Just minutes after I caught wind of last Thursday’s big news, I got a text message from one of my friends: “Do you believe Michael Jackson died?”
In the 80s and 90s certain countercultural types liked to riff on the notion of a Church of Elvis, but when you get right down to it, Elvis’s mythos is too tame to support a church—even a fake church. Aside from the interior design at Graceland and the massiveness of his pill habit, there wasn’t much that felt supernatural about the guy. As far as kinks go, girls in white cotton panties barely even registers. And who wouldn’t like a panfried peanut butter and banana sandwich?
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But Michael Jackson, on the other hand, has barely been recognizable as a human being since sometime in the mid-90s. Even before he started looking like an alien, he acted like one. You had to wonder what kind of person has a chimp for a best friend; fathers children with what are essentially surrogate mothers, one of them never identified, and then hides them behind masks; and frolics in a personal amusement park fraught with dangerous psychological implications (“Neverland”) while dressed as an implausibly fabulous military dictator—which, why not, since he was richer and more powerful than any banana republic autocrat?
I don’t know what to call that kind of devotion except religious. Woolridge’s obvious spiritual dedication and the physically demanding form his worship takes are like something out of a medieval monastery. He probably has more in common with holy men on the other side of the globe than with the people who stop on the sidewalk to watch him for a minute.
All the mourners spent at least a couple minutes at the shrine, mostly not talking, and most everyone snapped a few pictures of it on their camera or phone. A middle-aged man sat in a conversion minivan parked across the street, blasting Jackson 5 and Michael’s early stuff. Groups of girls sang and danced along. A woman, distraught and apparently wasted, asked us with an edge of panic in her voice if we knew where Michael was going to be buried.
