Michael calls again. Michael talks to you for hours. "We were broken," the mother says in video footage from 2003, pursing her ruby-red lips in a rehearsed, Hallmarky sadness (the jury has now watched this avowal of the curative powers of Jackson three times, courtesy of the defense). "We were broken and Michael fixed us."
So the family went to Neverland, over and over again, and on one of those early visits, Jackson made a short music video with the boy. The jury has watched that, too: Pop icon and sickly thin child stroll hand-in-hand across the Neverland grounds, over a bridge, and then they spread out a blanket by a pond and sit, as lovers might. The soundtrack is Michael singing: "Smile, though your heart is aching / Smile even though it's breaking."
Oh, the banality: To witness the Michael Jackson trial as it creeps interminably along is to be underwhelmed by the ordinariness of it all.
(Ric Francis -- AP)
|
|
For what purpose this tape was meant is unknown, but it was destined to be given an exhibit number and entered into evidence. The family is presumed broken again; the jurors will decide to what extent Jackson had anything to do with that.
In normal traffic, it takes 35 minutes to get from Neverland to Foreverland. Outside the front gate of the ranch on Figueroa Mountain Road, there are sometimes fans who've slept in their cars, their stereos blasting Jackson songs you've never even heard. (Others sleep four to a room at the Stardust Motel or the Econo Lodge in Santa Maria, so they can get to court early, for seats.)
Unless there is faux-breathless drama to be had -- bench warrants! A motorcade race along the 101! Blue pajama bottoms! -- what strikes you most about California v. Michael Jackson is how normal it all seems, how scripted in its peripheral set details, how everyone and everything are promptly in their appointed places at the county courthouse on weekdays at 8:15 a.m.
This saga could not happen without shaggy palm trees set against a brilliant California morning sky. (The only other backdrop, sometimes, is a dull, whitish fog from the Pacific, about 20 miles west of here.) The typically brown hills have been turned Irish green from record rainfall.
It could not happen without the television cameras. It could not happen without the guy behind the fence on South Miller Street who screams, "Michael's innocent! Michael's innocent!" until he is almost hoarse. On some mornings, this devotee is joined by a few others, and on other mornings there is only another fan or two with him; and on some recent mornings, he has been alone. The need for crowd control and circus management has yet to present itself; Santa Barbara County scaled back some of its sheriff detail, and Santa Maria police did, too.
What a letdown to get all the way here and not find the apocalyptic, post-modern melee you'd hoped for and also dreaded. What a letdown to find out there are sometimes empty seats in the courtroom, and anyone can have them.
Most of all it could not happen (doesn't happen) without Michael. Two black SUVs pull up and everything stops. People never tire of watching Jackson simply get himself here. You can watch it nine times in a row and still find that you stop whatever you're saying or doing when the motorcade arrives, so that you can lean against a barricade and watch it for the 10th time:
The bodyguards step out and look around. Then his nearly ossified parents, Joe and Katherine, step out and look back toward the car. Then there is a pause just a few seconds too long. You wonder at this moment most of all what Michael Jackson is thinking.
Then the umbrella.
Then Michael.
He moves along the sidewalk with the care of a person made of porcelain, toward the entrance, and the whole world watches. He turns and waves once. Reporters are scribbling . . . what? ("Burgundy jacket." "Flashes peace sign.") To see it for yourself is to know a special underwhelmedness.
The great courtroom dramas of our era (O.J., Scott Peterson, Michael) take place in unremarkable courtrooms, nothing like the movies. Where Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville presides, the primary interior details are the drop-panel ceiling, the gray carpet, the indeterminate wood that reminds you of home-office computer desks at Staples.
