From Encino to Forest Lawn... So close to Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson, 12 years following your voice #11

The day after my visit to Westlake Studios was a spring break Sunday. My hotel was not far from Encino and I didn't even mean to. So we stopped symbolically in front of the mansion's gate. From the street, there was no way to see the property. Anyway, I'm not an intrusive person.

After a few minutes breathing the same air in which he had lived for so long and where his mother and children now resided, we walked to the Staples Centers.

There is something really unspeakable about being in these places where he was and where I had never thought I would be, as if, finally, these places belong to fiction... As I walked around the buildings, I kept seeing the images from This is it in my head. I told myself that he had been there a few months earlier, that his voice had resonated there. I would have liked to hear the reminiscences... That the walls speak to me... That the trees and the birds tell what they had perceived through the walls... Impossible to enter because a Lakers game was to take place that evening. I had to pay the entrance fee and attend the game to see the room. So I tried a few shots behind the door. Capturing a few rows of chairs and telling myself that they were there and had attended the rehearsals, it was already so huge...

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Then we went to the Holmby Hills mansion, where he had lived his last days. Where, let's say, he had fallen asleep and never woke up again...

I walked around the house for a long time, looking at the windows, the ones, supposedly, of his room, with the little balcony. I walked, paced under this balcony... I tried to imagine the film of this last night, of this last morning, to put myself in the place of these windows, to feel their memory... This kind of thing is devouring. It grabs you, it "takes your head", literally. It drives you crazy... I looked in the corners between the gate and the vegetation... The weed was starting to grow between the slabs. Its size, still small, still made its presence close, and at the same time, it signaled its absence so much... A car was still there, covered with a tarpaulin, under the balcony of his room. It seemed to have been forgotten, abandoned. I was filled with a feeling of reverence. I remember not wanting to speak anymore. I looked at the neighboring houses. How could one have been his neighbor... Was it possible? I realized how he had been living on another planet for me since I was a child... And then, all of a sudden, I was struck by a detail I didn't expect: his mailbox... So he had a mailbox? So we could write to him? Could I have written to him? Was it all really real? Strangely, this box, which I touched, scrutinized, was suddenly a paving stone in the pond, an inscription in reality, in possible links, in a form of tangible communication between humans. I thought of the letter I had sent her when I was 10 years old and which had remained unanswered. If, since that age when I still had some sense, I had grown up knowing that this man lived on earth, I would have written again. Writing is my preferred mode of communication, always has been. And even for him, obviously, since it all started with a letter and today, even if I sometimes write to him and throw those letters in the sea or send them to him, I write mostly to talk about him.

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At noon, we went to Universal Studios. First, we stopped at the "Off the Wall" store where he had a habit. He used to come there to buy lots of trinkets, little antiques. I didn't dare ask the owner anything. His picture was on the door. I wandered through the aisles, wondering which of these objects had been there last year and had crossed his face... It was all so surreal...

When I arrived at Universal, I was so out of touch that I didn't even imagine that I would be in some of the aisles where he shot "Moonwalker". What a dizzying experience.... We wasted so much time there though. I didn't care about eating, about finding a restaurant. What I wanted to do, to complete the circle, was to go to Forest Lawn. I was so sure that it was only a formality, that I had already met him everywhere I went... Yet the clock was ticking and, being accompanied, I was not free to go wherever I wanted. I was tired of waiting on those who were with me and I ended up going to meet a bus driver to ask him if it was possible to find a line to go there or if I could go on foot... He laughed. No bus. As for walking there, it was without counting on the fact that I had to cross the freeway and it would have taken me many hours to get there. I really didn't realize it... This city is a huge spider's web with the biggest avenues exceeding a hundred kilometers...