Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (22 page)

When it came time to take off, the kids were so excited they couldn’t get in that balloon fast enough. They ran over and jumped right in with big smiles. Me and Javon sort of shuffled and stood back, and Mr. Jackson said, “Aren’t you guys coming?”

I looked at Javon, like, I think Javon’s got this one, sir.

Javon said, “Nah, I’m good. I’m good.”

There was a bit of an awkward pause. Mr. Jackson said, “What, are you guys afraid?”

I wasn’t about to tell the man I was scared of riding in that damn balloon. I said, “Nah, we ain’t afraid. It’s just . . . you know—”

“It’s okay if you’re afraid. You can just say so.”

“Nah, nah. It’s not that. It’s just, you know, we just feel like—”

He said, “Okay. Why don’t you just stay down here and follow us in the truck? I think we’ll be fine.”

I said, “I think that’s a good idea, sir. We’ll keep an eye on you from down here.”

So we followed the balloon in the truck. They were pretty high up. It was a nice summer day, not much wind blowing. Still, I was glad I wasn’t up there.

When they finally landed, Mr. Jackson came over to me and said, “Bill, the guy who flew the balloon, I think he took a picture.”

Sometimes you’d think that he was being overly paranoid about that sort of thing—and sometimes he was—but just as often he’d be proven right. I went over to the guy and said, “Hey, I need to see your phone.” He had one of the new iPhones. I went through the photos and, sure enough, this guy had tried to snap a picture on the sly. All he got was the back of Blanket’s head, but it was the breach of privacy that mattered to Mr. Jackson. Even just relaxing and trying to have fun on vacation, he couldn’t trust anyone. That picture got erased.

Javon:
It was one thing to keep Michael Jackson hidden in Las Vegas. The town is practically built for it. Lots of high rollers with personal security, restaurants with private rooms that cater to A-list stars who want total secrecy. It was a very different challenge moving the man around suburban Virginia. He didn’t exactly blend. We didn’t blend, either.

Bill:
One day, he decided he wanted to go to Walmart to do some shopping. It was just me and him; Javon was off with the kids. We went in the store, he had the veil on, dressed in all black. He went in first and I was five feet behind him in plainclothes. There was a security guard at the entrance, an older guy. Mr. Jackson walked in with that veil on, and this guard looked at him as we went by. I heard him say, “Did you see that guy? He’s dressed like he’s gonna rob the place.”

We went inside. Mr. Jackson grabbed a cart and went strolling through the aisles. He was looking at stuff—clothes, DVDs—just shopping like a regular dude. We’d been in there for about twenty minutes when I heard a radio and looked over and saw a cop coming our way. This was soon after the magic-shop incident in Vegas, so I immediately thought to myself, Oh, shit. Here we go again.

The officer came over and approached Mr. Jackson and said something to him. People began to stop and stare. I went over to the cop and tried to intervene, giving him the usual spiel. I’m doing private security for a high-profile dignitary, etc. Same as before, the cop wanted to know who the guy was. I did not want a repeat of the magic store. I did not want to say it was Michael Jackson, but this guy was pressing me for a name, being real persistent. “Who is it?”

I made a snap decision. I said, “It’s Prince.”

“Who?”

“Prince.”

“The guy from
Purple Rain
?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why is he all covered up?”

“He’s trying to be incognito.”

“Oh. We thought he was here trying to rob the place.”

“No, sir. We’re just shopping.”

So the one cop told the other cop and he told the floor manager, and as word started to circulate, the crowd dispersed. If it was
Michael Jackson, it was a mob scene. If it was Prince, people didn’t seem to care. That’s just how it was.

When we got back into the car, Mr. Jackson said, “What happened back there?”

I said, “I told them you were Prince.”

“Prince?”

“Yeah.”

He just laughed and said, “No wonder they left us alone.”

Javon:
Once a week, the kids got to pick a special place to go, and one of their favorite places was Chuck E. Cheese’s. Since Middleburg was in the middle of nowhere, the nearest one was forty-five minutes away in Alexandria, south of D.C. We took the kids there maybe three times. Two of those times, Bill and Mr. Jackson just dropped the kids off with me and Ms. Grace. We stayed at the restaurant while they drove around and went shopping. But this one particular time, we took the kids to Chuck E. Cheese’s, and Mr. Jackson wanted to go in too. He wanted to watch them play. I escorted the kids in first. Mr. Jackson came in about ten minutes later with Bill.

The kids were playing, and Mr. Jackson was sitting in the corner with a hat and a black veil over his face. The kids knew that whenever their daddy was in a public place, they couldn’t run up to him or approach him; that was against the rules. Can you imagine having to learn to stay away from your own father when he’s sitting just across the room? That’s what they had to do. It was a precaution, like using their code names. But Paris? She loved her daddy. There was no telling her, “Don’t talk to your daddy.” She wasn’t having it. She was going up to the top of these slides, yelling, “Look, Daddy! Daddy! I’m going down the slide! Look!”

I’d just reminded her not to do that, but she was so excited she was up there doing it anyway. It wasn’t really a big deal. There were lots of fathers in there; she could have been yelling at anyone. But a few minutes later, she was playing with this other girl in that
big pool of plastic balls they have. All of a sudden, Paris ran over to her dad, gave him a big hug, and pulled his veil down and gave him a kiss on the cheek and then put the veil back and ran back to the play area.

The little girl Paris had been playing with watched this happen. She just stood there, in the middle of all these plastic balls, with this stunned look on her face, staring at this man in the veil. It was like she lost her breath for a minute, like she was too excited to speak. Then she finally got her breath and she pointed and screamed as loud as she could, “
Mommy! It’s Michael Jackson! It’s Michael Jackson, Mommy! Mommy! Michael Jackson!
”

Bill:
The whole room got quiet. All these heads turned to look in our direction. Mr. Jackson shot straight up and walked out the door. He didn’t run, just a fast-paced walk, but he was out of there in a hurry. I walked out right behind him. I gestured to Javon to stay with the little ones. When I got outside, Mr. Jackson had gone over to the truck, but he couldn’t open it, so he’d sort of crouched down between the cars. I ran over there, and he said, “Bill, open the door.”

I couldn’t open it, either. Javon had the keys. I was on the driver’s side and I saw his head going away from the car and heading toward the street. He ran across the street and right into a Staples. I was nervous, looking around, thinking people were going to start coming after him any minute. But the amazing thing was nobody followed us out.

Javon:
Inside the restaurant, people were looking around, and you could hear them talking. “Michael Jackson?” “Did she say Michael Jackson?” “No way. Couldn’t be.” It didn’t cause a scene because no one believed it, because who would believe that Michael Jackson was hanging out at a Chuck E. Cheese’s in Alexandria, Virginia, on a Tuesday night? This poor little girl, everyone thought she was making things up, but
she was dead sure she’d seen what she’d seen. She kept insisting on it to her mom. Finally, she walked over to Paris and said, “Is Michael Jackson your dad?”

Paris was like, “Yeah, I
wish
!”

She was pretty quick on her toes with that one.

Bill:
One afternoon, Mr. Jackson called me and said, “Paris wants to ask you something. Can you come to the house?”

I went over. Paris was sitting there with him, and he nudged her. “Go ahead, ask him.”

She said, “Prince has Kenya, but he never lets me play with him. So I’d really, really like it if you could find me a kitten.”

A kitten? I thought, Who buys a kitten when they’re traveling? But Paris would just look at you with those big green eyes, and you couldn’t tell her no. And I couldn’t just go buy one, either. Mr. Jackson said it was important to adopt, to help all the unwanted animals out there. So I went back to Javon and said, “Yo, we gotta find a kitten.”

We both got online and started searching. We found a pet store in Chantilly, this small town outside D.C.; it was about forty-five minutes away. There was a pet store there that did adoptions. I printed out a list of all the kittens they had, with color photographs of each one. Must have been close to a hundred. I brought it to Paris and said, “Go through this and see which one you like.” About an hour later, she called me back and told me she knew which one she wanted: a little golden-brown one with white stripes.

The next morning, I ran some errands, grabbed breakfast, got off to a bit of a late start. When I got to the pet store, they told me, “I’m sorry, sir. That kitten has already been adopted.” Someone had picked it out the day before and the website just hadn’t been updated.

Paris was already calling me, asking if I had the kitten yet,
saying, “Make sure you get lots of toys and lots of food!” She was so excited. Hearing the anticipation in her voice, how happy this was making her, I knew I could not go back there without that kitten. I looked at all the kittens to see if there were any that looked similar to the one she wanted. There weren’t. I said to the guy at the store, “Yo, listen. My daughter really, really wants this kitten. I need to know who got this kitten.”

He told me he wasn’t at liberty to divulge that information. I said, “Maybe you could call them, give them my number.” They said all they had was the person’s address. I begged them to give it to me, saying I wanted to go and offer this person more money than what they paid. Finally the guy gave me the address. I put it in the GPS, and it was a ways away, close to an hour. What the hell. I was on a mission. I got on the road and went to the person’s house.

Finally got there. It was an older man, a single dude. Strange. I explained the situation. He didn’t seem particularly attached to this one cat; he’d only had it for a day. I asked him, “What can we do for me to get this cat from you?”

He said, “Well, I guess you could just give me what I paid for it.”

“How much did you pay?”

“Twenty-five dollars.”

I gave that man three hundred dollars in cash. I used my own money, too. I got that cat, hopped in the truck, and started flying back to the Goodstone Inn. I was at least two hours out. On the way back, my phone started blowing up. Paris was calling me. “Are you close? Are you close? When are you going to be here?” She called me so much that I just stopped answering my phone. I got to the house and pulled up in front. She must have been looking out the window, because the second I pulled up, she ran out with this huge smile on her face and snatched that cat out of my hands and ran back into the house with it.

Then, as I was getting back in the truck, she ran back out of the house yelling, “Bill! Bill!” I stopped and she ran up to the window, climbed up on the doorstep, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and said, “Thank you for bringing me Katie.”

If that’s all it took to make her happy, it was worth it.

Javon:
The biggest surprise Mr. Jackson gave the kids was taking them to D.C. for three days to visit the Smithsonian and the National Zoo. We arranged with the museum and zoo officials to have guided tours in the morning, before they opened. We did the Air and Space museum, the Natural History museum, the Museum of the American Indian, and on the last day we went to the zoo.

Bill:
We were escorted through the zoo by security. One of the head zookeepers was guiding the tour. There was a D.C. city council member there too. This had all been arranged through Raymone, with her political connections.

They drove us all around the zoo, to the monkey house, the reptile house. The funny thing was that Mr. Jackson had owned and operated his own zoo. We’d be walking through the tiger exhibit and Mr. Jackson would be talking in depth with the zookeeper about conservation efforts for tigers in the wild, the best ways to handle them in captivity. At one point, the zookeeper asked if we wanted to go and see such-and-such animal, and Mr. Jackson said, “No, I don’t need to see that. I’ve got plenty of those.”

Half the time the zookeeper just looked confused, like, Why am I even here? Why don’t we just let him run his own tour?

Javon:
When we were at the hippopotamus exhibit, Bill was walking a few feet ahead with Mr. Jackson, Prince, and Paris. They’d all seen the hippopotamus and moved on. I was hanging back with Blanket. He was straggling a bit because he was just so amused by this hippopotamus. He thought it was the greatest thing. Prince already
had his dog, and Paris had just gotten her kitten, so Blanket thought he should get a pet too. He called out, “Daddy, I want one of those as my pet.”

The zookeeper and everybody, they all laughed. But I knew that little guy wasn’t joking. If they still lived at Neverland? I’m sure a hippopotamus wouldn’t have been entirely out of the question. With all the other crazy things we’d been asked to do, I half-expected Mr. Jackson to say, “Guys, I need you to find Blanket a hippo.” Instead, Mr. Jackson just humored him. He said, “We’ll have to see about that.”