You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes by Jermaine Jackson

and Marlon screamed, ‘JOSEPH! JOSEPH! No! No! No! ’ The gang started using our drumsticks and mic stands as weapons. Joseph curled into a ball, covered his face with his forearms and took the beating.
    Meanwhile, Michael had sprinted to the nearest phone booth at the bottom of the street and called the police. ‘I couldn’t reach, so I had to jump up to drop the coin into the slot!’ he said afterwards. By the time he ran back, the gang had fled and Joseph was being helped to his feet by hotel management. He got hurt real bad: his face was mashed up and had already started to swell. Someone ran inside to grab some ice and he used it to wrap the hand he had fractured. He had also suffered a broken jaw. Sitting on the bumper at the back of the van, he steadied himself. Then, through one-and-a-half eyes, he looked at us: ‘I’m okay.’ He told Michael and Marlon to wipe their tears. ‘You can’t perform in that state,’ he said.
    ‘You want us to go on?’ asked Jackie, incredulous.
    ‘People are here to see you – people are expecting to see you,’ he said, gingerly getting to his feet. ‘I’ll go to the doctor in the morning.’ That night, we had to pull ourselves together and focus on our performance. Joseph was ever-present, nursing his hand, with Band Aids on his face. He had taught us another hard, if unintentional lesson: whatever happens, the show must go on.
     
    I DON’T REMEMBER DOING HOMEWORK ON school nights. We ate dinner and got ready to perform. Homework assignments were something we crammed in at weekends or scribbled in bed in the mornings. That was when our childhood started to become eclipsed by adult duties. There was always a new show to prepare for, a new routine to rehearse, or a new town to conquer.
    Aged nine, Michael had to grow up fast. As we all did. We now had a profession where other kids had nothing to do but play all the time. But had it been any other way, we might never have broken through as the Jackson 5, and the world would never have known Michael’s music. Things were as they were meant to be. We found real joy on stage: we looked forward to it in the same way that other kids looked forward to whatever pastime brought them enjoyment.
    With Mr Lucky’s and Guys and Gals offering us regular work, Joseph quit his canned-food-factory job and reduced his hours at The Mill to part-time day shifts. Our fees can’t have been all that good, but he maintained his gamble on the great future he banked on. Mother fretted, obviously, but Joseph reassured her that the momentum was building. She nodded silently in agreement and then, knowing Mother, she probably worried herself to sleep and said countless prayers to Jehovah.
    What she didn’t immediately know was that some of the late-night acts that followed us included strippers. That was the variety of bar acts back then and we often came offstage to find half-naked ladies in fishnets and suspenders waiting in the wings. If Christmas and birthdays were a sin in the eyes of Jehovah, then sharing a venue with erotic strippers was tantamount to hanging with the Devil, so you can’t blame Joseph for not detailing our exact itinerary to Mother. But the game was up one night when a stray lacy accessory found its way into one of our bags. Mother marched out of our bedroom holding an elaborate nipple tassel between her fingers. ‘WHERE did THIS come from?’ For once in his life, Joseph was speechless. ‘You have our children up all night when they have school in the morning and you have thempeeking at NAKED women? WHAT kind of people do you have our sons mixing with? This is QUITE the life you are showing them, Joseph!’
    We brothers viewed such incidents differently. In my mind, a woman’s body is hypnotic and beautiful, but Michael saw these women as degrading themselves to tease men, and men treating them like sex objects. Yes, he gawped and giggled like the rest of us, but his lasting impression formed differently. He always