Why I was outside the LA Medical Center on June 24th

On June 24, 2009, hundreds of people gathered outside of the LA Medical Center where, just hours before, Michael Jackson had been pronounced dead. Fans came to celebrate his life and music and to mourn his death. Each one of them has a story to tell about Michael, how he touched their lives and brought them happiness. My next few blog posts will tell some of those stories:

Elise Hawthorne
Michael Jackson broke my arm. Well, he didn’t really break it, but he was responsible for me breaking it. One day after school I was dancing alone in my room and I tripped. I had gotten two awesome gifts for Christmas (well, at the time I would have called them “wicked”): a new tape deck with a handle and a microphone jack, and the Thriller tape. I distinctly remember that “Beat It” was playing when I broke my arm.

I tripped because I hadn’t put on socks. I was wearing my new jelly shoes, you know, the ones that were made of really gooey plastic and supposed to be so comfortable, but weren’t really because they were too hot to wear barefoot so you had to wear them with socks, which made them feel less comfortable and made you look much less cool than you had before you put on the socks? Well, the tip of the shoe got stuck in the carpet. Our house was built in the late ‘60s and had been really fancy and modern then. It was a ranch and had wall to wall throughout. In its day, the carpet was bad ass. The shag was long and, although my mother called it “gold,” it was really the color of a Werther’s original candy. Well, there I was, practicing my coolest Michael moves and trying to moonwalk, when my rubbery jelly shoe got caught on a too-long piece of shag, I fell, twisting in mid air to avoid landing on my guinea pig – and bam! I remember lying on the floor just looking at my hand and thinking, “shit, that’s not in the right place at all.”

I stayed on the floor through the end of “Beat It,” and all of “Billie Jean”, but since I never really liked “Human Nature” I got up when it came on and went looking for my stepfather.

He was mowing the lawn.

My mom met us at the hospital and immediately started screaming that it was all his fault. At first I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I just watched, but it turned out that she thought he’d hit me or pushed me or something and had made me break my arm. I knew what he had been doing to her, but my mom had been trying so hard to keep it a secret. And because of that, because she thought I didn’t know, I pretended I didn’t. I was a teenager and somehow I thought that letting her know that I knew would hurt her more than he was hurting her. I hadn’t even said anything about the black eye. That summer I mostly stayed in my room and listened to Joan Jett.

There, in the hospital waiting room, the lights buzzed and flickered. My arm rested on a pillow. My mom yelled and my stepfather yelled back, saying that he hadn’t done anything, when a nurse walked out and asked me what had happened. I looked at my mom in her career separates pink blouse with the big floppy bow at the neck, and I looked at my stepfather who was still covered with grass. I didn’t like either of them too much right then, but I really hated him.

“He pushed me,” I agreed.

And that was it. My mother called the police, and I stood by my story no matter how many times I told it. Once I’d lied, there was no going back. He didn’t do any jail time or anything, it was 1982 after all, but my mother did divorce him.

I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years, and I think that even though on that day he hadn’t hit me, he would have started hurting me pretty soon. He was a mean bastard, and I think it could have only gotten worse.

I’m here to say good-bye to Michael Jackson today because I’ve always seen him as a character in the story I just told you. If it hadn’t been for his music, I wouldn’t have been dancing like a lunatic that day, I wouldn’t have tripped, I wouldn’t have broken my arm, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to tell that wonderful lie. He’s really the hero of my story. I’m sure you don’t see it that way, but I do.