"I Hear Michael Jackson at the Diner" by Dan Kraines
This is a selection from our Spring/Summer 2021 "The Empire Issue". Please click here to purchase a print or digital version of the full issue featuring prose, poetry, and art.
In my booth, at the diner, I hear Man in the Mirror. I imagine bright bulbs lining a large, square glass. I imagine Michael in his fedora, red leather jacket, black pants, and thick, white socks.
Jackson sings, I’m talking to the man in the mirror. I’m asking him to change his ways. I try to imagine myself in a mirror, but can’t. Coffee from the dish saucer spills over onto this notebook. Outside the window, above my booth, the engine of a city bus reverberates.
I remember, on the edge of the Torpedoes’ field, Angelo Castillo leaning back in his lawn chair, watching us play soccer: his aviator glasses hid his eyes; we were the home team; we wore red.
Faggot is a word I heard growing up, almost every day. It was so hurtful and stupid. And I said it.
I remember, within Angelo’s restaurant, a wall of celebrity photographs: Diana Ross, Lawrence Taylor, Ric Flair, Macaulay Culkin, and Michael. I remember a white tablecloth in front of me. A plate of penne and vodka sauce. And I remember, as we ate, Angelo visited our table.
The Torpedoes finished in first place. I was the goalkeeper. I wore special gloves.
The King of Pop rehearsed in the Castillos’ basement. He danced so hard. I imagine his sweat. When he was on trial for child molestation, the first time, the Castillos kept him, as family, somewhere in their home.
In the documentary Leaving Neverland, Michael has a closet full of leather jackets. He has hiding places throughout Neverland, almost all of which have cameras.
I crack the yolk and it pools across my plate. I see Wade Robson dressed up identically to Michael, all the way in Australia; Wade winning a dance contest, 8 years old, and grabbing his crotch with his white glove.
Michael gave Wade his red Thriller jacket. But how could it have possibly fit? Michael picked out a wedding ring for Wade and they pretended that it was for someone else. At Neverland, they married.
As I pay the bill, I hear the Jackson 5 and think about how Michael was once a child, too. Michael was a child before many things, but not before fame. Fame was concurrent. Now he is dead. But once he was a child.
“For it was evident by then that Michael Jackson was no mere child with a gift. Or, to put it more accurately, he was all child—an Ariel of the ghetto— whose appeal, certainly to the habitués of places like the Starlite, lay partly in his ability to find metaphors to speak about his difference, and theirs,” writes Hilton Als.
The Castillo kids were beautiful: I scroll through photos of Michael with two of the boys. In one, MJ stands with a teenager: each wears a bright red jacket and a white shirt underneath, their long hair lying on their shoulders. The photo, it would seem, like a Titian, makes their lips extremely red.
I stretched and sweat beneath my shin guards. The smell of grass overwhelmed my mouth and eyes. At the end of the season, we received our trophies in the Castillos’ living room. A plastic, gold soccer player, sliding through the grass and into a ball.
The boy described how Michael stood behind him and came into a tissue.
Molestation did not hurt me as much as shame that surfaces. The point is not whether I experienced pleasure. But will I untie entrapment from trust, self-harm from intimacy.
In the charges against Jackson, a main defense was that there was no evidence to corroborate the accusations of his victims, against whom there also were counterarguments of extortion.
Didn’t the press ruin Michael? Wasn’t their constant pressure and scrutiny of his appearance monstrous? And wasn’t the irony of their mockery that it was not commensurate to the pathology of his cunning depravity?
At Free Willy, I vomited in the theatre. At Free Willy 2, I vomited in the theatre again.
Didn’t Joe Jackson abuse his children? Didn’t he whip them? The abuse Michael inflicted was inextricable from his distorted sense of self and his mangled self-image was the mark of his father’s belt.
Margo Jefferson writes that “molestation and abuse are harsh unambiguous words, but we can’t fully understand them unless we understand that they are often inseparable from the lures and ambiguities of seduction.”
Against the wall of the Castillos’ restaurant, I played with my teammates. I liked Rodrigo, our best player, whose father worked in the kitchen. They lived in a room above the bridal store next door. As soon as he became a teenager, Rodrigo quit. I did not see him for a long time, until, late in high school, after a gay/straight alliance march, he took me out for ice cream.
I remember eventually seeing Free Willy 2 in its entirety, at soccer camp, during a cool down, after lunch, and Jackson, singing, his white shirt blowing out, ruffling behind his hands.
Dan Kraines holds a PhD in poetics. His chapbook, Licht, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. He lives in New York.
