And he was taking such good care of himself, too.

I won’t even attempt to decode the riddle of the Sphinx that was Michael Jackson’s psychological makeup, but I may end up being the only one. Rest assured that millions of words will be written about the gloved-one in the coming weeks, and none of them will even come close to getting to the bottom of, for lack of a better phrase, what the fuck happened.

This isn’t Elvis eating too many bacon sandwiches and popping a rainbow of pharmaceuticals, although it seems likely there were more than a few pharmaceuticals involved. Somehow, Jackson started out as a child who seemed like a man, then, as a man, slowly collapsed inward until he became a perverse parody of a pixie dust-addled child. Tack on a degree of megalomania that’s usually only seen in Eastern bloc dictators, and it was a disturbing, ridiculous, often ugly thing to see.

Was he an extraordinarily talented person? Yes. He was. There’s no denying that. But, as time went on, he was also scary as shit. Sane people, no matter how gifted, don't dance on the roof of an automobile, in front of the press, during their child molestation trial. And that's just the first incident I can think of. Sift through your box of memories for your favorite.

So now the pajama party is over for good. Jackson will be impossible to forget, of course; in the mid-1980s he was as popular and as ubiquitous as a person could possibly be. But you can bet there are people right now who are desperately telling themselves he didn’t really die, that he’s secretly stowed away to an even more private Neverland, one full of llamas and ferris wheels and soft-serve ice cream dispensers and go-karts and a million other things that no one in their right mind should have to have in order to be happy. These people, regardless of how they view themselves, weren’t his fans. They were his enablers, the screaming advocates of a self-annihilating train wreck.

                                                ***

Everyone will carry a personal version of Michael Jackson in their head now, and there won't be a new, surgically altered one to replace it. There are a lot of unnerving options, but when I think of him, this is the Michael I want to remember— this astonishing little kid who was so bursting with life, joy, and genuine, butt-shaking soul:

The tragedy here isn’t just that a man, a father, died at the age of 50. The tragedy is that something pivotal about Michael Jackson died 10 or 15 years ago, if not earlier, and his body finally caught up with it. And we all sat there and watched.

Is this a sick country or what?

Paul Tatara