The Idea of Michael Jackson’s D*ck

Bramble was talking about Michael Jackson again. “What I think he’s done is, he’s bleached his dick. He’s tried to turn his dick white.”
    “You can’t turn your dick white,” I said.
    Bramble poured himself another vodka. “Are you Michael Jackson?” he asked. “If the answer is: ‘No, I’m not Michael Jackson,’ then I don’t know why you’re talking about his dick.”
    “You’re talking about his dick,” I said.
    “Has he even got a dick?” said Delk.
    “Oh, he’s got a dick,” Bramble said. “He’s got a dick all right.”
    We were on Delk’s porch, watching the sun flame out over our neat little southern college town, where we’d come to cash in on the emerging field of cultural studies. None of us belonged here. That was totally obvious. But they’d let us in and our department chair, being a Southerner, was too polite to do the decent thing and rescind our funding. Every now and again, undergraduates would stumble past, hungry for some kind of dope. It was a Friday in spring. They were just waiting for sundown to jump on one another.
    “You sound pretty confident,” I said.
    “Photos,” Bramble said. “I’ve seen photos.”
    “I don’t want to hear about this,” I said.
    “Long and thin and pale,” Bramble said. “Think albino garter snake.”
    “So what,” Delk said. “Black dicks can sometimes look, like, lighter. Like the skin, it’s paler than the rest of them. Almost like pinkish brown.”
    “How about if we stop talking about Michael Jackson’s dick?” I said.
    Bramble leered. “Why? Does the idea of Michael Jackson’s dick threaten you? Some of that good old mandingo paranoia, Mikey?”
    Delk started to sing “Beat It” in a pinched falsetto.
    But it was no use trying to stop Bramble. He was like weather in that way: broad and incontrovertible.
    “Let me tell you boys a little story. When Jacko was about fifteen years old, he went over to Paris for a special appearance. This was after the Jackson Five had fizzled out, but before the big solo push. A fallow period, if you will. Anyway, he was over there, when is this, like late ’70s, for a benefit, a benefit for the child victims of land mines.”
    “Child victims,” Delk said. “Perfect.”
    Bramble waved his cigarette. “They wheeled all these mangled-up kids into this grand ballroom to watch Michael do a little lip-sync and dance thing, and these kids from, like, Kurdistan and Latvia, were bobbing their heads and blinking at all the flashbulbs from the photographers trying to capture the moment for PR purposes.

Suddenly, there’s this big commotion at the back of the room. Who should appear but Princess Diana? This is in the early days of the marriage, before the bulimia burned out her throat. She was a huge fan of Jacko. Documented. They arranged this backstage meeting, very hush-hush. Michael’s kind of shaken up, though, seeing all those kids. He starts to cry. Diana starts to cry. They start talking about all the pressure they have to deal with, you know, being famous, the fans, the press, and so forth. That’s what the super-famous talk about. It’s like their shared story, this aggrandized sense of grief no one understands. Lady Di is just smitten. She gets her security detail to smuggle her upstairs to where he’s staying and what happens is, they spend the night together. As in, together.”
    “That is such fucking bullshit,” Delk said.
    Bramble settled back in his chair and took a puff of his cigarette. It was lewd how much he enjoyed smoking. “Check the files.”
    Bramble did have files. He had read all the literature on Michael Jackson, the semiotics work out of Berkeley, the race-gender surveys undertaken at Michigan, every one of the sixty-seven unauthorized biographies. He had also amassed an archive of video footage. To Bramble, Michael Jackson marked the apotheosis of psychosexual/racial celebrity confusion. He had explained all of this in a lengthy paper (forthcoming in The International Journal on Pop Culture and Its Discontents) titled Pretty Young Thing: the Making of a Post-Modern Frankenstein.
    He had no compunction about lying when it came to Jackson either, because Jackson had, in his view, placed himself beyond traditional categories of truth. Whatever vestige of authentic personhood might have existed had long since been scraped away.
    “Michael Jackson is over,” Delk said. “Nobody gives a shit about him anymore. He was a big deal, like, twenty years ago. Thriller and all that. You know who cares about him now? The French. I don’t know anyone in the United States who gives a shit about him.”
    “Why is his trial front-page news?”
    Bramble had a point. All week long, the local paper had been running stories about Jackson’s lawsuit against his plastic surgeon. They’d run a photo on the front page showing Jackson swathed in bandages. He looked like a delicate mummy.
    “That’s just, like, the whole media-sell-shit mentality. They put him on TV because he’s a freak. There’s no deeper meaning,” Delk said. “Why do you assume there’s some deeper meaning to Michael Jackson?”
    I was afraid Delk might ask this. Bramble took a long, leisurely sip of his vodka. He drank the stuff from plastic bottles, which meant his breath often carried a hint of isopropyl. I knew this because I lived with him.
    “Michael is everything we could ever hope to learn about self-contempt. This is a black man with all the fame and money in the world, a tremendous talent who despises the conditions of his birthright. So he sets about trying to reverse all of them. Rather than adult women, he seeks out boys. Rather than accept his masculine Negroid features, he attempts to recreate himself as Elizabeth Taylor from her National Velvet days. That’s really what he’s trying to do, if you look at his face, his hair . . . “
    “His dick?” Delk said. “You’re saying Liz Taylor’s dick is all bleached?”
    “He’s even attempted to shave his own bones down. That’s why his face is collapsing now. The cartilage is starting to poke through. It’s a total genetic self-renunciation. When he went to Africa, he wore a mask the entire time. They brought oxygen over there for him, so he wouldn’t have to breathe the air. He was scared to breathe the air that other black people breathe.”
    Delk swigged at his vodka. “RuPaul should beat his ass. I’d pay good money to see that.”
    “What would be the point?” Bramble said. “Michael already hates himself more than anyone else could.”
    “Just tell me this,” Delk said. “Does he fuck those little boys or what?”
    “No no no,” Bramble said. “He’s scared to death of germs. Besides, sodomy isn’t his bag. Way too phallo-assertive. What he wants, actually, is to be welcomed by these little boys into their world. He’s revisiting the trauma of his own boyhood.”
    “What trauma?” Delk said. “He was a fucking rock star. Or whatever, before that, Motown.”
    “His dad beat him,” Bramble said. “His brothers despised him. His mother was in denial. No one ever made him feel loved as a child. He was just this little performing monkey. It was a kind of slavery. And all the desperation. Do you know where he grew up? Gary, Indiana. Have you guys ever been to Gary? It’s a graveyard.”
    “When were you in Gary?” I said.
    “I’ve driven through,” Bramble said. “A couple of times.”
    There was a nice little silence, which made me hopeful that we could stop talking about Michael Jackson. It was a downer topic, one that made me think of America as a terrible disease.

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Living in the South didn’t help. Race wasn’t something you discussed here, unless you were in a classroom, and every town was really two towns, the black part and the white part, and people might spend time in the other town (usually blacks who made the trip over for work) but aside from that, no one wanted to mess with the karma. There was too much history, the blood of a native war, and all these elaborate manners had sprung up to make sure the dead stayed buried.     “I’d fuck Janet,” Delk said finally.     “I’d fuck Tito,” I said. This was not true. I would not fuck Tito. But I was hoping to throw Bramble off the scent, to maybe move us into a joshing-around type scenario.     “What you have to realize about Michael is that he’s become dependent on his own mortification. This is what’s known as the Fame-Flagellation Nexus. Think of it as a more sophisticated version of the Negative Attention Syndrome. The subject attempts to use an external source of adulation to counteract a sense of worthlessness. This naturally causes an internal conflict, guilt over his success, invariably subconscious, which spurs a set of behaviors aimed at undercutting the adulation. Virtually everything Michael does is engineered to humiliate him. The sham marriages, the shitty records, the bizarre surgeries, the lawsuits . . . “     “I don’t think that monkey did much for him,” Delk said.     “Bubbles,” said Bramble. “He was a chimp.”     Bramble had devoted an entire section of his paper to Bubbles. It was called Bubbles: An Object Lesson in Totemic Identification.     “The point is, the tide of fame turns against him. He becomes the object of derision. But even this, you see, is preferable to his internal state, which is one of abnegation, of deadness. He begins to need the abuse in order to exist. Most celebrities suffer from the same affliction, though you’ll notice it’s more exaggerated among black men because they’re simultaneously loathed and fetishized by popular culture. Other examples would include Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson and Gary Coleman.”     I got up and went around back to take a piss on the ficus tree. This was something Delk encouraged. He was a meaty fellow with frat-boy tendencies. How he wound up in cultural studies was beyond us. My own theory was that an ex-girlfriend had slipped him some kind of mickey.     Bramble was still buzzing away. I heard the phrases “freak signifier” and “collateral sexualization.” I heard him lighting up another cigarette. I watched myself pissing on the ficus tree and wondered if Bramble would ever shut up. I liked the guy. He was relentless in a way I admired, and totally, annoyingly earnest. But there was something desperate in his tone. It made me suspect he hadn’t really decided who he was, that he hoped all his ideas might make him someone. I’m not saying I was so different; a bit less obvious, maybe.     I zipped up and turned around and was startled to find a little girl, maybe about five, watching me from the second-story window of the house behind Delk’s. She hadn’t seen anything in the way of flesh, I was pretty sure. But she knew I’d been taking a piss and that it was probably wrong for an adult to be pissing on a ficus tree.     She smiled like she was a little bit embarrassed, probably because she had been caught doing something naughty before, and she knew that it felt good as well as bad.     I waved at her. She lifted one hand from her thigh and gave me a little return wave. Then she did a little pirouette, some kind of ballet move which made her blond hair float through the air. She looked down to make sure I’d been watching.     I gave her the thumbs-up. She started to laugh and ran off. When I got back to the porch, Bramble was all alone.     “Where’s Delk?”     “He went inside to make a phone call or something.”     “You bored him away,” I said. “Seriously. You can’t just Michael Jackson people to death.”     “He was interested,” Bramble said. “He was taking an interest.”     “Not really,” I said.     Bramble waved his cigarette at me.     The sun was falling away, turning the high clouds pink and orange. It really was a nice city we lived in, very clean, with an excellent park system. You would have never known that people were dying of unhappiness, right there under the nose of God.     “We should get something to eat,” I said.     “Did I really bore him?” Bramble seemed to be considering this, turning the question this way and that in his long, yellowed fingers. “Do I bore you, Mikey?”     “It’s not a matter of boring,” I said. “But sometimes, I don’t know, I just wish you’d let old Jacko alone. He seems unhappy enough.”     I hadn’t meant to say this. I suppose a part of me was jealous of Bramble, of his ability to ignore obvious social cues, his assurance.     “I’m not trying to be a jerk. Geez, Mikey. You’re making me feel like a jerk.” Bramble polished off his vodka and stood up, a little uncertainly. For a sec, I thought he might start crying, that it would be one of those scenes.     “I just feel like we should be learning something about ourselves when we look at the world,” he said.     “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “Come on, Bram. You know you’re my homeslice.”     This was what we called one another. It was a way of reassuring ourselves that we weren’t alone, a kind of improvised brotherhood. Later, we’d head over to Sully’s and sit around the bar and try to figure out what it meant to be an adult, to love ourselves convincingly. It was a constant struggle. I held out my hand, and Bramble gave me the old soul clasp.     But there was something somber in the moment that we couldn’t undo. It might be said that Bramble had stumbled into his own Fame-Flagellation Nexus. Or maybe I had spoken a bit too much, turned the truth in a cruel direction. I wanted to apologize to Bramble, tell him I’d been out of line.     Before I could do that, though, we heard a wondrous noise, a wall of shimmery notes rising from Delk’s ancient stereo, floating out into the dusk. It was all there suddenly, in a way that seemed a small miracle of the heart: the syncopated three-beats, the bubbling bassline, the sunny guitars and then, just as suddenly, Michael Jackson’s tender alto rising up: “Oh baby, give me one more chance!”     Bramble closed his eyes and smiled. He began to move his hips without realizing it. Delk leapt out onto the porch, yowling the chorus at the sweet, terrified vegans across the street. I thought about the little girl I’d seen in the window, how she had offered up her performance to me. It was what children did, naturally — they drew love from the world. And they did it not because they were inherently good and pure, or any of that other Shirley Temple garbage. Instead, they knew how much the world could hurt them at any time, how quickly the fates could turn, and this made them desperate to charm.     It was the great and true tragedy of Michael Jackson that he’d felt this ability so purely once. His voice had enthralled the world, tamed the horrors he knew would find him. He kept trying to get back there, and he couldn’t, so he slowly destroyed himself instead. But for the rest of us, it was still there, what he’d done. His voice healed us a little. It was A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3. There was no way to resist the joy.  n° ©2003 Steve Almond and hooksexup.com