You Are Not Alone: Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

If Michael wasn’t on the street playing trains, he was on the carpet in our shared bedroom with his prized Lionel engine. Our parents couldn’t afford to buy him a new one, or invest in an electric-train set, complete with full length track, station, and signal boxes. That is why the dream of owning a train set was in his head long before the dream of performing.

SPEED. I’M CONVINCED OUR EXCITEMENT AS kids was built on the thrill of speed. Whatever we did involved going faster, trying to outgun one another. Had our father known the extent of our thirst for speed, he would have banned it for sure: the potential for injury was always considered a grave risk to our career.

Once we grew bored of the shopping-cart trains, we built ‘go-karts’, constructed from boxes, stroller wheels and planks of wood from a nearby junkyard. Tito was the ‘engineer’ of the brotherhood and he had the know-how in putting everything together. He was forever dismantling clocks and radios, and re-assembling them on the kitchen table, or watching Joseph under the hood of his Buick parked at the side of the house, so he knew where our father’s tool box was. We hammered together three planks to form an I-shaped chassis and axle. We nailed the open cockpit – a square wooden box – on top, and took cord from a clothes line for our steering mechanism, looping it through the front wheels, held like reins. In truth, our turning circle was about as tight as an oil tanker’s, so we only ever travelled in straight lines.

The wide open alleyway at the back of our house – with a row of grassy backyards on one side and a chain-link fence on the other – was our race-track, and it was all about the ‘race’. We often patched together two go-karts, with Tito pushing Marlon, and me pushing Michael in a 50-yard dash. There was always that sense of competition between us: who could go faster, who would be the winner.

‘Go, go, go, GO!’ yelled Michael, leaning forward, urging us into the lead. Marlon hated losing, too, so Michael always had fierce competition. Marlon was the boy who never understood why he couldn’t out-run his own shadow. I can picture him now: sprinting through the street, looking down to his side, with a fierce determination on his face that turned to exasperation when he couldn’t put space between himself and his clinging shadow.

We pushed those go-karts until the metal brackets were scraping along the street, and the wheels buckled or fell off, with Michael tipped up on his side and me laughing so hard I couldn’t stand.

The merry-go-round in the local school field was another thrill-ride. Crouch down in the centre of its metal base, hold on tight to the iron stanchions, and get the brothers to spin it as fast as they could. ‘Faster! Faster! Faster!’ Michael squealed, eyes tight shut, giggling hard. He used to straddle the stanchions, like he was on a horse, going round and round and round. Eyes closed. Wind in the face.

We all dreamed of riding the train, racing the go-karts and spinning on a proper carousel at Disney.

WE KNEW MR LONG WAY BEFORE we had heard of Roald Dahl. To us, he was the original African-American Willy Wonka; this magical man – white hair, wizened features, leathery dark skin – dished out candy from his house the next avenue up, on 22nd, en route to our elementary school at the far end of Jackson Street.

Many kids beat a path to Mr Long’s door because his younger brother went to our school. Knowing Timothy meant we got a good deal, two to five cents being good value for a little brown bag full of liquorice, shoe strings, Lemonheads, Banana Splits – you name it, he had them all neatly spread out on a single bed in a front room. Mr Long didn’t smile or say very much, but we looked forward to seeing him on school mornings. We grasped at our orders and he dutifully filled the bags. Michael loved candy and that morning ritual brightened the start of each day. How we got the money is a whole other story that I will reserve for later.

We each protected our brown paper bags of candy like gold and back at the house, inside our bedroom, we all had different hiding places which each brother would try and figure out. My hide-out was under the bed or mattress, and I always got busted, but Michael squirreled his away somewhere good because we never did find it. As adults, whenever I reminded him of this, he chuckled at the memory. That is how Michael laughed throughout his life: a mesh-up of a chuckle, a snicker, a giggle; always shy, often self-conscious. Michael loved playing shop: he’d create his counter by laying a board across a pile of books, then a tablecloth, and then he’d spread out his candy. This ‘shop’ was set up in the doorway to our bedroom, or on the lowest bunk-bed, with him kneeling behind, awaiting orders. We traded with each other, swapping or using change kept from Mr Long, or from a nickel found in the street.

But Michael was destined to be an entertainer, not a savvy businessman. That seemed obvious when our father challenged him about getting home late from school one afternoon. ‘Where were you?’ asked Joseph.

‘I went to get some candy,’ said Michael.

‘How much you pay for it?’

‘Five cents.’

‘How much you going to re-sell it for?’

‘Five cents.’

Joseph clipped him around the head. ‘You don’t re-sell something for the same price you bought it!’

Typical Michael: always too fair, never ruthless enough. ‘Why can’t I give it for five cents?’ he said, in the bedroom. The logic was lost on him and he was upset over the undeserved whack on the head. I left him on the bed, muttering under his breath as he sorted his candy into piles, no doubt still playing shop in his head.

Days later, Joseph found him in the backyard, giving out candy from across the chain-link fence to other kids from the street. The kids who were less fortunate than us – and he was mobbed. ‘How much you sell ’em for?’ Joseph asked.

‘I didn’t. I gave them away for free.’

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY, AND MORE than 20 years later, I visited Michael at his ranch, Neverland Valley, in the Santa Ynez region of California. He had spent time and money turning his vast acres into a theme park and the family went to check out his completed world. Neverland has always been portrayed as the outlandish creation of ‘a wild imagination’ with the suggestion that a love of Disney was its sole inspiration. Elements of this may be correct, but the truth runs much deeper, and this was something I knew immediately when I saw with my own eyes what he had built.

Childhood memories were brought to life in a giant flashback: white Christmas lights trimming the sidewalk, the pathway, the trees, the frame and guttering of his English Tudor mansion. He had them turned on all year round to ensure that ‘it was Christmas every day.’ A huge steam train with carriages ran between the shops and the movie theatre, and a miniature train toured the circumference of the estate, via the zoo. In the main house – through the doors, passed the welcoming, model life-size butler with tray, up the wide stairway and down the hallway – was the playroom. Inside, beyond the full-size Superman and Darth Vader at the door, was the biggest table dominating the room. On it, a vintage Lionel train set was always running: two or three trains travelling the tracks with lights on, around a model landscape of hills, valleys, towns and waterfalls. Inside the house and out, Michael had built himself the biggest electric train set you could ever imagine.

Back outside, there was a full-on professional go-kart track with chicanes and tight bends, and the merry-go-round was spinning to music, a beautiful carousel of ornate horses. There was a candy store too, where everything was free, and a Christmas tree lit up all year round. In 2003, Michael said he developed the ranch ‘to create everything that I never had as a child.’ But it was also about re-creating what he had enjoyed for too short a time, rebuilding it in an exaggerated version. He called himself a ‘fantasy fanatic’ and this was his eternal fantasy.

Neverland brought back our lost days because that is how he perceived his childhood – as a missing person; an inner child wandering around his past looking to somehow reconnect with him in the future. It wasn’t a refusal to grow up because if you asked him, he never felt like he was a boy in the first place. Michael was expected to be an adult when he was a kid, and he regressed into a kid when he was expected to be an adult. He was more Benjamin Button than the Peter Pan comparison he made himself. However much I might remember laughter in our childhood, he struggled to recall it, which probably had a lot to do with the fact that I am four years older.

A friend, a nephew and I took quad bikes to explore Neverland’s 2,700 acres, which seemed endless, rolling beyond every green horizon, scattered with oak trees. One dusty fire road took us climbing to the highest peak, far away from the developed area, and a plateau, providing a 360-degree vista. My eyes scanned it all – the property, the theme park, the lake, the ferris wheel, the trains, the greenery – and it filled me with awe and pride. Look at what you’ve created, I said to my brother in my head, and repeated to him later.

‘A place of ultimate happiness,’ he told me.

The later warped perception of Neverland shows how Michael was judged on the face value of his world and, in many cases, on the claims of others. There only ever seemed to be lurid judgements about him and his ranch without any attempt to figure out the more complex ‘why?’. As with everyone, his background shaped him. But fame – especially the iconic status attached to my brother – built a public barrier as big as a dam in front of his need to be understood. But to understand him, we need to walk in his shoes and see life from his perspective. As Michael said in 2003, in a message to his fans via Ed Bradley at CBS: ‘If you really want to know about me, there’s a song I wrote. It’s called “Childhood”. That’s the one song people should listen to …’

Michael’s honest awareness that he was a grown man with a kid’s mind shows in the lyrics: ‘People say I’m strange that way because I love such elementary things … but have you seen my childhood?’ His way of saying, this is the way I’ve been made. This is who I am.

Many people have attempted to look through the window of our childhood, and see past the smears of media coverage and the persona of a pop icon. But I feel that you need to have lived it, and shared it, to truly know and understand it. Because ours was a unique world, as brothers and sisters under the roof of one big family. It was in a small house at 2300 Jackson Street – named after President Andrew Jackson, not us – that we shared memories, music and a dream. It is here that our stories and his lyrics begin, and where, I hope, a better understanding of just who Michael was can be found.

CHAPTER TWO

2300 Jackson Street

IT ALL STARTED ONE DAY WHEN we found our voices around the kitchen sink.

It was more assembly line than kitchen sink, the wash-dry-stack-put away ritual after dinner. We divided the chore into weekly shifts as pairs – two children drying, two others putting away, our mother standing in the middle, an apron over her gown, hands deep in soap suds. She always whistled or sang some tune, but the song that first enticed us into joining her was ‘Cotton Fields’, an old slave number by blues musician Lead Belly. This hit resonated with her, for her roots were in Eufaula, Alabama, where she was born Katie Scruse in May 1930.

Her grandparents had been cotton farmers in what was then named ‘the Cotton State’ and her great-grandfather was a slave to an Alabama family called Scruse. This forefather could sing, too – ‘You could hear his voice from church ring out through the valley’ – and so could Papa Prince, her father. She swears that the voice we heard in our kitchen was channelled from her ancestors and developed in a church choir; she was raised a Baptist. Fine voices ran in the family, we were told. My father’s father, Samuel Jackson, was a teacher and school director who always gave a near-perfect rendition of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ but he also had ‘a beautiful high voice’ that graced a church chorus. Our mother played the clarinet and piano at high school, and Joseph the guitar.

When our parents met in 1949, their individual DNA must have combined to create some kind of super-gene for our musical inheritance. It was no accident of birth, Mother assured us: it was God’s gift. Or, as Michael later put it, ‘the divine union of song and dance.’

We each loved the sound of Mother’s voice. Standing at the sink singing, she was lost in those fields of Alabama, and she sent a shiver down my spine with a voice that was never flat and always on pitch. Her voice singing was like her voice talking: warm, soft and soothing. We began singing at the sink for entertainment when our black-and-white television was sent for repair, and one day I started making harmonies with Mother. I must have been about five, but I was keeping it high and staying on note. She looked down at me, still singing but beaming with surprise. Before she knew it, my brothers, Tito and Jackie, and sister Rebbie had joined the chorus. Michael was a baby, still stumbling into a walk with diapers on, but when the dishes were put away and the surfaces wiped spotlessly clean, Mother sat down, cradled him and sang him to sleep. ‘Cotton Fields’ was my vocal initiation and Michael’s lullaby.

Michael in his diapers is my first memory of him. I don’t remember his birth, or Mother walking through the door with him. New arrivals were no big event in our family. I was five when I started changing his diapers. I did what we all did – helping Mother where we could, providing an extra pair of hands for what would become a family of nine children.

Michael was born hyper, with boundless energy and curiosity. If any of us took our eyes off him for a second, he’d have crawled under the table or under the bed. When Mother turned on our excuse for a washing-machine, he jigged and bounced on the spot in time to its vibrations. Changing his mushy diaper on the sofa was like trying to hold a wet fish – wriggling, kicking and turning. The art of putting on a diaper with safety-pins was a test for any adult, let alone five-year-old me, and more often than not, Rebbie or Jackie came to my rescue. Michael had these extraordinarily long, thin fingers that used to grab my thumb, and he had wide, doe-eyes that said: ‘I’m having fun giving you a hard time, buddy.’ In my eyes, though, he was the kid brother who needed looking after. Caring for one another was instilled in all of us, but I felt protective of him from day one. Maybe it was because all I heard being shouted was ‘Where’s Michael?’ … ‘Is Michael okay?’ … ‘Is Michael changed?’

‘Yes, Mother … We got it … he’s here,’ one of us shouted.

Don’t worry. Michael’s okay. Michael’s okay.

OUR MOTHER’S MOTHER, MAMA MARTHA, USED to bathe us as babies in a bucket-sized pan brimming with soapy water. I watched Michael, arms held high and face screwed up, standing inside this tiny chrome ‘bath’, washed with tedious thoroughness from the gaps between his toes to the backs of his ears. We always had to be clean and stay on top of germs. I think this was drilled into us before we could walk or talk. And nothing beat Castile soap, and its coarse lather, for staying clean. Lather up and scrub hard. Mother was fastidious about cleanliness, and about everything being neat and looking pristine. Everything didn’t just have to be clean. It – and we – had to look pristine.

Germs were portrayed as invisible monsters. Germs lead to sickness, we were told. Germs are what other people carry. Germs are in the air, on the street, on the surfaces. We were constantly made to feel we were under threat of invasion. Whenever one of us sneezed or coughed, the castor oil came out: we all got a spoonful to keep infection at bay. I know I speak for Michael, La Toya, Janet and myself in saying that we grew up with an almost neurotic fear of germs, and it’s not hard to understand why.

In the kitchen, before the singing started, came the first elementary lesson: ‘We wash up only with clean water … CLEAN water!’ Then: ‘Use the hottest water your hands can bear, and lots of suds.’ Each plate was squeaked within a layer of its ceramic life. Each glass rinsed and dried, and held up to the light to make sure there was not a single watermark. If one was found, do it again.

After coming in from the street, we had to be virtually decontaminated. The first words out of Mother’s mouth were ‘Have you washed your hands? Go wash your hands.’ If she didn’t hear the tap running within seconds, there was trouble. On mornings before school, the hygiene inspection was always the same: ‘Did you wash your face? Wash your feet? In between your toes? Your elbows?’ Then came the acid test: a cotton swab dipped in alcohol rubbed across the back of the neck. If it turned grey, we weren’t clean enough. ‘Go back and wash yourself properly.’ If we wanted chocolate cake or a cookie, our hands were up for inspection, too. ‘But I washed them earlier!’ I often protested. ‘You been out touching door handles, boy – go wash them again!’

Clothes were never worn two days’ running, and had to be clean and pressed. No one from our family walked into the street with a single crease or stain. By the age of six, we had all learned to pitch in with the laundry. This was all part and parcel of a perfect order that helped keep so many kids – and potential chaos – in check.

When I joined the UK’s Big Brother house in 2007, everyone made fun of how I was always on guard against germs, asking house mates if they had washed their hands before preparing food. My wife, Halima, wasn’t surprised. She calls me a ‘germaphobe’ and I can hardly deny it. To this day, I won’t touch a door handle in a public restroom because I know how many men don’t wash their hands. I won’t touch the banister on public stairways or escalators. I’ll use a handkerchief or tissue to hold the gas pump trigger when filling the car. I’ll wash down with alcohol a hotel’s TV remote control before using it. I’m alive to cross-contamination from every surface.

Michael was no different. He even worried about other people’s pens when signing autographs, in the days when fans could get close enough. But his neurosis mainly centred on breathing in airborne germs. People mocked him for wearing surgical masks. There was speculation that he was hiding plastic surgery and I always laughed when I saw an article referencing the mask, saying it was ‘sparking fears about Michael’s health’. Because that was the point: it was all about fear – Michael’s fear that he could get ill. At these times, he will have felt he was coming down with something, or his immune system was low. He was, like me, on guard against germs all his life. At least, that was the origins of his surgical mask wearing and then, after a while, I think it became something of a fashion accessory that allowed him to ‘hide’; a mini shield for a man who wanted to grab whatever fraction of privacy that he could.

I DON’T REMEMBER A TIME WHEN Mother was not pregnant. I cannot recall her walking up the street with anything but a waddle, carrying in both hands two bags of shopping or second-hand clothes. Between 1950 and 1966, she produced nine children. That is some feat when measured against her and Joseph’s initial plan: three children maximum.

My sister Rebbie (pronounced Ree-bie) came first, then Jackie (1951), Tito (1953), me (1954), La Toya (1956), Marlon (1957), Michael (1958), Randy (1961) and Janet (1966). We would have been 10 but our other brother, Brandon, died during his twin birth with Marlon. That was why, at Michael’s memorial service in 2009, Marlon said, in his message to Michael: ‘I would like for you to give our brother, my twin brother, Brandon, a hug for me.’ A twin never loses that bond with his other half.

As kids, we received plenty of hugs from Mother. Contrary to the general depiction that we had some form of cold, unhappy childhood, our upbringing was full of love as Mother smothered us with kisses and affection. We still feel the strength of that love today. I was a real mama’s boy – as was Michael – and our worship became a fight between me, him and La Toya as to who occupied the coveted spot by Mother’s side, tight to her legs, gripping her skirt. La Toya did her best to unglue my attachment.

Whenever Mother was out and we brothers fought, we swore her into a pact. ‘Promise you won’t tell, La Toya. Promise!’

‘Promise,’ she said convincingly. ‘I won’t tell!’ As soon as Mother was through the door, the promise was undone with a dramatic confession. ‘Mother, Jermaine’s been fighting.’ We wanted to jack her up because she told on everyone. She always was the quiet observer, collecting her tales to spill later. It didn’t even matter if she made stuff up; she just wanted to win favour with Mother while I was left with extra chores as punishment. But the joke in later years was that I must have won favour more times than most because I was ‘always Mother’s pet,’ says Rebbie.

‘The favoured one!’ Michael said, which was a bit rich because he could do no wrong either.

I didn’t feel like a favourite but if Mother ever over-compensated, it had everything to do with an event that happened when she was pregnant with Michael. Aged about three, I decided it was a good idea to eat a bag of salt and so I was hospitalised with near kidney failure. I remember nothing of this trauma. I was a strong kid, but that illness put me in hospital for three weeks. Mother and Joseph couldn’t afford to visit me every day. When they did, the ward sister told them I had been screaming out my lungs for them. Every time they left, I stood on the bed, wailing. I’m kind of glad I don’t remember the look on Mother’s face as she was forced to walk away. She said it was ‘the most awful feeling.’

Eventually I was allowed home, but that event might explain why I became such a cry-baby and overly clingy, desperate not to be left behind again. On my first day at school, I struggled free of the teacher’s grip and sprinted down the corridor and out of the doors to find Mother. ‘You have to be here, Jermaine … You have to be here,’ she said, with the calmness that made everything okay again. Her compassion is rooted in a devout, unbreakable faith in God and she manages to strike a balance between the aura of a disciple and the authority of a Justice of the Peace. She has her breaking points, of course, but her calm made better any difficult situation.

She suffered for us, in being pregnant for 81 months of her life. She was beautiful, too, from the way she wore her wavy black hair to her pristine gowns, to the perfectly applied scarlet lipstick that left smudges on our cheeks. Mother was sunshine inside 2300 Jackson Street.

The moment she left for her part-time work at Sears department store, we couldn’t wait for her return. I have this warm image of her arriving through the front door, having trudged through the deep snow of an Indiana winter. She stood there, stamping her feet on the mat and shaking her head to dust off the snow. Then Michael – growing into the fastest of the brood – ran up and wrapped his arms around one leg, followed by me, La Toya, Tito and Marlon. Before taking off her coat, she brought out her hands from inside her pockets – and there was our regular treat: two bags of hot Spanish peanuts.

Meanwhile, Jackie and Rebbie prepared the kitchen for Mother to start cooking, waiting for Joseph to come home. We grew up calling him Joseph. Not Father. Or Daddy. Or Papa. Just ‘Joseph’. That was his request. In the interests of respect.

THERE IS A NURSERY RHYME ABOUT an old woman who lived in a shoe and ‘had so many children, she didn’t know what to do’. In terms of family size and cramped living quarters, it provides the best image of life inside the shoebox of 2300 Jackson Street. Nine children, two parents, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen and a living room were packed tight into a space about 30 feet wide and no more than 40 feet deep. From the outside, it looks like the kind of a house a child would sketch: a front door with a window either side and a chimney poking out the top. Our home was 1940s build, wood-framed, with a tiled pyramid lid that seemed so thin for a roof that we swore it would blow off during the first tornado. It faces on to Jackson Street on the corner of its T-junction with 23rd Avenue.