Jackson, Elvis and me
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
It amazes me how I remember small things like the broadcast on WCBS AM on this date in 1977, when the announcers noted that the numbers for the date were 7-7-77.
“This must be the luckiest day in the century,” one of the announcers said.
The other announcer laughed and asked if 7/13/77 would be unlucky. As it turned out, it was since that’s when we had the second great black out in the Metropolitan area.
Spike Lee did a film about that summer as the Summer of Sam – the 44 caliber killer who haunted us. I worked for the cosmetic company then, and remember our building getting hit by a tornado – a jumping little devil that pealed up the warehouse roof like a sardine can. I remember hearing the news that Elvis had died.
I guess that’s why I think of all that now with the memorial for Michael Jackson ready to get underway.
A jack ass Republican Senator named King mocked the whole thing calling Jackson nothing but a pervert.
Maybe he was. So were many of the greatest artists. But they were still artists. Even Elvis had problems, in the end seeming to be nothing more than a drug addict, when he was really so much more.
Somehow the two men are connected in my head, as if the spirit of one had passed onto the other so that Michael emerged as an even bigger star in the 80s inspired perhaps by the spirit of Elvis.
We live in a strange reality where people either believe in nothing but science or seem to go to the other extreme and deny science entirely.
Even religion has been affected, as fundamentalists teach crap like creationism as science, when it clearly can never be, nor should be.
What happened to the concept of faith? I was taught as a kid that God was beyond human reason, and that all we see around us is really an illusion. We take things apart and call it science, but we really have something broken in the end.
Perhaps we all live in a fantasy world, needing something to exist beyond life and death so that we might avoid going crazy with the idea that once we die everything comes to an end for us.
The family that I miss, whose graves I visit, have ceased to exist forever and that when I die I will cease to exist, too, as opposed to the hope that when I die my spirit will go to the same place they are and we will meet again.
As practical as I pretend to be, I believe the spiritual world exists. Too many things have happened, too many prayers have been answered for me to poo poo spirituality.
The oddest was associated with the last great blackout in 2002 when my disabled car required me to walk to work daily over the hump of the Jersey City palisades and into the heart of Hoboken.
One morning I strolled along the road and saw a green plastic rosary on the ground and picked it up because it was exactly like the one my mother used. She died a few months earlier so I still thought about her a lot.
I remember thinking at the time: maybe this is a message from her. Then shrugged this off until I noticed nearby on the wall of the house was a picture of the Virgin Mother my mother used to have above her bed.
I spent the rest of the day thinking about that, especially when I made the trek back the same way out of Hoboken.
Something odd happened between the time I climbed the viaduct to the time I got to the top of the hill. People milled around in the park. Traffic was backed up along two or three major streets. None of the traffic lights worked.
Although still daylight, the blackout wiped out most of the metropolitan area.
I got home before dark to find our block still had electricity when nearly every other block around us did not. I’m sure there was an explanation. But I kept thinking of the rosary I had found and the picture of the Virgin Mother, and I wondered, was my mother looking out for me after death as she had with her prayers prior to death.
I still think about that moment and still believe she is with me.
I still believe I will see her and my other family members again when my time comes to pass off this mortal coil.