AND SO, MY BROTHER AND I WERE ON TOUR WITH Michael Jackson. My parents flew out to meet us in various cities on the itinerary, but through it all, we stayed—traveling, attending concerts, and spending time with Michael. I already knew him as a father figure and a friend. By the time it was all over, I would know him as an entertainer. I would also witness and feel deep compassion for the struggles that began for Michael on the day when he was accused of molestation and continued to haunt him for the rest of his life.

   Before heading to South America, the tour took a weeklong break in Switzerland. Dad left us in Gstaad, where Michael’s friend Elizabeth Taylor had offered him use of her chalet. Gstaad was a beautiful village in the mountains where you could see cows walking down the streets among the people, shaking their heavy heads and sounding their cowbells.

   The first night in the chalet, we ordered cream of chicken soup from a hotel called the Palace right down the street. It was so tasty that we ordered it again every night. In the chalet, there was a sweet grandma of a woman who took care of us. She was small and a bit doddering, and we had fun responding to her warmth with exaggerated enthusiasm. We showered her with hugs and kisses until she giggled with embarrassment. Be it soup or old ladies—we thought it was funny to be over the top.

   Gstaad was a perfect escape from the rigors of touring. It was such a small town, and so remote from the rest of the world, that— in the beginning at least—Michael could walk freely down the streets, undisguised, without being bothered. This was a rare joy for him. Our first day, we wandered in and out of the quaint shops together, admiring and commenting on all that Gstaad had to offer. At some point I’d decided I would start collecting pocketknives and handcrafted lighters. I guess I’d heard of Swiss Army knives, but I have no idea why I thought I needed more than one. Anyway, once I’d made this decision, the three of us were wholly committed to it, so in the course of our stay, we found (and Michael purchased for my collection) just about every pocketknife in the entire town. As for the lighters, I liked to use them to set pieces of paper on fire. (No, not a pyromaniac, just a teenage boy.) Later, when we were leaving Switzerland, Bill Bray asked me to hand over my lighters. He didn’t want them to go on the plane, for security reasons, so he said he’d hold on to them for me. As it turned out, I never saw them again. Unfortunately, Bill Bray passed away several years ago. Where my lighters went is a mystery he took to the grave with him. One thing I’ll always remember about our time in Gstaad was Michael introducing me to new music. We’d always listened to music together, and anytime we were in a record store together, I’d walk right next to Michael to see what albums caught his fancy. I’d also seen him follow the songs that were popular on the radio, keeping abreast of current hits. He had an employee whose sole job was to prepare cassette tapes of each week’s top songs from around the world and ship them to Michael.

   Anyway, back at the chalet, we sat rapt, listening for hours as Michael played DJ, saying, “You have to listen to this song. Now you have to hear this group.” We listened to Stevie Wonder and all of the Motown stars. He had us listen to the James Brown song “Papa Don’t Take No Mess” —all fourteen minutes of it. We listened to the Bee Gees song “How Deep Is Your Love?” (I still believe that it’s one of the greatest songs of all time.) Michael went on about Aaron Copland, whom he considered the greatest composer of the twentieth century. He introduced me to all types of music—country, folk, classical, funk, rock. He even turned me on to Barbra Streisand. I fell in love with her song “People.” Michael liked to go to sleep to classical music, especially the works of Claude Debussy.

   I remember him putting on a group called Bread. I didn’t pay much attention to the music—I was too busy making fun of the name. “Bread? What kind of name is that? Want some butter with your bread?” and that kind of nonsense. But when I settled down for a minute and really listened instead of making sarcastic remarks, they became one of my favorite groups. I wanted to know everything there was to know about Bread. Yes, Bread was my jam (bad pun intended).

   Michael often talked about the universality of music. He wanted to write music that anyone in any country could sing, and as we traveled I would hear people who didn’t speak English singing “Man in the Mirror,” “Heal the World,” and, later, “Stranger in Moscow.” He always said that the lyrics to his songs wrote themselves. It was all about the melody. A musician, Brad Buxer, was with us on the tour, and as they composed together, Michael would tell him, “Play the piano like a five-year-old child, Brad. If you can play it like a child, it will last forever.”

   During our second day in Gstaad, it snowed, but that evening, around dusk, the sky cleared. Michael said, “Let’s go make wishes on the stars.” We went out to the backyard and lay flat on the ground, looking up at the incredible night sky. Michael said, with a hint of mysticism in his voice, “Be careful what you wish for—it’ll come true.”

   All of a sudden there was a movement nearby. A man appeared at the side of the yard. Nobody was staying in the house with us, and this unexpected apparition was definitely not something that any of us had wished for. In a flash, Michael jumped up and started screaming to try to scare the guy away. He threw a glove at him. (If the guy had had any sense, he’d have made off with that glove and kept it for his grandchildren.)

   The guy threw his arms in the air, saying, “No, no, it’s okay.” He turned out to be a harmless worker who’d come to check on something in the house, but in that moment we could see how, for all his love of childlike things and the childlike absorption he found in them, Michael absolutely saw himself as responsible for us. He was our protector, and in that mantle, he wasn’t scared of anything or anybody.

   By the next day, word had spread about the famous visitor who was staying at Elizabeth Taylor’s chalet, and some fans showed up. Late that night, they gathered outside the chalet and began to sing some of Michael’s songs. We went to the window and spent some time talking to them. This wasn’t unusual: wherever we went, Michael struck up conversations with his fans. He wanted to know where they were from, what they liked to do. He loved them, and no matter how enormous their number, he never stopped seeing and respecting every one as an individual. The swarms of fans that found him wherever he went might have upset someone who prized his solitude as Michael did, but he always found a way to show his appreciation by giving still more of himself to his fans. He was as open to people as he was to experience, and this, too, was a lesson I learned from him.

   One of the guys on Bill Bray’s security team, Wayne Nagin, went to every stop on the tour a day ahead of us to coordinate transportation, hotels, and security. Security was important. Dangerous was a major tour for Michael. The fans always knew ahead of time that he was coming to town. We couldn’t travel without a police escort. When we arrived, the route between the private jet and the hotel would be jammed with fans, as if the whole city had shut down in order to dedicate itself to welcoming Michael Jackson.

   In Buenos Aires, the intensity of the fans seemed greater than ever. As we drove from the airport, hundreds of people chased the car, banging on the windows, wanting to see MJ for two seconds, trying to touch him. People on the sidewalks waved to us the whole way to the hotel, as if Michael were the pope. The car moved slowly through the throngs. Sometimes Michael would put a hand out the window and people would go wild, screaming, even fainting at the knowledge that he was so close.

   I teased Michael, saying, “These people aren’t fainting over you, you know. It’s me. They’re fainting because of me. Can’t you hear them yelling, ‘Fraaaank, Fraaaank!’”

   He smiled and played along: “Please, don’t you know who I am?” Michael wanted to go shopping, but it was clearly impossible for him to appear in public without being mobbed. He loved his fans, but obviously he couldn’t connect with them at all times. The irony was that all this love, this desire to make contact, served only to force him deeper into isolation. This had been Michael’s reality for so long that he never seemed bothered by it, and I followed his lead. We had fun working around the restrictions. Often a disguise was in order, but no sunglasses on the planet would camouflage Michael’s identity. On this occasion in Buenos Aires, my brother and I dressed as nerds, wearing funny hats, glasses, and backpacks. Michael, not to be outdone, decked himself out as a wheelchair-bound priest.

   On our shopping expedition, he fell inexplicably in love with a statue of Napoleon riding a horse and entered into spirited negotiations with the art dealer to get the best price for it. As extravagantly as Michael spent money, he still relished a good deal. Watching him do his priest act as he purchased a massive statue for six figures … well, I loved that crazy shit.

   Back at the hotel, Eddie and I had to do the schoolwork that we’d been sent. We were supposed to complete the assignments and return them to the school. The teachers were under the impression that we had been provided with a tutor, and we did, in fact, have one … but we kept his identity under wraps. We were pretty sure that the school wouldn’t buy the idea of Michael Jackson as a traveling tutor. The truth was, he was genuinely committed to the job. Sure, we didn’t exactly keep regular school hours—lessons happened in the middle of the night sometimes—but Michael was the one who regularly sat down with me and my brother and went through our assignments with us. When we had to read books, he would read chapters of them aloud to us, then have us recap what we had heard, asking: “So who were the main characters? What did they want? What does it mean?” In the same way that he opened our minds with the movies he had us watch, he also encouraged us to think about our homework differently than we were used to and to take it seriously.

   In addition to the assignments our school gave us, Michael insisted that we keep journals of our trip.

   “Document this trip,” he’d keep telling us, “because one day you’re going to love to look back on it.” In every country he had us take pictures of what we saw, do some research about the customs, and put what we’d seen and experienced in our books. We explored the different cultures. We visited orphanages and schools. Eddie and I started to have a greater awareness of our place in the big, wide world. Only later was I wise enough to be thankful to my parents for permitting us to have this experience. They recognized that education wasn’t just about reading, writing, and arithmetic. They understood that we would learn by living.

  

   MICHAEL MAY HAVE BEEN OUR TUTOR, OUR FATHER FIGURE , and our friend, but onstage, he became another person. We went to every single concert in every single city. Sometimes I wore my pajamas—I was in a phase where I liked to wear my pajamas everywhere. As Michael warmed up his voice, which could take up to two hours, Eddie and I played games, watched cartoons, and ate candy in the greenroom, which was always stocked from floor to ceiling with sugary distractions. When it came time for him to perform, we usually watched from chairs on the side of the stage. Sometimes we’d wander back to watch the show on a monitor or chat with the makeup artist, Karen, and the wardrobe guy, Michael Bush, but for the most part, night after night, I watched attentively. The show never got old. I studied Michael, I watched the dancers, who were in awe of him, and I saw the reaction of the audience, which was always fascinating to me. In every city Michael’s show generated incredible excitement. To have that energy surrounding me was a new experience for a good New Jersey boy. It was a sense that people could join together, sharing thoughts and emotions without even speaking. There was power in Michael and in his music—the power to move people and connect strangers. During those concerts he made the world feel like a smaller, warmer, and more harmonious place.

   I loved watching the fans from the side of the stage, a sea of people screaming, crying, fainting, hanging on their idol’s every move. I’d sit there and think, This godlike being they’re worshipping is the guy who’s helping me with my homework. Often I wondered how it was that I saw the same people in the front row for show after show in city after city. How could they afford to leave their jobs and their lives and follow an entertainer from one place to another? Those of us who were part of the tour had the luxury of speeding around in private jets, but how did these fans make it to each city in time for the show? There was one fan, Justin, whom we called Waldo, after the character from the Where’s Waldo? books, because if we looked hard enough we could find him in every audience.

   As his last song in the show, Michael sang “Heal the World,” and each time he performed it, a bunch of kids joined him onstage in costumes from countries all around the world. My brother and I would dig up robes from other cultures and slip them over whatever we were wearing, then go out onstage with the rest of the kids. We had a funny dance that we named “The House” because it was inspired by Michael’s gofer, Scott Schaffer, whose nickname was “House.” We loved to mess with House. We’d knock on the door of his hotel room, saying, “House, we have something for you.” When he opened the door, we’d pummel him with pillows. Trust me, it was funny if you were thirteen.

   After seeing House dance, we created a wholly original dance inspired by his technique. Before the show we’d say, “House, we’re going to do ‘The House’ for you onstage tonight.” And soon enough there we would be, Michael, Eddie, and I, doing “The House” —which involved, well, it was pretty much rocking from one foot to the other in a uniquely dorky manner. Seeing a couple of kids dancing awkwardly onstage was one thing, but what I loved was that Michael, the greatest dancer in the world, was putting aside all his hours of choreography and practice to perform such a silly move onstage in front of a stadium packed with tens of thousands of people. All just to make one guy laugh.

   As funny and memorable as these inside jokes were, nothing in the show could compare to the moment when Michael sang “Billie Jean.” Michael was my friend. He helped me with my schoolwork. We had pillow fights. But when he performed “Billie Jean,” his transformation was awe-inspiring. As soon as I’d hear that kick drum come in, I’d practically go into a trance, my eyes riveted on his every move.

   Part of the brilliance of his performance of “Billie Jean” was that it somehow seemed simple and effortless. But behind the simplicity, I could see the depth of Michael’s understanding of composition and storytelling. For every song he performed, Michael knew exactly what he wanted the crowd to see, what he wanted to project, what he intended to give. As he performed, that ambition filtered into every aspect of his being; he became the song. You could see it most clearly in “Billie Jean,” but it was there in “Thriller” as well. Beyond the music, the dance, the vocals, and the stadium itself, there was a feeling of energy and magic that transcended the individual elements of the performance. The sum was greater than its parts, something bigger and more unique than what anyone, myself included, could have expected. The audience felt the magnitude of the brilliance that Michael put into his performance. Every moment of creating “Billie Jean” had been leading up to this one moment, as though every time he’d sung the song before had been just a rehearsal for its unveiling on this particular night. He was one with his art.

   This transformation was an art that Michael practiced and mastered. He told me, “Whatever you do or say or want the world to see, envision it and it will happen.” Michael preached about channeling the power of the universe long before spiritual books like The Secret were published. He told me I could achieve anything if I believed in it. I try to apply that philosophy to all aspects of my life. When I know what I want, I fully envision the end result. That way all the energy I put into it along the way focuses me in the right direction: toward the end product.

   “Billie Jean” was originally titled “Not My Lover.” Quincy Jones, Michael’s coproducer on Thriller, actually didn’t want it on the album, but Michael insisted, and he was right. Everything Michael did was incredible, but if I had to pick one performance out of his oeuvre as the quintessence and culmination, it would be “Billie Jean.” Every time I watched him perform it was a flawless, captivating moment in time. It always gave me goose bumps.

  

   AS THE TOUR PROGRESSED, I GOT TO KNOW SOME OF MICHAEL’S other friends and associates. In Santiago, Chile, Michael’s dermatologist paid him a visit. Michael had a skin disease called vitiligo. He had told me about it earlier that year, at Neverland, explaining that it caused patches of his skin to lose their pigmentation. He showed me some pictures of people who had advanced cases of it; those whose skin color was dark had dramatic and disfiguring patches of white all over their bodies. Michael told me how much he hated the disease, but how fortunate he felt to be able to afford the treatment, which involved lightening the rest of his skin to even out the color. Michael said that his dermatologist, Dr. Arnold Klein, was the best in the business; everyone went to him, even Elizabeth Taylor.

   A woman named Debbie Rowe, who worked for Dr. Klein as a nurse, accompanied him to Santiago to treat Michael’s skin and to see a couple of his shows. I liked them both right away. Klein was a big bear of a man, a very charismatic guy. Meanwhile, Debbie was spunky and a real straight shooter. She always spoke her mind. On the tour I witnessed Michael working with Brad Buxer, the musician, on the song “Stranger in Moscow.” Moscow had been a stop earlier on the tour, before Eddie and I had arrived. During his stay in the Russian city, Michael had been feeling deeply sad and alone because of the allegations he was facing. He had been sitting on the closet floor in his hotel room, crying, when the song came to him.

   Brad was Michael’s music director and personal music producer at the time, and there was a unique closeness to their collaboration. Michael told Brad the idea for the song, giving him a melody. Brad, who had set up a recording studio in his hotel room, created the song around that melody. They worked on the song constantly, Michael singing elements and giving beats to Brad, and Brad transforming them into music. Watching them cowrite, I saw how a song begins with an idea, with simple chords, and builds as time goes on. Michael said that he liked to let a song write itself. It told him what it needed. He’d spontaneously start singing and dancing around the hotel while the song evolved in his heart and mind.

   “Stranger in Moscow” would come out on the HIStory album. It will always be one of my favorite songs because I watched Michael create and produce it from start to finish. I was even on the set when they shot the video about three years later. It was the song that made me fall in love with the art of making music.

   Michael was introducing me to an extraordinary world. Beyond experiencing the concerts and the music, I was traveling, seeing new places, meeting fans and dignitaries. My whole world broadened dramatically and permanently. I saw that the world was a whole lot bigger than junior high school. I learned to appreciate and respect different cultures. But my biggest personal revelation was discovering the thrill of making meaningful art and having people respond to it. Michael, as my mentor, recognized that impulse and nurtured it in me.

   As for Eddie, Michael saw his interests and talents and mentored him in another direction. Eddie was always a fantastic musician. As he got older, he would expand his knowledge by learning the technical aspects of record producing. Michael always said to Eddie, “Be a master at this. Your time will come. Be patient. Keep writing. Stay focused.” I dimly saw that under Michael’s tutelage, Eddie and I were having something like parallel experiences. Close as we were, we didn’t talk much about what was happening on the tour, with Michael, and inside ourselves. We were too busy living it.

   What was nearly impossible for us to comprehend was that, at the same time as Michael was giving us a life-changing experience, he was enduring one of the hardest times of his own life.