West Coast Diaries: Michael Jackson

We arrived in LA on Thursday, to be greeted at the airport by my friend, Ji. After giving me as big a hug as a tiny pregnant Korean lady can muster, she said: ‘So, while you were in the air Michael Jackson passed away.’ I looked at my brother, who by now had adopted his LA outfit of massive aviator shades and a straw hat: ‘No way!’ was all we could think of to say.

We both stood slightly dazed while she went to pick up the car. We’d been talking about Jacko on the flight, trying to remember where the Neverland ranch was. MJ was a hero to both of us growing up. As a five year old my biggest ambition was to become one of his backing dancers. Jacko is the reason that I love dancing. We had a cassette copy of Bad that we listened to repeatedly as kids, lunging wildly round our tiny sitting room in time with the music. There’s no better music to learn to dance to. Each song has its own internal drama; the tension builds slowly, so to dance to it you have to be able to move both slowly and quickly, and to react to sudden shifts in tempo. Then there’s the dramatic gestures we all picked up from watching the man on TV: the hip thrusts, the sudden head turns, the weird jerky chicken thing that really shouldn’t work but does. My brother won a dancing competition when he was about six for his ability to moonwalk and pull off other classic Jackson moves. We adored the man. My brother refused to read books when he was little, but he made an exception for MJ’s biography.

The whole of LA was abuzz with the news. People were talking about it on the street and on the buses, TV coverage was non-stop. On Friday morning we decided we had to go and see the crowds around his star on Hollywood Boulevard. It felt like fate to us, and we knew we’d regret it if we missed out on participating in this particular slice of history.

We arrived there at around midday. There were fewer people than I’d predicted – maybe three hundred, but with many more gathered nearby and on the other side of the street just watching the drama of all the news crews and the pilgrims. We joined a bunch of people waiting to get behind the crash barriers leading to the mini-shrine that had been placed around the star. While we were waiting news crews flocked around us, thrusting microphones at people to ask what MJ meant to them.

‘What did Michael mean to you?’

The thing that most struck me was that nobody (including me and my brother) was sad. There was a sense of excitement, and of a sort of respectfulness, but everyone was having fun, even the LAPD officers around us. When one of the officer’s horses had to pee, and the road was temporarily covered in a lake of horse urine, the crowd erupted in gales of laughter. This was a kind of celebrity sideshow, and certainly nothing like the mass outpouring of grief associated with Princess Diana. Gradually we were ushered behind the barrier and formed a line waiting to see the shrine.

On the way we trod over such luminaries as Jack Nicholson (it seems weird to tread on these stars, somehow – almost sacreligious). I was touched to see that Jacko’s star is almost next to Mickey Mouse’s. Somehow, those two belong together. The atmosphere in the line was cheerful. Some nice people offered to take a photo of the two of us; people chatted and admired the handprints in the concrete outside the Chinese theater. Of course, getting to the main attraction was a total anti-climax. We just took photos and shuffled along, conscious of the many cameras trained at us. But the shrine itself was nicely understated: some candles and flowers, a few drawings and stuffed toys, and a single silver-sequineed glove next to his name.

I think Michael Jackson the person ceased to be real to most of us many years ago. His bizarre behavior and the child abuse allegations (which, let’s face it, most of us believe had at least some foundation in reality) distanced him from his fans. In fact I wonder if I am the only person to feel a sense of relief that he has gone. This was not a happy soul, and how likely was it that he would have enjoyed a peaceful and rewarding old age? What we were left with was the music, which was so extraordinary that it transcended the collective repugnance we felt at his decline. In the crowd some girls were complaining that no one was playing his music as we waited. ‘We could sing,’ someone suggested. But no one was keen – it was Michael Jackson we wanted to hear.