Pulphead: Essays

by Sullivan, John Jeremiah

  ME: Have they ever had a tranny on the show?

  CORAL: Not that we know of. But maybe …

  MELISSA: Maybe Julie?

  CORAL: I saw her balls! I saw them!

  MIZ: But the producers want more … people that people can relate to.

  CORAL: Dude, there’s some trannies that watch The Real World!

  ME: Coral, the whole country watches The Real World.

  CORAL: [squinting] Yeah, but it’s funny, you know—they perpetrate like they don’t.

  Coral was lighting cigarettes and then passing them to me. She also let me see the spider tattoo on her foot (to commemorate the spider that bit her there a few seasons back, causing her to have an allergic reaction, which in turn contributed to her and the Miz’s team losing on the Challenge). On two separate instances, when the subject came up of whether Coral’s mind-clobbering breasts are real, she grabbed them (somewhat violently), squeezed them together while pushing them up from below, and sort of shook them. Were they real? I don’t know—are the Blue Ridge Mountains real?

  Things were maybe winding down when I said, “Coral, what did you mean earlier, when you said that thing about how you don’t watch the show ’cause you know that that ain’t like that?”

  The Miz jumped in. (I noticed that, if you ask the Miz a question, Coral answers, and vice versa.)

  “Say we’re talking right here,” he said. “There’d be, like, a cameraman right here. There’d be a light guy right here. A director. And there’s, like, five people standing right there, [around] the conversation that you’re in. So it’s like, we know what they’re doing … We also know that, when you’re in interview, they’re asking you questions. A type of question would be, like, ‘Do you think anyone’s talking about you?’”

  ME: “They” are asking you questions?

  MIZ: Yeah.

  CORAL: There’s a confessional … You’re required to do an hour of confessional a week, and there’s also interviews that you have every week. And the person who’s interviewing you is a psychiatrist.

  ME: Are you serious?

  MIZ: Yep, swear to God. Dr. Laura.

  CORAL: Dr. Laura.

  MELISSA: Dr. Laura.

  CORAL: Who I love.

  ME: From the show?

  MIZ: Well, from our show.

  ME: Not the Dr. Laura from …

  MELISSA: Dr. Laura Schlessinger? That would be hilarious …

  I’d suspected there were puppeteers involved in The Real World, invisibly instigating “drama,” but to think that the network had gone for it like that and hired a shrink? One who, as the kids went on to assure me, was involved not only in manipulating the cast during shooting but also in the casting process itself? And she’s worked on other shows? This explained so much, about The Real World, about all of it. When I wrote that business earlier about how the casting people have made the shows crazier and crazier, I didn’t know I was right about any of that! This person is an unacknowledged legislator of the real world. Turns out Dr. Laura is a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, which is better, when you think about it, because psychologists don’t have to take the Hippocratic oath, and she’s definitely, definitely done some harm. No chance I was going to call her.

  No, I think I’ll picture the Miz instead, and see him as he was when I was walking out of Avalon, when we said good-bye. He was dancing with that girl whose breast he had signed. They were grinding. The night had gone well. He saw that I was leaving and gave me a wave and a look, like, “You’re takin’ off?” And I shouted, “Yeah, gotta go!” And he shouted, “Cool, bro!” and then he went back to dancing. The colored lights were on his face. People were watching.

  In that moment, I found it awfully hard to think anything bad about the Miz. Remember your senior year in college, what that was like? Partying was the only thing you had to worry about, and when you went out, you could feel people thinking you were cool. The whole idea of being a young American seemed fun. Remember that? Me neither. But the Miz remembers. He figured out a way never to leave that place.

  Bless him, bros.

  MICHAEL

  How do you talk about Michael Jackson except that you mention Prince Screws?

  Prince Screws was an Alabama cotton-plantation slave who became a tenant farmer after the Civil War, likely on his former master’s land. His son, Prince Screws, Jr., bought a small farm. And that man’s son, Prince Screws III, left home for Indiana, where he found work as a Pullman porter, part of the exodus of Southern blacks to the Northern industrial cities.

  There came a disruption in the line. This last Prince Screws, the one who went north, would have no sons. He had two daughters, Kattie and Hattie. Kattie gave birth to ten children, the eighth a boy, Michael—who would name his sons Prince, to honor his mother, whom he adored, and to signal a restoration. So the ridiculous moniker given by a white man to his black slave, the way you might name a dog, was bestowed by a black king upon his pale-skinned sons and heirs.

  We took the name for an affectation and mocked it.

  Not to imply that it was above mockery, but of all the things that make Michael unknowable, thinking we knew him is maybe the most deceptive. Let’s suspend it.

  Begin not with the miniseries childhood of Joseph’s endless family practice sessions but with the later and, it seems, just as formative Motown childhood, from, say, eleven to fourteen—years spent, when not on the road, most often alone, behind security walls, with private tutors and secret sketchbooks. A cloud-headed child, he likes rainbows and reading. He starts collecting exotic animals.

  His eldest brothers had at one time been children who dreamed of child stardom. Michael never knows this sensation. By the time he achieves something like self-awareness, he is a child star. The child star dreams of being an artist.

  Alone, he puts on classical records, because he finds they soothe his mind. He also likes the old Southern stuff his uncle Luther sings. His uncle looks back at him and thinks he seems sad for his age. This is in California, so poor, brown Gary, with its poisonous air you could smell from leagues away—a decade’s exposure to which may already have damaged his immune system in fateful ways—is the past.

  He thinks about things and sometimes talks them over with his friends Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross when they are hanging out. He listens to albums and compares. The albums he and his brothers make have a few nice tunes, to sell records, then a lot of consciously second-rate numbers, to satisfy the format. Whereas Tchaikovsky and people like that, they didn’t handle slack material. But you have to write your own songs. Michael has always made melodies in his head, little riffs and beats, but that isn’t the same. The way Motown deals with the Jackson 5, finished songs are delivered to the group from songwriting teams in various cities. The brothers are brought in to sing and add accents.

  Michael wants access to the “anatomy” of the music. That’s the word he uses repeatedly. Anatomy. What’s inside its structure that makes it move?

  When he’s seventeen, he asks Stevie Wonder to let him spy while Songs in the Key of Life gets made. There’s Michael, self-consciously shy and deferential, flattening himself mothlike against the Motown studio wall. Somehow Stevie’s blindness becomes moving in this context. No doubt he is for long stretches unaware of Michael’s presence. Never asks him to play a shaker or anything. Never mentions Michael. But Michael hears him. Most of the Jackson siblings are leaving Motown at this moment, for another label, where they’ve leveraged a bit more creative sway. The first thing Michael does is write “Blues Away,” an unfairly forgotten song, fated to become one of the least-dated-sounding tracks the Jacksons do together. A nice rolling piano riff with strings and a breathy chorus—Burt Bacharach doing Stevie doing early disco, and some other factor that was Michael’s own, that dwelled in his introverted-sounding vocal rhythms. Sweet, slightly cryptic lyrics that contain an early notion of melancholy as final, inviolable retreat: “I’d like to be yours tomorrow, so I’m giving you some time to get over today / But
you can’t take my blues away.”

  By 1978, the year of “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)”—cowritten by Michael and little Randy—Michael’s methods have gelled. He starts with tape recorders. He sings and beatboxes the little things he hears, the parts. Where do they come from? Above. He claims to drop to his knees and thank Jehovah after he snatches one. His voice coach tells the story of Michael one day raising his hands in the air during practice and starting to mutter. The coach, Seth Riggs, decides to leave him alone. When he comes back half an hour later, it’s to Michael whispering, “Thank you for my talent.”

  Some of the things Michael hears in his head he exports to another instrument, to the piano (which he plays not well but passably) or to the bass. The melody and a few percussive elements remain with his vocal. The rest he assembles around it. He has his brothers and sisters with him. He conducts.

  His art will come to depend on his ability to stay in touch with that childlike inner instrument, keeping near enough to himself to heed his own melodic promptings. If you’ve listened to toddlers making up songs, the things they invent are often bafflingly catchy and ingenious. They compose to biorhythms somehow. The vocal from Michael’s earlier, Off the Wall–era demo of the eventual Thriller hit “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” sounds like nothing so much as playful schoolyard taunting. He will always be at his worst when making what he thinks of as “big” music, which he invariably associates with military imagery.

  Nineteen seventy-nine, the year of Off the Wall and his first nose job, marks an obscure crisis. Around the start of that year, they offer him the gay lead in the film version of A Chorus Line, but he declines the role, explaining, “I’m excited about it, but if I do it, people will link me with the part. Because of my voice, some people already think I’m that way—homo—though I’m actually not at all.”

  People want to know, Why, when you became a man, did your voice not change? Rather, it did change, but what did it change into? Listening to clips of his interviews through the seventies, you can hear how he goes about changing it himself. First it deepens slightly, around 1972–73 or so. (Listen to him on The Dating Game in 1972 and you’ll hear that his voice was lower at fourteen than it will be at thirty.) This potentially catastrophic event has perhaps been vaguely dreaded by the family and label for years. Michael Jackson without his falsetto is not the commodity on which their collective dream depends. But Michael has never known a reality that wasn’t susceptible on some level to his creative powers. He works to develop something, not a falsetto, which is a way of singing above your range, but instead a higher range. He isolates totally different configurations of his vocal cords, finding their crevices, cultivating the flexibility there. Vocal teachers will tell you this can be done, though it’s considered an extreme practice. Whether the process is conscious in Michael’s case is unknowable. He probably evolves it in order to keep singing Jackson 5 songs every night through puberty. The startling effect is of his having imaginatively not so much castrated himself as womanized himself. He essentially evolves a drag voice. On the early demo for “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” recorded at home with Randy and Janet helping, you can actually hear him work his way into this voice. It is a character, really. “We’re gonna be startin’ now, baby,” he says in a relaxed, moderately high-pitched man’s voice. Then he intones the title, “Don’t stop ’til you get enough,” in a softer, quieter version of basically the same voice. He repeats the line in a still higher register, almost purring. Finally—in a full-on girlish peal—he sings.

  A source will later claim that Michael once, in a moment of anger, broke into a deep, gruff voice she’d never heard before. Liza Minnelli also claims to have heard this other voice.

  Interesting that these out-flashings of his “natural” voice occurred at moments when he was, as we would say, not himself.

  On the Internet, you can see a picture of him near the end of his life, juxtaposed with a digital projection of what he would have looked like at the same age without the surgeries and makeup and wigs. A smiling middle-aged black guy, handsome in an everyday way. We are meant, of course, to feel a connection with this lost neverbeing, and pity for the strange, self-mutilated creature beside him. I can’t be alone, however, in feeling just the opposite, that there’s something metaphysically revolting about the mock-up. It’s an abomination. Michael chose his true face. What is, is natural.

  His physical body is arguably, even inarguably, the single greatest piece of postmodern American sculpture. It must be carefully preserved.

  It’s fascinating to read the interviews he gave to Ebony and Jet over the past thirty years. I confess myself disoriented by them, as a white person. During whole stretches of years when the big media were reporting endlessly on his bizarreness and reclusiveness, he was every so often granting these intimate and illuminating sit-downs to those magazines, never forgetting to remind them that he trusted only them, would speak only to them. The articles make me realize that about the only Michael Jackson I’ve ever known, personality-wise, is a Michael Jackson who’s defending himself against white people who are passive-aggressively accusing him of child molestation. He spoke differently to black people, was more at ease. The language and grain of detail are different. Not that the scenario was any more journalistically pure. The John H. Johnson publishing family, which puts out Jet and Ebony, had Michael’s back, faithfully repairing and maintaining his complicated relations with the community, assuring readers that, in the presence of Michael, “you quickly look past the enigmatic icon’s light, almost translucent skin and realize that this African American legend is more than just skin deep.” At times, especially when the “homo” issue came up, the straining required could turn comical, as in Ebony in 1982, talking about his obsessive male fans:

  MICHAEL: They come after us every way they can, and the guys are just as bad as the girls. Guys jump up on the stage and usually go for me and Randy.

  EBONY: But that means nothing except that they admire you, doesn’t it?

  Even so, to hear Michael laid-back and talking unpretentiously about art, the thing he most loved—that is a new Michael, a person utterly absent from, for example, Martin Bashir’s infamous documentary, Living with Michael Jackson, in which Michael admitted sharing his bedroom with children. It’s only after reading Jet and Ebony that one can understand how otherwise straightforward-seeming people of all races have stayed good friends with Michael Jackson these many years. He is charming; his mind is alive. What a pleasure to find him listening to early “writing version” demos of his own compositions and saying, “Listen to that, that’s at home, Janet, Randy, me … You’re hearing four basses on there…” Or to hear him tell less prepackaged anecdotes, such as the one about a beautiful black girl who froze in the aisle and pissed all down her legs after spotting him on a plane, or the blond girl who kissed him in an airport and, when he didn’t respond, asked, “What’s wrong, you fag?” He grows tired of reminding people, “There’s a reason why I was created male. I’m not a girl.” He leaves the reason unspoken.

  When Michael and Quincy Jones run into each other on the set of The Wiz, Michael remembers a moment from years before when Sammy Davis, Jr., had taken Jones aside backstage somewhere and whispered, “This guy is something; he’s amazing.” Michael had “tucked it away.” He knows Jones’s name from the sleeves of his father’s jazz albums, knows Jones is a serious man. He waits till the movie is done to call him up. It’s the fact that Jones intimidates him slightly that draws Jackson to him. He yearns for some competition larger than the old intrafamilial one, which he has long dominated. That was checkers; he wants chess. Fading child stars can easily insulate themselves from further motivation, if they wish, and most do. It’s the more human path. Michael seeks pressure instead, at this moment. He recruits people who can drive him to, as he puts it, “higher effort.”

  Quincy Jones’s nickname for him is Smelly. It comes from Michael’s habit of constantly touching and covering
his nose with the fingers of his left hand, a tic that becomes pronounced in news clips from this time. He feels embarrassed about his broad nose. Several surgeries later—after, one assumes, it had been deemed impolitic inside the Jackson camp to mention the earlier facial self-consciousness—the story is altered. We are told that when Michael liked a track in the studio, he would call it “the smelly jelly.” Both stories may be true. “Smelly jelly” has the whiff of Jackson’s weird, infantile sayings. Later in life, when feeling weak, he’d say to his people, “I’m hurting … blanket me,” which could mean, among other things, time for my medicine.

  Michael knows he won’t really have gone solo until his own songwriting finds the next level. He doesn’t want inclusion; he wants awe. Jones has a trusted songwriter in his stable, the Englishman Rod Temperton, of Heatwave fame, who brings in a song, “Rock with You.” It’s very good. Michael hears it and knows it’s a hit. He’s not even worried about hits at this point, though, except as a kind of by-product of perfection. He goes home and writes “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” Janet tinks on a glass bottle. Trusted Randy plays guitar. These are the two siblings whom Michael brings with him into the Quincy Jones adventure, to the innermost zone where he writes. We don’t think of the family as having anything to do, musically, with his solo career, except by way of guilt favors. But he feels confident with these two, needs to keep them woven into his nest. They are both younger than he. His baby sister.

  From the perspective of thirty years, “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” is a much better track than “Rock with You.” One admires “Rock with You,” but melodically Michael’s song comes from a more distinctive place. You hear not slickness but sophisticated instincts.