Ace Hollywood and Michael Jackson
Ace left us on April 27, and I am still very sad. Three days ago, the gutter man came to clean out our roof gutters. In the fall, he pulls out the leaves; in the spring, it's the maple seeds.
"Where's your dog?" was his first question. I had forgotten that he and Ace had a Major Love Thang goin' on. Ace loved this man from the very first sniff, and the feeling was mutual. The gutter man knew last fall that Ace was carrying a fatal cancer, "but I was hoping to bring my kids over here to meet him." Yes. Ace was that sweet, that you'd want your kids to meet him no matter how weird it might seem.
Ace has a Hollywood star which I will show y'all sooner or later. Michael Jackson has two stars, one his own and one belonging to a radio host of the same name.
Jackson is only eight months older than I am, and we did some of our growing up only twenty miles apart. I lived in a white slum a bit east of the Indiana border. He started getting popular when I was in sixth grade. I can remember being jealous when my father watching the black-and-white audition tape, which was carried on our local news a couple of years after it was made, so maybe 1971 or so. "He's just like James Brown." Brief pause, the tape continues. "He's better than James Brown." Yes. He was.
Now that his trip is over, I confess to prurient curiosity about his autopsy results. I have long wondered if Jackson were a chemical or surgical castrato. I think so ill of his father, Joe Jackson, that I would put nothing past him to preserve his best money-maker. I had retreated from this notion when Jackson started having kids... but last night, it was revealed (to me, at least, maybe the whole world has known all along) that his children, all three, were the product of a particular sperm donor.
Oh.
As to his extensive course of self-mutilation, last night Deepak Chopra offered an explanation which made absolute sense to me: as he got older, he started seeing his father in his own face. I get that. Despite the protests of my animal-rights friends, I started coloring my hair in my late twenties, when it began turning dark, like my father's. I also used to wear very femmy rings and nail polish, because as I grew up, my hands started looking like his, and I couldn't stand it. (Now that I am so heavy, it's no longer an issue). If I had needed to do more than color my hair and wear nail polish to erase my father from my own physique, I would have done it.
Prior to hearing Chopra talk about this, I'd just assumed that the surgeries, etc., were part of reacting to a childhood of abuse, the way sexual assault survivors sometimes get into tattoos or other body mods: not just a reaction to feeling damaged, but a way of re-asserting your own control of your own body; of literally marking your territory. Sometimes the same thing with abused teens purposefully getting pregnant: my body, watch this.
I liked his music without ever being a fangirl, oddly, because I felt too close to him to be a fan. He was just a kid from twenty miles down the road. Never had a crush on him, never carried a lunchbox with his picture on it. But even so, I may be the only non-fan on the planet who still thinks he might truly have been innocent of child sexual assault. People don't talk about it much, but Gandhi did the same thing and I admit, I've always wondered what the hell that was about; it's creepy. But in Jackson's case, I still have that lingering suspicion about castration... which inclines me towards assuming that his innocence is a genuine possibility.
Demerol. I have had Demerol, and I purely love Demerol, so much so that I have told my physicians and surgeons to never give me any more. I've been addicted to morphine, but I dislike morphine so much that I don't fear re-addiction, even if at some point that becomes medically necessary. I'd be able to kick it again with no problem. Morphine is deeply unpleasant for me. But Demerol... anyway, I've never heard that Demerol could induce heart attacks, though, and I suspect we'll eventually find out that it did not.
Poor kid; rest in peace at last.
Late edit: Jesse Jackson just this moment (10:28 ET) told MSNBC, "We have lost our joy, but he has lost his pain." That sums it up nicely.