Mamarama (1 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Mamarama by Evelyn McDonnell. Copyright 2007 by Evelyn McDonnell.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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MAMARAMA
A Memoir of Sex, Kids, and Rock 'n' Roll

Evelyn McDonnell

To Mom, Mama, and mothers.

And to Karlie, Kenda, and Cole.

PREFACE
http://www.dailylit.com/books/mamarama/preface


1
DREAMING IS FREE

I would have taken a bullet for Michael.

That was the fantasy: I'm in Los Angeles, land of my birth and of Michael Jackson's superstardom. Usually, the setting is an amusement park (as a seven-year-old who had been transplanted to a Midwestern town, I pictured California as one big family fun zone). With a towering steel-and-wood roller-coaster as a mountain-range backdrop, the pint-sized lead singer of the Jackson 5 is spreading his love on his followers. I'm there (to comfort him, wrap my world of dreams around him, I'm so glad that I found him), at the front of the crowd, awaiting his benediction--a word, a glance, an autograph.

Michael and I are mere feet apart when I see the man with the gun. Menacing. Jealous. A hater.

"No!" I scream, and the next few seconds pass in slow motion.

I leap in front of Michael as the muzzle flashes . . . The bullet lodges in my shoulder, perilously close to my heart. . . . Guards tackle the assassin, and Michael rushes to my side.

"You saved my life," he says, gently, sadly, tenderly.

"I love you," I whisper.

We both cry.

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Assassination fascination: I suppose it's what happens when you were born less than a year after John F. Kennedy was killed, when the slayings of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X punctuated your toddler years like so many cosmic timeouts. I imagine it's a shared trait of "my generation," that is, no generation--we of that age group that's too squirrelly for the yuppies and too old-school for the slackers. Who knows, maybe news of the gunman at the Rolling Stones' '69 Altamont concert had penetrated my grade-school consciousness. I always was a bit of a pop culture junkie.

My first crush was a cartoon--a cartoon who was a child prodigy, who became the King of Pop, who devolved into a surgical composite of our culture's psychic breakdown. In 1971 The Jackson 5ive, a series produced by animation kings Rankin-Bass, made being music stars look like the Great American Adventure. The five brothers carried on the tradition of The Monkees, the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night, and Our Gang in Little Rascals. Only the Jacksons were our age, sort of. (Being a cartoon made them seem younger than they were.) I was born the year the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show; the Monkees were more my older brother's cup of tea. But musicians beamed every Saturday morning onto the TV screen in my Midwestern ranch-house living room made rock and roll seem like the Jetsons' space home or the Flintstones' stone age: a domesticated fantasy realm.

My brother has confessed that around the same time I was obsessing about Michael's fancy footwork, fuzzy Afro, and angel voice, he fell for Speed Racer's limpid eyes. Brett, two years older and cerebrally light years ahead of me, was my partner in pop-cultural immersion. Cartoons helped us imagine a miscegenated, bisexual future. But how were we, as adults, supposed to manage real-life relationships when we got our start with the perennial happy endings of Technicolor, bubble-edged creations?

Some three decades later, the ironies of my prepubescent imagination are abundantly clear. These days, Michael Jackson gets arrested for allegedly acting out fantasies somewhat different from my own, with little boys, not little girls. Apparently, life in the Jackson 5 was not quite the fantastic adventure depicted in cartoons.

But the '70s were an age of innocence. I wanted not merely to meet Michael, become his girlfriend, and save him--Did I somehow know he needed rescuing? Was it, in fact, obvious?--I wanted, of course, to be him. A rock star. A singing, dancing world traveler. A being whose divine gift lifted him above the dull, daily duties of life (homework, jobs, dishes, bills).

I wonder if Michael wishes he had had my relatively normal, safe, happy, if daydream-obsessed, childhood. Would he star in this role-play movie, trade places with not necessarily me, but someone like me? Someone not on a crash course for obliteration by the dream/hit factory, his very face erased.

I'm not sure those dreams did either of us any good.

But we'll always have the music.

Jackson 5 Greatest Hits. All music obsessives ask each other, What was your first album? That was mine. Plus, I owned a 45 of "Ben," Michael's love song to a rat. Seven-inch vinyl was where it was at when I was growing up in a small Wisconsin city. We heard the songs played by WLS in Chicago on our transistor radios, saved our allowances, rode our bikes to K-Mart, and brought home the hits. Though record collecting now seems to have become the ultimate nerdy fanboy domain, it was we girls who traded 45s while boys fretted over baseball cards.

A testament to the mentality of the collector, I still own that dog-eared album. On the cover, Michael looks nothing like the specter that haunts tabloid television. His image is positively Afrocentric in that groovy '70s way: big hair, nose, lips, collar. He's wearing a choker, and his colorful shirt is open. Michael doesn't look like an adult, but he's no kid either.

The joy, the glee, the abandon, the excitement are all in his voice. The Beatles were great, yeah, but sometimes I think pop music truly peaked later, with the bubblegum soul of the Jackson 5. John, Paul, George, and Ringo would have been inspiration-impaired without Motown, the Sound of Young America. And in Michael, Motown head Berry Gordy found what he had always been looking for: an old soul with a young voice.

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