michel jackson

When Michael Jackson died, in the early summer of 2009, it was the kind of celebrity death that my particular generation has become especially used to in the past two or three years: a hero adjacent to our childhood suddenly gone, unexpectedly and out of nowhere. Death simply opening its mouth to a wide yawn and drinking in a life that certainly had more to give. While it isn’t like Michael Jackson was the first shocking star death by any means, to my friends and me, his death felt especially heavy. Many of us — namely, all my friends who were born in the 1980s and came of age during the latter part of that decade and into the early ’90s—learned what a pop star was from Michael Jackson. That’s when Jackson was at his most performatively decadent: everything cloaked in gold, music videos premiering in prime-time hours like news specials, Neverland Ranch sprawling over endless acres. Despite the fact that in 2009, Michael Jackson was far from the pop star draw that he once was, his death still echoed for my corner of people in a way that I can’t remember any other death echoing. Jackson seemed, at times, to be immortal. Even amid the controversies that surrounded him and his odd public behavior, he was still our pop star. The one we assumed would live forever.

It was hot in Columbus, Ohio, on the day Michael Jackson’s death started to circulate in the news. It was a different time, in some ways. Twitter was in its absolute infancy, and Facebook, much like it is now, wasn’t the place to get accurate real-time news. I scrolled through and refreshed a series of choppy news reports on my laptop from bed while two fans blew at full ferocity onto my sweat-slicked skin, which was staining the pillow resting at my back. I remember the heat by the way I sat forward in the moment when the news seemed most true, when several outlets were reporting it at once. I remember the heat by the way the pillow cover first stuck to my back as I reached for my phone, and I remember the heat by the way the pillow cover then slowly peeled away from the embrace of my damp skin. And I remember the heat by the way I ran outside to share the news with my neighbors, who were sweating on their porches, because it was slightly better than sweating in their non-air-conditioned apartments. And so I’m saying that the heat in Columbus was unforgiving on the day Michael Jackson died. I’m saying that everything in the air had bad intentions.

In Columbus, there is a bar called Hampton’s on King, and it is largely unspectacular as far as bars go, except for its basement. The basement of Hampton’s on King is a cave. It is one of those spaces that almost certainly should not hold people within it, and yet it does. There are no windows or ventilation, just space and opportunity, should a DJ feel compelled to bring the tables out for a night of revelry. On the night of Michael Jackson’s death, a handful of DJs from Columbus dragged their equipment into the basement of Hampton’s on King, and the bar called off every other purpose it served for one evening and told the city to come dance in the name of the King of Pop, workweek schedule be damned, and so we did. In the basement of Hampton’s on King on the night Michael Jackson died, there wasn’t enough space for the bodies to do anything except dance with the dance partner claustrophobia chose for them, and sometimes that was the wall, and sometimes you couldn’t lift your arm to wipe your sweat, and so sometimes you just shook your sweat off onto whoever was in front of you or behind you, and that person didn’t mind because I think what Michael meant when he sang “Don’t stop till you get enough” is that a river must be built out of what the dancing can offer so that we might float once again out of grief’s island.

I will get to the food you came here for, reader, if you will stay with me for just one more memory — one that you might know and one that you might have enjoyed at the opening or closing of some summer of unbearable heat. There is something about the way the night air purses its lips and blows a gentle respite over sweat-soaked skin that truly does it for me. I want the feeling of walking out of a hot, sweat-drenched dance party and into a cool night bottled and sold. The first few moments of the breeze hitting you, carrying you to a cooler freedom. In Ohio, the humidity has teeth. But once it subsides, the night air is a blessing. In the early hours that came after the day Michael Jackson died, my friends and I stumbled out of the basement of Hampton’s on King at 2:30 in the morning and realized that we were hungry, most of us having not eaten since we’d heard the news.

If you are on foot, as we were, your dining options in the area of Columbus in between downtown and the Ohio State campus are somewhat limited, particularly in summer, after the students have gone home and there’s less need to keep establishments open late. The White Castle on High Street, however, stayed open 24 hours a day, year-round. It was a pillar of the community. A monument, even. It was a place to stay for those struggling with homelessness on the exceptionally cold or exceptionally hot nights and not be hassled and maybe get a free coffee. It was a place that took all comers after the bars let out late in the summer or winter months and folks needed a place to sober up or extend their night a little bit longer before heading back to their homes.

And for my friends and me, in the early morning hours after the day Michael Jackson died, it was where we went to revel in the fact that we lived at the same time as Michael, as if he were a friend we were saying a brief goodbye to, knowing he’d one day come back.

To eat a small and square White Castle burger — particularly at an hour after midnight — is to enter into a contract, particularly with your own stomach, almost promising that you will endure some aches at a later hour. They are tempting in many ways: the small onions with their rich smell and the way they almost dissolve in your mouth like cotton candy; the size, which makes you feel like you aren’t committing too heavy of a sin in the name of grease. But the payoff is risky. There are exceptions, of course: my pal John would throw back a 10-pack of jalapeño burgers at 1 a.m. and be ready to play a game of full-court basketball by 8 a.m. Some of us are more skilled than others. If you are looking to play it safe, skirting around the burgers and getting something like chicken rings is a slightly safer bet, though not always a safe bet. One time, I ate some ranch chicken rings on a road trip and found myself in an immovable heap a mere two hours later. I’m saying that it’s all a roll of the dice, which makes it delightful and not.

In the early morning hours on the day after Michael Jackson died, my six friends and I crammed into a booth after ordering a case of 50 burgers and several sides of fries and onion petals. We were still sweating and ate the burgers as if they would absorb both our sweat and our aching nostalgia. And you could convince us that they did. In the White Castle, there was a motley crew: a table of old men, some construction workers who had either just ended a shift or just gotten started, some drunk partygoers, and us. The construction workers overheard our memorializing of Michael and chimed in. One, more than a decade our senior, told us that Thriller was the first album he purchased with his own money. One of the old men in a corner booth told us that he saw Michael back when he was little Michael Jackson of the Jackson Five. One of the drunk partygoers began to belt out an uneven and screeching rendition of “You Are Not Alone,” prompting raucous laughter from the employees behind the counter, who then pulled out an old radio and turned to the Columbus station that was playing only Michael’s songs for 24 hours straight.

And I am saying that this was always about White Castle. About how we choose to bury those we cannot actually bury with our own hands, and how the right funeral is sometimes a case of shared burgers, because everyone has run out of food except you, and you don’t want to go home just yet because the radio behind the counter plays “Smooth Criminal” for the third time in a row, and you want to see if the sobering-up partygoers can effectively pull off the lean from the music video, knowing they can’t.

The White Castle on High Street is gone now. It’s being rebuilt, they say, into an apartment complex with a newer, fancier White Castle underneath. I’m not sure I understand the concept of a fancy White Castle. I’m not sure if they’ll still employ people who will play the radio when a pop star dies. But when I woke up on the afternoon of the day after Michael Jackson died, my stomach felt fine. I haven’t been back to a White Castle since.