X-Memories

Thanks to the miracle of Netflix streaming, this year I watched every single "X-Files" episode, from the pilot to the finale. My main conclusion — not a groundbreaking one — is that the show was incredible. My second is that, for me, it's also incredibly nostalgic.

This surprised me, as I didn't start watching the show until the first movie came out, and even after that I wasn't the most loyal viewer. But I did love the series, and my brain apparently hosts a thick tangle of memories related to it.

For me, it started on Martha's Vineyard island. Yes, just like Mulder! Well, not exactly, though I did have a charge named Samantha (my dog, not named for the ill-fated girl).

I had gone to the island in the fall of 1994 to report for one of the papers there. It was my first time living in New England, and I knew only one person within a thousand-mile radius. The island at that time of year is quiet, a bit lonely, and incredibly beautiful. Or it was in those years. I lived in a one-bedroom in Katama, near the south shore. The apartment rented for $2,000 a week in-season, but I had it for $350 a month through April. It was furnished, beautifully: there was a huge bed, a table that was the perfect size for my chess set, and a big-screen TV hidden in a tasteful wooden armoire. It was probably the nicest apartment I've ever lived in. I still remember my friend Kate, who's usually reluctant to show she's impressed, saying, "oh my god, it's glamorous!"

I didn't really watch TV then, but I used to come home, open the armoire, and turn on the set for background noise. I was just getting to know the island — still figuring out that Aquinnah is technically the town of Gay Head, and Vineyard Haven is really Tisbury, but it's not West Tisbury, and by the way West Tisbury is just a small town that people from off-island tend not to know — and so on. So I was confused to occasionally glance at this show and see a label printed
across the screen, saying "West Tisbury." I remember thinking absently once, "This is a local show? ... Surely not." Someone at work cleared things up for me, but I didn't start watching the show then.

The next winter I was home for the holidays in the Midwest, and my dad said we should watch this sci-fi show that he liked. The X file in that case had to do with an invisible elephant, and I didn't really get it. I basically tuned it out but sat there for its duration, probably drawing or doing something crafty. I remember my dad saying that he really liked the show, though he complained that "she never believes him." Over the course of time, there have probably been countless evenings when I sat with my dad like that — me drawing, he fixing a watch or fiddling with a car part, all while a movie or TV show played — but this is the only specific night that lives in my memory.

Back on the island, the paper kept me busy, and though I was off the clock occasionally, I didn't go to the movies much back then. In fact, the island had only a few movie theaters at that time — in Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs. Both had painfully uncomfortable chairs, and the Vineyard Haven cinema was reputed for its elderly projector operator, who tended to get tired and make mistakes. He was known for once having played "The Usual Suspects" reels out of order, and for failing to keep movies focused if they went on longer than two hours. (The first time I saw "Titanic," poor Jack was pretty blurry by the time he finally slipped underwater.)

Sometime around 1997, a new cinema opened in Edgartown, which was pretty exciting for those of us who lived and worked on that end of the island. The Edgartown cinema had comfy chairs and was actually able to show more than one or two movies at a time! An actual cineplex. It was there that I saw the trailer for "Fight the Future." At first, it wasn't obvious the trailer was related to a TV show — for a minute or so, you saw no actors. I was into it until spotting the black-haired guy and the red-haired woman from that nichey TV show.

Luckily, I had a friend who saw the error in my thinking.

I had met Lila a few years earlier, when she was a clerk at my then-roommate's clothing store on Water Street. We connected when I walked through the store, not taken with anything until Lila said, "I know what you should try on." She directed me to a pair of pants that fit like they'd been tailored for me, and I bought two pairs.

Lila was not someone you would think of as the typical genre-TV fan. For one thing, I can't remember her watching any TV, outside of "The X-Files." In general, I think her tastes ran more to things like classical music and horseback riding. She had glorious long blonde hair, absolutely no ambition, and an obsession with Johnny Depp. She seemed committed to living a high-brow life, yet she lived on a shoestring, working for an inn in Oak Bluffs, in part for her lodging. Still, somehow she was always J. Crewed or Neiman-Marcused out and didn't understand why everyone else wasn't. She couldn't abide incorrect fashion choices, and she couldn't accept that I didn't want to see "Fight the Future." Her instincts were right — we went to see it at the new cinema, and I loved everything about it.

After that, it was our hobby to convene for "X-Files" reruns at the inn where Lila worked. On the way, we'd get takeout from Zapotec or Jimmy Seas. I remember once the Zapotec waitress brought us complimentary sangria while we waited for our food. The takeout arrived quicker than expected, and Lila said we had to leave immediately to catch the show. When I protested that I wasn't done with the drink, she didn't miss a beat, gathering her things and commanding "chug it!"

I don't recall what channel these reruns were on, but I do remember that they weren't in order, so Lila had to spend a lot of time during commercials explaining things like alien bounty hunters and black oil — every week a different topic, and not necessarily having much to do with whatever we'd been over last time. One of her most memorable explanations was of Krycek, whom she described as "Not as hot as Mulder, but hot. There's this one scene where Krycek gets up in Mulder's face and you just really want them to kiss — you've gotta see it."

Unfortunately, watching "The X-Files" out of order isn't really the right way to watch, so I was glad a brand-new season kicked off that fall, and I could finally start watching some episodes in the proper sequence. After the movie, Season Six was a bit of a letdown, but I stuck with it. By myself, this time. Lila was seasonal, usually not around in the fall and winter.

As it turned out, my time on the island was winding down, too. I decided to leave that next spring. I had about a month left on the job when one of my editors approached me and said, "You like 'The X-Files,' right?" When I answered in the affirmative, he explained that the next issue of our magazine was on track to have a few big empty pages in it — either a freelancer had flaked out, or an ad had gotten dropped or something like that. Anyway, long story short, he had an idea that we could fill the empty space with something about "The X-Files," a piece explaining why Mulder was an islander. My editor said it could be short and we could always fill it with art as needed. He figured I could just call up Chris Carter and get some insight into why the Vineyard figures so prominently in the show.

Well, surprise surprise, Chris Carter never called me back, and I couldn't get a word out of even the lowliest flack at Fox. My editor told me not to worry about it, but now I was interested in this question myself. I decided to query fans of the show about why they thought Mulder had been imagined as an Islander.

I started by looking for fans on the island, but I didn't get anything good that way — most local people just wanted to whine about all the inaccuracies in the show ("There is no Vine Street in Chilmark"). One exception was a guy up-Island who tried to show me a crazy mystical chamber on his farm where real ghosts or reincarnated spirits or walk-ins or some crap like that lived. I'm not sure he'd actually seen the show, despite his claims to the contrary.

Instead, I took to the Internet, visiting fan sites, e-mailing authors of fanfiction, and actually getting some interesting responses.

In those days, our paper had only one PC that was wired to the Internet (not mine), and I wasn't connected at home, so I came into the office at all hours to do my research. Since I was getting ready to move to Boston after four and a half years on the island, those were bittersweet evenings during which I'd do a little work, and a little packing up of my desk, sometimes wondering whether it was right to leave. I agonized over the story, too, driving my editors crazy with last-minute tweaks. I was reminded of this recently when going through a box of old stuff from that era. I actually came across a hard copy of one of my drafts that had been printed out for a proofreader, with my editor's scrawled comment: "The latest, and I hope last version of Sasha's masterpiece."

So the story was published, my things were packed, and I finally got off the rock. Season Seven of "The X-Files" saw me, at last, in the city, trying to get into the tech business, nickel-and-diming it, and renting a room from an elderly New Englander, Cora, who was fond of offering opinions on, well, everything. I still remember the night Cora joined me to watch the episode in which Scully wears a slinky black dress while dining out with Cancer Man. My septuagenarian roommate, speaking slowly and deliberately — as if making a very serious point she'd been meaning to articulate for some time — informed me, "If she was going to wear a dress like that, she really should have done something with her hair." Harsh words! Although, in reality, probably not as hypercritical as they sound. Cora felt obligated to offer guidance on such things: fashion, etiquette — how to have success in dining rooms and everywhere.

I was busy in those days, but I did still want to go back and watch the early episodes the way they were meant to be watched. Sadly our Blockbuster had only a "greatest hits" selection of about 16 episodes. I watched them all but didn't feel filled in on the mythology.

Eventually I dropped off. I caught one or two later-season episodes but didn't retain much about them, other than that I'd recognized Annabeth Gish bringing a wide-eyed optimism to the show.

A few years later, I tried to watch the whole series on Netflix DVDs, but about 20 million people must have had the same idea, because almost every "X-Files" disc looked like it had been pounded with a meat tenderizer. I got through most of the first season, but eventually became weary of sending scratched discs back only to get replacements were equally unplayable, and I gave up.

Then, several months ago I figured out that Netflix has the entire series available for streaming, and now — finally — I am all caught up. And after having watched the series finale yesterday, I find myself strangely preoccupied with all these past associations. What's really odd is that I wasn't nostalgic until after watching the finale. During the past several months of actually viewing all those old shows, I barely gave these memories a passing thought. I guess maybe now that I'm done with the series, I feel like I'm really done with all those things from the past as well, or a lot of them anyway.

Of course, the real tragedy is that I have no more of this brilliant series left to watch! I realize that this post has said absolutely nothing about why "The X-Files" is great, but if you don't already know, then I suggest that you navigate to Netflix.com and start watching. It'll be clear soon! Then you can join me in hoping that rumors of a third movie are true. I don't even care of it's good — I just want more.

The oatmeal of my dreams

In my dream, I was at the home of an acquaintance who was making oatmeal. He was combining all sorts of weird ingredients, but the stranger the combinations, the more delicious the concoction became, or so it seemed.

My acquaintance, John, stirred the oatmeal in a big bowl with a wooden spoon. The oatmeal looked light and smooth and creamy, more like a cool chocolate mousse than a hot cereal. John's house was a bit chaotic, with kids running around, the phone ringing, and guests coming and going, but he put the dish together with the grace and confidence of Kim Yu-Na channeling James Bond.

By the time John was finished, I knew I had to have his recipe and I said as much. As he rattled off ingredients and procedures, I tried to write everything down. But each time I went back to check my notes, I realized that I had missed not just a few but many important points, and no amount of checking and rewriting seemed to correct the errors. I began to have the sinking feeling that I was not going to be able to record the recipe, but I also refused to give up.

As my alarm intruded, I began realizing the recipe was just a dream. Yet for several minutes I still believed that, even though it wasn't real, and dubious as some of the ingredients were, the recipe should be tried — that it might be transcendent. As sleep slipped away, I struggled to remember the ingredients.

Today I can recall only two: barbecue sauce and Greek whipped cream. Or not quite enough to make the magic happen.

Rest in peace, Temple members

Years ago I learned that an acquaintance of mine had been involved with burying the victims of the Jonestown tragedy. My acquaintance, whom I'll call Sam, told me that his family's funeral home had publicized a toll-free phone number for friends and relatives to call if they wanted to identify any of the bodies. I can still remember Sam telling me that no one had ever called, that many victims had ended up in a mass grave. Sam, who is black, seemed to think that society in general didn't care about these people because most of them were either black, poor, or both.

I took this story with a grain of salt, thinking that surely there were many people who grieved for the Jonestown victims. Still, the idea that no one ever called that number has always bothered me, as has the idea that the victims were simply dismissed by the world. It made me wonder who they were and what they went through. At the time, I tried reading a book on Jonestown, but the one I chose was too disturbing for me then, so I set the topic aside for a long time.

Recently, I was flipping channels and caught the last 20 minutes of a documentary on the Jonestown. Later I rented a different documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, and after watching it, I read Seductive Poison, a memoir by former Jonestown resident Deborah Layton. Both were excellent. I'm going to devote this post to the documentary, and a future post to the book.

Passionate idealism
If you've never heard of Jonestown, here are the basics: Jonestown was named for the Rev. Jim Jones, who was the leader of a church — or cult — called Peoples Temple. Espousing the causes of racial integration, social justice, and community, Jones led a congregation of 900 people from San Francisco to the wilds of Guyana, on the northern coast of South America, where they said they would build a utopian society, which came to be called Jonestown.

But before too long, questions arose about how people were treated in Jonestown and whether they were truly free to leave. In November 1978, a congressman from California went to visit, along with several journalists — and violence erupted. As Congressman Leo Ryan was trying to leave Guyana with several church members who had pled for his help, Temple gunmen launched an attack that killed Ryan and four others. Later that day, Jones, who had become increasingly paranoid, told his disciples they were in grave danger and ordered them to drink cyanide-laced punch. Those who resisted were forced to drink or injected with cyanide, while armed Temple members kept people from fleeing. A total of 913 people died.

That's a lot of ground to cover in 90 minutes, but that is what this film attempts to do. Actually, it attempts to do even more. The movie, which was directed by Stanley Nelson and released in 2006, begins with Jones's impoverished Indiana childhood, describes the creation of the Temple, its growth in California, and its end in Guyana. Forgoing the use of voiceovers and interviewer questions, the filmmaker relies soley on comments from well-chosen sources — including many former Temple members — and historical footage.

What I liked about the film was the very real face it puts on the group. Especially compelling are former members who describe the ideals that brought them into the fold, mainly Jones's causes of racial integration and equality.

"I was impressed by how it was such an interracial group, and people were really happy," says Bryan Kravitz in the film. He explains that he first saw Jones speak during a Temple visit to Philadelphia. "I heard Jim Jones talking about equality among the races. ... The good works that they were doing. Things that I wanted to get involved with but didn't even know where to make an entrée. And all of a sudden, the answer was there."

Some of those who went to Jonestown speak of the joy they felt in being able to live simply and self-
sufficiently, producing all their own food and essentially being shareholders in a community that they built themselves. As part of the Jonestown footage, the film shows photographs of people tending crops, kids playing basketball, and mothers holding children.

"It was just an exciting time," said former Temple member Laura Johnston Kohl. "Everything was new and unique and just fun, you know? We just had fun with it as it grew. I just loved that we created what we ate, that we did all these jobs."

But there was a dark side. Many people, members from varying stages in the Temple's 20+-year life, speak of discovering Jones's deceit, his sadistic tendencies, and his gestapo-style intimidation of those who might want to defect from the group. These troublesome facts about Jones seemed to become increasingly evident over the years, apparently reaching fever pitch in Guyana.

For many, however, the problems were secondary to the central mission of the group. Many in the film speak of how and why they came to accept the abuses. "It's like a child in a dysfunctional family," said former member Jordan Vilchez. "On a certain level, it's normal."

Added former member Hue Fortson Jr.: "We felt like we had gotten involved and gotten in so deep that there was actually no way out."

'She died in my arms'
The film captures — in chilling detail — the strange events of Nov. 17 and Nov. 18, 1978.

The sequence begins with video footage of Ryan and his party's first visit to Jonestown, where residents initially put Ryan's mind at ease. Many of the Jonestown residents seem to be in good spirits, and a singer entertains the multiracial group. As a member of Ryan's party says in the film, "It was a vibrant community. I would never have imagined that 24 hours later those people would be dead."

The first warning sign was when a frightened Temple member tried to pass a note to a member of Ryan's party asking for safe passage out of the community. That person was one of those who eventually reached safety, though Ryan, three journalists, and one defector were not as lucky. They were shot to death while trying to board a small plane out of the area. An NBC cameraman, who died in the gunfire, filmed some of the events before he was killed, and the footage is featured in the movie.

Perhaps even more disturbing is audio that the filmmakers secured, apparently from tapes recovered from the site, of Jones informing his congregation that Ryan was dead and that all of Peoples Temple would be blamed and punished — tortured even — unless they escaped in an act of "revolutionary suicide."

"It's nothing to death, it's just stepping into another plane. Don't be this way," Jones calmly intones. And later: "Quickly quickly quickly quickly quickly. Where is the vat? The vat, the vat, bring it here so the adults can begin."

It is one of the more haunting pieces of audio I've ever heard. I suggest not watching this right before you go to bed.

Of the entire film, some the most heartbreaking moments are the accounts of members who escaped from the scene of the murder-suicides. Two members watched their wives die; one also watched his baby die. You can almost feel the claustrophia of the jungle and the madness of Jones as they describe their loved ones' last moments.

"I saw my wife with our son in her arms and poison being injected into his mouth," former member Tim Carter says in the film. "My son was dead and he was frothing at the mouth. You know, cyanide makes people froth at the mouth. My wife died in my arms. And my dead baby son was in her arms. And I held her and said, 'I love you, I love you,' because that was all I could say. It was like — she died in my arms."

Later in the film he says, "They were just fucking slaughtered. ... It was just senseless waste and death."

Stanley Clayton relays how his wife saw her mother, grandmother, and siblings die. Then she followed Jones's directive willingly.

"She went up to that Kool-Aid, to that death barrel, and she just didn't hesitate," Clayton said. "She took it and drunk and told me to hold her. ... She died in my arms. Once I laid her down — she told me she wanted to lay with her grandmother — I at that point knew that I didn't have any reason to be here anymore." Clayton then cleverly tricked armed Temple guards and escaped into the jungle.

If I have a complaint about the film, it's that I think it glossed over certain details. Perhaps this is a necessity when boiling down a complex topic to a 90-minute presentation, but after doing a little reading on the topic, I think it would have been useful to identify the time frame that each member was in Jonestown, and whether any were "inside" members close to Jones, as opposed to being further way and perhaps insulated from his more frightening behavior.

I also thought that a letter found at Jonestown, and read at the end of the film, was edited in such a way as to make it seem more ambiguous than it really was. Perhaps this wasn't intentional, but from the presentation in the film, I thought the letter-writer was resistant to the suicide order. After finding the full transcript online, I no longer think so. Either way, the letter is incredibly moving and sad; I just don't think it was edited well for the film.

But these are mainly nitpicks. In general, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple offers a fascinating introduction to its topic.

Memorial
After watching this film, my thoughts turned back to Sam and his recollections. I've since learned that a memorial wall is being erected at the site of a mass grave of several hundred Jonestown victims in California.

My own memorial is below. In my drawing, I chose to make all the headstones the same size to indicate that the people had something in common, but the individual inscriptions were inspired by remembrances I found on a web site called Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. This site, which is part of San Diego State University, includes a list of all those who died, with tools that let friends and relatives leave memorial comments about any of the victims.

If you're curious about this tragedy, I hope you'll either rent Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, which is available from Netflix, or go to the SDSU site and look at some of the testimonials about the victims. I think that the greatest honor we can do the Jonestown victims is to remember them, and recognize that each one represents a unique and incalculable loss.

Help me sing it!

I saw a poll the other day asking people to name their favorite Michael Jackson songs, and it got me thinking about whether I have one of my own. I'm not sure I do. How does one choose between the taut dread of "Billie Jean" and the delirious fun of "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough"? Between the relish of "Human Nature" and the pain of "Will You Be There"? Some of these songs, as Newsweek recently pointed out, are "so perfect of their kind that they'll never sound dated."

Still, there's one song for which I have a particular affection. I'm not sure I can explain why, because there's no big dramatic story, but I'll try.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid, because my dad was in the Air Force. I usually adapted pretty well, but one move was kind of overwhelming — when we went from Spain, where we'd been for four years, to a small town in Oklahoma. I had just turned 13 when we came stateside, and I didn't know what to make of anything. I really missed my old life. I'd loved the Spanish architecture, the Spanish countryside, and the Spanish food. Moreover, the military community had been inclusive and welcoming. We'd had a nice house with a backyard, from which I rode my bike all over. We hadn't had things like current American TV, so we'd apparently missed a few cultural phenomena including "Who shot J.R.?," but I was
fine with that.

By contrast, Oklahoma seemed small, and the people in our town homo-
goneous. It felt like we were the only new ones, and for some reason we lived in an apartment with no windows. It's hard to believe now that the fire codes allowed that, but apparently they did. The apartment had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, all weirdly dark. We took to clustering around the TV.

Life outside the apartment wasn't so hot, either. I thought the area was desolate, and I missed my friends. It didn't get better when my mother took me to register at the middle school. I remember that weekday afternoon quite clearly; she and the assistant principal got into a long, boring conversation that didn't grab my attention until my mother asked when I should start class. My brain desperately screamed "not today," while the administrator said, "Might as well jump right in." I was reluctantly led to a classroom.

I never fit in at the school. I thought the other kids were cliquey, and I was horrified to find that the Oklahomans were way ahead of me in math.

My fondest memories of the first few weeks are of holing up in my room, writing in my journal, and occasionally walking to the Arby's next door. And of course, visiting the record store. Back then, I listened to ELO, Billy Joel, and the Beatles, along with a healthy smattering of Eighties froth. I had a wonderful stereo, a Christmas gift from the year before that had been carefully selected for me by my dad. It was a silver mini-component set. Most of the components were Fisher, but the piece that sat on the bottom was a little Pioneer turntable. You just pushed a button and the turntable slid out magically from its enclave below the tuner.

We hadn't been there long when the 20-something daughter of family friends left her home a couple of states away to come stay with us for a while. I liked Sarah, though she made me self-conscious. She was self-assured and beautiful, whereas I was clumsy and wore glasses. I remember watching some sort of music show with her on TV, and talking about which were the best John Cougar songs — I was thrilled I could hold up my end of the conversation. Initially neither she nor anyone else told me the real reason she was there, but after she left I found out why: her boyfriend had been beating her up, and after she'd left him, he'd stalked her. She'd come to our home to disappear for a while. In my memory, those facts make the shadowy apartment seem even more like a bunker than it might otherwise.

Eventually Sarah went home, and life started going really well for her (as it has ever since). I found I was sorry to see her go. In her absence, I spent more time angsting over various things, some real, others not so much.

Left to my own devices, one of my favorite distractions was listening to Casey Kasem. I heard the first few "Thriller" singles that way. As I wrote in a previous post, I resisted the album at first, but the snippets I heard won me over. Making the decision to buy the record got me kind of psyched, in a way. No one in my family liked Michael Jackson, so buying the record, even though it was so popular, felt in some ways like a private thing, just for me. I remember bringing it home to my darkened room and sitting on my bed to unwrap it. I put the record on, heard "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" for the first time, and it was like someone turned the lights on.

I don't know what exactly happened. Maybe the song inspired me while I was feeling a bit off my game. Maybe it reminded me that there was a world outside Oklahoma. Or maybe it's just a really kick-ass song. With its urgent beat and that glorious, high-octane African chant, it was like nothing I'd ever heard. And yet, I also had the strong sense that the song couldn't be new. I know now that the chant is a riff on the one from Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa," but if you've heard that song, you know it sounds nothing like Michael's, so that doesn't account for my aural déjà vu — how in a very strange way, I felt like I'd always known "Startin' Somethin'." I was sure the song must have been years old. I put this to people many times over the coming weeks. For some reason, they all insisted the song was new. Eventually I accepted that. I concluded it was just some peculiar magic that made the song seem special, timeless. That song, and the whole album, felt like a gift.

Like I said at the top of this post, I don't really have a favorite Michael Jackson song, but the sheer power of that one — the way it instantly brightened everything like no single song had before or has since — will always give it a special place in my heart and mind. Perhaps that's an overly sentimental notion about a song that really couldn't be less so itself, but there you have it.

Miracle in the Sooner State

One of my earliest memories about Michael Jackson is also one of my clearest of middle school. I was sitting in my eighth grade math class, waiting for it to start. I was new — my dad was in the Air Force, and we'd just moved to town. I was your basic shy outsider, trying to move silently through insular environs. In that class, I sat next to three of the most popular boys in school, a trio who, in my opinion, acted a bit more superior than was warranted. That day, they were talking about Michael Jackson's new album. "Do you have 'Thriller' yet?" the blond son-of-the-teacher said to the football player. The athlete nodded sagely and said, "yeah." And then they fell silent for a moment, reflecting, or so it seemed, on how cool they were.

I was determined not to like this record. My aversion was spurred not just by these Heathers, but also by my tendency then to distance myself from things wildly popular. Not that we in that corner of Oklahoma really knew what was wildly popular, but we knew about "Thriller." And despite my principles, I heard "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," and soon it became clear that resistance was futile. One overcast Saturday afternoon I walked down to our little record store, where they displayed posters of Prince next to Def Leppard and John Cougar, and I bought what was to become one of my most beloved pieces of vinyl. In the coming years, "Thriller" would travel with me everywhere — when my family moved to yet another town and school system, when I went away to college, and when my various journalism gigs propelled me around the country still further. The record got a bit battered in greater St. Louis, when I unwisely situated my music a little too close to the air conditioner, but luckily no major harm was done.

"Thriller" was hardly the only memorable Michael recording in my life. During my freshman year at school, one of my two roommates was fond of playing Jackson 5 cassettes (to the disapproval of our other roommate, who favored INXS). I wasn't ready for the Jackson 5 back then (or INXS); that was the year I listened to "Abbey Road" over and over. Still, to this day when I hear "ABC," a track I now love, I can see that room we three shared: complete with boom box, Anne's fish bowl, and a stash of Swedish cupcakes, which were occasionally delivered by Ingegärd's mom.

A couple of years later, I was living and working in Texas. After a Bad Breakup, I decided a change was in order, so I moved from the antiseptic, urban sprawl of Arlington to Dallas's funkier lower Greenville area. From there, I and my fabulous best friend, a singer and dancer, explored dance clubs in Deep Ellum and Cedar Springs. We also made a mix tape of dance tunes that featured some choice "Off the Wall" tracks. But the real victory of that era was when I stumbled across an LP that featured five different mixes of "Black or White," which I promptly bought and recorded to a cassette that I labeled "45 minutes with Michael." That song's infectious exuberance — undercut with just the right amount of steel — is one that still gives me a lift, particularly the Clivillés & Cole House/Club Mix.


The mid-'90s found me on Martha's Vineyard island, where, like many other year-round residents, I bounced between gorgeous winter apartments and humble summer shacks at the whim of the tourism industry. My first summer was spent in a centuries-old house in Vineyard Haven, where the rotating cast of residents included a waitress, a high school student, and a handful of chain-smoking musicians who liked to tell stories about the place possibly being haunted. My housemates were diverse in age (17 to 40-something) and in ethnicity (Venezuelan, Cuban-American, Anglo), but united in their desire to cluster 'round the TV for the world premiere of the "Scream" video. I'll never forget it: stark and angry, it was an entirely valid rebuke to the venomous tabloid press and, more broadly, to the sometimes judgmental nature of the public's celebrity fascination. And while its refrain — a cry for mercy from oppressive pressure — was clearly not inspired by the sorts of problems I had, its effect was cathartic. I loved it.

Of course, despite the message of "Scream," over time it became ever more the fashion for people to mock MJ's oddities. It seemed like I was always the last to hear about the latest gossip, but I admit that occasionally I too was put off by his eccentricities. Still, I was generally inclined to defend him. So was one of my later roommates, Kate, a small-business owner who was endlessly curious about MJ's life. "It makes sense that he would marry Lisa Marie," I can still remember her saying. "Look at the lives they've led — they're the same."

Eventually I ditched the island for Boston, and the journalism gig for Corporate America. As Michael's output slowed, I suppose I thought about him less, though with the advent of iTunes I loaded up on his work, buying several vintage tracks I hadn't heard before, including the joyous "Just a Little Bit of You" and some cool previously unreleased "Thriller"-era recordings. Last year I drew heavily on all stages of Michael's oeuvre when I created my "Best of the Jacksons" playlist, a favorite for when I'm cooking or working out.


My iPod and the playlist were with me at my gym last Thursday night, but I wasn't listening to them; I was watching CNN's coverage about Michael Jackson being taken to the hospital. My initial reaction was one of mild concern, yet whenever they showed recent footage of Jackson, I was also — selfishly — a bit irritated. Why did he have to get so weird? It's uncomfortable to admit that now, but it crossed my mind. Still, when Wolf Blitzer paused and said darkly that there was new information, I drew in my breath and brought the elliptical machine to a halt. How could Michael Jackson be dead?

Since then, television and Internet reports have shown me a lot of fandom. When I hear people say "I feel like I knew him!", the hyperbole makes me cringe a bit and yet, I kind of get it. Perhaps anyone who follows an artist for a long time starts to feel they know the person. Yet we obviously didn't know him. So why does the loss seem so acute?

For me, a partial answer came tonight when I was streaming videos: "Thriller," "Remember the Time," "Bad," the sublimely simple "Rock With You," and others. MJ's intonations are so familiar, and yet no less pleasing for being so. Likewise, the imagination and style of his performances still floor me, even those I've watched countless times. The work would be great even without the nostalgia component, yet the latter is there too, and it's strong. The music of Michael Jackson has been such a constant in my life, throughout many miles of travel, friendships that came and went, and a few decades of growing up. I'm scarcely the same person I was when I first dropped the needle on "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," yet MJ's music has been a steady soundtrack, and a damn good one. When I think of his voice, his smile, and his grace, I'm rather thrilled that anyone could have had these gifts. I realize now that, in a way, those gifts must have been a burden to him. That makes me all the more grateful that I got to enjoy them, and it seems wrong, somehow, that I can't thank him for that.