THE YEAR 1993. THINK ABOUT ALL THE HORRIBLE things you heard about Michael Jackson around this time. Think about all the jokes on late-night talk shows, all the ugly rumors, all the accusations and all the names. Now think about being the person— the innocent person—toward whom all this hatred and ridicule and negative energy is being directed. Imagine the damage that it would cause even the strongest of men. Michael was a professional. And while his performances never suffered during this time of trial, he himself did. He’d said, “I have rhinoceros skin. I’m stronger than all of them,” but Eddie and I could see the truth behind the bravado. The accusations that Jordy’s father had leveled against Michael were a source of unrelenting anxiety to him. At night he would sometimes vent: “I don’t think you realize” —and we certainly didn’t— “I have the whole world thinking I’m a child molester. You don’t know what it feels like to be falsely accused, to be called ‘Wacko Jacko.’ Day in and day out, I have to get up on that stage and perform, pretending everything is perfect. I give everything I have, I give the performance that everyone wants to see.

   Meanwhile, my character and reputation are under constant attack. When I step off that stage, people look at me as if I were a criminal.”

   I think that without our knowing it, the support my brother Eddie and I gave Michael helped him continue that tour as long as he possibly could. Especially Eddie, who was only eleven. Michael was responsible for us. He couldn’t fall apart in front of children. He had to be strong for us, and in some small way, this helped keep him going.

   When we arrived in Mexico City, nobody, including Michael himself, knew that it was going to be the last stop on the tour. Whether from the mental anguish caused by the accusations or the sheer physical toll of performing so many concerts, Michael was in extreme pain every night. During every show, he lost a lot of water and was at risk for dehydration, and he required a doctor, sometimes two of them, to help him recover. They visited throughout the day to give him nutrients and rehydrate him by IV. He drank Ensure, a protein-and-vitamin-supplement drink, to replenish himself.

   But then, at night, a doctor always came in right before he went to sleep to give him what he called “medicine.” I was a kid. All I knew was that the doctor gave him this medicine to help him fall asleep. Only later would I learn that it was Demerol. Michael was first introduced to prescription medicine, and Demerol in particular, before I met him. In 1984, his hair caught on fire while he was shooting a Pepsi commercial. He suffered secondand third-degree burns on his scalp and body. They were horribly painful, and doctors prescribed painkillers.

   Now, on tour, and again in deep physical pain, Michael turned back to those drugs. Maybe he was simply following doctors’ orders: his adrenaline was so high after each show that it was the only way he could sleep. For all I really know, the treatments may have been his idea. However it came about, over time Michael began to rely on Demerol to wind down after the shows, and most likely to escape from the overwhelming stress, pressure, and responsibilities of his extraordinary life.

   Who can truly imagine what it was like to be Michael? Devoted fans screamed around him all day, and at night he performed for several hours as the King of Pop. Coming home, he had to shift into reverse, trying to rest in order to do it all again the next day. How impossible it must have been to dial down from the hyper mode of the show to the complete calm of sleep. It wasn’t a natural way for a human being to live. Only a machine could have done it. This was his schedule, day in and day out. And then, on top of all of it, the crushing weight of the false accusations of child molestation.

   I couldn’t tell that he was upset, exhausted, or overwhelmed, but when my father periodically joined us during the tour, he saw that Michael was under a lot of stress and that it was taking a physical toll on him.

   As I see it now, when he became completely exhausted and overwhelmed, Michael had only two options. One was to say, “I can’t do this anymore” and walk away. But Michael was a perfectionist. He didn’t want to show weakness. He wanted to prove to the world that he was innocent of the charges against him and that he was strong enough to fight them. So to him, quitting wasn’t an option. His only other option was to use whatever means he could to simply endure it. Michael wasn’t trying to get high. He had to go on with his life despite the intolerable pressures, and he did it the only way he could.

   At the time, the “medicine” that Michael used in order to fall asleep didn’t really affect my experience of him. The doctor came, and then Michael went right to bed. I understood that he was taking medicine to help him go to sleep. I knew nothing about prescription pain medicine. The doctor was there to make sure he was healthy. For the young teenager that I was, the world was still a simple, black-and-white place, where doctors always prescribed medicines to cure their patients. I assumed that my friend was in good hands. Now that I look back on that trip through adult eyes, I can discern a couple of instances when the stress Michael lived with daily, and the devastation it was causing, were evident.

   One instance occurred when Eddie, Michael, and I were doing schoolwork. Michael seemed fine. Normal. Then, all of a sudden, in the middle of a conversation he said something really strange. “Mommy,” he said, “I want to go to Disneyland and see Mickey Mouse.”

   I was taken aback, confused.

   “Applehead? Are you okay?” I asked. At the sound of my voice, Michael snapped back into reality. He didn’t seem to realize what he’d just said.

   When I repeated his words back to him, he said, “It must be the medicine. Sometimes the medicine makes me do that.” That was the first time I ever felt that he wasn’t all there. I was worried, and later I asked the doctor about it. He said that Michael’s lapse was a normal side effect of the medicine he was taking, that it was nothing to worry about. I was thirteen years old. Again, I trusted doctors. Why shouldn’t I? Only now does it strike me that if, in a moment of psychic confusion, Michael was revealing his deepest truths, it was simply that he longed to be a kid whose parents were taking him to Disneyland.

   Another time, in Santiago, there was the incident in the hotel’s hot tub. Eddie, Michael, and I were soaking in the hot tub, maybe playing around and seeing how long we could hold our breath underwater. (For some reason, whenever Michael went swimming, he wore pajama pants and a T-shirt. He never wore a bathing suit.) All of a sudden Michael said, “I’m going to hold my breath,” and slipped under the water. Time went by. More time went by. I looked at Eddie nervously. At first I could see the bubbles rising from his nose. Then there were no more bubbles. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I dove down and pulled Michael up to the surface. I said, “Applehead, are you okay?” He was conscious, but kind of out of it.

   “Yeah, I don’t know what happened,” he replied. “I must have fallen asleep.”

   This may sound strange, but despite the way it may seem, I’m almost certain he wasn’t on drugs. Over the many years I knew him I had a chance to develop a pretty good idea of when he was on something and when he wasn’t, and in retrospect, I really think that in this instance he was sober. He had a stunned look on his face, as if he couldn’t really believe what had just happened. He kept apologizing and saying he didn’t want to scare us. He knew we depended on him, and he didn’t want to show his vulnerability. Nonetheless, I thought Michael was fine until, before one of the concerts in Mexico City, Elizabeth Taylor suddenly showed up. Michael adored certain screen icons, and Elizabeth was one of his favorites. He especially identified with current and former child stars, as Elizabeth had been, because he knew they shared some of the same experiences growing up.

   My father was actually the man who arranged for Michael and Elizabeth Taylor to meet for the first time. It happened when one of Elizabeth’s daughters was getting married and she was staying at the Helmsley Palace at the same time as Michael. Although he was leaving that day, he called my father up to his room and said, “Dominic, please give this note to Elizabeth Taylor. I’d really love to meet her.” He handed my father a handwritten note. My father duly delivered it to the star when she returned to her room from the wedding. When Michael came back to the hotel, two or three months later, he kept asking my father, “Did you give the letter to Elizabeth? Are you sure she got it?” He couldn’t believe she hadn’t been in touch with him.

   A month later Elizabeth finally called, and the next time my father saw him, Michael happily reported that he and Elizabeth had had dinner. The rest is history. She was a warmhearted woman, and was very maternal toward Michael. They had dinners together when their paths crossed and did favors for each other: she lent him her chalet in Gstaad; he hosted her eighth, and final, wedding, to Larry Fortensky at Neverland.

   By the time she visited him at the hotel in Mexico City, Michael considered her a trusted ally, so when she showed up, he was, initially, thrilled. But backstage, before the show, Elizabeth took me and Eddie aside.

   “Michael has to go away for a little bit,” she told us confidentially. “He’s not feeling well, and we’re going to get him some help. After the show, he’s getting on the plane and we’re taking him to a safe place.”

   That was it. Michael was going to rehab.

   Michael, Eddie, and I had been together for almost two months when all of a sudden our Huck Finn adventure came to an abrupt end. Michael knew that Eddie and I were part of a bigger package. We came with our parents and our brothers and sister. We had all been family to him during the most difficult time that he’d experienced in his life. He had found people who supported him and loved him for who he was, no matter what others were saying about him. I often ask myself what it was that he saw in me, and I think that the answer was simple: in my eyes, he felt recognized, seen as his real self. I liked him for the same reasons he liked himself. He was simply one of my best friends.

   Eddie and I watched the final show that night, but we knew that everything had changed. The rest of the tour was going to be canceled, and this made us terribly sad.

   After the show, Eddie and I went with Michael to the airport, where a private jet was waiting. We said our good-byes in the car, all of us crying like babies. Michael boarded the plane, which soon took off for London, where he was to enter rehab. Nobody but us knew that Michael was gone. When we arrived at the hotel, a security guard with a dark towel over his head waved to fans and entered the hotel with us, pretending to be Michael. That night Eddie and I climbed into Michael’s bed and stayed awake talking most of the night. The room felt strange and empty without him. My parents were already en route to join us; they had been planning to visit us again in Mexico City. When they arrived, Bill Bray explained the sudden change in plans. Michael was canceling the rest of the tour and entering rehab. All my parents saw was that Michael wasn’t well, that he needed a break from nonstop performing. They didn’t think that he was entering rehab because he was addicted to drugs, or that they had left their children in the care of someone who was using drugs—a thought to strike horror in the veins of any parent. Michael’s relationship with drugs, which would one day become much more complicated and evident, wasn’t on their radar. At any rate, they were right to trust Michael—he never would have let anything interfere with the care of their children. In later years, Michael would explain to me that the cancellation of the tour had had nothing to do with drug addiction. It was because his next tour date was in Puerto Rico, on American soil, and if he had entered the United States at this time, there was a very real chance that he would have been arrested on the allegations of child molestation. To avoid his arrest, his team of handlers had to come up with a way to get him out of the rest of the tour. The only way to guarantee that the part of the tour that was canceled would be covered by insurance would be if Michael opted out because of a medical problem. So he told the world that he had a problem with prescription medicine. It was humiliating—another serious blow to his reputation—but he had no other viable choice.

   Leaving the tour under such humiliating circumstances must have been devastating to Michael. As for me, in my own, much smaller world, after flying to exotic cities around the world and being part of the concert tour of one of the most famous entertainers in the business, having to return to eighth grade in New Jersey would be its own harsh awakening.