like most children born in 1983, in the shadow of the incomparable thriller, the first recording artist i remember being into is michael jackson. in fact, for the first five or six years of my life, i don’t remember liking any music if it weren’t buoyed by jackson’s vocal cords. so many vivid memories of my childhood revolve around those songs: sitting in the kitchen, humming “ABC” while my maternal grandmother washed dishes; being amazed and stupefied when motown 25 was replayed on motown’s 30th birthday, and witnessing the moonwalk for the first time; being similarly stupefied when my uncle bought bad on CD (much like the stranger’s megan seling in this piece, i was like, “what the fuck is a CD?”); wishing i could be macaulay culkin after the one-two punch of home alone and the “black or white” video; asking my grandmother for a pet rat after listening to “ben”; the list could literally go on for days.
a very pivotal moment in my life came when i watched the jacksons: an american dream on television. being shown the image of a sublimely talented artist, an artistic perfectionist, struggle with the harshness of being an abused child is hard enough, but it resonates with you on an entirely different level when you’re an abused child yourself. watching michael tremble in fear at the sight of his father getting angry pierces a hole inside of you when you know exactly what he’s feeling. watching the jackson children suffer beatings at the hands of joe made me relive any recent beating i may have received from my biological mother (if you’re a longtime reader of fresh cherries, you know that my biological mother and the woman i refer to as “mom” are two different people– if you aren’t, now you know). i’ve never spoke ill of michael’s devolution from king of pop to tabloid fixture, because i have a firsthand account of the psychological damage that comes from being an abused child.
i’d like to think that i’m on the lucky side of kids that come from abused childhoods; i’m an artist across several different mediums, i have a close network of family and friends who i love with all of my heart, and i have a near-blemish-free criminal record. although i do have some pretty serious psychological issues that will not be discussed in public, i turned out alright. like all-too-many cases of abused kids, michael joseph jackson didn’t. throughout the near-twenty-six years of my life, i’ve watched the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of the greatest performer of my lifetime, noticing the similarities of internal issues the both of us had, the only difference being that i was afforded the opportunity to work mine out in private. as michael bleached his skin and underwent multiple plastic surgeries to hopefully alleviate some of the self-loathing, i watched as people mocked him. as he was accused of molestation for bizarrely being an adult trying to live the childhood he was never given, i watched. as he tirelessly worked on his comeback single (the still-great “you rock my world”), showing glimpses of the perfectionism and brilliance as a performer he has showcased over the course of his life, i watched as people cynically said it would flop. i watched as it seemed his mental health was slowly deteriorating, and i was just thankful that he wasn’t the abused child that killed himself, like another one of my musical idols, elliott smith.
but then, he died. it’s an absolute shock when someone who has always been of healthy body passes away from cardiac arrest. and it could very well be that those demons that he spent his life getting away from finally caught up with him at the wrong time. the emotional scarring from being abused as a child never actually leaves you, though, nor do you leave it. you just use it as a springboard to make yourself a better person. and say what you want to about michael jackson, he tried– goddammit, he tried– to make himself a better person. it’s just that the problems that were beaten into him as a child, coupled with his accelerated adulthood, never left him. perhaps they have left him, now.
