Tell me what you think about MJ and your memories... I am getting creeped out watching all the old footage, especially the ones of Diana calling Michael "sexy" while they are are both wearing those dark spangly shirts...
I wish he'd been happy. I find it hard to believe he was.
Peace,
F
Excerpt, Kiss the Sky, Atria Books, 2009 -- Written from the P.O.V. of the main character.
Drifted into a drowse and thought about the way music was my whole life.
My great grandfather sold Billie Holiday reefers, back when she was a bad little girl and he was a dirty old man. A withered up little yellow man. Always looking at the girls of school-age. A sailor, in and out of port. In town just long enough every time to get great-grandma pregnant. And wasn't it just like me to love Billie, all of her, even her vices.
Then there was my first musical love, Michael Jackson. I was six, and to my child's eyes he seemed just enough older to know a lot of things I wanted to learn. He was pure music, shimmering, shimmying, shaking, grooving, moving, liquid hipbones and fluid bell-bottomed pantlegs, denim, slouchy caps, a sexy choirboy backed up by his older brothers; plus television, dancing lions and tin-men, a too-old Diana as Dorothy. But wait, that last part was later.
Still, the Michael and The Wiz were always linked in my mind. When I was six, my Daddy and I went to see The Wiz, way before the movie with Michael and Diana, before the nose jobs and the skin lighteners and the hair straighteners and out-of-court settlements. Strange third-person memory: I see myself and my father walk towards the exit, along a half-lit aisle, with the play unfolding (bright reds and golds) behind us.
But: Michael. His was the music of longing, in a man-child's voice that a little girl could understand before she truly knew desire. I liked Michael the same time Daddy liked to play the Isley Brothers. I didn't understand the Isley's lyrics (thank God), but their guitar licks and keyboards made it hard for me not to dance; their whispers tickled my ears.
Older still: When my girl scout troop had a party I brought Stevie Wonder and my friend Ronnice brought Michael Jackson's Off the Wall, which was everything you needed to know about the difference between uncool and cool. Stevie was uplifting and parent-approved; the teenaged Michael was your best friend's older brother, a boy who you had a crush on so bad you thought you might melt every time you saw him. Ronnice was in fifth grade and I was in third, which might have been part of my problem, but not all of it. She was what my mother called "fast" -- loose with the boys, hard and unforgiving with the girls.
I loved Michael, don't get me wrong. How could I not? He was my first. But I mounted a defense of Stevie, which all the girls took as a weak-assed move.
When I was in eighth grade, Ronnice had an abortion. Like most of my fast girlfriends, she loved house music, the kind you heard in the clubs she'd sneak into. She was underaged but built like a brick shithouse and nobody checked her I.D. When she got into LL Cool J, I was loving Prince.
Later I worked my way through alternative rock, romantic R&B, gay disco, Public Enemy, Madonna and Grace Jones. Music ecstatic and anthemic, smoke drifting through laser lights, tranny boys in platform heels and lip liner, parties on the subway platform, lots of drugs but not down my throat or up my nose, the music simply lifting me, carrying me like the wind under the cape of a superhero or a pigeon caught in an updraft from a subway grate.
The music, just the music, used to be enough for me. Everything else came later.
I wanted to get back to those days again.