they already owned the place. The kids would run around and say, “This is my room! This is my room!” Mr. Jackson would point and say, “We’ll need more trees over there. We’re going to need guard dogs.”

He showed us the guesthouses on the property. He showed us this other building where he said we were going to stay; that was going to be the security center, he said. It was a hell of a lot nicer than the trailer we had at Monte Cristo. He said he was going to buy a fleet of mini golf carts and have a garage for them. If you lived there, you’d need a golf cart just to get around the place. It was that big. He wanted a property so huge that he could go outside and feel like he was free. He could go and climb a tree, do whatever. He said he was going to buy it and call it Wonderland.

Javon:
We found out this place was on the market for something crazy, like $55 million. Part of us was thinking, How can he possibly afford this? How? But at the same time, he was so convincing in the way he talked about it. He talked about the house like it was already his, like the deal to buy it was basically finished, and there were a couple of formalities holding things up and that was the only reason he didn’t live there already. If we were going to the movies or the bookstore, he’d want to drive by it just to take a look. He’d say, “Let’s drive by my house.”

Bill:
He’d visit nearly every chance he got. Sometimes it was once a week, usually on Sunday. This one time, we couldn’t reach anybody to make an appointment. We pulled up out front, and there was a chain on the gate. We sat there almost thirty minutes trying to reach somebody to let us in. Finally Mr. Jackson said, “I wish we could just get in there somehow.”

I looked at Javon, and Javon looked at me. We both knew what he was asking us to do. Back of my mind, I wanted to say to the guy, “Don’t you think you’ve got enough lawsuits against you without adding a charge for breaking and entering?” And me, I wasn’t keen on going to jail. But Michael Jackson wants what Michael Jackson wants. He just sort of sat there with this sense of expectation.

Javon:
We had a toolbox in the back with a pair of bolt cutters in it. I didn’t want to volunteer that I could break into someone’s house for him. But he stayed on it. He was like, “Don’t you guys have something to get that chain off the fence?”

I said, “We do, sir. But I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

He said, “It’s no problem, Javon. It’s going to be my house. The realtor knows. It’s okay, I’m telling you.”

And he wore us down. He was that convincing. He
believed
that this house was his, so much so that he made
you
believe it was his and it was okay for him to do what he wanted with it. I got the bolt cutters and got out. This was right off a busy street, broad daylight, cars going by. The whole time Mr. Jackson was giddy. It was like this little adventure for him. Not me. I was too busy looking around for the police and thinking, How the hell we gonna explain this shit? I popped the lock and got the gate open and we went onto the property. The door to the house was unlocked, and they all went in and walked around and ran through the kitchens and the bedrooms like they always did.

Bill:
Michael Jackson’s reality was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. That’s what made this job so different. I always considered Mr. Jackson to be different. Never weird, just different. Every day with him was a different direction of thinking. Every day was different from the day before. There was always something new you’d find out, whether it was a request, something he would say. I didn’t
understand a lot of the things he did, a lot of the choices he made, but I also could never begin to understand the life he’d lived, which had led him to be that way. That’s what made it so impossible to judge a lot of his actions, one way or another.

There was this one time we went to a magic shop. He was a big magic buff. We went and saw nearly every magician who played on the Strip. He had a bunch of those take-home magic kits, too, for doing tricks with coins and cards and stuff. Around May or June maybe, he wanted to go to the magic shop at the New York–New York casino. So we started planning that detail.

The morning we were supposed to go, he called down and asked me to go pick up some gauze. I asked him how much. He said, “Get as much as you can.” I was worried that somebody was hurt. I went out, picked up a couple of bags of medical gauze from the drugstore, and I brought it to him. About half an hour later, he called down again and said, “Bill, I’m ready.”

Javon got the cars ready to roll. I was out in the driveway, waiting for Mr. Jackson to come around the corner. He came around, and when I saw him, he had on a green coat with a hoodie underneath. But his hands were all wrapped up with gauze. His entire head was wrapped in the stuff too, with little slits for his eyes. He was dressed like a burn victim or something. He looked like the Mummy. At that point, I thought I’d seen everything with Michael Jackson, but this floored me. I called Javon on the two-way radio. I was whispering into the microphone, “Yo, Javon. You ain’t gonna believe what the boss has on.”

Javon:
Bill was trying to call me, but my radio was off. I was in the security trailer, still getting ready to go. So when I stepped outside, I had no idea what was going on. I walked out and I saw what looked like this weird guy, all bandaged up and disfigured, wandering around the property. This alarm went off in my head. I thought, Intruder! and I ran. I booked it across that driveway and I grabbed
this guy and I slammed him against the car, yelling, “
Who are you? What are you doing here?
”

Then Bill started yelling, “Javon, no! Javon! That’s the boss! That’s the boss!”

I realized who it was, and I backed off and I panicked. I mean, I’d shoved him
hard
, and he was so skinny and fragile. I was scared I’d broken his arm or something. I started gushing, “I’m so sorry, sir. I didn’t recognize you at all. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. I’m so sorry.”

Bill:
Javon probably apologized about a thousand times, but Mr. Jackson just started cracking up. He thought it was hilarious. I thought for sure he’d be livid; for a minute, I thought that this was going to be the last day we ever worked for the man. But Mr. Jackson thought it was great, that his disguise had actually fooled someone. He just climbed in the car, laughing and saying, “Did you guys really not know who I was?”

Javon:
We got in the car and drove out to the casino, like it was any old regular trip, with him dressed up in this mummy costume in the back. We took the back entrance into the casino, but the magic store was still a few hundred feet from where we entered, and the place was packed with people. Soon as we walked in, they started turning and noticing me and Bill wearing these black suits, following this guy who’s dressed like a mummy. You could hear the whispers, people going, “Who’s that? What’s going on?”

It was obviously drawing more attention than it was avoiding. If you looked at him even for a minute it wasn’t hard to figure out who he was. He’d gone to all this trouble, wrapping up his face and his hands, but he was wearing the white socks and the hiked-up pants with the slip-on loafers. That’s his signature look. Everybody knows that. Plus he just had a way about him—the way he moved, the way he walked, the way he’d pick something up off a
shelf—that was unmistakably Michael Jackson. Everyone on the planet knows how Michael Jackson moves.

Bill:
At one point, as we were walking through the casino, this lady walked up to him, middle-aged woman. She walked right up to him and stood next to him in this mummy getup. Then she sort of gave him this look and said, “I know who you are.”

Mr. Jackson said, “Hmmm?” He did it in his high-pitched tone, acting like he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Hmmm?”

She said, “I know who you are. You’re not fooling anyone.”

Then she just walked off and let him be.

We finally made it to the magic store, and Mr. Jackson was browsing. The store manager walked up to him two or three times and asked him if he could help him with anything, and he’d just shake his head no. Didn’t really say anything. They had a lot of these kits and magic tricks. Mr. Jackson was picking things up, looking at them, playing with them, putting them back down. I was watching the store manager’s eyes, and I knew exactly what I would have been thinking if it had been my store. I watched this guy pick up the phone, quietly say something, and then hang up real quick. About five minutes later, two police officers walked in and they went over to the manager. They talked for a minute and then he pointed at Mr. Jackson. I was just shaking my head, thinking, No, no, no. Please no. This isn’t happening.