Wacko Jacko’s Wild Ride No Stranger Than Society’s

I used to adore Michael Jackson. The Jackson Five was the first rock ‘n roll group I ever listened too. Sure, I heard The Beatles when I was little, but that was my older sisters’ stuff. Michael Jackson’s music was mine.

I started memorizing lyrics to his songs in third grade. We had just moved to Jacksonville, Fla., and my new school was starting an awkward transition toward integration. My parents, like all parents at the school, worried about safety. Students were cruel to one another. I went home one day with a black eye and bloodied lip after getting too close to someone else’s altercation.

But the day I was hit is fuzzier in my memory than the day my teacher decided to play records and let us make chocolate chip cookies. We listened to “I Want You Back,” and wiggled our 8-year-old bodies to the best of our respective abilities. Everyone talked about Michael.

“He’s an amazing dancer!” We all agreed.

“I’m gonna marry him!” said one of the girls.

Michael Jackson was cool. That was probably the only thing at school that went undisputed.

By 1974, we had moved to Spokane. Michael began to sing without the Jackson Five, and Expo transformed downtown into something exciting.

My best friend was a minister’s daughter named Ann. She used to come to my house after school on Fridays, and we went to the fair together. My mom gave us change for the bus and for pay phones, a five-dollar bill for an emergency, and an admonition not to spend it otherwise. We boarded the Cable Add, checked in with my older sister who worked as an usher, and wandered the park by ourselves.

Early one evening, Ann and I sat on a bench watching the Spokane River flow past, talking about things that are important to fifth-grade girls, and throwing popcorn to squirrels. As the squirrels came closer, begging for more food, Ann started singing, “Ben, you’re always running here and there…”

“…here and there,” I backed her up.

She stopped singing, and said, “You know, Michael Jackson is singing that song to a rat.”

“He is not,” I said.

“He is.”

“That’s the weirdest thing I ever heard.”

“No kidding.”

Hard as it is to believe now, the freedom we had was common among our peers. It was tremendous fun to be 11 years old and responsible for ourselves. If we ever got lost, we were comfortable asking strangers for directions. People we did not know often pulled us to the front of the group at exhibits, to make sure we could see. We were always careful, but never afraid.

A few years later, I was a student at Lewis and Clark High School. Michael had begun his physical transformation with a nose job. Everybody was listening to “Off the Wall.”

Back then, I usually walked home from school with a friend who lived a couple of blocks from me. As we walked up the hill to our street, we talked about the usual things. Since this was the era of the South Hill rapist we wondered if we ought to carry whistles, but we doubted anyone would come to our aid if we used one.

We counted the red figures that had been painted on sidewalks throughout our neighborhood, marking locations where women were raped. It was strange, at 16, to feel less secure walking home from school in the middle of the afternoon than it had felt at 11 to be downtown in the evening.

Though Michael Jackson remains hugely talented, I pay little attention to his music now. The constant changes in his appearance detract too much from his work.

“Wacko Jacko!” say the tabloids. But I’m not sure his metamorphosis is more strange than the rest of ours. We are a long way from the time when the weirdest thing a fifth grader ever heard was a pop star singing a love song to a rat. Instead, youngsters have a coroner who thinks it is reasonable to question the sexuality of a dead child.

Wouldn’t it be a relief if the worst fear creeping into a child’s mind at night was that she might be beaten up at school. Now she fears being shot. The community chooses to affirm that fear by approving more juvenile jail cells, instead of finding the optimism necessary to build a science center.

When even good manners among strangers seem a quaint anachronism, Michael Jackson seems less an aberration than a reflection.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Mary E. Douthitt Contributing writer