Michael Jackson? Nothing to See Here

The Howard Hughes of pop. But without the dreadful manicure. The reaction to his death? Yet another milestone on the Road of Our Decline.

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
-- Hart Crane

One day at my job for Cosmodemonic Monthly in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper in the early 1990s, I walked into one of the art directors' offices to discuss a minor matter of pix&fonts versus "readability" (A concept art directors of magazines find quaint.) His office on the 10th floor of the skyscraper was on a level with a hotel just across the street. Because hotel visitors are unclear on the concept of "If you're doing anything private in a hotel room close the drapes first," all of the art directors had their desks arranged in such a way that they could see directly into the windows of the rooms across the way on the 10th floor.

As I walked into his office, I placed my papers on his desk prepared to battle with him for the umpteenth time for the prize of "readability" when he said, "Check out that guy over there."

I looked across the street in time to see a man in a hotel room (slacks, suspenders, clean white shirt) open his window wide, place his foot over the sill, and without any hesitation at all throw himself out of the window and into the air. And then he fell, going down faster than I would have imagined possible, out of sight to the street below.

Ten floors up and behind the sealed glass you could not hear the sound his body made when it hit just as you could not see all of the fall. But within ten seconds you could hear the tires screech and the storm of horns begin.

Stunned, both the art director and myself stepped up on his desk and onto the waist high panel next to the window to look down. Ten floors below the man's body had landed not on the sidewalk but between two parked cars at the curb. His head had struck the curb itself and the result looked like someone had detonated a blood grenade on the sidewalk. The body's limbs were splayed at impossible angles.

The sidewalk had been stopped in both directions and doormen and bellboys were running out of the hotel. Within a minute someone had brought out a sheet to cover the body. Traffic had stopped in one lane but continued to squeeze by in the other. After about five minutes sirens started to converge from uptown and downtown and crosstown.

Everyone in the office it seemed had heard within a couple of minutes and dozens lined the windows looking down at the covered corpse below. Not a lot was being said. Just some sort of low hum of murmurs remarking on how the "jest falls from the speechless caravan."

Then, with the sirens still on the way, the Executive Art Director -- a short man with the Little Hitler complex some short men always carry in their vest pocket -- came out of his office, glanced out of the window and down at the sidewalk, and commanded, "Okay. So what? Nothing more to see. Everybody back to work."

And to a man and a woman we all went.

Posted by Vanderleun at June 26, 2009 8:46 AM