Now I ask you—what father talks about his child that way? Well, maybe some do but (a) I don’t know them, and (b) they probably aren’t raising an eyebrow and looking suggestive when they say it. Over the years I’ve heard many proud fathers tell me, “My son is great,” or “My kid is adorable,” but this was the only time I’d ever heard this particular boast:
“My son [unlike most average male offspring] is VERY [unsettling smile, raised eyebrows, maybe even a lewd wink] good-looking [pause for you to reflect and/or puke].”
It was grotesque! This man was letting me know that he had this valuable thing that he assumed Michael Jackson wanted, and it happened to be his son. But it wasn’t who his son was, it was what he was: “good-looking.”
So here was Dr. Chandler telling me how Michael was buying his kid computers and taking him to incredible places and sleeping in the same bed and getting him… WAIT!
“Hang on,” I said. “I have to interrupt here. Let’s just go back a tic, okay?”
“Sure,” Chandler said.
“They’re sleeping in the same bed?!”
He blinked. “Well, yeah, but my ex-wife is always there, so it’s okay, and his stepfather and… and… and…”
Dr. Chandler’s stories became longer than my treatments. The drugs were wearing off before the story. Not that there was enough dope in the world to make these stories palatable. This was one creepy story. Off hand, I’d say the creepiest. And somehow I’d become this freak’s confidante.
So I told this bizarre tale to my friend, Gavin de Becker, who specializes in, among other things, celebrity weirdness, with a particular expertise in protecting celebrities from stalkers. He’s written four compelling books about fear and security and the like. So I called Gavin and told him about this dentist dumping this ghastly tale of his son and Michael Jackson in my lap, and Gavin told me, “Here’s what you should say to the guy: ‘Let me get this straight. You’re telling me your son is having sleepovers in the same bed as Michael Jackson. Let me put this to you another way and tell me if you think this is okay. Your thirteen-year-old son is sleeping in the same bed as a thirty-something African-American millionaire. Is that okay with you? Or does it need to be Michael Jackson to make this incredibly flawed situation make sense?’” I said this to Chandler and, as I dimly recall, we didn’t speak much for a while after that.
Then one night some months later, Dr. Chandler came up to my house again and told me that he and his wife were going to sue Michael.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because,” he explained rationally, “Michael is sleeping in the same bed with my boy.”
Now, I know for a fact that when this first started happening, the good doctor saw no problem with this odd bunking! Excuse me, he had been creepy enough to have allowed all this to happen, and now he’s suddenly shocked—shocked!—virtually consumed with moral indignation! “Can you believe it? I think Michael may have even put his hand on my child’s privates.” Well, what was this man thinking in the first place? Why did he encourage him to sleep in the same bed as Michael Jackson to begin with?
He did it because he knew, somewhere, he would eventually be able to say, “Oh, my God! I suddenly realize that this thing between Michael and my son is weird. I’m horrified. My son may have been damaged! And the only thing that can repair this damage is many millions of dollars! Then he’ll be okay! And we’re not going to buy anything for ourselves with that money! It’s all going toward our son being okay!!!” This was around the time that I knew I had to find another dentist. No drug can hide the fact that one’s skin is crawling.
The thing is, though, I never thought that Michael’s whole thing with kids was sexual. Never. Granted, it was miles from appropriate, but just because it wasn’t normal doesn’t mean that it had to be perverse. Those aren’t the only two choices for what can happen between an adult and an unrelated child spending time together. Even if that adult has had too much plastic surgery and what would appear to be tattooed makeup on his face. And yes, he had an amusement park, a zoo, a movie theater, popcorn, candy, and an elephant. But to draw a line under all that and add it up to the assumption that he fiendishly rubbed his hands together as he assembled this giant super spiderweb to lure and trap kids into it is just bad math.
I actually don’t think Michael was sexual at all. Incredibly talented, yes. Childlike, for sure. Pathologically kind, absolutely. But how stupid would you have to be to have sex with the little kids you’re endlessly hanging out with? And Michael was not stupid. He might have been a little naïve and definitely richer than most anyone in the whole world, and it was this absolutely fatal combination that made people want to desperately try to figure out how to squeeze some of that money out of his enormous wallet.
But wait! Check this out! Let’s say your “really good-looking son” started hanging out with this odd-looking famous multi-multimillionaire that could maybe be persuaded to give you twenty-two million dollars if you threatened to tell everyone in the world that he touched your son’s underage, maybe-not-even-fully-grown-yet member. Well, I don’t know what you’d do? But when my dentist was presented with a choice between integrity and twenty-two million dollars, you’ll never guess what he did! That’s right—he went for the cash! But hey, he was only human-ish, right? But really, who could blame him? I mean, besides you and me and anyone else alive who cares about ruining their kid’s life, who else could blame Dr. Chandler for what he did? (I’ll wait while you think.)
Moving on…
I always felt that a huge part of the appeal of kids for Michael was that they couldn’t be corrupted by his fame. Obviously a celebrity is a person set apart from the throng. Someone who not only has a private life, like all humans, but a public one as well.
“What are they like in real life?”
What sort of question is that?
“Oh, he’s so nice,” people will say after they encounter a celebrity. “Incredibly down-to-earth.”
Down-to-earth from where? Where did they get back to earth from?! And was it a long trip? Will they go back soon? And why? And will they take me with them?
Michael’s celebrity turned many people into eager, greedy stargazers who only wanted something from him above and beyond what a normal human is willing or expected to give. They were there for the anecdote. It’s what I call the “shine.” People want to rub up against it, and in so doing, their own value is increased. But I’d like to propose a reason why Michael might’ve preferred the company of children to what I’ve heard referred to as adults.
Kids of a certain age, being too young to understand the peculiar phenomenon of fame, are potentially easier to trust and hang out with than a certain kind of adult, who, as I said earlier, more often than not have a tendency to start acting completely disorganized around someone as outrageously famous as Michael. And children are far less likely to act this way because they don’t exactly know what fame is yet. To them, famous is cartoon characters, or Muppets, or Barney. It’s too abstract a concept for kids.
Obviously, children are more likely to feel important if they’re treated well. I don’t think that they necessarily compute need and/or feeling better because they’re treated well by millions of strangers. Their toys aren’t more fun than ovations.
The other people who aren’t rendered strange around famous people are generally… other famous people! In such instances, the issue of celebrity is neutralized, and they are free to move on to whatever they like or don’t like about one another in the usual human way. So that partly explains why Michael might have enjoyed hanging out with say, Elizabeth Taylor, for example, or even maybe me! (Yes, that’s what all this finally boils down to—me, me, me, me, me!)