The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  He had Attention Deficit Disorder and the doctors put him on Ritalin. ‘I was always puking in the afternoon,’ he said. ‘I was like a zombie, but that stuff works in some way. I could rush through my lessons no problem but by 4.30 in the afternoon I’d be so angry. I’ve always been angry but that was too much even for me.’ Sam’s grandmother, who tried to look after him, turned to alcohol just as his mother had, and she spent a lot of his childhood in rehab. As a way of avoiding reform school, Sam went as a teenager to a place called Camp Ek-Su-Mee near Candor in North Carolina. It gave him a way of transcending danger and fear. ‘You had daily chores,’ he said. ‘Latrines. Pow-wow. Making kindling wood for the fire. All that. I cried like a bitch when I had to leave that place. They were like family – you woke up with them every day. I loved it there. I used to climb trees just to breathe, man. You could see for miles up there. The hills and everything.’

  Sam said he’s always wanted a bigger purpose. ‘I also wanted a true friend,’ he said. He had two friends when he was young, Algernon and Moo-Moo, two black kids who died after being shot in separate incidents, but he always felt Cherry Hospital ruined his chances because people thought he was retarded. ‘Everybody always told me I’d be in prison by the time I was twenty-one. Well, I’ve proved them wrong, haven’t I?’ Sam has made his work and his children and his truck the centre of his bid for renewal. And he always wants to make good the past. ‘One day I was talking with my father,’ he said. ‘We were talking about education and stuff, why I’d been passed over so much and had failed so badly. He told me that the whole time I was being sent off to the mental place, they were saying: “The son will be fine, save the mother.”’

  Sam’s story, he indicated, even asleep with the walkie-talkie in his hand, is the story of how a person might overturn anger with usefulness, if not goodness. He isn’t sure that this will work but he hopes so. ‘I’ve always had this feeling,’ he said, ‘that there was something for me to do that was important and the whole world would know about it. I suppose this whole trip has been about that feeling.’

  At the Orange Grove Elementary School a gymnasium was piled halfway up the bleachers with donated clothes. Some of them had tags indicating they had come from Utah, from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and others were from people in Canada, Mexico or New York. Sam and Terry stood in the middle of the gym trying to separate the great heap into women’s, men’s, boys’, girls’ and babies’. Terry found A Bible Promise Book in a box of tangled T-shirts. He opened the book at random and saw a quote from Jeremiah. ‘I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in the land with all my heart and soul.’ Many of the T-shirts in the box had Coca-Cola logos on the front or American flags or Disney characters. A man walked past who had lost his house in Biloxi. His name was Leroy. His girlfriend and his mother had disappeared in the flood. ‘The walls of the house just opened up like a zipper,’ he said. ‘The tide dragged me out and then threw me back in again, just sucking me out with all the furniture and then back again and eventually I held on to a tree. Held on to that tree for fourteen hours, just waiting for the storm to pass and someone to come get me.’ He looked down at the pile of skirts and bras and women’s jeans. His arms were badly burned where he’d hugged the tree.

  A woman in her fifties came in and lifted some clothes out of the heap. Her name was Charlene. ‘All my memories floated out on that filthy water the day of the hurricane,’ she said. ‘Everything. I’m just gonna make a little pile here of clothes to take away.’ A Red Cross co-ordinator asked the boys if they’d load up their truck and take emergency supplies to some of the outlying towns, Long Beach and Pass Christian, that had been badly hit and were not getting enough help.

  ‘Let’s get to it!’ Sam said. ‘They’re desperate for food out there.’

  They loaded up the truck with water, pasta sauce, baby food, assorted tins and military MREs – meals ready to eat. Long Beach was weirdly quiet, except for the sound of gas-fuelled generators. We stopped at the Conoco gas station and the woman who ran it clapped her hands and got her husband to help the boys unload. No sooner was the food on the ground than people were moving in to take it to their cars. ‘This is great,’ said the woman. Sam was like a field commander by this point: he found out what else they needed and arranged with the woman to bring further supplies, while calling Yolande in North Carolina to tell her what was happening.

  ‘He’s like a goddamn reporter,’ said Terry.

  Many of the doors in Pass Christian were daubed with orange paint. A terrible, plague-like atmosphere existed among the shattered houses. It didn’t seem as if the hurricane had come in from the Gulf at all but had risen, instead, from the centre of the earth. Houses had simply been split down the middle or had exploded in a thousand flaws. Sam drove the truck to a drop-off point in the worst area and then felt excited. It was part of their camaraderie: whenever Sam was feeling pleased with himself he’d immediately start feeding Terry’s appetite for sexual repartee and girl-talk. A young woman and her boyfriend were holding hands under a battered bridge. Sam stopped the truck to ask if they were OK and then turned to Terry as he drove away. They did it in the style of an elaborate hip-hop-style joke.

  ‘I’d rape the fuck out of that pussy. You?’

  ‘All the way,’ said Terry.

  ‘We could mangle the boyfriend fucker,’ said Sam. ‘I’d hold her down for you. Would you hold her down for me?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Terry.

  ‘You wouldn’t hold her down for me?’

  ‘Nope. I don’t do that shit.’

  ‘Well, fuck you,’ said Sam. ‘There’s been a lot of fuckin’ rapin’ down here with this disaster shit.’

  A woman called Audrey asked the boys if they’d put some of the supplies into the trunk of her car. She was seventy-three years old, wearing a polka-dot shirt and flowery shorts and carrying a bottle of water. She had a tumour on her neck. ‘I have terminal cancer,’ she said. ‘And my husband here, Mickey, he is on dialysis. We’re going to New Jersey so’s he can get his treatment.’ Audrey began to cry when someone brought up the subject of New Orleans. ‘I come from there,’ she said. ‘It’s too terrible. I think people should just get out of there and never go back. It can never be the old way again.’

  That night was Sam and Terry’s last night in Mississippi. They had borrowed fold-down beds from the Red Cross and had set them up beside those of the refugees in the school library at Orange Grove. A Hispanic man had lost his identification and was worried about being able to get the $2,000 relief package that FEMA was offering to hurricane victims. He sat on the edge of his bed in the library with a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on his lap. ‘I found this on the shelf,’ he said. The front of the book had a page with children’s names written out beside the date of borrowing. The man’s name was Carlos A. Garcia and he was thirty-three years old. ‘That Sunday morning,’ he said, ‘it started raining and there was a little wind. I lived in the apartment block at 601 Joseph Fine in Pass Christian. The block had a lot of Hispanic people living there. Not everybody speaks English. The storm got up and the trees were just breaking like crackers. The trees were bent over like people praying. The cars flew past the window, man, and then the stairs of the apartment got ripped off. We ended up on the roof, we put the old people up first. The water got so high that people were just swept off the roof and some of them jumped in. Twenty-four people from the apartment are lost and I just know they died.’

  The shelter at Orange Grove School had a Stars and Stripes and a Confederate flag outside, rippling in the breeze. The night was ripe with the sound of crickets and some old men sat smoking and tapping ash into a bare tin can. The red sky had turned dark and the men were worrying about a new hurricane that was said to be gathering force outside Florida. A weeping woman came wandering across the car park and stopped a state trooper. Her child was clinging to the backs of her legs and seemed frightened. ‘We’re here in a shelter and h
e’s drunk. He’s over in that truck drinking beer and he’s drunk.’ She asked the officer to give her husband a breathalyser test but he demurred. The husband walked over and the woman pulled at her hair and shouted past him into the school windows: ‘If you can drink when we’re homeless! If you can do that! What’s the use?’

  One of the old men tapped his ash several times and stared through the smoke at the other men. ‘Everybody’s got problems,’ he said.

  Sam and Terry were bonding with the local boys. ‘We thought we could ride it out,’ said George McCraw. ‘We ended up running to the Gates Avenue Baptist Church two miles from the beach. Man, the roof was caving in and the children were screaming. The wind was poppin’ so bad and it was like rotor blades going over there. The steeple was coming off the church and the light poles were scattered across the road. Sparks flyin’ everywhere. You could feel the force of the hurricane move you, man. It was just like someone had dropped a bomb. You’d just never think water could do that damage. It was bad, man. We had just got on our feet down there. We found this little place and a good job and we had a car. We weren’t insured, though. Everything’s gone. It’s just toothpicks. But the Good Lord was with us the whole time. We looked hell straight in the eye. That’s what we did. We looked at hell.’

  George’s younger brother wondered if there was any liquor to be had in Gulfport that night. ‘Not with the curfew,’ Sam said.

  ‘There’s a garage up by the freeway,’ George said.

  Sam and Terry were told to load up as much of the supplies as they cared to take back to North Carolina. ‘You guys have earned it,’ said the Red Cross co-ordinator, shaking their hands. ‘I wanna thank you guys. You guys are patriots.’

  They loaded up the truck and looked over at the homeless young guys pushing and joking under the white light above Orange Grove. ‘That bitch, woooo,’ said George’s younger brother. ‘She comes out here, eyes poppin’ like a frog.’

  ‘I’d bend her over and fuck her like a dog,’ George said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Sam said. ‘I hear you.’

  Terry disappeared into the library to find a book and lie down with it. ‘Some drivin’ to be done tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I hope we can stop off in Atlanta. I wanna go and speak to that son of mine.’

  ‘He’s just an old dog lookin’ for a bone,’ said Sam. When most people had gone to bed, he walked across the car park and lingered there with a cigarette. He’d given his mobile phone to people who needed to make calls and he stood there thinking about friendship and looking into the trees. Sam looked to the very tops of the trees and then turned back to the school. There was laughter inside. ‘I’m going to miss you guys,’ he said.

  The Faces of Michael Jackson

  JULY 2006

  Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah. Jackson is said to have become a Muslim (which is sure to please his critics on Good Morning America), but evidence would suggest he has yet to get the hang of Islamic custom. Not long after arriving in the famously tolerant state, he caused uproar when he entered the ladies’ loos at the Ibn Battutah Mall dressed in female headgear and positioned himself at the mirror to put on his make-up.

  Jackson’s new friend has a bit of cash, and the pair have set up a record label called Two Seas Records. Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad al-Khalifa is also the governor of Bahrain’s Southern Region, but that hasn’t prevented him finding time to write a song with Jackson’s brother Jermaine, ‘a passion-filled song that calls for world peace and global solidarity in the face of wars and disasters’. According to local correspondents, the record already has a title, ‘He Who Makes the Sky Grey’, but no release date is in sight. The king’s son has high hopes for the recording. He recently called a press conference in order to claim that the project ‘intends to bridge the gap between East and West’. Meanwhile, Jackson is in the habit of smiling widely beside his new friend. Things are going well in Bahrain. According to the Militant Islam Monitor, he is planning to build a new mosque in Manama.

  Some insight into Jackson’s life in the Middle East was offered recently by a young man who goes by the name DJ Whoo Kid, has a radio show on the New York station Hot 97 and produces work with gangsta-rap outfits with names like G-Unit and Lil Scrappy. According to MTV News, ‘Whoo Kid says he originally connected with Bahrain’s royal family when he was recommended to DJ their parties by mutual contacts, including the Prince of Monaco and Seif Gaddafi, son of Libyan dictator Moammar (“They’re huge G-Unit fans,” the DJ said).’ The last time Whoo Kid turned up in Bahrain he found Jackson drinking lemonade by some profoundly extravagant swimming-pool. They went to supper with the sheikh that night and DJ Whoo Kid decided to give the Gloved One, the Baby Dangler, or the Prince of Pop, as he’s still sometimes known, some wise advice on the fashion front. ‘You can’t talk to Mike all fluffy like everyone does,’ he told a reporter. ‘I told him he needs to cut his hair, get some million-dollar earrings, get a million-dollar watch and take all them spaceship clothes off. He said: “I have to change my whole outlook.”’

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, things are getting a bit wild with Michael Jackson’s finances. The star was about to be made bankrupt over a $240 million debt to the Bank of America – he was also being sued by ninety of Neverland Ranch’s employees, who hadn’t been paid for some time – when the bank sold the debts to the Fortress Investment Group, which has issued Jackson with a $270 million loan, saving him from bankruptcy but costing him part of his share in his greatest asset, a music catalogue which gives him rights to 4,000 classic songs, including 200 by the Beatles. Jackson bought the catalogue against stiff competition, including that of Paul McCartney, in 1985, and it is said to be worth a fortune, though perhaps it’s worth more than money to Jackson, who proved by purchasing it that he was bigger than the Beatles, who were once said to be bigger than Jesus.

  What explains Jackson’s journey from cute little black boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us laugh, but he might also frighten us into recognising the excesses we demand of those we choose to entertain us. For my money he also constitutes a mind-boggling and vaguely uplifting example of human instability in pursuit of perfection. In a sense he is all of the show-business spectacles we have ever known rolled into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet?

  Jackson’s mother, Katherine, a Jehovah’s Witness, has said that Michael never quite seemed like a child, that even in his nappies he ‘felt’ old. At little over a year and a half he would stand with his bottle and dance to the rhythm of the washing machine. Joseph, his father, was angry and ambitious, an excellent if often sorry combination in the parent of a child who wants to be successful in show business. Everything that is bad for a child might be good for a performer – including, I suspect, being locked in a cupboard by one’s father – and the horrors of his childhood very soon became part and parcel of Jackson’s act. In many ways the early career of the Jacksons is a classic American show-business story – the Gumm sisters with spandex trousers – except that the boys were black and suburban and they became unprecedentedly popular in white America.

  Only in the early 1980s, after Jackson went solo, did he go from being a musical genius to being a genius at selfhood. He remade his nose, he started getting interested in robots and toys, he began to wear make-up every day, and he began to fashion himself as an only child and a lost boy. He began, in other wo
rds, to disappear into some region of total ambiguity. In his biography of the star, J. Randy Taraborrelli describes going to interview Jackson at his California home in 1981. Jackson’s sister Janet was there and Jackson insisted that the journalist ask her his questions, then she would ask Michael, who would tell her the answer and she could then tell Taraborrelli. Here’s part of the exchange:

  ‘Let’s start with the new album, Triumph. How do you feel about it?’

  Michael pinned me with his dark eyes and nodded towards his sister. I redirected my question. ‘Janet, would you please ask him how feels about the album.’

  Janet turned to Michael. ‘He wants to know how you feel about the album,’ she said.

  ‘Tell him I’m very happy with it,’ Michael said, his tone relaxed. ‘Working with my brothers again was an incredible experience for me. It was,’ he stopped, searching for the word, ‘magical,’ he concluded.

  Janet nodded her head and turned to me. ‘He told me to tell you that he’s very happy with the album,’ she repeated. ‘And that working with his brothers was an incredible experience for him.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You forgot the part about it being magical,’ Michael said to her, seeming peeved at her for not doing her job properly.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Janet looked at me with apologetic brown eyes. ‘He said it was magical.’

  ‘Magical?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Magical.’

  Jackson has what might be called a supernatural relation to his own personality, a position which, far from holding him back in the real world, led in the months after this interview to the making of his album Thriller, which became the biggest-selling album of all time (fifty million sales, plus seven Top Ten singles). That level of success seems both to have enlarged his sense of messianic purpose and deepened the role of fantasy in his life. He had more and more operations on his face, he went to Disneyland every chance he got, he starred in a remake of The Wizard of Oz, he befriended a monkey called Bubbles, he pretended to sleep in an incubator each night, his skin got whiter and whiter, he became a recluse, and he invited children to stay at his ranch.