Javon: I was fine with the people who just said, "Well, he was a great entertainer and we'll never forget his music." That didn't bother me. But I couldn't stand all the celebrities coming out of the woodwork, trying to act like they were his best friend, like they were talking to him on a daily basis. People would say stuff like, "Yeah, I was chilling with Michael about a year ago..." And I'd just stare at the TV like, No, you weren't. I was with him the whole time, and you weren't there.

  I knew this funeral would be fake. I didn't want to be around the fakeness. I knew I wouldn't be able to keep my composure. I told Bill, "If I go, I'll hurt somebody. For real." I wanted to pay my respects and have my one-on-one time with Mr. Jackson, but I knew it wasn't going to be like that.

Bill: Part of me didn't want to go, either, for the same reasons, but I was more torn about it than Javon. I felt like it was important to attend.

  The morning of the memorial, I headed over to the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hill, where they were distributing the tickets. I saw a bunch of people who'd won tickets on the radio – they were doing giveaways. You could win a spot at Michael Jackson's memorial. That really bothered me.

  Outside the Staples Center, it was crazy. Police everywhere. Blocks and blocks cordoned off. I parked in a garage, must have been about ten blocks away, and I walked. His fans were lining the streets behind the police barricades, holding up signs and flowers. People were dressed like him, with the mirrored sunglasses and the fedora. Just thousands of people.

  Once I got inside and got to my seat, I could tell right away that this was going to exactly what we thought it was going to be. This wasn't going to be a real, genuine thing. It was going to be Hollywood, a place to be seen, a who's who. I looked around and saw all of these celebrities. People were talking, laughing socializing. Even the Kardashians were there. Really? Javon would have lost his mind if he'd seen that.

  There were about 1,500 people in the section I was in, and I only saw about fourty, fifty people who were actually, genuinely, in mourning. I saw the girl with the red car who used to always park outside the Monte Cristo house. She was there. When I saw her, I said to myself, that's who should be in here. They should take all these fake-ass people and put them out in the streets, open up the doors, and let his fans in. They're the ones who deserve to be here for this. His fans were the only ones who never deserted him. Whenever the fans said, "We love you, Michael," he'd always say, "I love you more." And he meant it. They meant more to him than he did to them. He cared for them so deeply that in some ways they constituted the only sustained, committed relationship in his life – the only real love affair."

  Once the program started, I really didn't pay too much attention to what was going on onstage. I was more lost in my own thoughts. I felt like the people up there were all saying good-bye to a different person than I was. All the artists that were performing – Usher, Mariah Carey, John Mayer – I didn't pay them no mind. I really didn't. This wasn't a memorial. It was a show. That's exactly what it was.

  At the end, they brought the Jackson family onstage. Some of the brothers said a few words, and then someone said, "Paris wants to say something." When I heard that? I went straight for my coat pocket and pulled up my sunglasses and put them on. I knew I was going to water up the minute she started to speak. She stepped up and they brought the microphone down for her. She started talking and when she said, "Daddy was the best father you could ever imagine," I just lost it. I completely lost it. I didn't even hear the rest of what she was saying. It was too painful. It was words I didn't want to hear.

  Then she started to cry, and the moment she did that, I realized I'd never seen her cry before. I'd only ever seen that little girl cheerful and smiling and laughing. Prince and Blanket too. Prince cried when he had to leave his dog in New Jersey, but that was the only time. Other than that, I'd never seen those children crying or hurt or upset. They were just the happiest kids. They loved their daddy and loved each other. They were the happiest family, always.

  After Paris spoke, Marlon Jackson came up to thank everyone for coming. He and the other brothers went over to the coffin to carry it offstage. 'Man in the Mirror' started playing, and people were shouting, "We love you, Michael!" Looking at all that going on, there was one memory that kept running through my mind, a conversation I'd had with Grace [the nanny] back at the Monte Cristo house when I first started working there. She and I were in the garage. I was putting together some of the security equipment, and Grace was at the little workstation she'd set up. Mr. Jackson had told her to get in touch with somebody. She was getting frustrated and she said, "The boss wants me to get in touch with this person, and I keep leaving messages, but nobody's calling me back. It's like he forgets sometimes that some people don't want anything to do with him after all this mess."

  I said, "What mess? What are you talking about?"

  "The trial," she said. "Since the trial, a lot of people just don't call back anymore."

  She was giving me the heads up, filling me in on how things worked, like she often did. She started telling me about the days right after the trial was over. "After he was acquitted," she said, "we had a party at Neverland for him to celebrate, and nobody came."

  "Nobody?"

  "A few people," she said, "but not many."

  She said they'd put together a guest list of all these friends and people Mr. Jackson had worked with over the years. They invited close to three hundred people. Maybe fifty showed up. And a lot of the people who did come were people that worked for him. People that worked the grounds at Neverland. People from his lawyer's office. People who were paid to be there. Everyone else called and said they couldn't make it or they had other things planned. "And he knew," Grace said. "He knew why they didn't come. People called him and told him that they loved him and that they were praying for him, but very few people would go public and say that they believed him. A lot of people act like his friends but they're not really his friends. If he's not making them money, they're not really around."

  When that trial was over, Mr. Jackson really wanted to believe that his life would be like it was before. He thought the world would see his was innocent, that he'd been wrongly accused, and then everyone would come back to him and love him again. But that didn't happen. It broke his heart. We keep having all these trials and depositions, people going around and pointing fingers and asking questions, everybody suing everybody, all this bickering over who or what killed Michael Jackson. To me it's perfectly obvious what killed Michael Jackson.

  As I sat there in that arena, looking at all the people packed into the seats around me, I couldn't get that conversation with Grace out of my head. I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts, to have my own moment to grieve. But I couldn't. Because all I felt was anger. That overtook everything else. I sat there with all these people getting up onstage and talking about what a great friend Michael was and how much he meant to them, and the only thing I could think was: Where were they? Where were they when days went by and the phone didn't ring? When he couldn't sleep at night and had no one in the world to talk to? Or when it was Paris's birthday and no one showed up to watch her open presents, except the nanny and a couple of security guards? Where were they when he was getting turned out of hotels and his kids were living out of suitcases and we didn't even have money to put gas in the vehicles? Where were these people then?

  Where were all these people when he needed them?