So I go to the barbershop. This is an important ritual for me, and an unnecessary expense. They always just shave my head- an operation I can easily perform on my own, but I love the barber’s. A singular male ritual.
As the stringy Russian dabs foam on a pasty business dude, the news breaks about Michael and quickly advances from spectacle to outright tragedy. I am called to the chair and sadness washes over me. Michael is dead. I try to hold on to my personal sadness. Not a sadness for a figure, some placeholder for my childhood, or even a great entertainer, but simply for a departed soul. In recognition that there was a person before the personification.
I am lost in my pity for this media sacrifice. Robbed of his youth, he spent all his coin building a shrine to Peter Pan.
Michael 10 years old was too black and too real. Is that why he needed to white himself out and become a ghost? All celebrities are asked to wear a mask. Was he the first to have his surgically attached?
Suddenly the barber is animated- in an accent thick as pickled herring he babbles about the prophecy of 2012:
“Jackson, the other actress die, the rain- these are signs!!!”
“Is that Nostradamus?” I ask in that nonchalant voice you use with insane people.
“Nostrodamus, I- Ching, the Mayans.. you name it. This is sign…”
I admit it. After 9/11 everyone was so surprised. I didn’t get it. I was haunted by a sense that the plot was written years in advance. You could smell it in the air. If you possessed some basic understanding of history, the event seemed almost inevitable.
Michael is feeling the same. You’ve already read this story. Judy- Elvis- Jesus (the Man not the Message)- only Michael is this story on steroids. More saturated, exposed and mediated.
The crazed barber is telling me how Jesus is gonna return and the Jews will be sorry- right then he opens the straight razor to do my neck. Interesting. I make sure to tell him my family is from South America as if that will obscure my Jewface. He’s ranting about Mother Mary appearing in Spain and how Rabbis with giant servers decoded 9/11 in the Torah. It’s an old argument. History is simply a code. In the movies of course, the shit really hits the fan once the code is cracked.
