This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange Page B

separates itself! And now see how handsome! How lithe and graceful and literally sparkling !
    Michael was a dancer, sure, but more than that a mover . For what would become the biggest performance of his life, the 1983 Motown 25th Anniversary concert, Jackson chose to lip-synch to “Billie Jean.” I became a student of his charisma that night, convinced there might be some kind of proof for the exchange of energy between his body and mine. For me the charge of his performances always carried a postscript to self—not to get myself famous or become rich enough to keep a baby chimp, but to learn, literally and otherwise, how to move .
    Movie is the shorthand that preceded talkie . But it’s the latter term that faded away. It’s the movement that sets the form apart ( Action! ), and the beauty of bright, moving bodies that transfixes. In that sense, Michael was a movie star in the same way Elvis was a movie star even before he shook his business in Blue Hawaii . They were basically made for motion pictures. If anything, Elvis’s acting career, in neutering and homogenizing him, subtracted from his movie-star-ness. Eventually he reclaimed it with a musical TV special, during the taping of which he famously ejaculated in his pants; even little Elvis died for us. Michael insisted on calling his videos “short films,” and the producers of the Academy Awards, who included him in their 2010 “In Memoriam” montage, apparently agreed.
    On a Saturday morning a year or so after reading the Michael Jackson biography, I settled in front of the TV, fast-forwarding through the commercials with my remote arm raised up high. Devoted to keeping my moves current, every Friday I set the VCR to tape Friday Night Videos , which aired well past my bedtime. The show often had guest hosts; on the weekend in question it was a tiny woman in welding shades, Yoko Ono, and her sweet-faced son.
    They were there to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of her husband, John. His story, sketched out in brief, evocative strokes, shook me to the bottom of my pink flannel jam-jams. I watched the “Imagine” video over and over, contrasting it with the footage of a younger John in pageboy caps and Pierre Cardin suits, the black-and-white Beatles taking over the world. And that was pretty much it. From that moment in 1985 until the year punk broke, I rode out an especially barren period in popular music on a strict diet of John Lennon’s Beatles, supplemented—sometimes even surpassed—by every band bio, memoir, and history I could get my hands on. And I did have to lay actual hands on them, back when mining data was a more physical ordeal.
    What John Lennon introduced me to, together with the great pleasure of his music, was the culturally engraved narrative of tragic greatness. Where Michael Jackson was at an apex, still walking on the moon, Lennon’s death had completed his story. That particular combination of greatness and tragedy punched out a ten-thousand-piece puzzle inside me. His life seemed to me thrillingly, ineluctably merged with his art, and his murder an act against that art so total and devastating it could hardly be fathomed, and never at length.

    5
    My only clear and openly publicized objective for the future, from the time I began to consider it, was to get myself to New York. At sixteen I rode a Greyhound into Manhattan with the rest of my drama class, where the objective crystallized into a many-pointed ache. We visited the Actors Studio and bought fake IDs in Times Square; I finagled permission to stake out the Letterman show. It was as I thought—the city where you made yourself happen—and I swore I’d be back. A dedicated drama geek, I quelled private ambitions to act with a steady course of magical thinking, frustrating my teacher more than once by auditioning and then ditching on the callback. I thought I was battling the Canadian impulse against distinction,