Why I Don’t Mourn the Death of Michael Jackson....

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By William Wheaton....

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            Mourn the death of Michael Jackson?  This is only partially possible for me to do.  I never met Michael Jackson, but I have crossed paths with two of his PIs (I was at the original trial of Anthony Pellicano where I had a brief conversation with Paul Barresi in which Barresi lied to my face about an article he’d written for Mark Ebner’s Hollywood Interrupted about work he and Pellicano supposedly did on Tom Cruise’s sexual orientation). Certainly, that is closer to meeting him then masses that ‘mourn’ for his loss, and exposure to the company he kept doesn’t endear very well. Focused more on allegations of child molestation Michael Jackson’s various ties to organized crime, either in the form of Notorious B.I.G. or Pellicano, where ignored by the media or some reason, as well as the fraud allegations from the prince of Bahrain.  The media even largely ignored his painkiller problems, all though right now that is impossible. I will say this one thing about the late Michael Jackson with all certainty and from first hand experience- Barresi and Pellicano are some very sketchy people to have working on your child molestation case, and I would be wary and even frightened of some one who did. Mourn the death of Michael Jackson? The truth is I don’t really care that much at this point.   It’s the same with Spector going to jail. To me that’s all just media iconography I used as the basis for short stories five years ago.  I’ve moved on, in part because I wasn’t able to sustain enough media attention to make money out of my books.....

My first book, Electric Beauty and the Beast featured a short story about him, “The White Glove”.  It also has a story about the recently imprisoned Phil Spector in it.   Electric Beauty and the Beast was written some five years ago.  But in these five years, so much has changed that Michael Jackson’s death signifies nothing so much as the passage of time, the measure of transformation within some five eventful years. When Electric Beauty and the Beast came out, I was a man who ran from personal demons and thus related to Jackson’s media image as a man running from personal demons, as it existed with his then current plight of child molestation allegations.  I was running from events in the news myself with the usage of my grandfather’s invention the M14 assault rifle in wars overseas, to the point of desperately trying to immigrate to Montreal despite problems with Canadian immigration. My mother’s death from cancer was still recent.   Those days are dead like Jackson now.  Problems with stalkers lead me back to using guns.  I wasn’t making any money through my writing, which lead me to the possibility of making money through guns. Then working as a reporter on the case of Anthony Pellicano lead me to the possibility of joining the PI business.  Many private investigators are or have been firearms instructors, so now I’m a firearms instructor in Vegas trying to become a PI. I still write but don’t try to use it to make a living anymore, it becomes more just brief reflection.....

I don’t give a fuck about the media image of Michael Jackson as a tortured soul anymore.  There was something in my writing about taking the images of insanity, of pubic madness that appeared in media, or were created by technology and the nature of media itself, like Michael Jackson’s face, and making that the starting point and opening up from there a more basic and all-encompassing nihilism   It was sort of the way a Joy Division song, for example “Decades”, utilizes a stark futuristic feel in combination with lyrical themes of insanity and misery to open up into a more universal asking of the nature of existence.  That’s already an approach I’m trying to shift or re-tool, if not abandon.  I’m literally in the gun business now and have taken more the angel of documenting or commenting on things related to the firearms or private investigative industries as kind of an after thought, because that makes more sense from a financial prospective for me these days.  Aside from just the financial advantage of taking that approach, it is actually darker.  This is no longer a writing that comes from observing crime or firearms from the outside at all.  “The White Glove” was for me a writing exercise, a speculation into something that only existed for me as an abstraction.  Pellicano became familiar and concrete for me, as I sat in a room alone with him staring at me at one point.  ....

As to Electric Beauty and The Beast, all that has died and been replaced with something else. It was impossible to prevent it from happening.  It was a financial matter as much as anything. Sometimes it is difficult to accept that that happened.  Other times I don’t care.  About Michael Jackson’s death itself, I don't mourn that at all...

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