Gary, Indiana, Michael Jackson, and the End of Childhood

The media are in a feeding frenzy right now over the death of pop icon Michael Jackson. I'm a generation behind him, but I did love his music.

I went into labor with my second daughter the night he did the moonwalk on the now-famous 1983 Motown reunion TV special. He was wearing that silver glove and tipping that black hat, and he wow-ed no less a legend than Fred Astaire with his smooth, fierce dancing.

Eight hours after that unforgettable performance, I gave birth to a baby girl

What baby wouldn't want to come out to hear such as that?

Life may be painful and tragic, but it also rocks.

I remember listening to the Thriller album with my young girls (now grown, one with a child of her own) and dancing around the living room pretending to be zombies. We must have played that album a thousand times. Who needs Veggie Tales when you have great music like that?

Kids aren't stupid.

But the saddest image of the past few days for me wasn't anything from the 80s and it wasn't anything from Michael Jackson's later life or painful disfiguring identity struggles.

For me, it was the shot shown over and over on the national news of the home where Jackson grew up in Gary, Indiana.

I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, about 60 miles due east of Gary and about four hours south of Motown, in a small, crappy little aluminum-sided house that looks a lot like the house Michael Jackson grew up in.

My neighborhood was filled with block after block of identical, tiny two-bedroom houses occupied by low-income white factory workers and their overly large families. Our house held two adults and four kids. Two houses down another two bedroom house held two adults and seven kids.

In those days, the very idea of a house with three or four bathrooms was unthinkable. Maybe people lived in such houses, somewhere on earth. But not back then, not in my neighborhood.

Back in those days there was no such thing as "child abuse" either. Dads routinely punched their teenaged boys just to toughen them up. Belts were used for whippings. The very concept of "sexual abuse" was unthinkable for many reasons, not the least of which was that no one acknowledged sex in front of children, never mind with them.

Stuff happened in life. You dealt with it and kept going. That's how it was then.

About a mile from the house where I grew up, a major city street marked the boundary between blue collar homes and white collar homes. The name of the street was Portage, which, (perhaps ironically) refers to the original route that French trappers and Indians used to carry their canoes over dry land from the place where the river bent to where it continued on unmolested.

It couldn't have been tons of fun carrying a canoe through the woods in the 17th century, and it wasn't much fun trying to cross Portage in the 20th century either.

I vividly remember kids from the other side of Portage not being allowed to visit my house after school because "it wasn't safe," so I had to visit theirs instead. I also remember my mother fighting the grade school powers-that-be to get my brother and me into the 'advanced classes' with the kids from the right side of Portage, and I recall her pushing both of us to make friends with those kids and avoid the ones who lived right next to us.

One of the biggest deals to the fathers in the neighborhood I grew up in was the fact that, even though we all lived in this tacky working class ghetto, it was at least totally segregated.

On one side of Portage lived the rich white children of dentists, doctors, attorneys, and accountants. On our side of Portage lived the poor white children of factory workers and rednecks. And past both those neighborhoods, near the city gravel pit and the airport, "The Projects" and the black part of town crumbled and decayed.

So the big deal in our neighborhood (at least for the men) was, "OK, we're poor. We work our asses off. Our houses are little and crappy. But at least we aren't black."

Pathetic I know, but that's how it was. They said it pretty much just that way.

This was in the 60s and 70s, before the Jackson Five hit the scene, and the civil rights movement was unfolding day by day all around us. Riots in Detroit, riots in LA, riots at the local high schools. The year I started junior high, the Supremes had just hit the airwaves with "Baby Love" and I instantly knew what I wanted to do with my life:

I wanted to be a Supreme.

Before that, I wanted to be a Shirelle.

My best friend and I got involved in the civil rights movement when we were just kids because we knew things were messed up bad, and we thought that if we could help that change come, our lives would be better too. The way we figured it is fodder for a separate essay, but when I look back on our logic, it strikes me that while we were very young and naive, we weren't wrong.

She attended a mostly black church, and then as now black churches were major centers of local political action. So we jumped in feet first. We went to Chicago and saw Jesse Jackson speak at Operation Breadbasket. We went to poetry readings featuring Leroy Jones (and were seated behind a pole).

We went to discussion groups and, as the the only two white faces there, dutifully absorbed all the rage and ranting anyone wanted to dish out, convinced we were helping. We heard stories about Devil's Food Cake versus Angel Food Cake and accusations about our grandfathers, great-grandfathers and so forth, and we went on marches and wore black armbands and sang "We Shall Overcome" and all that stuff. We must have looked insanely out of place.

We were 15.

My parents were crapping themselves over it.

So one day my father, who drove a yellow truck for the gas company and said very little, ever, about anything, informed me that I would be going to our church instead and I would not be seeing my best friend any more either, "for my own good."

A nondenominational Christian singing group was being started at the mostly-white Catholic Church my parents favored, and my father had decided to help run it. It was called, "The We Together Singers." I was to join, whether I liked it or not.

Imagine if the extras from the Lawrence Welk Show were kidnapped by the cast of "Pippin" and forced to dress in matching outfits and do choreography to covers of "inspirational" but really, really awful pop tunes.

OK, now imagine none of those people can actually sing or dance.

We had four hour practices three times a week, plus we sang at mass, and then, in addition to that, we gave concerts all over town too, so there was no time for a normal life.

I was in that group from 1968 through 1971.

I felt like I was imprisoned in a f*cking cult.

All of this happened a thousand years ago, in another world and another life.

I left home at 18 and tried not to look back, but I had to keep looking back, over and over, before I finally was able to let it all go. Most people don't know that I grew up in this whack-job Christian rah-rah singing group or that I grew up with horrible neighborhood violence and family violence and racial violence that would be over the top in a novel never mind real life.

My folks died mercifully young. It was a mercy to me too, because once they were gone, I was free, finally.

Michael Jackson never got free, except in his music.

I remember the young man he was before all the surgeries and the monkeys and the kids. I remember well the smouldering rage that came out in his music and yet was so powerful and enervating to everyone who heard it, white or black, and how he smashed right through all that shitty "poor whites versus poor blacks" steel town crap with this incredible music and a persona that still makes a freight train look like nothing at all.

What a miraculous and amazing talent. To pull all that out of Gary, Indiana, one of the worst places in America to grow up, bar none, and a bad dad and relentless work since childhood and the unforgiving lens of celebrity, God. It still shakes me.

Sometimes a small body can't contain a mythic force. There is lasting damage.

Endings come painfully.

But I will remember Michael Jackson with respect and lasting gratitude.