Michael Jackson
1958-2009

Reluctance doesn’t begin to describe how I feel this morning as I contemplate an obituary on Michael Jackson. Four people I know have died in the past four days. Three of them you know. I am sitting in a waiting room at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank as my wife, Rana Platz-Petersen, RN, undergoes some scheduled and unscheduled tests. I have been here for 2 ½ hours. I am fearful for many reasons. Rana, if you don’t know, is a show business nurse…34 years with CBS…and the Business Rep for Studio First Aid. Injuries and deaths within the “community” are her stock in trade. Rana is a true Insider. If someone is employed in the entertainment industry and has a medical condition, she’ll know about it. She has to.

I stepped out to the car a few minutes ago to pick up phone messages at home and turned on to a local news station, KFI, and listened to a report that did not surprise me. You may have heard that a silver BMW was towed away from the rented Holmby Hills home of Michael Jackson. The car belongs to Dr. Tom-Tom, the physician who was actually present when Michael Jackson stopped breathing. The UK tabloids are reporting that Dr. Tom-Tom was in the home to administer an injection of Demerol to Michael whose history with pain-killers has been well documented in the world’s Press. MJ himself admitted to treatment. It is being reported that Dr. Tom-Tom (aka: Conrad Murray) was giving Michael CPR when the paramedics arrived shortly after Noon…yesterday, June 25th…a date that a lot of us are not going to forget.

Dr. Tom-Tom has gone missing. Elvis echoes are all around me. Mental snapshots of River Phoenix and Anna Nicole Smith are swimming through my mind. The connections are too obvious to ignore.

If you examine the recent images of Michael Jackson, or talk to the people who were rehearsing with him for the now-cancelled tour dates, you must acknowledge that he was painfully thin…anorexic, in fact…and if you admit that Michael was known for altering his appearance by the most radical means then you will remember Karen Carpenter, another anorexic raised and trained to please others and her tragic, unexpected death in the home of her mother.

Anorexics, over time, do tremendous damage to their bodies’ chemistry in their quest to be super-thin…dangerously thin. Thomas Wolfe called the girls of Hollywood and Wall St., “X-Ray women” for their skeletal appearance when seen in the flesh. This disease was once the province of adolescent females but has spread into the entire entertainment community because of its (Hollywood’s) obsession with appearance; boys included who spend too many hours peering at themselves in gym mirrors.

A drug-addicted anorexic is vulnerable to sudden and unexpected reactions to pharmaceuticals, and I fear that’s what happened yesterday. The wrong diet, an unrevealed drug that was self-administered, high levels of stress, and contra-indicated medications in abundance and you suddenly have a Heath Ledger.

The point is that an anorexic may sail along taking prescription drugs for months…years… then suddenly have a negative reaction…a heart attack or seizures.

I want to scream…or weep…or somehow express my frustration…but this is a hospital waiting room and there are lots of folks with me with pain etched in their faces as they wait for their loved ones. I am just one among many.

“Oh no, not another one…not little Michael. It can’t be true.”

But another part of me, the part that has witnessed so many unhappy endings, that other part of me knows better. There are demons even in the stratosphere and they would demand an untidy end for Michael Jackson.

I feel cheated. I honestly do. I was praying that Michael’s tour would be a smashing success…bigger than Elvis’ return in Vegas, bigger than Judy Garland’s comeback performance in Carnegie Hall. I wanted him to come back bigger and better than ever. I wanted a miracle.

Then I remembered who I was comparing Michael to…Elvis and Judy. I know better…and so do you, dear reader. We put up with too much and demand too much.

I can hear the voices: “If you’re going to screw up your life like you have, Michael, then you better be really good when you comeback.”

Forgiveness is conditional when it comes to a celebrity, even one with transcendent skills like Michael Jackson. The mountain proved to be too high.

I hope the autopsy is inconclusive. I hope the toxicology tests come back clean. I hope the police find Dr. Tom-Tom and he’s dragged before the bar.

I hope Rana’s tests come back positive, and here she is now, my Rana-Girl, wife of 20 years and the best friend I’ve ever had. Please God, let us enjoy a healthy future. That’s only fair, I think as we head for the car.

K-Earth 101 is playing all Michael Jackson songs. News is that the top fifteen album downloads are all Michael Jackson. Of course.

It’s reported Michael recorded more than one hundred songs that have never been released so his children would have a lifeline to prosperity and a way to survive the crushing debts Michael left behind.

It’s a downright dirty shame, that’s what it is. Rana and I finally turn off the radio to quiet our minds. We have a funeral to attend today. Gary Toya lost his battle with kidney disease while waiting in vain for a transplant.

I don’t know what to say. Really, I don’t. With all his success Michael Jackson was a remote and tormented soul living in a world of his own making where performing for the masses, appealing to all of humanity, estranged him from real-life people who might have been able to tell him he was dangerously off the rails. The person who signs the check often doesn’t hear the truth. The question is, do the brilliant music and his performance skills make up for the indebtedness and questionable personal conduct?

At the Gary Toya memorial service, which was filled with humor and love as the life of a man who never left his community (and threw the best parties known to Gardena), who knew by name all the families and their interconnections in town and loved golf despite three hip replacement…a man who had friends of 58 years smiling at his memory…whose friends spoke of all the laughter Toya generated and his courage when his kidney’s failed…this man was laid to rest with all of us knowing that he never failed his obligations as a son, a friend, an Uncle and that he died gracefully as a citizen of substance.

Gary Toya didn’t have to hide in the spotlight to cover his failings. There was no need. He touched people’s lives face-to-face for the entirety of his life. There were no secret rooms in his house or exotic pets and carnival rides outside, yet children loved him, especially his nephews who spoke movingly at the service and made me cry.

I’m thinking of Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, two people I knew well and saw often during my years in this town. Here’s the poem that was read during Gary’s memorial…and reprinted below for you to consider as we weigh and measure the lives of people who have left us:

I have this poem above my desk thanks to a pal in Topeka, Kansas, Jim Cates…right next to Mother Teresa’s prayer. I’m looking at both right now. If you’re interested, here’s a link: