I was one of only five people on the planet who didn't own a copy of Thriller, largely because I like to be contrary; it allows me to feel superior and rebel against alcoholic absolutism by being absolute in a different direction. But because I grew up in the 80's, I couldn't escape knowing every song on the album whether I owned it or not. (And then secretly singing them to myself when there was no one around to see me being anything less than contemptuous of their choices.)

When Michael Jackson's skin whitened and his nose became skeletal, when he was accused of child molestation and and sued for debt, when there were reports that he bought the Elephant Man's bones, when he nicknamed his son Blanket and built an amusement park in his back yard, when the tabloids dubbed him Wacko Jacko, I liked to tell people "I told you so. I always thought there was something wrong with him." As if that were really the reason I pretended to disdain him when he was at the height of his popularity and continued to mock him as his untreated mental illness* played out on a global stage.

But my relationship with Michael Jackson (as with so many people in and out of my life) has changed as my relationship to myself in recovery has changed. Instead of seeing him as someone to mock in order to feel clever and healthy, I started to see a someone who was aching enough inside to have visibly mutilated (or paid his plastic surgeons to mutilate) his body. I saw a talented man who lived imprisoned in his own deep pain, a man who self medicated through fantasy in many of the same ways I had myself. As I came to better understand my own love of Peter Pan and the fantasy of Disney and my own desire to escape into some fantasy childhood, I suspected I better understood his too. And I used to, in my own way, pray for him. I thought about how hard it must be for someone so insulated from the world by money and fame to finally reach a point low enough to break through denial and bring desperation for change, and I would hope that he would finally lose enough to get help.

When I learned of Michael Jackson's death, I felt the same sadness I felt at the death of my father-in-law: the grief that he died without ever finding relief, redemption or recovery (in its broadest sense) in this life. But I am grateful, as I see my own progress mirrored in my changing perceptions of him, that I can finally crank up "Thriller" and spin a bit in his honor.

Photo credit: Photo by lightmatter on Flickr

If you have ever been at a Billy Joel concert, you may have seen me. I'd have been the one belting out the lyrics to "Only the Good Die Young" with much intensity and gusto, reaching a feverish crescendo at the line "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints; the sinners are much more fun!" I would have followed that up by howling, "Wooo!" (Remember me?)

As a Catholic girl, that song was my anti-Catholic anthem, summing up in one line the crux of my complex girlhood theological argument against the church: they were a bunch of uptight prudes. I don't know if you all have seen many saints, but you've certainly seen portrayals of Jesus. And they tend to be a grim bunch on the whole. At their best, they possess a sort of transcendent calm; at their worst, they are famine thin and bloodied by oppressors. I've never seen any of them kicking back and enjoying a good belly laugh: slapping a knee, wiping tear-filled eyes crinkled with joy and hardly able to draw breath through the peals of riotous laughter. That behavior is strictly for hardened sinners.

That was the dichotomy in my eyes, proven out by Billy Joel (and of course, Footloose) on the one hand and by Father McDougal on the other: one could be spiritual or one could enjoy life, but not both. Or in a similar dichotomy, summed up as one of those pithy bits of wisdom posted on the wall of one of my high school classrooms: "those who feel, cry and those who think, laugh." And oh, do I think! I left the saints to cry in church, while I laughed, in a very sinful way: laughed with tears of delight streaming down my face.

Nothing makes me laugh harder than cleverness, flipness, sarcasm, irony, exaggeration, absurdity, mocking the ridiculous (and with it, authority). When I laugh and I revel in the intellect of the joke teller, or if I am the witty one, I delight in crowing, like Peter Pan, "Oh, the cleverness of me!" At my witty best, I am laughing less at the subject matter than I am delighting in that cleverness; in fact, the subject matter doesn't figure in much at all. I laugh at the ridiculousness of strangers and celebrities and friends and myself. I laugh at things that should offend me. I laugh with a group of women whose name alone is so offensive that some of my real life friends can't bring themselves to say out loud. And when others mock me or things close to my heart, if they do it cleverly and well, I laugh too.

Of course, one person's ridiculous and absurd is another person's deeply and seriously held belief. When I lampoon someone's cherished beliefs (whether it be in the solidity of their own mental health or in the reasonableness of George Bush's policies), I shut down dialogue and close the door on understanding. I'm also easily misunderstood and apt to unintentionally misrepresent myself. Therein lies the danger in laughter for me: as someone prone to hyper-intellectualize, it lets me wall myself off from my feelings and from other people, and view my life, and everyone else's, with a detached, seemingly unkind, smile. Laughter lets me hide. Even having left Catholicism, I sometimes find it hard to reconcile my particular brand of humor with the spirituality and compassion in my life.

I have a real life friend (who doesn't read this blog) who is an active sex addict in denial. Her therapist has told her she is a sex addict (which she complained to me was "ridiculous"); she's been through three failed marriages, each failed due to her sexual behavior. She's a well educated, intelligent woman, highly respected in her field, with a variety of interests, but her career is starting to suffer as she spends time at work focusing on meeting new men online in the wake of her most recently failed marriage. I visited her MySpace page recently and noticed two things: she is currently dating yet another man who is supposed to be "the one," and her one and only listed interest was "men." I love her and have genuine compassion for her, but her single listed interest was so true and yet so absurd that I could not stop laughing.

When I shared it with my husband, he was too pained, too sad for her and for himself, to talk about it. And that brought me up short. I know she's in pain. I know I feel compassion for her. I know I love and care about her and wish there were a way to make the pain stop, a way that didn't involve masking it with man after man. Yet, even so -- even though my chest gets tight with sorrow when I let myself feel where she must be to write that -- when I take myself away and look at all the puzzle pieces of her life in their absurd array, it's just deliciously, wickedly, ridiculously absurd, and so funny.

Years ago, when I was college age, I was traveling in Asia and saw happy Buddhas out on the mats and tables of every street vendor. My friends and I would bargain for them and regale each other with tales of "Buddha bargains": how we got the cheapest price on a (faux) jade Buddha or what our Buddha's imaginary provenance might be. Gautama Buddha may have gone out and starved himself like any good acetic, but that little guy, whether reclining in chortles or throwing his hands above his head in glee, looked like someone not averse to a little good fun. All life may be suffering, but my happy Buddha was riding the suffering in style.

What I liked most about him was that he didn't seem like the kind of guy who would begrudge me denigrating his religion by taking him home as a cheap souvenir. My own little Buddha came home, happily chuckling, in a carry on bag and has found a proud place to sit in every home since, while crosses have slipped off to Goodwill or pawn shops. I look at him now, sitting on a shelf in my room, reclining in fat resplendence, tickled at his own enlightenment. And I think it's possible -- that balance between compassion and bemusement, feeling and intellect -- I think he's figured it out. He sees the world as it is and laughs at it and loves it tenderly at the same time. I'm working on getting what that guy has: spirituality with a good belly laugh.

Before I realized that I'm attracted to addicts, I used to say that what I loved men who reminded me of Peter: men with a boyish vulnerability, a wounded child inside. So, in recent years, of course, I've begun to wonder about the two common threads connecting the men I've loved: addiction and Peter Pan. And I've found that Peter has some deliciously addict-like qualities about him (and Wendy some delightfully codependent ones).

Now, I have to be clear, the Pan I love is not the Disney version, he's J.M. Barrie's own original creation: wounded and cocky, lonely and thoughtless, fearless and needy. I love the boy who lies down in bed desperately wanting to cry after Wendy and the lost boys leave him, but decides it would be crueler to them to laugh instead. I love the boy who lets his tears cascade over Tinkerbell's finger when she lies dying and then forgets he ever knew her after she's gone. I don't love a happy little boy, I love a tragic figure.

I have heard it said that addicts stop growing emotionally at the age they began using their drug of choice; they remain frozen in time, perpetual children in adults bodies. And of course, that makes for a wonderful Peter Pan parallel, but mere childishness is two dimensional; it isn't compelling. For Peter Pan (or my husband) to capture and hold interest there has to be complexity and depth. It's not the childishness that draws us in (or at least draws me in) it's the wound that caused the child to remain behind, fearful of going any further. It's the way he needs and wants a mother's love and care, the way he brings Wendy to the island to fill that void, and yet he despises grownups (read: parents) and expects them to hurt and abandon him, to bar the window against him as he tells Wendy his own mother did.

"Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence. At such times it had been Wendy's custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he quite woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she had subjected him."

What good codie could hear of Peter Pan crying in his sleep and not want to soothe him? And more than that, not love him for it?

But it's more than the refusal to grow up, more than the woundedness that brings addiction to mind when I read Peter Pan now, it's the ability to make fantasy a reality. Neverland begins as someplace entertaining and exciting Wendy, John and Michael dream about. It may come close to them in the nursery, but without Peter to lead them there, it doesn't break through into reality. Peter makes fantasy real for the children.

"In the old days at home the Neverland had always begun to look a little dark and threatening by bedtime. Then unexplored patches arose in it and spread; black shadows moved about in them; the roar of the beasts of prey was quite different now, and above all, you lost the certainty that you would win. you were quite glad that the night-lights were in. You even liked Nana to say that this was just the mantelpiece over here, and the Neverland was all make-believe.

"Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days; but it was real now, and there were no night-lights, and it was getting darker every moment, and where was Nana?"

And Peter, like an addict, makes fantasy real to himself.

"The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had their dinners."

In fact, "make-believe was so real to him that during a meal of it you could see him getting rounder."

Like Wendy, I'm entranced by the beauty of the fantasy but I want to enjoy it from the safety of home. I want to protect and care for the boy who so clearly needs it and refuses to admit it, to take him home and tuck him safely in bed with a nightlight on. Yet this would destroy the very image I love: the boy outside the window, looking in at a loving family he can't be part of.

The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the 5th sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag 5 people

Peter Pan
Page 123 of that particular edition (the one I gave my husband as a Christmas gift 17 years ago because it is my favorite story and because the lost and thoughtless Peter reminded me of him even then) is a picture. So I got another of my editions, but page 123 was not particularly interesting. So I pulled down a third copy from my book shelf. But there are fewer than five sentences on page 123, so I'm giving up on the exercise and picking my favorite passage from that page, and going over by a sentence.

This is from the first American edition, titled Peter and Wendy. (I found it in a rare book store about 17 years ago as well, and indulged myself.) And yes, I own at least three different copies of Peter Pan.

You must not think from this that the mermaids were on friendly terms with them: on the contrary, it was among Wendy's lasting regrets that all the time she was on the island she never had a civil word from one of them. When she stole softly to the edge of the lagoon she might see them by the score, especially on Marooners' Rock, where they loved to bask, combing out their hair in a lazy way that quite irritated her; or she might even swim, on tiptoe as it were, to within a yard of them, but then they saw her and dived, probably splashing her with their tails, not by accident but intentionally.

They treated all the boys in the same way, except of course Peter, who chatted with them on Marooners' Rock by the hour and sat on their tails when they got cheeky. He gave Wendy one of their combs.

This is one of my favorite chapters, ending with one of my favorite lines and images: Peter ends up alone on the rock in the night with the tide coming up. Surrounded by mermaids calling to the moon, knowing he is likely to drown, he says "To die will be an awfully big adventure."

This book happened to be closest to my bed (where I am writing) because I want to reread it and post about Peter Pan and addiction. Someday...