SIX MONTHS AFTER MICHAEL’S DIVORCE FROM LISA Marie, he and I embarked on that classic of buddy adventures: a road trip. During the summer of 1996, after my sophomore year of high school, and just before he began what would be two years of touring for the HIStory album, Michael and I went to Europe together. Because my siblings had school conflicts, it was just the two of us.

   Michael came to visit my family in New Jersey before we left for Europe. One afternoon we were playing video games when he suddenly said, “Frank, I have to tell you something, but please don’t mention it to anyone.”

   “Of course. What is it?” I asked.

   “I am going to be a father.”

   “What? How?” I was surprised to say the least.

   “Debbie is giving me the greatest gift in the world.”

   The Debbie he was referring to was Debbie Rowe. Over the years, Michael had confided in Dr. Klein and Debbie about how much he wanted to be a father, and how difficult it was because he couldn’t trust anyone. Then, according to Michael, one day Debbie told him, “You deserve to be a father, and I want to make your wish come true. I will carry your baby and make you a father.” As he told me this, he was the happiest I’d ever seen him, and I was thrilled for him. I wasn’t shocked. I knew Michael could make anything happen. As he was explaining how all this had come to pass with Debbie, he said, “Hold on. I want to play something for you.” He played me a tape on which I heard Debbie’s voice. She said something like “Michael, I want to make you a father. This is my present to you. I do not want anything from you. In fact, if the kids ask where their mother is, tell them I died in a car accident.” Michael trusted Debbie, and I saw why. Debbie worked around celebrities every day. She wasn’t starstruck. Nor was she flighty or impulsive. Rather, she was a thoughtful, measured person with a degree in psychology. If she’d made this offer, she went into it knowingly and was doing it because she truly believed Michael would be a great father. Debbie’s intentions were true. She meant what she said.

   Michael was going to be a father. It made perfect sense. As my father would later say, Michael had had plenty of practice running around after us Cascios.

   Our first stop was London, where Michael had some meetings. After his obligations there were done, he had some free time before he was scheduled to record two songs at a studio in Switzerland, and he decided to take advantage of it. In the hotel he came to me with the following suggestion:

   “Hey, let’s drive through the countryside to Scotland.” He always flew in, performed, and then flew out of cities, and so he rarely had a chance to spend any time exploring. And with him preparing to be a father, he figured this might be our last chance for a while to embark on a solo trip.

   “Absolutely,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

   Cue the Steppenwolf.

   Before we got in the bus Michael had chartered for the trip (what, you thought we were gonna be doing this in a VW bug?), he and I went shopping for supplies. He said, “We’re going to make a mind map.” Now, growing up in Michael’s sphere meant absorbing his one-of-a-kind philosophy. I may not have been a straight-A student, but we all learn in different ways, and I had a rare and inspired teacher. A mind map, as I learned that day, was a book in which we would paste pictures of things that inspired us—places, people, images of what we liked and what we hoped to achieve. Materials required: piles of magazines full of photos, blank notebooks, glue, and scissors. Purchases made, we boarded a big luxury tour bus outfitted with comfortable couches and beds, and soon we were departing London en route to Loch Lomond. A driver and two security guards accompanied us. Michael and I had the bedroom at the back of the bus. When we weren’t taking in the scenery, we were in that back room, making our mind maps. Making mind maps was new to me, but it wasn’t the first exercise Michael had given me that had to do with how I conceived of and planned my future. Michael had already given me some of his favorite books about success: The Greatest Salesman in the World, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Creative Visualization, and many, many others along these lines. Now, while we worked on our mind maps, he helped me see that the opportunities were endless. There was no limit to what one could achieve. He talked about how his album Off the Wall had sold extremely well, and that afterward nobody thought he could top its success. Hearing this only made him all the more determined that his next album, Thriller, would be the biggest-selling album of all time. In fact, his goal with Thriller was to sell one hundred million copies worldwide. That was his goal, and he achieved it. God-given talent only gets you so far in this world, he told me. He’d achieved success because he believed he would do so.

   As the gorgeous landscape rolled by, Michael lay on the bed, and I sat on the floor of the bus, both of us paging through magazines, ripping out images, snipping around thought-provoking words and phrases, talking about which castles Michael wanted to own, which girls he wanted to date (Princess Diana was top of his list), which hotels and resorts I fantasized about owning, the Academy Awards and Grammy Awards I hoped to win. I was about to turn sixteen, and the world seemed limitless. It was easy for me to hear Michael say he wanted a castle and to reply, “Yeah! I want a castle, too!” It was the perfect time and the perfect place to entertain outsized fantasies and ponder the meaning of life. Michael had also recently introduced me to meditation. The spring break before our trip to Europe, I had spent two weeks of my vacation staying with Michael in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I knew that he often meditated, and on that trip I told him I wanted to try it, too. He encouraged me from the start.

   “You should definitely do this. It’s a time to think for yourself, clear your head, and manifest what you like. When you meditate, it’s like planting a seed. You plant a seed in your mind, and your mind will manifest the reality.”

   When we were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Michael’s driver, Gary, became my meditation guide. Now, Gary wasn’t exactly the most obvious candidate to be a spiritual guru, especially considering how much time Michael and I spent making him the target of our silly jokes. I’d known Gary for a while: he was the guy who had picked me and Eddie up at the airport the very first time we went to Neverland. Gary was from Texas, and he loved to write music. He was very sincere about his songs, which were so bad that they were great. Once he said, “Mr. Jackson, I’d like you to listen to this song I wrote last night. It’s about a red hawk.”

   “What inspired this song?” Michael asked.

   Gary told us that he’d been standing by his window and a bird (not a hawk) flew by and made a noise that sounded to Gary like the words “red hawk.” The story of his inspiration caused Michael and me to crack up. He had another hit song called “Powder Blue.” We knew every single word.

   “Gary, you should go on tour,” Michael would say. “The girls will be fighting over you.”

   “Gee, Mr. Jackson, I don’t think so,” Gary would respond. In 1996, Michael had done a concert for the sultan of Brunei’s fiftieth birthday. He brought me, Eddie, and Dominic to Brunei with him. We were staying in one of the sultan’s guest houses. (He had about twenty guest houses, all staffed with housekeepers and cooks, which would have been considered luxury homes in the States.) Before we’d left for Brunei, Gary had given us a cassette tape of his greatest hits. I’ll never forget when the four of us got in a golf cart to drive around the sultan’s property. We were already five minutes away from the house when Michael realized something. “Oh no!” he exclaimed. “We forgot Gary’s Greatest Hits!” We turned the golf cart around and drove back to get the tape. As we drove around that foreign land, we blasted Gary’s music, the four of us singing at the top of our lungs. We knew every word to every song. We were his biggest (and possibly only) fans. We teased Gary, but it was only because we loved him. He’d been with Michael for a long time and was completely loyal.

   And yet, when it came to meditation, friendly, naive Gary proved himself to be a natural instructor. He taught me the technique in the Beverly Hills Hotel. In his hotel room he had made a little shrine of sorts out of candles and a handkerchief spread out on the floor. He told me to close my eyes and take deep breaths. Gary took what we were doing very seriously, and so did I. After several days of this, he gave me my mantra, a sound that I still use to bring myself into a meditative state, one in which I’m not thinking but am at the same time in control of my thoughts.

   Now, during our bus ride through Scotland, Michael and I started meditating together. Michael would time us, and we’d meditate for twenty-five minutes, with a five-minute rest at the end. From then on, whenever we were together, we made it a ritual to meditate at least once a day. We kept each other focused. It was like having a gym buddy. After this trip, meditating was something we would continue to do together for years.

   And so we made our mind maps, meditated, and thought about how our minds worked and what our places were in the universe. I still have the mind map I made back then, and looking back on it, I see that the fantasies I had then have evolved into the goals I have today. I wanted apartments in Los Angeles, New York, and Italy— all of which I ended up having at one point or another in my life. I wanted to own a hotel and a soccer team, and both of these dreams have nearly come true. I wanted to produce films and music, which I am working on now. And I wanted to model. (I was sixteen. Cut a kid some slack.)

   Without realizing it at the time, one of the earliest lessons I absorbed from Michael had to do with understanding the opportunities that came with empowerment, ambition, and selfawareness. Thinking in those terms is enough to make a kid want to grow up to change the world.

   Every so often we would ask the driver to stop the bus. We’d get out and look around, and Michael would talk about where we were, what we were seeing, and why it was important. I remember stopping the bus to watch a particular sunset. There was an expanse of green grass, and tall, beautiful trees framed our view. “Look at that,” he said. “You know that there’s a God when you see a landscape like that. We’re so fortunate to have the opportunity to travel like this. If people saw this every day, they’d probably take better care of this earth.” Michael taught me to see nature. If I hadn’t had him as a guide, I might never have learned to pause at the side of the road and let the landscape have its effect on me. I don’t care how cheesy it sounds. Michael was open about loving our earth with great passion. He wanted to help preserve it forever. I’d heard him say so before, both in person and in his music, but now, as we took time to appreciate God’s handiwork, I felt it in a new way.

   One of the books Michael told me to read on that trip was Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Jonathan, out of all the seagulls, saw that there was more to life than just being a seagull—more than what was right in front of him. Michael wanted to live that way—to fly beyond all expectations, to live an extraordinary life. He instilled that ambition in me, often asking me, “Do you want to be Jonathan, or one of the other birds?”

   That bus ride was one of the most memorable times I spent with Michael. We never got bored. We never fought or argued. We rode through Scotland, talking about life, bonding, and as the miles clicked off on the odometer, our exchange became less that of a teacher and his student and more that of peers. It didn’t matter that I was more than twenty years younger. For the first time, Michael and I started having a real dialogue.

   “All you have to do,” he’d say, “is study these pictures and these words. Look in the mirror and tell yourself what you want to happen. Do that every day, and it will happen.”

   “That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all you have to do?”

   “It’s not just about thoughts and words. It’s an emotion that drives through your blood. You have to feel and live it every day until you believe it.”

   “Wow,” I said. I was blown away. “That makes a lot of sense. So that’s what you do with your music.”

   “Yeah, Frank, that’s exactly right. And soon I want to take the same formula and do it with movies.” Our exchanges were heartfelt and meaningful to both of us. I was still young, of course, but Michael saw that I was curious and ambitious, and, as my life teacher, he embraced the opportunity.

  

   ON THAT TRIP, THE JOURNEY WAS MORE IMPORTANT than the destination. But eventually our big bus rolled up a gravel road to a castlelike hotel on Loch Lomond.

   It was already dark when we arrived. We were met by a receptionist with round glasses. I think his name was Herron. He seemed calm and businesslike, but as he walked us to our room he said, “By the way, there is a ghost in your room.” Michael and I looked at each other.

   “Great, a ghost. What’s its name?” Michael asked. “Her name is Katherine,” Herron responded. Michael’s mother’s name. Spooky.

   We got to the room and settled in. It was after midnight. The security guys went to bed, but Michael and I were night owls. And it felt like we’d been cooped up in that bus forever. And there was a ghost in our room. No way were we about to go to sleep. Without missing a beat, Michael said, “Let’s go explore.”

   We walked through the empty halls: it was a big hotel. Where were all the other guests? we wondered. Were they all sleeping? We headed out to the lake to see if we could summon the Loch Ness Monster. So what if this was the wrong loch. Nessie was a monster of mystery. Who knew where she might appear? Besides, it was very pretty out by the lake. The air was fresh and chilly, though there was no sign of Nessie. Michael said, “This place is weird. Why aren’t there any cars in the parking lot?”

   All of a sudden Herron, dressed in black, appeared right there next to us. A reflection of the moon glimmered in his round glasses. He scared the shit out of us.

   “Can I help you?” he asked in an eerie monotone. “I don’t want you to go too far and get lost.”

   The haunted castle, the lake, the creepy receptionist. It was straight out of a Scooby-Doo episode. I was sure that if we ever saw the ghost Katherine, I’d be able to pull her mask off to reveal that she was really none other than Herron, dressing up as part of some evil scheme he had concocted in order to get rich.

   “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Michael said, trying his best to disguise how strange everything seemed to us. “I just wanted to see the property. It’s so beautiful.” Michael loved to go overboard with people, being effusive and flattering them, so he started laying it on about how enchanted we were with the hotel, how unique it was, and how Herron was doing such a wonderful job taking care of it. I joined in. Then we asked him all about the Loch Ness Monster and if he’d ever seen her.

   “I’ve never seen her,” Herron said, probably restraining himself from saying, “You dumb tourists. This is Loch Lomond.”

   There was an awkward silence. Then Michael said, “It’s cold out here. We’re going to go get some rest.” Our host walked us back to the hotel. The place was quiet as a tomb, and by now we had realized that we were definitely the only guests. After Herron escorted us back to the room, we thanked him, bade him good night, and closed the door behind us. But we still weren’t remotely tired. There was nothing to do besides continue our investigation of this big, empty hotel.

   We stepped out into the hall. There, walking down the corridor, was a young woman in a beautiful white wedding dress. Her hair was puffed up on top and cascaded over her shoulders in long curls. She glanced at us without slowing down. Then she was gone. Michael and I stood in stunned silence. If that wasn’t our ghost, Katherine, then who the hell was it?

   That vision should have scared us off, but instead we continued —in the opposite direction from the spook, of course—peeking around corners and testing locked doors. Then we saw a sign for an indoor pool. We opened the door, and there he was again: Herron. It was after midnight, but there he was, in his little round glasses, cleaning the pool. This guy was everywhere. We apologized again, saying we just wanted to see the beautiful hotel, and headed back to our room for real.

   We sat on the bed, talking about this strange place. Why would they tell us there was a ghost in our room? How were we supposed to sleep? All of a sudden the curtains moved. I started to leap to my feet, but Michael stayed me with his hand. “Wait a second,” he said. “You don’t ever have to be scared of a ghost. If you don’t challenge them, they won’t do anything to you. Just say a little prayer and they’ll go away.”

   He wasn’t afraid. And because he wasn’t, I wasn’t either. Ghosts or no ghosts, now we were hungry. Was there any food in this place? The menu said that there was twenty-four-hour room service, so we ordered egg whites and Tabasco. Michael and I loved egg whites and Tabasco. We ordered about four or five eggwhite- and-Tabasco omelets. When the food arrived and we opened the door, there was Herron standing there holding the tray. (At least it wasn’t Katherine the ghost.) It was impossible to be spooked out when enjoying egg whites and Tabasco. We ate until five in the morning.

   Our next stop on the scenic route to Switzerland was Paris, where Michael would introduce me to someone who would become a familiar figure in our lives.

   I had come down with a cold. Michael was due to record a couple of songs in Switzerland, and whenever he had to record or perform, he became especially worried about germs and getting sick. Every time I coughed, Michael would use a fan or a towel to push the germs away from himself. He really couldn’t stand it if anyone sneezed around him: he’d walk out of the room.

   So in Paris I stayed in my own room and didn’t see Michael for a whole day. The next day he called me to his room. “I’d like to introduce you to someone,” Michael said. “You can call him ‘Little Michael.’”

   In came a thirteen-year-old kid with long hair, dressed exactly like Michael. He wore black pants, penny loafers, a fedora, a red shirt, and eyeliner. He really was a miniature Michael, which I thought was kind of cute … albeit in a creepy sort of way. We had dinner together. Little Michael (whose real name, I would later find out, was Omer Bhatti) didn’t really speak English. He was quiet, and when he did speak, he talked so fast I couldn’t understand a word he said. But I was polite, as I always was.

   At some point during the night, Michael pulled me aside and revealed that Little Michael was his son.

   Huh? His son? I’d never heard of this child, never seen him, didn’t recall a single reference to him in the ten years I’d known Michael. But in Michael’s world I knew to expect the unexpected. This was just another unpredictable turn. I started laughing, saying, “Are you serious?”

   Michael told me that once, on an earlier tour, he’d met a blond Norwegian girl and that he’d had an affair with a fan for the first time. This girl had gotten pregnant, but when she had the baby, she literally went mad, overwhelmed by the notion that she was having Michael Jackson’s baby. (I know what you’re thinking. Believe me, I had my doubts, too.) Now, his story went, the mother was in a mental institution. The baby supposedly was adopted by a Norwegian woman named Pia, who was a nurse in the psychiatric hospital, or something like that. He’d been raised by Pia and her husband, Riz Bhatti.

   Then, as Michael told it, he was in Tunisia on the HIStory tour. When Michael was on tour, fans often gathered outside the hotel, singing and dancing for him. I’d seen him invite random fans up to the hotel room to meet him and take some pictures. Sometimes the fans would try to dance like Michael. It was so funny to behold that I’d have to cover my face and run out of the room to keep from making a spectacle of myself.

   So Michael was in Tunisia, and he heard about a kid who had won some kind of Michael Jackson look-alike dance competition— possibly one of the kids in the crowd outside the hotel. Michael wanted to meet him, so the winner, Omer, was brought up to the hotel room. When Michael saw him, he noticed the similarities in their appearance and wondered if this could be his child from the affair in 1984. Indeed, as fate would have it, he was that very child, or at least, so Michael said.

   How was I supposed to respond to this?

   It was a great story, however implausible, and Michael really tried to convince me that it was true. He was absolutely certain that he’d finally found his long-lost son. He’d always known about him and now he was bringing him into the fold. Michael expected me to believe his story, and he kept pushing me to believe it, even though we both knew there wasn’t an iota of truth in the whole thing. Finally, after we spent a few minutes going back and forth on the subject, I didn’t see any harm in it, so I relented and said, “Okay, that’s your son.”

   Ultimately, it was harmless, but it was also indicative of something that wasn’t. Omer was the beginning of a trend that was developing in Michael’s life. He had started to surround himself with people who put him on a pedestal, who said what he wanted to hear and did what he wanted them to do. Such people made his life easier, and maybe being surrounded by yes-people gave him the sense of safety he needed, but I always felt that being truthful was more important than currying favor. Even going along with Michael’s benign story about Omer was hard for me. Being a real friend meant being truthful, and I wanted to stand by that principle, no matter what it cost me.

  

   AFTER PARIS, OMER RETURNED TO HIS SO-CALLED adoptive family in Norway while Michael and I continued on to Switzerland, where he was slated to record two songs: “Blood on the Dance Floor” and “Elizabeth, I Love You.” The latter was a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, which he would present to her at a celebration of her sixtyfifth birthday almost a year later, in February 1997.

   In Switzerland, we stopped at Charlie Chaplin’s house near Vevey and visited his grave so that Michael could pay his respects. We had dinner with his family, including his beautiful granddaughter, on whom I had a big crush. (Yes, I had a lot of crushes.) Charlie Chaplin had long been one of Michael’s heroes, one of the people he thought of as great entertainers, innovators, and/or visionaries, whose lives and accomplishments he studied in depth: Walt Disney, Bruce Lee, Fred Astaire, James Brown, and Charlie Chaplin. From Disney he learned that he could create a world out of his fantasies. From Charlie Chaplin, Bruce Lee, and Fred Astaire, he learned attitudes, positions, postures—ways of moving that he incorporated into the choreographed stories he wanted to tell and made his own. Most of the time we were in Switzerland Michael spent working in the studio, but we still found a few spare hours to visit a museum in Zurich. At an early age, Michael had introduced me to art, and we tried to go to museums whenever we traveled. As soon as we entered this particular museum, we met the director, who was a very nice middle-aged woman with glasses and bobbed hair. When it came to humor, Michael and I had always had a unique connection, and he seemed to intuitively understand the random, crazy ideas that always popped up in my mind. Now, as soon as the museum director came up to greet us, I saw a familiar glint in Michael’s eye and thought, This is going to be fun.

   Michael and I had a favorite shtick. We loved to act as if we were deeply serious about a completely made-up or trivial topic, just to see what reactions we could get from people. One time we’d rented a house in Isleworth, Florida—Michael was always interested in real estate in the area—and a real estate agent was taking us to the house of Shaquille O’Neal, who at the time was playing for the Orlando Magic. Shaq was a big fan of Michael’s, so the agent had arranged a meeting.

   As we drove to our appointment, Michael said, “Wow, what beautiful thesasis trees. They are amazing.” There is no such thing as a thesasis tree, of course, but who was going to question Michael Jackson?

   “Yes, they are gorgeous, aren’t they?” said the agent. Michael went on to have a long conversation with him about thesasis trees. It was hilarious.

   Thinking of that moment and others like it, I said to the museum director, “What perfume are you wearing? It’s delicious. Michael, you have to smell her perfume—it’s incredible.”

   I sniffed one wrist while Michael sniffed the other. He said, “You smell so good.”

   She said, “Oh, I’ll get you the name. I’ll write it down for you.” Now we had her. I moved on to the hair. “Your hair. It’s beautiful. What do you do to it?”

   She said, “Nothing special, I just shower.” And then she said, “Actually, I do use a spray—it gives it volume.” I made her write down the name of the spray along with her perfume.

   Now, while Michael was truly passionate about art, this museum was nothing short of horrible. But this didn’t matter to us. We were on a roll. Michael went up to what had to be the most hideous painting in the room and exclaimed, “Oh my God, we have to stop here.” He pretended to be overcome by the beauty of the canvas. “I’m so sorry, but do you by any chance have a tissue?” “Is everything okay?” I asked him.

   He just shook his head. “Feel it,” he said, as if deeply moved. “This work of art is special.”

   “Yes, I feel its beauty, too,” I said, keeping as straight a face as Michael had.

   The director was clearly impressed. She said, “You both have such an incredible connection to art.” Now Michael was pretending to cry. The director turned to me and said, “Wow, he’s very sensitive.”

   “Yes, very sensitive,” I replied. “He’s taught me everything I know about aesthetics. I feel what he’s feeling, but I’m just a little better at containing my feelings.”

   “You guys,” she said, pausing dramatically for a moment, “are so special.”

   We continued this journey, entertaining ourselves by alternating between asking her random questions about the crappy art and raving about her dress, exclaiming, “What’s this material? You’ve got to feel this material.”

   The security guys with Michael were shaking their heads in mock disapproval at us the whole time. Our behavior was obnoxious, sure, but it was a lot of fun.

   Sometimes our pranks weren’t so elaborate. There was that time in the south of France, for example, when we went to see Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and played Ping-Pong on a gold table. We were staying in a fancy hotel. Down there, the nightlife never stops. One night Michael and I were standing on the balcony of his hotel room, watching people eating dinner at three in the morning, when Michael said, “We should do a prank.” We filled a bucket with water and … splash! … dumped it off the balcony onto the unsuspecting diners below. We ducked our heads and scrambled back into the room before anyone could see us. Nobody ever figured out that we were the culprits.

  

   BY THE TIME MICHAEL WAS DONE IN THE SWISS RECORDING studio, I had to get back to high school. When I flew home by myself on the Concorde, I was seated next to a man in a suit. As we shot through the air at supersonic speed, my seat mate and I got into a conversation about spirituality, business, and life in general. After a few minutes, the man asked, “What line of business are you in?”

   Surprised by the question given my age, I answered, “Sir, how old do you think I am?”

   He said, “Twenty? Thirty?”

   I replied, “Sir, I’m sixteen.”

   A look of astonishment on his face, he said, “Sixteen? How do you know all these things at sixteen?”

   I was flattered and partly insulted that he would think I was so much older than I was. I liked the idea of being wise beyond my years, but I didn’t want to look like an old man. And yet, I realize that over the course of that trip, I had grown up in many ways. The friendship that had begun on the Dangerous tour had now evolved into something quite different. For the first time, I felt quite clearly that I was growing up, that I had become more attuned to the world, that the experiences I was having with Michael had pretty much equipped me to hold my own in a conversation with just about anyone, anywhere. Michael had noticed the change in me as well and had begun speaking to me in a different way than before. Although he’d never really treated me like a child even when I was one, he now discussed everything that was going on in his world with me. He made it clear that he valued my perspective, young and inexperienced as it was.

   Yet, despite this change in his attitude, and despite my newfound maturity, I don’t think either one of us had the slightest inkling of what was in store for us, or where our friendship would eventually take us.