It’s a Thursday–just a regular, run-of-the-mill Thursday–and I spent it as I do most days during this recessed disaster of an economy. I sit. Well, first I wake up and forget to eat breakfast. And then I sit. I check my email. Then Facebook. Then if I remember between the hours of 11 and 12, but not after 11:30, I watch The View and determine whether it’s worth watching and a lot of times it’s not. And then the TV turns off and sometimes at 12:30 I’ll remember to watch The Young and the Restless and Days of Our Lives at 1:00, but usually I forget and reload. Reload. Reload. The world wide web. And reload. Usually I forget Ellen at 3 and Oprah at 4 and since I’ve moved into this one-star palace, I’ve lost my cable and with that went Nancy Grace and CNN and Cold Case Files and now I don’t know all of the kids who have been murdered and if their dad had a bowel movement today and I don’t know about Amber Alerts and how many points the Dow has dropped or if Dick Cheney is still back from the dead.

But this is Thursday and it was a regular, run-of-the-mill Thursday. There was a smattering bit or two about Ed McMahon and how he will be remembered for his time with Johnny Carson, but I was asleep in bed during that time in his life because I was just a baby. Ed McMahon lived in my mind as the reigning champion of Publisher’s Clearing House. I always appreciated him sending those envelopes with sheets of likable stamps that I could sometimes sneak out of the trash when my mom ditched his offers month after month. If I’d checked the mailbox before her, I’d have a heads-up about those stamps and so I did. It was before I knew this was a world that gave you mail named junk and when I still believed Ed would show up at our house in a boxed limo and bring one of those great big checks that take three smiling people to carry. It was back in the day when I valued an extra-large check more than the zeros it represented.

Ed was old. He was permanently old in my mind and so when he died and was 86, I only thought that he was old and I remembered that he never came to our house and now he never would, but I don’t even live there anymore and he had a good run to have lived a whole 86 years.

And then Barbara Walters suddenly drew me back to the television because she got very quiet and very serious and she told me that Farrah Fawcett wasn’t dead but would be soon and that she only had minutes and she was right because it wasn’t long after that reload. Reload. Reload. She was gone. And the headlines had all of this time over her years long battle with cancer and could only come up with, Charlie Lost An Angel. I didn’t think she was old like I did with Ed, but I was prepared because of her NBC special that only aired a few weeks prior. I didn’t think she was old, but she’s my parents’ age and I was too small to watch Charlie’s Angels, so I only remember making fun of people who attempted having her hair. And one time I convinced my brother that our dad had been her boyfriend in 6th grade because they both lived in Oklahoma in their early years, but he believes almost anything, but it’s definitely harder to make up lies for him to believe after that one with Farrah.

Mostly though. Mostly I thought that she had a big life with big things and she was an icon and got to be famous and have a lot of money and it’s not that I thought she never had any problems–I mean, she got slapped with anal cancer–but I figured, aside from the cancer that killed her, she probably caught as many good breaks as anybody and yet, at the end of everything she was an angel of Charlie who had anal cancer. Her whole life was reduced to these very small things that were cursed with A+ clever headlines. It made me feel for a few moments how briefly any of us get to live. I mean, the world is supposedly billions of years old and then there are the other planets and demoted Pluto and millions of galaxies all with their own planets and stars and homemade bombs and nations who pledge allegiance and in the middle of all of this is a 62-year old woman and she died of cancer and what did it mean that she lived and got to be on television and the walls of 12-year old boys? She, maybe like all of us, shifted the plates and made the day called tomorrow happen a little differently and maybe she mattered and maybe she didn’t, but it made me think it even more than I already did–to mean everything and try everything and fail as miserably or live as strong and get things right and get things wrong and never be sure of much of anything.

We should all be playing.

I figured that was enough of a life lesson, so I went back to my regularly scheduled program of reload. Reload. Reload. And I updated my status about how stupid my roommate is and how bored I am and I contemplated taking a nap and I went over to CNN.com to see the latest on Iran and their Ayatollah and crazy dictator with too-close eyes and I saw Michael Jackson’s picture and expected another article about his upcoming tour or financial trouble or something jacked up like him holding his baby over a balcony, but instead it was Michael–newer, whiter Michael–and letters that spelled cardiac arrest.

I believe anyone can recover from anything–barring murder and old age and sudden death. It’s a part of me who believes anything can happen in real life and that Superman could have existed and that maybe he was just before his time.

Cardiac arrest is no big deal. They put some machines on you and beep beep beep your heart and watch you lay in your bed and in two days you go home. It’s Michael Jackson and he was 50 and he was burning hair in Pepsi and he was my third grade. He was my sixth grade. He was my college. And he was destruction never destroyed.

Michael was ghettoblasters on the playground in a new school in Oklahoma, half-way through the third grade, when I didn’t know anybody and the cool bully bitch called me over to her side and it was me and her and five other nine-year olds and I stood and stared at them as they snapped their fingers and bobbed their heads and it was Thriller. Thrill the night. I didn’t understand. Not even kind of. Just months earlier, at my old school, I had brought my Garfield to show-and-tell and nobody’s mom let them bring ghettoblasters to school. We didn’t even have ghettoblasters. They didn’t have ghettos. And neither did I. It was maybe my first inclination that I would never be cool.

We only listened to country music in our house and that was only while we were being transported in our sweet duotone Vanagon. It’s not that my parents disapproved of us listening to anything other than God’s music, it’s more that they kept us from knowing any such thing existed.

By day, Billie Jean was not my lover, but by night I was with Dolly and Kenny on Islands In The Stream. That is what we are. No one in between. How can we be wrong? I never stood a chance with the cool kids, but I did learn the whole Thriller album from our 30-minute-a-day recess. If I managed to escape it at school, there was always church where the kids would gather in the adjoining gym after services for more ghettoblasters and breakdancing and Michael Jackson. Not me though. I would just gather. And watch. And think how I could potentially learn to do the moonwalk, but never the helicopter.

Shortly after his Thriller fame came Eat It and USA for Africa and if I had We Are The World consecutively recorded on a 90-minute cassette, it still wouldn’t be enough–not even after a million, trillion years played straight.

Man in the Mirror. Dirty Diana. Smooth Criminal. Bad. And God love all of the little kids I babysat who owned Free Willy and didn’t mind me playing the bonus video, Will You Be There, again and again and all the while he was crumbling. I watched him and he crumbled. I watched him crumble.

His skin. His nose. His hair. Eyes. Lips. The umbrella. Blanket. Veils. The voice. And then there was a disconnect. I watched him say that the most loving thing you could do was share your bed with a child and the way that boy was holding his hand and the way they sat together. There was a disconnect. He had been dying and he died that day. Michael Jackson never lived past the killer whale.

As he fell apart, so did parts of me. Not for him. I just mean in my own life and my own world. I became conscious of myself and things inside of me and about me that weren’t likely to ever go away. The soundtrack of my childhood–we were simultaneous and uphill and I outlived Michael Jackson and he was 50 and I am 34 and I outlived Michael Jackson.

While they were dancing to Beat It outside the Apollo and Brooklyn held rooftop vigils and played his songs long into the night, I sang inside of my head because it’s dangerous for me to sing out loud and the words went bye bye miss american pie drove my chevy to the levy but the levy was dry. Buddy Holly and his 1959 plane crash that also took Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper was somebody else’s memory in somebody else’s place and time. But this day. This 25th day. Is the day my music died.

Tags: "death", "ed mcmahon", "farrah fawcett", "michael jackson", "minus five", "music", "new york", "sarah coffman", Brooklyn

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Thoughts on Life.
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