We go to war with each other. With moods. A callous ‘I can’t tonight’. The absence of a forced laugh. A lack of attention. Differences of opinion. Subtleties that incite. I don’t think we mean to do it. Certainly there are moments plotted. But in the end, I think it just sort of happens, subconsciously. Maybe it’s not so much a game as it is the failure of a ridiculous expectation that two people will share the same disposition at any given time.

“Mmm,” she moans, scooping rice into her mouth, most of it waterfalling over her chopsticks. “Brandi and some of the girls are going out to West Sixth tomorrow night…we should go.”

She’s twenty-nine, but doesn’t seem a day over eighteen. None of them ever do. She’s wearing a slim black dress with slits cut at mid-thigh. She’s worn it at work before. Her hair always seems nicer when she doesn’t do anything to it, but tonight she has it frizzled and curled. Same goes for her lips, which she’s lacquered with blood red paint.

“I don’t think so,” I say, my eyes fixed on swirling a roll around a pool of thick brown goop. “Not really my scene.”

“C’mon, it’ll be fun. We both work all the time…it would be nice to go out to a real bar for once.”

“I hate that whole area…it wouldn’t be fun for me. You should go, though.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean that I hate that whole area, and I wouldn’t have fun.”

“But I would?”

“You just said you would,” I mumble, my cheek puffed with a mashed mixture of salmon, cream cheese and rice.

I have to come to learn that in my twenty-six years, I know next to nothing when it comes to sexual relationships. But I do know that the ensuing few seconds of silence has officially killed this one. It may take awhile longer for the structural damage that just occurred to send the whole thing into collapse. But this is the beginning of the end.

“Well, I’d rather hang out with you.”

These are the sorts of comments that I brush off, or don’t even think about, until hours, months, or years down the road, when I finally see one vulnerable human being reaching out to another, a chain reaction from some misguided form of affection. It is then that I set out to amend such callousness, but by then it is already to late – they have either moved on, or are now on the attack, leaving me to counter. It seems to be cyclical, the nature of those I gravitate towards. We both seem to be active participants in giving and receiving the antithesis to our dispositions. But again, I don’t think we realize that at the time.

“That’s fine.”

“And we’ll go to West Sixth?” she asks, lowering her eyes to meet mine.

“No,” I say after a bout of silence. “If you want to go there, go. If you want to hang out with me, that’s cool, too. But I hate that place, I never have fun there, and the only reason I’d be there would be to hang out with you…and we wouldn’t be able to talk because they’d be blaring some shitty…I don’t know, who’s popular these days?”

“Katy Perry.”

“Some shitty Katy Perry song.” She laughs. My humor is a right hook meant to back the opponent off.

She puts her hand on mine, and softens her eyes, in the manner that a mother or a sister or a close friend would. This freaks the hell out of me. I don’t really know how to go back to the apartment and fuck someone who does that. For worse, I need that cold distance we just braved back there. I need the beginning of the end in order to go on. I need that war.

And when I don’t, when I want to raise the white flag and call an end to the whole thing, just shut my mouth and drink enough $6 rums to be comfortable simulating sex in public to to Lil’ Wayne, and admit to deep affection…she will be ready to fight.

It’s a little after seven in the morning, and I’m driving east on I-90, wearing a suit and keeping one eye on the road while I attempt to relight a wind-extinguished joint. A weekend A.M. conservative radio host rants against the propaganda of the H1N1 virus scare, as I am on the way to a funeral to mourn a person who has just died from it. Normally, I’d find myself uncomfortably incensed, but it doesn’t really register. Perhaps I’m reeling from a lack of sleep. Perhaps I’m high. Perhaps it just hasn’t hit me yet.

Daylight blooms into a soulless grey sky, and the landscape slowly devolves from city to suburb to country. And it hasn’t hit me yet. Around nine, I stop at a small gas station in the middle of nowhere and pick up a tall Pabst. The clerk looks at me with a hint of apprehension and asks if I want a bag. It still hasn’t hit me yet.

Driving along the fields, I sip my beer and think about serving her quintuples in oversized styrofoam cups, charging her high fives. I think about her large and warm eyes. I think about idle chatter during cigarette breaks. I think about that whole town, vibrant and driven, because of people like her. A community of unbridled enthusiasm, yet to be put into its place by the ways of the world. Still nothing.

I pull into the church parking lot, the modest building standing out in the middle of nowhere. It feels like a Guns ‘N Roses video. I sit in my car for a moment before stepping out to see Karen, a beautiful acquaintance from the past, her lips bent into a rarely seen frown, her pale face red from the tears. She nods solemnly to acknowledge me. I see Alan, with an unexpected beard and a ponytail, emitting the same expression.

And it hits me. Kimi is dead. And I am still alive.

It’s not the specter of death that gets to me, nor the gravity of the loss. It’s the impermanence and the unfairness. Here I am in a fucking cornfield, wearing a suit, staring into the faces of pain, the faces who no longer parade down High St. without a care. And Kimi is dead, and I haven’t slept, and I’m twenty-six years old and I drive prostitutes around for a living and I’m an adult. I am an adult.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

I make quiet hellos in the parking lot, splash some water on my face in the bathroom and take a seat in a pew, staring at the photo of her lifelessly emitting from the projector. An attempt at a hip Christian song plays on loop. As people fill in I daydream about taking a bullet for this one. It’s not so much a daydream as a plea or a silent prayer. Just go back, and take me. I’m an asshole, I drink too much, I do too many drugs, I hurt too many people and quite frankly I’ve never really wanted to be here. And she’s the one who has to go?

The room swells and swells and swells. Ushers scramble to find more seating. I can’t help but think that whether they know it or not, this is everyone’s deepest fantasy. As morbid as it sounds, what more can we ask for, but to have an unexpected turnout for the mourning of our demise?

People clumsily share their memories of Kimi into the microphone, and towards the end of the ceremony, a bald pastor lectures theatrically about the need for Christ to save our souls. He makes little mention of Kimi except to use her name as a means to promote what he’s selling. I think he means well, but he’s the furthest thing from well that I can think of.

His words bring me back to reality — life is not fair, nor is it logical. Good people will do bad things. Bad things will happen to good people. Kimi is dead. And I am alive.

After the ceremony I hug Rebecca in the parking lot. Her face, like Karen’s, is puffy and red. I can feel her organs pumping as I hold her. After the casket has pulled away, all of us make avoiding small talk and take far too much time to plan a trip to Bowling Green for pizza.

I eat a few slices, make a few wisecracks and have a few rum and Cokes before heading off to blow a tire a quarter mile into the turnpike. I wrestle off my suitcoat and light a cigarette, resting against the guardrail while cars whir by. I think about Kimi, and how life isn’t fair.

But I am still alive.

We had a neo-Jesus walking amongst us, and we didn’t recognize it until it was too late.

But I am still alive.

Dawn is just starting to seep into the sky as Kelly wearily turns the key into her door. The hallway smells like laundry. She goes off to wash the fluid of strangers from her body while I change out of my work clothes and pet her attention starved cat. I imagine it must be a bit of a sacred ritual, the cleansing. There are no photos of her family in her apartment. There are many black and white photos with matching frames that express trend rather than vision. It almost seems like a designed set. She has a copy of Mystic Pizza on DVD. Nonetheless, it is the apartment of an adult.

Free from the suffocating leather dress, her hair still stringy and wet, coltish legs now sheathed in denim, we drive to the third shift bar, basking in the dead lights of the buzzing but dormant commercial district, where we join an odd gathering of cops, working girls, factory workers, war veterans and insomniacs. We sit in the corner and our ice sloshes around the rocks glasses like barely perceptible piano tinkling.

“I always wanted to go to the San Diego Zoo,” she says, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth.

“Why’s that?”

“Sounds like a nice place…when I was younger my class went to the Cleveland Zoo, and when I asked the teacher what the best zoo was, he said San Diego.”

“Ever been to California?”

“No. Vegas once,” she says biting her pinkie nail in contemplation. “But we all need that place…we’ve never been but know we want to be there.”

“Only place I want to be is places I’ve already been…places I can no longer be.”

We finish our drinks far too fast. The ice has barely melted. I rise to get another round but she grabs my wrist. Fleetwood Mac plays on the jukebox.

“I’ve got it…I had a good night.” She says it without bravado, or shame or monotony. It just hangs in the air. It’s accepted.

I know she had a good night, because I was there. Or near there. Sitting in the hotel bar, or listening to the classic rock station in the car, while she had her good night.

Her hair has started to dry, flourishing into a marble-like swirl of its two-tones. She could pass for twenty-five, claims she is twenty-nine, and is probably thirty or thirty-one. Here at the bar her make-up is subtle. At work, it’s rather garish, not exactly tacky, but a mask of sorts. As she slides into the booth, she squeezes the lime into my drink and drops the remnants of the rind into the glass. I note that the bartender and two others are looking at me.

The color has washed from the film of my life. It’s an indie film, a rerun from the 70s’, anything but real.

“What do you think of Fleetwood Mac?” I ask, as if I expect to learn something important from the answer. Call it a stereotype or just a personal generalization, but I find that if a woman has some deep admiration for Stevie Nicks, they are more likely than not batshit crazy.

“I adore Stevie Nicks,” she says, sipping from her glass. I like batshit crazy. “You?”

“I dig ‘em.”

“Yeah, they’re good,” she says for no reason whatsoever, and we fall into a brief silence where we stare at each other, not dotingly or longingly or nervously. We just stare. It’s accepted.

It’s light out when Kelly wearily turns her key into the door once again. We each have a Bartles & Jaymes Pina Colada from the fridge and play with the cat for a minute before we sulk off to the bedroom, where we whisper languidly and fall asleep.

The man sitting across from me may have provided your buddy with the bundle that stopped his heart. He may have been the one who sold the pill that was slipped into your sister’s drink. It’s entirely possible that he will one day indirectly contribute to the death of this writer. He didn’t shove the shit down our throats, but his prints are all over the instrument of death.

He is a saavy businessman or a heartless sociopath, depending on who you talk to. To hear him tell it, he’s merely providing a service, a good time, an escape. According to the sobbing mother who unsuccessfully pleaded desperately against his parole, he floods the streets of our city with poison and decay, and should be caged like the animal that he is.

So which is it?

“S’go down to your school dis weekend…goo’a money in Costa-Q’s in colleges,” he says flatly, with a smile. “Frat boys eat dat shit up, eh?”

“I don’t need to fuck around with roofies, man,” I say, plugging one nostril and taking a sniff from the glass bullet cradled in the other hand.

“Wha’s the big deal, eh? You coak a pretty young ting up for de first time, you nail her…das not the same ting? You buy hair juan too many beers. Same.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”

“Jah’stafy what you do, damn what you don’t…no?”

“Pretty much…but I still don’t need to fuck around with roofies. No offense.”

“Noan taken.”

Some would think that I’m throwing you a softball here. Let’s face it — this cat is a scumbag. There’s no two ways about it. But maybe that’s why I chose to tell you about him. Forgiving the scumbags is the hardest part, isn’t it? The thing that separates us from the morality of Christ that so many in this country purport to want to achieve? Maybe it’s not as easy as we think or want it to be.

Let’s mix it up a bit — what about the kid from the mill town who sends an Iraqi’s brains across the sand? He killed someone’s kid, someone’s dad, someone’s husband. Is he is just doing his job, serving his country proudly? Or did he just kill a man in cold blood? Which is it?

What about the CEO of the cigarette company? Or the woman who sits in a cubicle and deems your cancer to be a ‘pre-existing condition’? The person who robbed you, who raped you, who broke your heart? Where do they land? What about you?

What about me?

“Jew want to stick aroun’, some girls on de way,” our original subejct says. “Fine tings. We hit the bar, eh, Shakespeah?”

“No roofies,” I say coldly. He laughs.

“Den no booze, no cocaina…no even a cigarette,” he says with a smile. “Es no goo’a for dem.”

The buzzer goes off, and after examining the grainy, black and white security camera, he presses a button to let them into the lobby. They’re Latin girls, in their late teens or early twenties, wearing less clothing than most girls I know wear to bed. They chew their fingernails and shift their legs back and forth, balancing in their heels, unaware that we’re watching them.

“Jess kidding,” he says, slapping me on the shoulder and heading towards the door. “Dee’s ones are so dumb, jew need no pills…only words.”

I’m wrong and I’m sorry.

When the evolutionists pitch you their case, they always leave out one key component. One integral idea that is tied to the hip of their theorem, and yet they don’t acknowledge it. De-evolution. You simply can’t have one without the other, and yet these folks would have you believe that the chart of our existence can only go up, up, up.

The Days Inn near 90 is notorious for having a sizable chunk of its business stem from underage parties and interstate drug trafficking. Diego and I pull up in a car neither of us own, windows down, the commercial light spilling across the landscape, ‘Only In My Dreams’ blaring from the speakers.

“Is that Debbie Gibson?” a young and pretty girl asks incredulously/flirtatiously. She sits next to her friend, smoking cigarettes outside of the card-only annex entrance.

“You bet your ass it is,” I  grumble with a smile, tossing my cigarette butt as I walk by. It had another three or four good hits left. Just felt right at the moment.

“Room 305!” she calls out as we pass, no doubt in consideration of Diego and his square jaw, tea skin, Anglo blue eyes and flowing black ponytail. He laughs with a shake of his head.

“First business,” he says casually.”Den girls.” Diego is so fake that I couldn’t make him up if I wanted to.

Forty-five minutes later we find ourselves in 305, drinking beer and snorting lines with our newfound friends. Conan talks from the chained-down television, but no one listens. The art is compromised of sailboats and cabins. The bedspread is maroon and itchy. The carpet is visibly stained. There’s a notepad waiting on the desk, and I want to write in it…but would anyone want to read it?

I end up talking with a chunky Italian girl. Her hair is wavy and greasy looking. She reeks so badly of hairspray that it makes me nauseous. Barely respectable breasts hang from her tank top, sheathed by a purple bra purchased to imply sexuality. Her razor thin jean shorts aren’t suited for her. She reminds me of Bristol Palin. She’s void of any intellectual thought, and we have absolutely nothing in common. She’s perfect.

These days I can only sleep with women that I am not attracted to — either physically or mentally. If there’s a single spark, I run for the hills.

Diego has the best-looking girl in the bathroom, and the others mill about the cubicle, so for privacy we move to the car in the parking lot.

It’s cramped, but she manages to mount up and slide her underwear over. As she thrusts I fantasize about someone sneaking alongside the window and blowing my brains out. I use the image of white hot steel racing through the flesh of mind in order to get off. It’s quick. It’s flashy. Mind erasing. I can see the neon of the Days Inn logo backwards in the windshield.

It hasn’t been the same since I took this path. These days it either doesn’t work, doesn’t shoot or shoots too quick. I don’t seem to care…this fact alarms me more than anything.

Getting bored, I put everything I have into it until my dick is wet and cold. I am ready to depart. Back in the room, I have to wait for Diego to emerge from the bathroom, squirming as she traces her finger along my upper arm and kisses me on the cheek after everything I say, drawing her index finger to my chin and pulling towards something I will retract from.

I am assuming that she wants something hedonistic. I just wanted a fuck. I want to share her obliviousness, and she wants to be what she think I am.

Diego surfaces, and we exit. Abruptly. Coldly. Fake numbers. We laugh about it on the way back to his place.

I would’ve been happier if I’d stayed home and read a book.

Why do we pine for people instead of moments?

Brain cancer. Lung cancer. Breast cancer. Pancreatic cancer. Rectal cancer. Bladder cancer. Cervical cancer. Stomach cancer. Ovarian cancer. Bone cancer. That’s some nasty stuff right there. Black, rotting, and destructive. Shit will eat you alive. Fast, if you don’t catch it in time.

But what about the cancer of anger? Of hatred? Of regret? Those will eat you up far faster. The pain is worse. Much harder to endure. No ribbon for that. No charity walks for loathing of the self, of others, of the world. Not much funding for cancers of the soul.

No cure. The disease mutates. We implement ‘cures’ for slavery, for lynchings, for ‘whites only’, yet it still thrives inside. Now they just think ‘nigger’ instead of saying it out loud. We learn to bury the word ‘bitch’ or ‘cunt’, but it still festers. We bury the past. But we don’t kill it. We don’t let it die. We project it. Displace it. We must not recognize it’s presence in our bodies, our souls.

They call it ‘remission’. Remission. The lack of a previously present disease. The forgiveness of sin. The reduction of a prison sentence. ‘Remission’ is synonymous with ‘cure’. But is it, really? And if so, why don’t we just say ‘cured’?

Because it might come back. And if it can come back, it’s not dead. It’s inside us, somewhere, buried, waiting to re-emerge.

I am in remission. The hate, anger, and regret remains inside of me, waiting to eat me alive.

For the past two months, I start every day by tailgating it. Within thirty minutes of waking, I crack the first beer, or pour the first drink, and sit in the folding chair I’ve propped in the center of the front lawn. I play Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll, Part 2′, and then Warren Zevon or REO Speedwagon or Journey. I sing along loudly. I dance without thought. I point and make gestures. Neighbors driving to work or walking their dogs or mowing their lawns stare. Sometimes I think they want to be me. Sometimes I know they pity or loathe me.

As the day passes, I move on to a dealer’s apartment, or a friend’s house,  or a bar. I imbibe whatever is available to dilute my mind. Drink. Snort. Shoot. I fuck who I can, so long as I don’t care about them. I punch who I feel deserves it. It’s amazing what an unexpected haymaker coming from the back pocket can do. The dull thud, like hitting dough — it gives the illusion that I’m letting it all go.

I drive drunk. I mouth off. I smoke too much. I clog my arteries with greasy food. I pay for beer with dimes, without shame. I am described as ‘fun’ or ‘carefree’. If you smile while you do it, not many question it. They believe in remission, much like they believe in the politician’s promise of ‘change’.

I speak and write tersely. Description is superfluous. I write only when I am too numb to feel the impact and meaning of my words. I avoid those who care for me. I chase those who don’t. I only commit to actions I do not have to ponder. I pretend to believe in nothing in the name of self-preservation. I avoid an active life, because an active life will cease the so-called remission.

Smile. Fake it. Fuck her. Hit him. Just do it. Don’t think. Thinking is a disease. Thinking is weakness. Weakness gets your throat ripped out. What’s worse — a severing of the jugular or a slow, painful death? We don’t fear death. We only fear fear.

I am not defined by my disease. I am only shackled to it.

If I can forgive you, I can forgive myself.

How crazy do I sound? Is it any crazier than what you repress? What you think you’ve sent into remission?

Every bender has a brief period of pure tranquility. In this eye of the storm, you tend to believe that every conversation is memorable and every moment priceless and meant to be embraced with reckless abandon. You no longer hold rigid value in money, and every song sounds as fresh as the first time you heard it. The girl you’re fucking appears to be the girl you want to be fucking in that immediate moment. The dim lit bar at lunch hour seems exactly where you want to be. Those that poison your conscience no longer seem all that dangerous. Empathy drips off of you. It’s a lot like love in that regard.

Dale is a grizzled Nam vet. He drinks Miller Lite and prefers standing at the bar over sitting.  He doesn’t talk about the war, but he alludes to it every now and again, and from there it just seems to hang on his every word. According to his stories, he’s covered just about a quarter of the earth.

“Oh, Hong Kong?”, he’ll say, raising his eyebrows, snorting and laughing, losing himself in the past. An inside joke that exists to no one but him.

Tonight we’re betting drinks on mid-level cable boxing.

“Next round says red trunks wins,” I offer. A boxing match is almost always decided before the first bell rings. Just watch their eyes. More often than not, the first one to look away is going down.

“Sure…Mexican kid looks tough.” We’re not looking at each other. Our eyes listlessly follow the television, afraid to look at one another or ourselves. The Mexican kid rolls his neck and snorts like a bull, imperceptibly darting his eyes towards the canvas.

The simple truth is that if I don’t figure out a way to enjoy this – and I don’t mean the impending free drink, but rather the sitting broken in a dive bar with someone equally broken, disgusted, confused, jaded, addicted and alone – if I can learn to say fuck it and enjoy Dale’s company…I have a shot at this thing. If I can find beauty in this, I can find beauty anywhere.

But I don’t seem to want to. I find beauty in the unattainable. And making distracting bets with Dale as we murder the brain cells that cause us to ponder ourselves is most certainly attainable. I find beauty in destruction; of my life, of my relationships, of my liver, of my brain and of myself. Of everything I know and feel and love. Because most of that is, thus far, unattainable — no matter how hard I try, I don’t seem to be able to destroy my soul. I seem to be able to destroy relationships fairly well. And my life. With ease. But the soul lingers.

The Mexican kid gets whacked with a nasty right cross midway through the fifth. Dale buys me a round and we toast.

“Write a story about that, cocksucker,” he says with a wink and a smile.

I am me. Through all of the impermanence, this is the only truth that remains.

I spat in a girl’s face after fucking her once. Like, right after fucking her. She was a near-prostitute, emaciated and pale with mousy hair and protruding ribs, her pubic hair in need of a trim. It’s been a few years since I’ve fucked someone I was remotely attracted to. It’s just easier this way.

I groaned something intelligibly about an impending ejaculation, and she scurries backwards and lines her head with my dick, shaking back hair and smiling. My life turns into a pornographic film. This has happened to me a precious few times before. But you never get used to it.

“Go ahead.”

I directed towards the ground and fired into the carpet, and before I knew what I was doing, I cocked back and fired a ball of spit right into her face. Upon the realization, she began flailing at me in a fit of rage. I handcuffed her wrists with my hands, my thumbs resting on the bony knobs.

“You asked for bodily fluid on her face,” I said, panting. “Think about that.” I collected my things and left. It wasn’t that long ago.

I recall the incident while sitting solo in a bar. I watch National League scores scroll at the bottom of the screen and order one more. I’ve completely given up. I’m standing impatiently over the stove of the universe, waiting for my brain to fry. I don’t know who I am anymore. And I am me.

I smoke some weed in the parking lot with some kids that recognize me, stop at the gas station for one more, and return home, eager to be anesthetized and unconscious.

At the root of everything I love, there is me. This is the only truth that remains.

She sits alone in her bedroom, drinking cheap wine and waiting for him to call. She listens to thoughtless music and chats with friends on the computer, and occasionally a roommate drops in, but no one really ever says anything. Just enough to distract. With each passing minute, a little of her bounce and self-esteem withers, and eventually she grows weary of passively eying the photos of parties gone by that adorn her walls, waiting for him to call, and dials my number.

I have spent the last hour or so in the same state, the only difference being that I’m in a bar, and my tense anticipation has been for the call that actually comes. If at last call he fails in his quest to nail something new, I am out of luck. But in the meantime, we’ve both got companionship for a few hours, and – if worse comes to worse – a comfortable fuck.

We start with pitchers, before the bar fills in and the jukebox volume rises. Daily classes/errands/minutia fill the void for awhile. After the second pitcher we chat about failed romances/fantasies, unconvincingly acting out feelings of jaded, mysterious, unaffected apathy and pessimism.

I strike a respectable balance between prowess, goofiness and whimsy while while dancing to 80’s songs. We are onto whiskey. I make garish, effeminate faces expressing sexual desire. She makes ‘ha-ha-we’re-just-friends’ faces expressing sexual desire. I suavely (!) dip her during Fontella Bass and her eyes light up like I’ve just given her an orgasm.

On her porch, we both pretend as if we’re just hanging out. She’s still holding out a little hope that he’ll call. I’m thinking of a similar scenario with another girl that took place years ago. We smoke cigarettes (she only smokes when she’s drunk or flirtatious) and try not to sound as vulnerable as we are. Her cleavage is suddenly amazing. My wisecracks are suddenly flawless.

At no point do we ever actually say anything. We hint at it – through smiles or gestures or pre-planned statements blurted out in a hollow delivery – but we don’t say it. We jump through the flirtation hoops as if conversation were karaoke lyrics. We are running through lines. Both of us are entirely replaceable, and perhaps a replacement would be preferred by both parties.

A stale excuse to enter the house is offered. The hints become less subtle. Still no one says anything outside of what seems appropriate and casual. Last gulps of courage are taken, and we both settle into what we’ve settled for. The first three seconds of any kiss is always awkward. In morning light, we will be even more distant than the previous evening.

This wasn’t how we’d planned it in our heads, in our respective bedrooms, when dusk gave way to evening and the air buzzed with possibility.

It’s more comfortable than if we had gotten our wishes.

Supposing that, instead of blame and censure, or judgment and punishment, we met deviations and aberrations of the norm with sympathy and understanding, with a desire to aid rather than a desire to protect ourselves. (Henry Miller)

For better or worse, Michael Jackson was without a doubt the most fascinating public figure I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, arguably the most captivating and perplexing celebrity in the history of modern media. He suffered the trappings of fame worse than anyone since the Beatles, sans the three compatriots to share in the alienation and loneliness that stems from such widespread adoration. And he endured it from an age when most of us were grappling with multiplication tables. The Fab Four, Elvis, Marilyn, Diana — in terms of fame and its pitfalls — none of them had anything on the kid who never got to be one.

He was the first black man that I can remember everyone wanting to be. Sure, there were others who were accepted as an equal or as immensely talented or envied for their wealth and status, but no one so talented, so cool, so mesmerizing, that white folks would give up their majority status to be him. The kids I knew would’ve killed for Jimi’s guitar skills, Ali’s bravado or Eddie’s sense of humor, but at the end of the day, they wouldn’t trade their skin for it. Michael transcended that, though it was clear from his years of medical disfiguration that he himself wasn’t willing to enter into that pact.

But for all of his transcendence and talent and appeal — which will be detailed and lauded ad nauseum in the coming days – perhaps his most fascinating accomplishment as a human being was his endurance of a constantly observed life virtually no one in history has ever had to undergo. His celebrity was overwhelming, masochistic and unprecedented. He gave us what we never knew we always wanted, and he gave us something no one in their right mind would’ve ever bargained for — a deal he unwittingly entered into before he had pubic hair.

As far as the world was concerned, he existed for no other reason than our own entertainment. This can be said about so many in the fame lexicon, but none so as fervent and lasting as Michael Jackson. He was the celebrity’s celebrity. Whether or not you view the phenomenon of celebrity as a blessing or a detriment, Michael Jackson was the king, pure and simple.

I do not know for certain whether or not he ever molested children. At the end of the day, I believe that he probably did at one time or another. And yet I still feel a great deal of empathy for him. I always have, and always will. Childhood, a learning curve of innocence and wonder that serves as the building block for our foundation as people, was never given to Michael Jackson. And in that process, the world was invited to watch and gawk along the way. We raised him. He was our monster, our creation.

Many will clamor in the coming days to dismiss such rhetoric as limp-wristed psychobabble, denouncing Jackson as a bizarre pedophile, but this is nothing more than wiping our hands clean of our own involvement. What, I ask you, happens when you rip a child from his childhood, whip him with a belt for dance missteps, and send him out at a single-digit age to entertain patrons of minority strip clubs, a pit stop on the way to an unparalleled celebrity status that would never, ever relent, scrutinizing every step of the way? I do not have a proper answer to this, as the only test subject suited for such a question is Michael Jackson.

All I really know is that when I put on ‘I Want You Back’, I lose sight of the eroding nose, the embroiled allegations and the punchlines; I forget myself and the inhumanity of the world around me. I dance, and I sing uninhibited along with the eleven year old who never really had any idea of who he was. For that, I am forever indebted.

Sadly, so was he.

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