Bramble was talking about Michael Jackson again. "What I think he's done is, he's bleached his dick. He's tried to turn his dick white."
    "You can't turn your dick white," I said.
    Bramble poured himself another vodka. "Are you Michael Jackson?" he asked. "If the answer is: 'No, I'm not Michael Jackson,' then I don't know why you're talking about his dick."
    "You're talking about his dick," I said.
    "Has he even got a dick?" said Delk.
    "Oh, he's got a dick," Bramble said. "He's got a dick all right."
    We were on Delk's porch, watching the sun flame out over our neat little southern college town, where we'd come to cash in on the emerging field of cultural studies. None of us belonged here. That was totally obvious. But they'd let us in and our department chair, being a Southerner, was too polite to do the decent thing and rescind our funding. Every now and again, undergraduates would stumble past, hungry for some kind of dope. It was a Friday in spring. They were just waiting for sundown to jump on one another.
    "You sound pretty confident," I said.
    "Photos," Bramble said. "I've seen photos."
    "I don't want to hear about this," I said.
    "Long and thin and pale," Bramble said. "Think albino garter snake."
    "So what," Delk said. "Black dicks can sometimes look, like, lighter. Like the skin, it's paler than the rest of them. Almost like pinkish brown."
    "How about if we stop talking about Michael Jackson's dick?" I said.
    Bramble leered. "Why? Does the idea of Michael Jackson's dick threaten you? Some of that good old mandingo paranoia, Mikey?"
    Delk started to sing "Beat It" in a pinched falsetto.
    But it was no use trying to stop Bramble. He was like weather in that way: broad and incontrovertible.
    "Let me tell you boys a little story. When Jacko was about fifteen years old, he went over to Paris for a special appearance. This was after the Jackson Five had fizzled out, but before the big solo push. A fallow period, if you will. Anyway, he was over there, when is this, like late '70s, for a benefit, a benefit for the child victims of land mines."
    "Child victims," Delk said. "Perfect."
    Bramble waved his cigarette. "They wheeled all these mangled-up kids into this grand ballroom to watch Michael do a little lip-sync and dance thing, and these kids from, like, Kurdistan and Latvia, were bobbing their heads and blinking at all the flashbulbs from the photographers trying to capture the moment for PR purposes.

promotion

Suddenly, there's this big commotion at the back of the room. Who should appear but Princess Diana? This is in the early days of the marriage, before the bulimia burned out her throat. She was a huge fan of Jacko. Documented. They arranged this backstage meeting, very hush-hush. Michael's kind of shaken up, though, seeing all those kids. He starts to cry. Diana starts to cry. They start talking about all the pressure they have to deal with, you know, being famous, the fans, the press, and so forth. That's what the super-famous talk about. It's like their shared story, this aggrandized sense of grief no one understands. Lady Di is just smitten. She gets her security detail to smuggle her upstairs to where he's staying and what happens is, they spend the night together. As in, together."
    "That is such fucking bullshit," Delk said.
    Bramble settled back in his chair and took a puff of his cigarette. It was lewd how much he enjoyed smoking. "Check the files."
    Bramble did have files. He had read all the literature on Michael Jackson, the semiotics work out of Berkeley, the race-gender surveys undertaken at Michigan, every one of the sixty-seven unauthorized biographies. He had also amassed an archive of video footage. To Bramble, Michael Jackson marked the apotheosis of psychosexual/racial celebrity confusion. He had explained all of this in a lengthy paper (forthcoming in The International Journal on Pop Culture and Its Discontents) titled Pretty Young Thing: the Making of a Post-Modern Frankenstein.
    He had no compunction about lying when it came to Jackson either, because Jackson had, in his view, placed himself beyond traditional categories of truth. Whatever vestige of authentic personhood might have existed had long since been scraped away.
    "Michael Jackson is over," Delk said. "Nobody gives a shit about him anymore. He was a big deal, like, twenty years ago. Thriller and all that. You know who cares about him now? The French. I don't know anyone in the United States who gives a shit about him."
    "Why is his trial front-page news?"
    Bramble had a point. All week long, the local paper had been running stories about Jackson's lawsuit against his plastic surgeon. They'd run a photo on the front page showing Jackson swathed in bandages. He looked like a delicate mummy.
    "That's just, like, the whole media-sell-shit mentality. They put him on TV because he's a freak. There's no deeper meaning," Delk said. "Why do you assume there's some deeper meaning to Michael Jackson?"
    I was afraid Delk might ask this. Bramble took a long, leisurely sip of his vodka. He drank the stuff from plastic bottles, which meant his breath often carried a hint of isopropyl. I knew this because I lived with him.
    "Michael is everything we could ever hope to learn about self-contempt. This is a black man with all the fame and money in the world, a tremendous talent who despises the conditions of his birthright. So he sets about trying to reverse all of them. Rather than adult women, he seeks out boys. Rather than accept his masculine Negroid features, he attempts to recreate himself as Elizabeth Taylor from her National Velvet days. That's really what he's trying to do, if you look at his face, his hair . . . "
    "His dick?" Delk said. "You're saying Liz Taylor's dick is all bleached?"
    "He's even attempted to shave his own bones down. That's why his face is collapsing now. The cartilage is starting to poke through. It's a total genetic self-renunciation. When he went to Africa, he wore a mask the entire time. They brought oxygen over there for him, so he wouldn't have to breathe the air. He was scared to breathe the air that other black people breathe."
    Delk swigged at his vodka. "RuPaul should beat his ass. I'd pay good money to see that."
    "What would be the point?" Bramble said. "Michael already hates himself more than anyone else could."
    "Just tell me this," Delk said. "Does he fuck those little boys or what?"
    "No no no," Bramble said. "He's scared to death of germs. Besides, sodomy isn't his bag. Way too phallo-assertive. What he wants, actually, is to be welcomed by these little boys into their world. He's revisiting the trauma of his own boyhood."
    "What trauma?" Delk said. "He was a fucking rock star. Or whatever, before that, Motown."
    "His dad beat him," Bramble said. "His brothers despised him. His mother was in denial. No one ever made him feel loved as a child. He was just this little performing monkey. It was a kind of slavery. And all the desperation. Do you know where he grew up? Gary, Indiana. Have you guys ever been to Gary? It's a graveyard."
    "When were you in Gary?" I said.
    "I've driven through," Bramble said. "A couple of times."
    There was a nice little silence, which made me hopeful that we could stop talking about Michael Jackson. It was a downer topic, one that made me think of America as a terrible disease.