Dear Michael

This is not a letter to Michael, it is an ode; my ode to the boy who helped shape my identity.

I will be the first to admit that I was not a fan of Michael Jackson in his later years. I believed him to be a pedophile, largely influenced by the fact that he had never emotionally matured past an adolescent himself. I believe his love of children, while sincere in his mind, heart, and interpretation, was unhealthy. I was repulsed by the physical transformation he underwent and saddened that he hated his blackness so much that he felt the need to mutilate his face to look monstrous and grotesque.

But this is not about the Michael Jackson of later years. This is about the brown, immensely talented little boy with whom I fell in love before I knew what love was. The Jackson Five’s first hit was released when I was three years old. I literally grew up with Michael Jackson. I had posters on my wall and every birthday and Christmas of memory is one marked by a Michael Jackson gift. On my 6th birthday, I received an orange record player and the album Got To Be There. I played the song Ben over and over again, believing in my heart that I felt a connection with young Michael that only he and I could share. His emotion poured through my young body and loved him.

Michael Jackson was the boy to whom I compared all others. In the third grade, I had a crush on Kim Williams because he had a big afro like Michael Jackson. In junior high I had a crush on a boy from my church who had a jheri curl just like Mike. I vividly remember getting a cassette tape of a Jackson 5 album and playing it on my grandmother’s tape recorder one summer until I broke the tape and cried incessantly. I would watch the Jackson 5 cartoon because I felt like it was “my” cartoon, created for me and little brown girls like me. Yeah, there were the Osmond’s for white girls but the Jackson 5 belonged to me. They danced like I danced, they grooved like I liked, and they looked like me with brown skin and African features. I have vivid memories of staring out the window and wondering how far it would be to Indiana. Many a night, when I suffered the abuse of my dysfunctional mother, I would dream of packing my clothes in a red bandana handkerchief, tying it to the end of a stick, and walking to where Michael Jackson lived. I felt sure in my heart that he would love me as much as I loved him.

As I got older, my walls filled with posters of the various heartthrobs of the day. Foster Sylvers, Lawrence Hilton Jacobs, and Ralph Carter all had their respective spots. I even had Scott Baio, Sean Cassidy, and Leif Garret to reflect my diversity. The only person who remained consistent, the only space that remained reserved was the place for Michael Jackson. He represented all that was beautiful to me. I would dream of the day I would be old enough to marry Michael Jackson and I just KNEW that I was his biggest fan.

If I were a gambling woman, I'd put good money on the bet that the very first person I had a masturbatory fantasy to was Michael Jackson. I don’t have a specific memory, but I remember being under the covers, a flashlight, a Right On Magazine, and a funny feeling "down there". When I got Off the Wall, I would play She’s Outta My Life over and over and over. I wasn’t allowed to curse so when he said, “Damned indecision and cursed pride,” I had to skip that word. When he cried at the end, I cried. And even though I knew he wrote the song for Tatum O’Neil, I convinced myself that if he had ever had the chance to meet me, that he would have written it and sung it for me.

When MTV started playing Michael Jackson videos, I would stand in front of the TV and duplicate the choreography and go to school and perform for all my classmates. The debut of a new MJ video was all that we lived for. I remember when Thriller came out. There hadn’t been anything like it before and my best friend and I were MESMORIZED by it. I’ll never forget the woman’s name, Ola Ray, who played his girlfriend. I hated her. Not “hate” the way the word is used today, but hate in the sense that if I had ever seen her I would have beat her ass senseless. I was so jealous that she got to kiss Michael Jackson that I was green with envy. By the time I had gotten to high school, the delusions of me meeting Michael Jackson and falling in love with him were over. I was content to think that I could however marry Randy Jackson and just be NEAR Michael during the holidays and family gatherings. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

When I was in college, he made the Bad video in a subway station in Brooklyn. My friends and I went down there and thought we were going to be able to get a part in the video. She was light skinned and half Puerto Rican and I was the best dancer of anyone we knew. We just knew that if anyone two people could talk our way on the set, it would be us. Needless to say, they didn’t let us anywhere near the set and we went home, dejected and arrogant. “Michael Jackson ain’t shit . . . he don’t know talent when he sees it.” Forget the fact that we didn’t even get close to him. It was after that that my love affair with MJ started to fade. When his nose kept getting smaller and smaller, and his face started getting whiter and whiter, and when his dance moves stayed the same, I fell out of love with my first true love.

Without Michael Jackson, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today, of this I am convinced. Without having him as my tween idol, I’m convinced I wouldn’t love black men the way I do. Michael Joseph Jackson set the standard to which I compared all other potential lovers for a very long time. He was my first crush, my first boyfriend, he was my first true love. I mourn this day at the loss of my first love. I mourn this day for a soul who shaped lived in ways that he may have never comprehended. Beyond his music, beyond his transformation, his core, the beautiful brown boy with the immeasurable talent was a driving force in the creation of who I am today and I honor and praise all that he was.

Copyright 2009 Scottie Lowe