From the moment Marcel Leech saw Michael Jackson, he wanted to be Michael Jackson. He started as far away from the thing Michael became as Michael did. Marcel set out as a chubby white kid with ginger hair. Michael set out as a skinny black kid with a wide nose and a big, happy mouth. So they travelled towards the Horrified White Lady look from points diametrically opposed, Marcel always one step behind Michael. Michael had his hair straightened; Marcel had his hair dyed. Michael had his skin bleached; Marcel had his freckles lasered. Michael had a nose job; Marcel had a nose job to match it.
He tracked Michael Jackson through a score of surgical procedures, each leaving him broke and forcing him to work double shifts at Safeways unloading pantechnicons of refrigerated vegetables through the night. Eventually, when Michael had his last surgery and ended up looking like a snapshot of Jackie Kennedy five seconds after her husband’s brains had been blown out, Marcel only needed to have his chin squared with a $2000 collagen implant to join him there as his twin, his impersonator and his acolyte.
When his surgical journey was complete, people on the streets of Melbourne stopped and openly stared at Marcel, before breaking into smiles. Here before them was someone who had changed his face to look the way the King of Pop had changed his face to look: Jackie Kennedy in an unfolding tragedy. Some broke into clunky moonwalks that backed them into parking meters, some broke into side-glides that sent them toppling into gutters. Children laughed and clapped. A joyous outbreak of piss-take followed Marcel wherever he went. He mistook it as a kind of adoration. The public loved him, it seemed to him, and as he had no one else to love him he felt it as strongly as a child feels the love of a mother.
So close was his likeness to the King of Pop that he became a registered, approved Michael Jackson impersonator. He had a licence issued to him by Michael’s Australian representatives and had to abide by a certain code: no bucks’ nights, no stripping, no profanity, etc. He threw in his job at Safeways and made a comfortable and happy living waving to delirious kids at shopping malls. He bought himself a Saatchi jacket and a Naugahyde divan, because he read in an interview that Michael loved the feel of Naugahyde and no animals suffered in its manufacture. Marcel was a self-made man. A success story.
Today he gets out of bed, checks himself in the mirror and smiles. The reflected smile amplifies the real smile amplifying the reflected smile, like two friends complicit in the beautiful memory of yesterday, when he performed on a double bill at the Sydney Myer Music Bowl with the Easter bunny. He mimed along to ‘Billie Jean’ while three thousand kids grooved in the aisles with their parents. He blew the bunny offstage. The parents forgot Jesus and the kids laid their eggs aside and danced. This was surely what it was like to be Michael Jackson: a triumph over religion and chocolate. Marcel runs his fingertips across his lips to confirm his smile and shakes his head at its unlikely existence.
He chooses his drummer-boy suit with the gold braid and stovepipe trousers and white gloves, and walks light of foot, executing side-glides, shimmies, moonwalks and spins on the way to the Galleon Café in St Kilda, where he eats breakfast every day in a pool of borrowed limelight.
The first hint that something is wrong comes from a garbage truck. A young garbologist with dreadlocks wearing a Day-Glo safety vest shouts out at Marcel that he’s a sicko as he goes by hanging from the truck’s running board. He plucks a beer can from the garbage and tosses it skittering across the footpath to Marcel’s feet.
Marcel starts to notice the world is tainted and changed. People blank-face him or snarl. There are no clumsy, happy moonwalks this morning. Kids that gawp are snatched away by parents.
In the Galleon, having drizzled honey over his porridge, he opens The Herald Sun. His own face stares up at him. Michael Jackson is accused of paedophilia; accused of taking advantage of his little friends at Neverland. Marcel quickly closes the paper.
Today is Wednesday, the day he poses for Turton Pym, a duty he carries out with pride. Since Marcel has become a Michael Jackson look-alike Turton Pym has painted his portrait a number of times for different clients – organisations, clubs, fans. They have spent a lot of time together as model and artist, and have grown to like each other. While posing, Marcel has begun to confide in Turton through the side of Michael’s mouth about his lonely life, his upbringing as a ward of the state, being beaten by nuns for wetting his bed. He’s told Turton how at sixteen he fell for Michael and worked nights to pay for plastic surgery. He’s told him how, step by step, piece by piece, he became Michael Jackson. How being Michael brings him happiness. How he sometimes has to pinch his own (Michael’s own) cheek to make sure he is awake and not dreaming.
But today, by the time he reaches Turton’s studio he feels diseased. Children have been snatched away from him and people on the street have moved him on with their eyes as though he were the carrier of a bubbling leprosy. Hunted and breathing hard, he slams the door and leans his back against it, thinking himself safe at last. Turton looks up from a canvas at him and flicks his eyebrows up and down to ask, what have you been up to?
‘It’s not true,’ Marcel explains. ‘It’s lies. They’re gold-diggers. It’s blackmail.’
Turton flicks his eyebrows again. Maybe it’s lies and maybe it isn’t. Anyway, it’s disappointing.
‘It’s lies,’ Marcel whimpers with his hands splayed across the gold braid of his drummer-boy jacket.
‘People want it to be true.’ Turton nods slowly. ‘That’s how things get to be true. God gets to be true that way.’
Turton is standing before a canvas that Marcel assumes is the painting for which he has been posing during these last weeks. He quickly takes up the inflatable moon he has been posing with, drapes himself across the green velvet armchair and kicks his legs up over one armrest, leaning his head back over the other, holding the inflatable moon above himself, his arms fully extended, gazing at it dreamily. In this position he freezes. Michael Jackson: the Man in the Moon. He becomes completely still, save for the nervous flight of his eyes.
‘Marcel …’
‘What?’ He side-mouths the question like a ventriloquist, not moving his lips, the perfect model.
‘Put the moon down.’
‘Why?’ Again without moving his lips.
‘The commission has been withdrawn. The Royal Children’s rang. They don’t want a portrait of Michael any more. Put the moon down.’
But Marcel doesn’t put the inflatable moon down. He holds it tighter. His gloved fingers sinking into its crust as it shakes in his hands, the Sea of Tranquillity rippling and tossing as his grip hardens. ‘No.’
Still no lip movement, still posing faithfully, as if he were the elfin wonder of yesterday. ‘Paint me,’ he whispers from the corner of his mouth.
‘Marcel …’
‘Please paint me.’
If Turton were to take up the brushes today he would paint Marcel’s flit-eyed desperation, his steely attempt to be a worthy subject, a legitimate object of fascination, someone loved, worshipped. He would paint his determined stillness. As if, were he to remain there unmoving, unrenewed, the old truths could live on unshattered by the new. After this, Turton would paint Marcel’s tears, then the fingers girdling and ploughing the moon, the lunar continents warping and becoming flaccid as it pops and deflates.
But he doesn’t paint today. Instead he gets Marcel a glass of pastis and iced water. Marcel slowly releases his grip on the deflated husk of the moon and sits upright and takes the glass and sips from it, before holding it out in front of his face and furrowing his brow – even this magical concoction is soured now.
‘It’s absolute baloney, Turton. I’m so angry.’
Turton nods. ‘He’ll be acquitted then.’
‘Hundred per cent.’
‘In a year maybe.’
‘My God.’ Marcel covers his eyes with his gloved hand, panting with despair.
‘It was a dangerous bandwagon to be on. Elvis would have been safe. Springsteen’s a no-nonsense, dependable guy. But Michael – we were all waiting for the other shoe to drop, weren’t we?’
Marcel groans at the mention of these other artists, at the thought of sharing either their music or their faces. ‘Michael hasn’t done anything wrong.’
‘Michael’s hiding behind big iron gates. Two hundred acres of zebras and Ferris wheels.’ Turton goes to Marcel and bends before him and lays a hand on his knee. ‘You haven’t got a fantasy ranch to hide in. We’ve got to change your look.’
Turton lends Marcel a baseball cap as an ad hoc disguise and takes him to sensible menswear store Fletcher Jones. As they walk through the city Marcel is called names from passing cars. Popcorn pimp. Chutney ferret. And if it never bothered him that he has done nothing to deserve Michael Jackson’s accolades, certainly a sharp sense of injustice stings him now that he, an innocent double of an innocent man, is hounded and heckled.
Together they choose a checked shirt and some casual bone slacks with a crease. A pair of Sperry Topsider boat shoes. In the changing room Marcel looks himself up and down and sees a suburban man and begins to cry. He untucks the shirt and lets it hang.
‘Would you like me to wrap them?’ the shop guy asks through the curtain.
‘No, I’ll wear them.’ A new outfit for an impossibly boring life of blending in. Instead of going to the Grammys and performing for the Sultan of Brunei, he’s on the run, disguising himself as a mortgagee. The shop guy bags his white gloves and his Little Drummer Boy braided jacket and his stovepipe trousers and white socks and sparkling black patent leather shoes. Out on the street Marcel keeps catching his reflection in shopfronts. Oh God, this weekend golfer is me.
Everyone sees through his disguise. Even those who don’t recognise Michael Jackson have a creeping intuition they are in the presence of a sicko, a clerk who has imprisoned a girl in his cellar.
In his flat that night Marcel changes back into Michael’s clothes and puts on Thriller. ‘Wanna Be Starting Something’, ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Beat It’. He scoots around his Naugahyde divan, sliding, posing, miming. But the music has changed. He stops and sits on the sofa. He has abandoned Michael in his darkest hour. Michael … innocent, innocent, innocent. Michael, who I’ve always loved. The music sounds like a rebuke, the ghostly voice of a deceived lover. He goes to the hi-fi and lifts the needle off Thriller for the last time.
Now that Michael is accused of misdeeds with lads, Marcel’s professional appearances end. Nobody wants a registered and officially recognised Michael Jackson look-alike any more. No one wants to hire a Michael Jackson in any capacity. Not to deliver pizzas. Not to sweep streets. Marcel becomes desperately short of money. Southeast Water send red invoices. Eastern Gas call after 8 pm.
One night some months before, while Marcel and Turton were enjoying a limoncello in a nightclub called Handgun, a guy laid five hundred-dollar bills on the bar in front of Marcel. Fanned them out like a straight flush. Marcel didn’t know what that money meant at first. He blinked at it and pouted at the guy, asking. When the guy licked his lips Marcel turned away, flustered. The guy laughed, picked up his money and left.
Neither Marcel nor Turton spoke of it then. But now, hungry, rent due, the minions of Eastern Gas calling daily, Marcel remembers those five bills. Now he knows what that money means. He goes back to Handgun and sits at the bar. Suddenly it’s the only money in the world.
He begins selling his hero to men in bars. To men who stroll down Fitzroy Street. Men who skip sideways out of the streetlight and drop, bent-backed and furtive, eyes darting, cruising to assuage an appetite they so despise that they attack it with the ferocity of rape and, when it’s done, toss money onto the dirt as if the other party in this transaction bears all the weight of its indignity. Marcel closes his eyes and races his eyeballs around beneath his eyelids, humming a tune.
It pays well, but it is an unforgivable treachery, an impossible insult to Michael, and it sends Marcel spiralling into fits of depression every time he commits it. One night in Catani Gardens he sells himself to a Greek restaurateur who gives off airs of cologne and cuisine and whose lips have a latticework of spittle joining them as he snarls snatches of Thriller lyrics in his climax. Listening to those verses it is easier for Marcel to believe Michael innocent of the crimes of which he is accused than to believe himself innocent of them.
Afterwards, he goes home and drinks a bottle of Stolichnaya and eats a handful of Panadol. He wakes the next day to the sound of the evening peak hour, pain flaring like aurora in his head. He showers three times before the smell of that restaurateur is off him. Cries in the shower each time, then prays to a poster of Michael for forgiveness.
In the end Turton insists on finishing Marcel’s portrait, though there is no client for it now. He has him sit for hours, imploring him to remain perfectly still and to hold the broad, enigmatic smile they have chosen, even when Marcel complains his back is killing him and his cheek muscles are screaming with the effort. He promises Marcel a time will come when it’s wanted. It will hang in a children’s ward, he says. Or the foyer of Sony. Your portrait, in the palatial foyer of Sony Corporation headquarters.
Turton hugs him as he leaves the studio and whispers, ‘Acquittal.’ He nods wisely at him as if it’s a done deal. Sometimes on the way home after these torturous sessions Marcel is surprised to find a dance step creeping back into his walk. And though the portrait is not one of his better efforts, Turton looks at it for a long time after Marcel is gone, smiling.
On the suburban fringe, a place of woodyards and used-car lots and scrap-metal recyclers, in a vast metal shed chirping under the hammer of a wind that carries the fecal stench of dairy farms, Marcel Leech is watching Turton Pym paint a fanged skunk onto the Harley Davidson of a Stinking Pariah named Larry Skunk Monk. Turton is the artist of choice of the Stinking Pariahs MC and has leased this shed in outer Pakenham in order to go about his business quietly, undiscovered by the art world.
Marcel often accompanies Turton into the wilds to this shed and his airbrush operation. Feeling comfortable in the cathedral darkness and the company of his friend, he dresses again as Michael Jackson and talks gently in his falsetto while he watches Turton work. He sits in an armchair Turton has reclaimed from a dumpster, his schoolgirl voice barely audible over the chug of the compressor.
‘The day I left school, I was fourteen, expelled. Father O’Brien gave me a ride down to the local Safeways. Said he’d talk to a man he knew. I waited in the car, watching the front of Safeways, people in and out like flies, all of them dull-faced – shopping, you know. Toothpaste, cantaloupes, Tim-damn-Tams. I started to feel real sick. Father O’Brien came outside with the man and introduced me and we shook hands and the man said because of Father O’Brien I had a job and if I worked hard and was reliable then la-de-da one day I’d be … I don’t even know what. I was crying, whole place swimming in front of me, the Safeways man too. Next day when I started I couldn’t even recognise which one he was to report to.’
Marcel sips his coffee. Turton is kneeling before the Harley blowing softly to dry the angry skunk he is painting.
‘They had me hauling trolleys of groceries from out back in the storage area into the store itself. “Pick up any cabbage leaf you drop.” “Customers have right of way.” That first day I started dreaming that Michael was going to come into my Safeways wearing his black Fedora, a bodyguard either side of him, three abreast down the aisle, and hold out his hand to me, and say, “Come with me, Marcel.” It was a vision. I kept it up for about a year. Him walking in there, all the shoppers with their mouths open. In the last months I really had to screw up my face and concentrate to get it to play. Till one day there I was, rice and pasta aisle, my face screwed up, trying to get Michael to appear, and this old biddy tapped me on the arm with a bag of linguini and asked me if I was all right. Told me to sit on the floor so I didn’t fall. That was the last time I ever had a vision of Michael coming for me.’
Marcel, looking at Turton kneeling there, says, ‘You must think I’m pretty weird.’
Turton puckers his lips in judgement. ‘No. Everyone hates Safeways.’
Two motorbikes pull up outside and their engines rev high before dying. Wal Wolverine Symonds and Larry Skunk Monk enjoy their footsteps echoing as they walk through the dark of the warehouse. Listening to the approaching steps, Marcel wraps his arms about himself.
‘It’s only the Stinking Pariahs,’ Turton tells him. Marcel’s eyes widen and his throat clicks.
‘I’m painting this skunk for one of them.’ Turton tries to calm him.
They step into the light, denim and leather and big outlaw hair and dark shades. Seeing Marcel, Larry Skunk says, ‘Shit. Michael Jackson … beat up.’ Marcel smiles and says, ‘Hello,’ in Michael’s falsetto.
‘Hell happened to you, Michael Jackson?’ Wal asks.
‘Nothing.’
‘No, tell,’ Larry Skunk says.
Marcel’s eyes are swollen black from being beaten senseless by four friends of a client who had paid $500 for a night with him. Having satisfied his own libido inside ten minutes, the client figured that, as he’d handed over five big ones for the night, Marcel was still his property and he could do anything he wanted with him until morning, including making a tidy profit by subletting him for $2000 to four like-minded acquaintances he called in on his phone.
Marcel, when he was told of the arrangement, for legitimate health and business reasons, refused to sublet himself. When the quartet of wannabe sub-lessees of Michael Jackson’s surrogate arse had Marcel’s stance explained to them by the original lessee, they were, at first, only stamp-foot angry and edgily horny. But all four, having given up other Saturday night recreations for this taste of cloned star buttocks, soon went into a huddle and talked up a moral outrage between themselves. ‘Shit. This guy’s interfered with kids.’ Then they beat Marcel unconscious.
When Marcel finishes telling this story to Larry Skunk, the man raises his eyes to the heavens and looks at Wal Wolverine Symonds and shakes his head, and Wal Wolverine Symonds shakes his head back, acknowledging what a crazy, disappointing world we are forced to live in.
‘Legitimate businessperson like yourself. I’m Larry Skunk Monk, presidential guard of the Stinking Pariahs.’ He holds out his hand. ‘You need protection. What’s your name?’
‘Marcel.’
‘Arse Sell? You’re kidding. Arse Sell?’
‘Marcel. With an M. Marcel.’
‘Right. Marcel. Only, I knew a guy called Bernie who was an arsonist.’
Larry Skunk comes from Mount Beauty, a hydro town in the mountains. Left school early and started work for the hydro company alongside the other men in his family. But one day he was late for work and when his foreman called him a lazy little shit in the smoko hut in front of a gang of linesmen, Larry was astonished to see that foreman turn into a grizzly bear before his very eyes. Especially astonished since that foreman had been, up until then, his beloved Uncle Bruce. No matter – a living, breathing, drooling grizzly bear needs to be brought under control, and Larry Skunk brought him under control by whipping him with a length of steel rope. Then he scarpered as the prostrate grizzly began to show signs of turning back into Uncle Bruce, trounced and bloodied.
That event was Larry Skunk’s first realisation that he had a psychosis that blurred the lines between bears and beloved uncles. He came down to Melbourne, where a man could comfortably live with such an affliction, and fell in with the Stinking Pariahs by beating up a Bandido. After Larry Skunk had performed the Twelve Labours of Hercules: stealing the Golden Harley of the Hell’s Angel’s master at arms, homiciding Alphonse of the ten-thou heroin debt, poisoning a kennel of Drug Squad rottweilers, conflagrating the Sydney Road Souvlaki Palace, etc., the Stinking Pariahs inducted him into their exalted ranks with a coat-of-arms tattoo, a bottle of Jim Beam and the two-hour rental of a seen-better-days street-corner slut. Welcome to the gang, Larry Skunk.
A decade of dope, LSD and speed has not helped Larry Skunk overcome his propensity for psychotic delusions. Fantastical comic-book hallucinations pop up before him like cardboard cut-outs in a shooting gallery. He is about as crazy a man as can operate within the confines of an outlaw motorcycle gang without being thrown out for being crazy. Beasts and goddesses appear before him. Tutankhamen in a white-goods store, Wonder Woman in a pub – it all adds colour to his day. The fact that he sometimes makes threats or whispers sweet nothings to thin air doesn’t bother his colleagues. If you’re having a council of war with the Gypsy Jokers in the Rosstown Arms and are at a fragile moment in territorial negotiations, when your president has just said to theirs, ‘If you want Bays-water, you give up Coburg,’ and into the dangerous silence that follows, one of your stone-hard presidential guard says in awe, ‘Throw that magic lasso, girl,’ to a super heroine nobody else can see, it gives your gang a valuable whiff of lunacy. Larry Skunk brings that to the Stinking Pariahs.
He likes fighting and fights often. After the years of drugs he is as happily deluded as any holy warrior. Knows he is on the side of the angels, and doesn’t need any righteous justification for a fight, because he can hallucinate his own righteous justification in a trice. It might start as an argument over a parking infringement. But anybody who angers Larry Skunk quickly transforms, before his very eyes, into a slavering Hun, a Red Indian warrior, a paedophile, a terrorist, a triceratops … Any one of a cast of monsters is retrievable from his frontal lobe at a moment’s notice.
These happy metamorphoses mean Larry Skunk never has to feel guilty about chopping down a lollipop man or trouncing a milk-bar owner. He has always defeated a fiend of the most contemptible kind. And when that fiend lies, beaten and groaning, on the ground, Larry Skunk walks away before the delusion clears and before him, once again, is a parking officer or a clumsy motorist. Larry Skunk is happy in his violence. He saves himself and his friends from the clutches of fiends several times each week, and walks proudly through his days.
This man gives himself the assignment of chaperoning Marcel Leech into the suburbs at night to meet with clients. It’s a minefield of violent incident, babysitting a whore-poof. Right up Larry Skunk’s alley. He enjoys the work – Marcel’s self-deprecating humour, the fifty per cent cut. And it’s a blast coming to Marcel’s aid when things turn sour. A blast to beat up weasel-type faggot clients who become violent or won’t pay. You’ve got to be broadminded, because on the one hand it is, after all, a faggot you’re rescuing. But on the other it’s a faggot you’re beating up. So it’s a nil-all draw on the right/wrong scale. And as far as the drama of the event goes it’s not so different to rescuing a damsel in distress. Sometimes, on good nights, when Larry Skunk is clubbing a client who has misbehaved, Marcel transforms in Larry Skunk’s peripheral vision into a distressed damsel in an ankle-length velvet dress. This gives Larry Skunk a heroic blush. He takes big righteous breaths and stares down on the sprawled malefactor and delivers maxims at him like, ‘A lady tells you to stop, you better stop, Jack.’ Or, ‘You agree on a price, you don’t insult a lady by offering less after the fact.’ Marcel doesn’t mind being called a lady in these circumstances. Truth is, it gives him a thrill being Larry Skunk’s lady, his honour regained in that moment of crisis.
For Larry Skunk it turns out to be cool to keep a pet as small and disgusting as Michael Jackson, whom everyone abominates. Anyone can ride with a rotty or a pitbull behind. But only a real hard-as-stone outlaw can keep a little homo sidekick crazy enough to be living out a King of Pop fantasy.
Marcel, too, feels some comfort in the arrangement. He feels safer, at least, under the protection of the Stinking Pariahs. But he is still morbidly depressed about selling his hero as a whore. Seeing his flagging morale, Larry Skunk begins to feed him speedballs. Whenever he picks up Marcel for an assignation he palms him a little aubergine-coloured pill, and when Marcel pops it, for a few hours the significance of the life and times of Michael Jackson shrivel and deflate until that h oofer’s tribulations are no more engaging than the meanderings of a carpet beetle and Marcel knows a delightful ease – before the monstrosity of his predicament comes stampeding back at him … He cries then, uncontrollable tears. Holds his throat and rocks backwards and forwards, racking his brain to find a way to make enough money so he can stop selling Michael as a whore.