No Land's Man (8 page)

In other words, Americans think about the rest of the world the same way New Yorkers think about the rest of America: they don’t. Which is why when I woke up one day to find that my name was no longer Aasif (aah-sif), but instead I had been given a brand new American moniker, Aaseeeef, I didn’t mind at all.

Y
OU CAN
’
T BE
M
ICHAEL
J
ACKSON
all the time, unless you are Michael Jackson.” This was the title of a poem I wrote while lying on the floor of my friend Roy’s bedroom during my senior year of high school, while in a marijuana-induced haze of lucidity. It was 1984 and MTV had recently launched on American cable television. It was the first of its kind and would revolutionize the music industry as a channel dedicated solely to music videos—by white artists. That’s right. It wasn’t a stated purpose, per se. I don’t believe it was part of their marketing campaign, but let’s just say the network was suspiciously sans R&B. If one was looking for Stevie Wonder or the Gap Band, one mostly got British punk, new wave, heavy metal, and glam metal, a tragic combination of Led Zeppelin and Liberace that aliens might one day use as a justification for destroying our tiny blue planet. But all that changed with the release of one monumental album: Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
.

Thriller
quickly became the bestselling album in the world with people dancing to “Billie Jean” as far away as Mumbai and Tokyo, a phenomenon not seen since Elvis or the Beatles. But what was equally as amazing as Michael’s meteoric rise from ordinary pop star to the King of Pop was his striking physical transformation. His nose had been pinched, his chin squared, and his eyes lifted. Eventually he no longer looked like an African-American man at all. Instead, his delicately miniaturized features looked more like those of a beautiful Indian girl.

That same year the drama department at my high school decided that instead of producing a traditional fall play, they would put on a variety show in collaboration with the music department. The drama students were asked to perform some kind of musical number, even if their lack of singing ability left them to resort to lip-synching, for which there was an actual category. This was absurd to me, since lip-synching requires no talent at all; I would rather listen to bad karaoke than watch pretty good lip-synching. Initially I decided to boycott the show entirely, but a few weeks before the performance I changed my mind . . . because of Michael Jackson.

It would be fair to say that most Indian immigrant parents would assert two important restrictions on their sons before entering high school: “No dames and no drugs.” I use the word dames here simply for alliteration purposes—no Indian parent would use the word
dames
. To be fair, no non-Indian parent would use the word
dames
, unless your dad happens to be a James Cagney impersonator. My larger point is that up until my senior year I had never partaken of either. However, as my interest (and frustration) in the former increased, my attraction to the latter did as well. If only being a 125-pound geeky Indo-British theater nerd with an
Afro who specialized in funny walks had somehow made me more attractive to women, I may never have settled for drugs as my act of rebellion.

When I say drugs, I don’t mean hard drugs, or even medium-soft drugs; I mean marijuana. This probably sounds innocent enough, but for someone who had never even kissed a girl or tasted wine, it might as well have been crack. Actually, it was not the pot that I was drawn to; in fact, for a long time I refused to inhale and only pretended that I was high. I just wanted to hang out with the guys who were smoking pot because they seemed cool, funny, and intellectual.

Unlike the rest of the kids in high school, Roy and Rick, my soon-to-be stoner friends, were not listening to Duran Duran or going to the mall to play video games and watch Molly Ringwald movies. They were two handsome white guys with 4.0 GPAs who had given up student government to be actively counter-culture. They didn’t care what anyone thought of them as they passionately discussed for hours on end the literary merits of Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison. I realize now this is just what happens when you are stoned, but at the time they seemed completely unlike myself and the other kids in drama. Most importantly, unlike me, Roy and Rick seemed to be having lots of sex . . . with dames.

Roy and Rick reminded me of some of the boys in my British boarding school, super-smart kids from wealthy families who would snort glue behind the cricket field. I was never foolhardy enough to join them, but I wondered what it must take to risk being suspended or even expelled. Perhaps you had to be incredibly angry, I thought, to be able to say “Fuck you” to the school, to your parents, to risk ruining your future. As an immigrant kid whose parents had sacrificed so much to give me the life I had, I never felt I had
the luxury to express my anger in that way, but I was nevertheless envious of those that did.

In Roy and Rick I found a similar expression of anger and rebelliousness. They both came from wealthy, divorce-traumatized homes. Unlike at my house, where my parents had never heard of personal space and if I had a friend over my mother would walk in to my bedroom every five minutes with offerings of Indian delicacies or random food items like peaches, Roy’s parents never seemed to make an appearance. We would spend hours after school and on the weekends getting stoned in Roy’s basement bedroom and freaking out on the few occasions the front door slammed. We spent a lot of time driving around in Roy’s beat-up sky-blue Volkswagen Bug blasting Beatles tunes and discussing Nietzsche while baked out of our minds.

On one weekend during one such car ride, a few minutes after Roy and I had picked up Rick from a local pizza restaurant where he waited tables, I experienced something that changed the rest of my high school experience. As we drove up North Dale Mabry Highway out of town, toward the open fields of north Tampa, we toked and smoked like three Easy Riders. Roy had forgotten his cassette of
The White Album
so we blasted the radio and, since it was the eighties, it was only a matter of time before the familiar drum beat and weeping falsetto of “Billie Jean” began to squeeze its way through Roy’s tinny speakers. We didn’t care, we sang along like it was Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” rolling down the windows as we let the humid Florida wind whip us into a sixty-mile-per-hour frenzy. As Roy floored the pedal we accelerated just as Michael hit the all-too-familiar chorus and I leaned forward from the backseat throwing my head out of the passenger window, screaming to the
surprised shoppers in the Winn-Dixie parking lot, “She says I am the one. But the
kiiiiiiiid
is not my son!”

Rick turned to me, his eyes bloodshot, his face beet-red, his surfer dude blonde locks wildly blowing like his entire head was enveloped in flames, and shouted, “Oh my God. Listen to you. You sound like Michael Jackson, dude.”

He was right! And I was as surprised as he was. It seemed that without really trying I was managing to hit those high falsetto notes and doing a pretty good impersonation.

Earlier that year, Michael Jackson had sealed his stature as being bigger than Jesus while performing at the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary celebration; a single glove, a fedora, and the moonwalk all came together in a magical moment. Michael seemed to walk on water that night. Truth be told, it was not the first time I had ever seen the moonwalk—the black kids in school had been popping and breakdancing outside the lunch room for almost a year before I saw Michael do it on TV. I had even tried doing it myself in my bedroom late at night, but I always looked less like I was dancing and more like I was being riddled with bullets. I lacked three basic components: grace, control, and coordination. But while many of us had seen the moonwalk before, just the same way many had seen a magic trick before Houdini ever put on a show, no one had ever seen it elevated with the style and attitude that Michael gave it. So in that drug-induced moment in the back of Roy’s sky-blue Volkswagen, I made a decision that would change the rest of my high school experience. The school variety show would have its very own Michael Jackson.

Rick’s girlfriend had taped the Motown performance, and since my family didn’t own a VCR, I went over to her house every night after school to watch the tape and memorize the kicks and squeals
and the part where he jumps up and down and screams, “She led me to her room, hey, hey, hey.” I practiced that dance everywhere, all the time. I danced in the shower, to the thumping of my mother on the other side of the bathroom door yelling, “What are you doing in there? Why are you taking a shower at two o’clock in the afternoon?”

I danced in my sister’s bedroom when she was not home in order to gain inspiration and ape Michael’s pained facial expressions from the posters that covered her walls.

I even broke into the dance one night before bed, while I was grabbing a glass of milk. My parents’ bedroom was just off the kitchen of our small two-bedroom bungalow. With my first jump I woke my father, who emerged from bed to the sight of his teenage son kicking and twirling and emitting piercing high-pitched squeals while holding a glass of milk and wearing only his underwear at two in the morning. He must have wondered in that moment, as he watched me from the shadows, why he had ever come to this country. In the middle of a sliding moonwalk across the linoleum floor I was startled back to reality by his quiet voice saying, “I think it’s time for bed.”

Around the same time that my Michael Jackson transformation was in its pupa stage, my grandparents came to visit us from India. They clearly wondered what had become of their grandson. I wore dark shades, my Indo-fro was Jheri-curled, and I would spend hours in my bedroom singing and dancing with my Walkman on my head. Roy and Rick even started calling me Michael.

After much provocation from my sister I even deigned to perform for my grandparents. I couldn’t imagine how this was going to go over, but at least it would explain why I kept jumping up on
to my tiptoes all the time. My grandparents looked puzzled as they sat in the living room with my mom next to them. My sister hit the cassette player and as the song began I came out from my bedroom wearing shades and one sparkly glove. I began singing too early in the music so I started again. This time I attempted the 360-degree spin and my shades flew off and landed by my grandmother’s feet. I don’t think she knew if she was meant to laugh or not. I sang and danced through the rest of the song, missing notes and missing steps. A couple of times I even lost my balance completely and collapsed to the floor. By the end I was exhausted but had learned two very important lessons: singing and dancing at the same time is really, really hard, and moonwalking on a carpet just looks like you are trying to wipe something off the bottom of your shoe.

Despite my poor display my family was supportive. Even though my grandmother didn’t understand what it all meant, my less-than-average homage to Michael Jackson brought a smile to her face. For the rest of their visit she would walk into my bedroom every day and sing “Billy Jesus not my lawyer.” She had no idea what she was saying, and it didn’t matter. She was now a fan.

For most of the following week, I kept practicing while feeling increasingly sick to my stomach. I realized that stoned people make impulsive decisions that lack judgment and that this was the backbone of the “Say No to Drugs” campaign. I also realized that singing like Michael and dancing like Michael at the same time was probably out of the question for a kid with asthma and so I reluctantly switched my name from the singing category to the lip-synch category, knowing full well that the only way this would work was if I nailed those turns and kicks. My moonwalk had to look like my shoes were made of glass.

The day of the variety show arrived and my transformation was complete. I was about to lip-synch “Billie Jean” for the entire student body.

I walked out in the darkness and stepped into a spotlight at center stage. My heart was pounding and in an instant my mouth seemed to lose all moisture. My limbs felt heavy as I assumed a familiar pose. The audience recognized the silhouette but not the person and there was a murmur that went through the auditorium. Before I was ready for it to happen, the familiar throbbing beat began and students began to look at each other. A whistle pierced the air and I heard an “Oh yeah!” as I reached up with my makeshift glittered glove, drenched in sweat, and slid my fingers across the brim of my fedora. Here we go, I thought, as I thrust out my hip and kicked my right leg straight and hard. A girl screamed, “I love you!” I heard another voice scream, “Hell yeah!” Then another, and another, and in an instant something felt different. For the first time I was not just recreating choreography—I was inhabiting it.

A confidence began to come over me that I had never experienced before. I felt strong and graceful as I began to release my anger, rebelliousness, sexuality, and playfulness through the pounding of Michael’s rhythm. As the drumbeat gave way to the first few lyrics I turned from profile to face front. There was an explosive scream from the audience as I swallowed and opened my mouth, becoming a vessel for Michael’s pitch-perfect lament. Before I knew it the fedora went stage left and I glided stage right. I had to land the next move like an Olympic gymnast, a 360-degree spin that ended with me on my tiptoes. It happened so fast I barely had time to think, but I nailed it. The room erupted with hoots and hollers. Then I put one foot back, thrust my neck forward, and as the music hit the crescendo,
muscle memory kicked in and all I had to do was bring the swagger. I walked forward and glided backwards. It couldn’t have been easier.

I was an Indian, English kid who had been transplanted to America, dancing on a Tampa high school stage, channeling a black man who looked like an Indian girl. My grandmother was sitting in the audience and there was no turning back. It is true that you can’t be Michael Jackson all the time, but on that day, for four minutes and thirty seconds, the entire student body—black kids, white kids, the jocks, the prom queens, Roy, Rick, the drama kids, and even the two Asian kids and Dilip—stood up and screamed, “Michael!”