Age 13: The Michael Jackson Phase

When I was in Six and Seventh grade, which are universally recognized to be circles of hell worse than anything Dante could imagine, I was obsessed with Michael Jackson. Nowadays, people throw that word "obsessed" around a lot: "I'm, like, so OBSESSED with Wittgenstein!"--but this Michael Jackson thing was a true, possibly clinical obsession.

Nothing sexual here--at the time I was a budding (though still closeted) heterosexual, nursing crushes on 1) the cute and very popular blond girl in the class and 2) the cute and very popular curly redheaded girl in the class. My thing with Michael was more identity-worship: wanting to BE him. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense to me why a sensitive little fella like myself, adrift in the maelstrom of adolescence, would want to be somebody else. BUT WHY HIM?? Well, this was the Eighties--"Thriller" had come out recently and, to the rest of the world outside of my Six and Seventh grade classes, was one of the coolest albums ever. Michael was the man. I wanted me some of that cool. Thing was, all the people in my life who were in a position to acknowledge or deny my coolness--i.e. my schoolmates--thought Michael Jackson was gay, and that anyone who liked him (or worse, wanted to BE him) was gay by association. Being gay, in the worlds of most 13 year olds, even in these more enlightened times, is very much like being a leper was in the Bible. If 13 year olds had the power to create a "gay colony" and exile to it anyone suspected of this offense, they would definitely do so.

But for me, in my world, Michael Jackson was BAD. I videotaped his performance of "Billie Jean" on the Grammys and rewound it a thousand times to learn the moonwalk and that leg-shaking move (anybody know what that was called?). I dressed, for Halloween, in a costume my mother had made (Enabler!) of that sort of glittering international diplomat outfit he had, with the epaulets. I had the Thriller jacket, which I reluctantly purchased from the women's department of Hecht's because that's the only place you could get it, and lived in fear that somebody might one day notice that the zipper was on the wrong side.

I had two "the glove"s: one, from Spencer Gifts (anyone remember that place? I remember scratching my head as a, like, 10-year-old in front of the edible underwear and the 2-person "funderwear"), was covered in rhinestones, and was less ghetto (and therfore more highly prized) than the one onto which my mother had painstakingly sewn thousands of sequins.

In Michael Jackson drag I went one time to a roller rink with my friend Jason Smink. I had on the diplomat outfit, Porsche Carrera sunglasses (fake), and "the glove." As I skated around to "Eye of the Tiger," which always filled me with an undefined sense of optimism and power, I caught the eye of a young lass, who I remember as being somewhat rabbit-toothed (my aesthetic demands being all out of proportion to my reality, given that I was a complete and utter Geekazoid from the Planet Geekzor). She approached my friend, as was the custom in those days, and gave him her number to give to me. Of couse I never called her: rabbit-teeth notwithstanding, I was terrified of girls.

My Sixth grade year culminated in a thing called "Punk Party," a party I co-hosted in the gameroom of my house with a popular boy from our class (this alliance being a well-advised political move for me). We decorated the gameroom in crepe streamers, spelling out "Punk Party" on the wall, and people sprayed their hair with temporary green and blue dye from this place in Georgetown...something Lizard...repository of silver skull rings, dog-collars, and all things subversively cool. I dressed as Michael Jackson at the Grammys (bowler hat, sparkly sash, yellow pants, loafers). Everybody from the class was invited--this party was a very sweet attempt on the part of my mom (who wore a kind of Pat Benetar/Olivia Newton John getup to it, with a t-shirt that said "Get Physical") to popularize me with my peers.

For hours we danced to the soundtrack to "Footloose" (this being, after all, a Punk Party), ate chips and m&m's, and had a good time. I kissed the curly redheaded girl and we were "going out."

At a predetermined time, the party transitioned to the Family Room, where, in front the big screen tv (one of those early, three-color projection numbers) playing the video of Michael Jackson's Grammy performance of "Billie Jean," I dance-synched the same routine. It was received ok: the crowd was feeling indulgent, having gorged itself on Kenny Loggins and m&m's. They clapped, we took photos, and everybody went home flushed and happy. It was a kind of drunkenness--all that glitter and music and junk food and dancing and punked-out hair...

PART TWO--IT ALL COMES CRASHING DOWN

So the Fall saw my entrance to St. Albans School For Boys, a gothic, Dickensian, ivy-covered bastion of Anglophilic education in the shadow of the Washington Cathedral (the school was started for choir boys around the turn of the last century, after, I believe, they had stopped castrating them). At STA there was a pretty strict dress code: Jackets, ties and slacks were the norm, though turtlenecks and sweaters were also permissible. Any kinds of shoes were ok, which in Eighth grade resulted in my accompanying a navy-blue ensemble with multicolored, fluorescent Vans hightops. But we're getting ahead of ourselves...

Seventh Grade, Halloween. I dress as MJ--the Grammy outfit again, I think. At lunch the MC (a teacher) calls me up to the microphone to be introduced to the school and to receive the prize for "the costume we least want to see ever again." Everbody laughs and laughs. I slink, lizardlike, away.

This experience puts me in mind of the scene in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (one of the greatest films, EVER, as far as I'm concerned) where Sir Richard Burton gives a drunken monologue (did he ever give any other kind?) about when he was a kid, how he went out to a drinking hall with his classmates, taken there by the "gangster father" of one of them, and ordered "bergen"--and how, for the rest of the night, people were ordering "bergen" and laughing, and pointing at him and laughing again.

As a 13 year old kid, new to the school, I didn't have a sense of humor about my little affliction. I was a morbidly sensitive little dude, which is not a good thing to be at St. Albans (or any boy's school, I imagine), where things can get way Darwinian--very "humiliate-or-be-humiliated." I went home crying to my folks, who promptly called the teacher who had given me the prize and demanded a public retraction.

This was the worst thing imaginable. The next day, at lunch, I was called up to the mic again to receive a Michael Jackson puzzle and a public apology. If it were possible to evaporate at will, I would have become a faint gaseous trace and drifted up through the roof of the Refectory and into the Washington sky.

But negative publicity is still publicity, and all of this put me on the St. Albans map, laying the groundwork for a future coolness and sense of belonging that, at the time, I could only dimly imagine. People forgot about the incident, but they knew who I was. All of the Michael Jackson paraphenalia were consigned to a dresser drawer, the posters came down and were replaced by John Lennon, U2, the Who and the Cure. When the album "Bad" came out, I didn't even buy it. Over the next few years, I would do some more shape-shifting, becoming a "preppy," a "hippie" and a "goth," but never again would I stand before a poster, praying to wake up as somebody, anybody other than me.