Just Calling It Like I See It

I have resisted jumping into the fray about Michael Jackson, but I can't help myself. There are things about him that are irrefutable: he was an iconic artist who changed pop culture forever, he was a talented singer and songwriter, and he lived his life in the glare of the public spotlight.

I'm not here to write about the child molestation allegations against him - in my opinion the best case scenario is that his behavior with children was incomprehensibly inappropriate, and the worst case scenario is that he was a pedophile and a criminal. Neither option is okay with me.

What strikes me most about the whole thing is this: Michael Jackson was an addict. He died a junkie. He was taking a lethal cocktail of painkillers and intravenous drugs used by the medical community as anesthesia. He had been doing this for a long time.

I have looked long and hard at the media hype surrounding his death, searching for references to his addictions. What amazes me is how, on a global scale, we see what we want to see. There are countless references to his work as an artist - the party line seems to be: yes, he had personal trials and tribulations and increasingly bizarre behavior over the years, but lets celebrate his life and work for the artist he truly was.

We collectively enabled him - we treated him like the town kook, or the off-beat artist who led a strange life and justified it by saying: who wouldn't under his circumstances? I hear talk about how hard it must be to grow up in the public eye. How he had domineering parents who pressured him to be perfect. How isolating his level of celebrity can be. I even read reports that bordered on sympathetic about how the stresses of the child molestation trials drove him - drove him - to use painkillers to hide from the emotional pain. Excuses - all of them - to avoid the truth: he was an addict. I hear it all the time - if you had my life, you'd drink, too.

The arc of his life - for all his celebrity - follows a pattern that is all too familiar for addicts. A star that burned bright, full of promise and talent. An introduction to drugs, and a slow spiral of addiction, denial and isolation that eventually killed him.

By most accounts, his first introduction to pain medication came in 1984 after the Pepsi Commercial Incident. For those of us of a certain age, the imagery of this is etched into our minds - they played the footage of his hair catching on fire while shooting that commercial over and over and over. He took pain medication during his recovery from this injury, and the subsequent surgery on his face and scalp to repair burn damage. From my vantage point, this is where the addict was born. Here is a picture of Michael Jackson in 1983, at the height of his personal and creative success:

In 1988 he co-wrote "Man in the Mirror" - the irony of the lyrics is inescapable. "I'm starting with the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways. No message could have been any clearer, if you wanna make the world a better place take a look at your self and then make that change - you gotta get it right while you got the time..." In 1988 he looked like this:

By 1993, he cancels his "Dangerous" tour, stating an injury he had while on tour led to a Demerol addiction. He disappeared from the public eye for a while, and there were unconfirmed reports that he went to a "wellness center" in the United Kingdom to help with his addiction. It was at this time that the allegations of inappropriate conduct with minors began surfacing.

By 1997 his behavior is all but inexplicable, and he writes a song called "Morphine". Here is a sampling of the lyrics: "Demerol, Demerol, Oh God he's taking Demerol. He's tried hard to convince her to be over what he had. Today he wants it twice as bad."

Again, from my vantage point, this is where he "crossed the line", as they say in recovery - when his addiction consumed him. The next 10 years are spent mostly out of the public eye - with the notable exception of the child molestation hearings - with reports of ill health, missing court dates due to "spider bites", "swollen toe", "exhaustion". He is estranged from most of his family, and has a cycle of friends who come into his life for periods of time, only to have falling outs with him and disappear. It is acknowledged that his inner circle of friends and family knew of his addiction, tried to help, tried to intervene, to no avail. Several of them admit to being unsurprised at his death of a heart attack at age 50.

By 2007, he looked like this:

He was disfigured, bald (he wore a wig), frighteningly underweight, and virtually incapable of functioning in the real world. He had surrounded himself with paid help - doctors, nurses, body guards. He had the money and the means to maintain his addictions, and like any good addict, he did. There is no way to watch this evolution and say that he was anything but a very sick and broken man.

Here's the thing: I don't put the responsibility for his drug use on anyone but him. I think the doctors that supplied him with these illegal medications are reprehensible and possibly criminal, to be sure, but ultimately it was Michael Jackson's addiction - his illness. It is impossible to get someone sober, and keep them sober, if they don't want recovery for themselves. Throughout his life, his behavior demonstrates a kind of self-rejection ... self-repulsion, even - one of the four horsemen of addiction.

But he is no different than any other addict or alcoholic I meet every day. He had the added difficulty of living in the public eye - I do have sympathy for how that complicates things. But it irks me to have his obvious addictions explained away -- this is enabling. It isn't any different than a family member who loves someone struggling with addiction - it is very hard to see how bad things really are. It is part and parcel of the illness - the addict is in denial, and will do anything to maintain their addiction. They will isolate and vehemently maintain that everything is fine. They will do this until it kills them if they don't get - and accept - help. His death was a virtual certainty. We all watched it unfold over the course of nearly three decades. We have a strange level of intimacy with our celebrities. We love to idolize and vilify them. But they are human, and subject to the same pitfalls as the rest of us. There is a very straightforward answer to all of his odd behavior, his isolation, his steadfast denial that his behavior was odd or inappropriate: he was an addict. He created impenetrable walls of denial around himself - he had the means to build them stronger than most - and he shut out the people in his life who tried to help him.

So now he is gone. His talent at the pinnacle of his career is undeniable. We lost an iconic artist, and that is always jolting - like Elvis or Marilyn Monroe before him. I heard some say his death is like a loss of innocence. But Michael Jackson the talented and promising artist, the singer/songwriter, the creative talent, the man himself - he has been gone from us for a long time, it is just that few people really want to admit it. But I do. One of the real tragedies here is the lost potential. Thriller - even for people who aren't particularly fans of his kind of music -was an amazing piece of artistry. It changed pop culture forever. Can you imagine what else he could have done, what other barriers he could have busted down, what kind of cutting edge music he could have created if he hadn't been taken down by drugs?

So while I honor his artistic legacy, I say a prayer for another life and spirit extinguished by addiction.