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°
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 . . . "
