Polyethylene -- the Great Equalizer

I could barely grasp what I was hearing. One morning in 1977, Regina Jones, publisher of the Los Angeles-based Soul Newspaper, was on the phone with incredible news: I was going to interview Michael Jackson.

Seven years earlier, Michael and his brothers had burst upon the scene to fill the musical void in my existence left by the official breakup of my beloved Beatles. Honestly, at 15, I was too old to continue secretly pretending to be one of the Fab Four. Besides--young, rangy and black--I looked more like a Jackson. I promptly became a Jackson 5 fiend.

By 1977, though, hue was all Michael and I appeared to have in common. By then I was 22 and preoccupied with finding my voice as a writer; Jackson was, at 18, an accomplished man-child star in transition. The group’s ebbing glimmer didn’t matter to me. In my mind, the acts I’d previously interviewed as a fledgling journalist were merely training for my summit with Michael Jackson. Finally, that day had come. And I was scared to death.

I was the most insecure person I knew when I was growing up. Unbearably shy, I often took refuge in the library during high school lunch break to avoid interacting with classmates. As a professional journalist, my laid-back conversational interview technique was a well-honed act. Truth is, before entering the room for an interview, I would almost hyperventilate. I found being younger than most of my subjects comforting; they wouldn’t expect much from a skinny kid.

But the notion of sitting before the Jackson boys--talented, handsome, privileged, my age--was pressure on another level. On the freeway heading to the family’s Encino home, I nearly turned around twice. When I finally arrived at the nondescript ranch-style structure, set back from the street and nestled among trees, I identified myself through the intercom. Watching the wrought-iron gate slowly open made my heart race.

“Is that thing gon’ leak?” “Papa” Joe Jackson grunted, ignoring my outstretched hand and gaping at the battered blue-and-white ’56 Buick Century I’d just maneuvered onto the Jacksons’ driveway. Larry, Joe’s gentler, kinder brother, doing double duty as the Jacksons’ uncle and road manager, intervened and led me into the eerily quiet home. The rest of the brothers, he explained, were gone. It would be just Michael and me.

Alternately exhilarated and terrified, I eyed a wall of gold records, photographs and awards. I remembered 1972 in my hometown of Oklahoma City, where a friend and I had skipped school to crash a midday J-5 sound check for a concert that night at the Myriad Convention Center; considered that kid now sitting in the home of his idols.

And I began to feel ill. I was about to find a bathroom--the Jacksons’ bathroom!--when Uncle Larry reappeared and asked me to follow him. Straggling behind like a man being led to his execution, I wanted to stop him and gingerly explain that the inexplicable had come up, or was about to come up, when I saw something to my left.

It was a room--living room, sitting room, I’m not sure what it was--filled with conventional furniture, its style and design inconsequential except that most of it was covered in plastic.

I’d seen a room like this before, with furniture sealed in clear, custom-fitted, permanent plastic, in the Oklahoma City tract home of my Aunt Betty Lewis. We always entered Aunt Betty’s through the den. Using the front door meant walking through the living room, and with me and Betty’s sons being rambunctious teenagers--our sneakers tracking in motor oil off somebody’s basketball court of a driveway--the living room was reserved for “special occasions” that never seemed to occur. You’d walk by the living room and peer in, as if viewing a museum exhibit.

Years later, when Aunt Betty lost her 42-year-old daughter, Charlotte, in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, “Dateline NBC” chronicled the family’s agonizing days-long wait as search teams sifted the rubble for her body. I sat in front of my television in L.A., gazing at the surreal sight of my ordinary family grappling with extraordinary circumstance in national prime time, and wondered if death was the special occasion that afforded Bryant Gumbel access to Aunt Betty’s sacred room. My memories of that room rushed back as I pondered the suburban tackiness of the Jacksons’ polyethylene living space. At first, I was puzzled. You just don’t expect famous people to be concerned with prolonging the life of a sofa. But even at the home of the Jacksons, it still came down to keeping the kids off the good furniture. In the seconds after I glimpsed that room I felt a weight leave my shoulders. I straightened up.

When Jackson joined me in another room for our interview, I was still nervous, but now it was more from excitement. And curiosity. I saw him for who he was: lanky, shy, introspective. It all felt strangely familiar. He proved to be uncomplicated but fascinating, talking show business like a veteran one minute, asking questions with the wonder of a child the next. “How tall are you?” he asked, insisting that we stand back to back to measure ourselves.

I left Encino that day feeling as if Jackson could easily have been one of Aunt Betty’s boys. For years I’d seen him and his brothers in those teen mag photos hanging out at the house, sitting on matching motorbikes under a summer sky, looking euphoric and out of breath. Now I knew that their sneakers might have had motor oil on the soles. Fitted plastic on a couch had become the great equalizer. And as I got back on the freeway, the idea left me feeling content with being me.

Almost 30 years later, I look at Jackson in the bizarre TV news footage, surrounded by entourage and controversy, and wonder what remains of the person I met in 1977. I believe he’s in there, somewhere. But it must have been tougher being him than I thought.