Just beat it

SANTA MARIA, Calif. — In one of life’s strange coincidences, Michael Jackson’s personal problems seem to coincide with those of a 49-year-old legal secretary from Corpus Christi, Texas, named Deborah Dannelly. This is striking to Dannelly, if not to Jackson, because as president of the 16,000-member Michael Jackson Fan Club, she tends to measure the chronology of her life against that of the pop star she’s been following since she was 13. Back then she thought she would marry Jackson, but she “grew up and got a grip on reality” and decided to devote her life to being his fan.

Right now, Dannelly’s father is bedridden after a severe stroke, which Dannelly thinks is eerie because it coincides with the allegations against Jackson that he sexually abused a teenage boy, which is made eerier by the fact that Dannelly’s husband’s death from cancer coincided with the last time Jackson faced similar allegations in the early 1990s.

Her father’s health is so precarious that at first she didn’t want to leave him to come here for the weekend rally she’d organized on Jackson’s behalf. But she felt the stroke was “almost a wake-up call to say you have to stand by the people that you love.” Which meant Michael.

Besides, the fans would never forgive her if she wasn’t there to oversee the weekend’s scheduled events, which consisted of prayer vigils, a tap dancing group, a Jackson impersonator and the bashing of a piñata of the prosecutor (Tom Sneddon) who Jackson fans despise.

“Even my mother said, ‘You have to go,’ ” Dannelly says. “She believes in Michael.”

Dannelly is talking on the phone late Thursday, hours before a morning flight to California. “I guess it’s a test of your faith” — all this tragedy, Michael’s and hers.

“Just a few days before my husband passed away, he told me, he said, ‘You stand by Michael ‘cause he’s always been there for you,’” she says. “And of course I did.”

About 35 Michael Jackson fans have gathered in a park here on Saturday afternoon in anticipation of thwacking the “evil spirits” out of a cardboard Incredible Hulk figure that has a photograph of Sneddon’s face pasted onto it.

The fans are mostly young women. While they wait for the piñata, they color posters for a rally scheduled for the morning of April 4. They project an earnest, vulnerable air, like children making welcome-back cards for a favorite teacher who’s been sick.

There’s a young woman who has a Michael Jackson tattoo on her left bicep. She touched Jackson’s hand when she was 16, she says, which is when she felt the “magic,” which is why she eventually left Japan and came to Encino, Calif., to pursue her college studies, because someday she wants to marry Jackson, which could happen because “he doesn’t have Asian kids yet.”

There’s a young woman who was burned in a fire and who credits Jackson for saving her life because despite the flames her CD player was still playing his ballad, “You Are Not Alone,” and that’s what encouraged her to get up from the floor and jump out the window.

There’s Mary Carr, 54, one of Dannelly’s volunteer assistants, a preschool teacher with a sweet face, a flowered shirt and sensible, neck-length hair. She is from Forest Grove, Ore., and looks like the TV model of housewifery, straight from a Palmolive commercial. She holds a bundle of white rope in her hands.

“I have to go hang Tom Sneddon,” she says.

Carr walks over to the piñata and wraps the rope around its neck and green arms.

“Oh, this might just rip his arms right off,” she says, worrying. She doesn’t want to short-circuit everyone’s fun. She readjusts the rope, and then hangs the figure from a tree.

For those assembled here, Sneddon is the most evil of all who are associated with this trial. It was Sneddon, a bespectacled father of nine, who investigated the case against Jackson in 1993, before it was settled out of court, and Sneddon who held an oddly jovial news conference in 2003 to announce the newest charges against the entertainer. Jackson fans believe he’s pursuing a vendetta against their idol. He is a man of hate, whereas they — like Jackson — are people of love, which is why they want to give a statement before they pummel this cardboard effigy with all their might.

“On behalf of the club, please do not misunderstand today’s activities,” says Vernay Lewis, 28, another of Dannelly’s assistants. “We intend no harm to Thomas Sneddon.

“With that,” she adds, “we may now start the festivities!”

The tool of destruction is a long wooden pole. Most people go for the chest but one woman goes straight up the crotch of the pinata.

There are plenty of celebrities to idolize. But to embrace Jackson is to embrace not only that young, handsome man who astonished us with his sweet voice and flashing feet but the Jackson of now, with his tortured, elfin nose and our sense of a 10-year-old boy hiding behind that curtain of smooth, inky hair.

That the fans appear to hate Sneddon almost as much as they love Jackson seems important. It is the persecution of Jackson that fascinates them. Jackson has for years publicly aligned himself with the weak and the suffering. The tape he sometimes puts on his fingers is a “private message to fans,” Dannelly says, which means “there’s still people suffering — we still have work to do.”

“I’m a warrior,” Jackson said during his recent interview with Jesse Jackson on the latter’s radio show. The fans have absorbed the popular story of Jackson’s childhood — that he was overworked, that his father made him ashamed of the way he looked. His endless rounds of plastic surgery are his battle wounds, aren’t they?

“He’s human and he’s got issues, too,” says Jade Johnson, who escaped from the fire to the tune of a Jackson ballad. The backs of her hands are white and rippled with scars, as is her chin.

The pinata has broken and shed its candy. Maybe the fans have been broken, too; maybe that’s why they’re here.

“His music is righteous — he’s a messenger of God, really,” says Bahar Badizadegan, 30, a deejay and poet whose family emigrated from Iran when she was 12.

“You know, back in the day, we had prophets,” says Badizadegan. “Michael is a prophet of our time.” His message is “love and unity.”

“This is my antiwar movement. … Protesting against (George) Bush is the same thing as protesting against Sneddon.” She pauses. “I believe all cops are evil.”

Badizadegan, walking out of the park to catch a ride with fellow fans, reaches a car where the impatient driver is making faces and pantomiming. But Badizadegan is just getting to her crucial point: This trial is not about sexual abuse at all.

“There’s way too many clues that he’s innocent,” she says. “He’s a threat to the political system. A war on Michael is like a war on Iraq.” Greedy forces are out to get them both. “It’s the same as Jesus. Jesus was a warrior,” she says. Then she climbs into the car.