I Once Met Prince

I lose track of all the things I’ve done, it’s why I started writing, so I wouldn’t forget. My current intuition, as the book is done and out and I’m getting antsy, is taking me to a place fiction and stories and plays. I remember though, I’ve got so much still to tell with regards to who I’ve been and what I’ve experienced. Raspberry Beret came on in a Christmas store yesterday and I remembered, ‘Oh yeah, I once met Prince.’

It was in Brazil. I’d been a fan since Controversy. If you’re on my team then you’re the same. We all joined Prince at that juncture. I still don’t know honestly what came before Controversy. I remember hearing at one point he opened for The Rolling Stones and got booed. That would have been before Controversy. I’m certain The Rolling Stones fans were oblivious and stoned and completely not ready for what came before the Stones on the stage. I know the feeling. Just not being too open or verse to something new when all you want is familiar and crusty. I get it, I’ve been there, and like I said, I don’t know what Prince was doing pre Controversy. I like to think I would have been open to what he had to offer but who knows. It seems like a stretch, I wonder how his opening for them happened. Like, The Rolling Stones sought out Prince? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Controversy though. It came with the poster. It’s Prince posing in a black g string in the shower for those of you who don’t do vinyl. That visual! Who would, why would, how could, Prince did. But then the song, how it starts and the thump of it as it begins and the poster unfolded, relentlessly sensual and soulful and painful and screaming of sex. And the word, honestly… Controversy. Yes. It was that. It was owning a certain sex that preceded drag, it preceded gay branding, it came before all of that and also Prince was a black man. To couple that though still with religion? Religion in the mix of all of it? Like Prince recites the Lords Prayer in Controversy. Did we forget that? As the poster opens and I was poring over it, Prince posing in the black g string all wet and sexy fuck me in his face and then… the Lords Prayer? My closests and me were so in. So in. People call me rude, I wish they all were nude, I wish there was no black and white, I wish there were no rules. Shit, man.

The record plays out like a sexual jackhammer. Yeah, there’s Do Me Baby, the ballad of all fuck ballads but for sure Prince led with his sex. I can’t skip over 1999, by then we were in the throes, but it was Purple Rain that changed me and the world. For whatever reason it was the storytelling, that’s where Prince went and that’s where I followed. I haven’t watched it since I did in the theatre cause I’m scared to. In the same way that I only got my Tarot cards read once. The results were so good that I never went back. Prince’s intuition to tell the story of Purple Rain spoke to me. I’m a story teller too, Prince. There’s nothing that gets me off more than the journey of an unfold of a tale set to the backdrop of songs. It was like a musical but not as cheesy because it was Prince. We were so onboard that summer. Me and my sisters we’d run around the house and punch each other we were so excited by it. It was so prevalent, I remember Greg Gardner driving me to the airport that summer and saying, ‘Should we listen to it one more time?’ and turning on the radio in the car and there was Purple Rain, the song, on for the millionth time. We couldn’t get enough.

This isn’t a Prince discography or anything, I’m remembering how I met him but I need to remember first how he lived and then how he died. Which is insane because I remember nothing. I blocked it out, it was painful and I didn’t want to know it. I still almost barely do. Did he pass during Covid? Was it before? Don’t answer me, I’m not asking, I’m talking to myself and querying the universe in the absurdity of it. Did Prince honestly die? He did and when he did I really just couldn’t deal and well, clearly, I still can’t so I’m going to lean into the memory of our meeting.

I’d never been to Brazil, it was my first time there. Brazil is such a crazy fantasyland, I was instantly smitten, I can’t believe I never moved there, I loved it so much. I got there after a red eye type of plane trip and we drove from the airport to the hotel where every band in the world was staying. It was Rock in Rio and the lineup was astounding. Guns n Roses, Judas Priest, George Michael, Run DMC, Dee Lite, NKOTB and yeah, Prince. We were all staying in the same hotel and it was mayhem. I remember being delirious and wanting drugs and it was early, early, early, and the driver told us over their shoulder as we drove through the morning traffic from the airport to the hotel, ‘I must insist you take everything from your pockets, leave your jewelry behind, please, no colorful clothing and do not leave the hotel by yourself.’ Which. Ok. I love a challenge.

So I was dressed in all white with all the jewelry I could muster and recently money changed Brazilian real stuffed in my pockets and out on the sidewalks that stretched along the beach of Rio looking for not necessarily drugs but anything that could get me closer to the core of the city that I’d never been in. The tiles on the sidewalk I remember being swirled and dreamy and surreal, intricate and full of a depth I didn’t know. It felt like a boardwalk like Venice Beach but there was a smile on it and a musicality and a celebration that was alive and fresh. There was a man in front of me walking in a thong and kicking a soccer ball expertly. There were fruit stands that were selling coconuts with straws and there was music, not recorded, but live, coming off the beach. Ensembles of men and women with percussion and flutes and guitars and singing and people around them joining in. Naturally and present and in a way I’d never seen. It felt exotic and it was taking me someplace I needed to be.

The hotel was on the water and it wasn’t the rockstars so much as it was the riff riff that accompanied them. I saw Rob Halford in the swimming pool in a speedo and I wasn’t honestly aware of who that was. I never did rock in that context when I was young but I’d caught wind of the fact that he was gay and not open about it. He was in the shallow end with a sexy beefy dude that was like beyond. Speedos were suddenly in the mix in a way that was sexy and macho. All the Brazilian dudes wore speedos. I think I was mostly bent on meeting Dee Lite. I wanted to hang with DJ Dmitri. He was sexy and Russian. I never saw him, that was a miss. Lots of them I didn’t see. I didn’t have the wherewithal to know that I shouldn’t have presented so ‘available’ but it wasn’t clear to me that I was famous or of that ilk. I was like a tourist and as a tourist I was mostly asking questions and hearing about things.

Maoro, our translator, bodyguard, security detail told me he’d been with George the day before, all day. George Michael, another man in the rock world performing at the festival who wasn’t out of the closet. It’s hard to imagine but I remember Maoro being covert and speaking a secret speak in terms of George being gay. But letting me in on what he’d been up to nonetheless. Which was nothing, honestly. It amounted to a date he had with someone he’d been fucking on the beach. They were on a quiet beach and they held hands. Maoro had been his bodyguard the day before and had witnessed that. But that was something I took in as part of the whole.

Prince was probably the most elusive in the mix of who’d been there and who was going to perform. Because it was Prince. He was the pinnacle of mystery and the most interesting, honestly. The word on Prince was that he had asked for 200 white towels to be brought to his room. That. That was enough. Two hundred white towels. I mean, wrap your head around that. What the fuck, my mind spun. What is Prince using two hundred white towels for? And the audacity of the ask. Astounding. My band and I talked about it with anyone who would listen.

The synergy of the Brazilian people and the rockstars in the hotel hinged on the thick rope and a throng of young people behind a barricade in front of the hotel. I hadn’t seen that and it hadn’t occurred to me that I was part of the circus that was being cloyed at. I jumped in. I signed autographs and talked with the kids, I didn’t care, it was a closeness that provided a window to a part of where we were and what we weren’t seeing. It was mayhem, the interaction but it was that and it was all wild and loud and boisterous. Without engaging, though, there was a separation and a hierarchy.

That night we arrived there was a party and it’s where I met Prince. I remember I was wearing all white still, I had on quarter length baseball pants of some sort that I’d found at a sporting good store and puffy white sneakers that were popular then and a long sleeved white shirt that said NO BONES on it. That was the name of my best friend’s hair salon in Los Angeles. I had hair that was kind of cut in a bob and I had an eyebrow piercing and I had on beads that I’d found for sale on the beach of Rio when I’d walked that morning. They were round wooden beads that were big and on a necklace. From the start we knew that Prince was at the party. He was in his own space, with us, but separate, and I went for him immediately. Like a magnet, I scoured the big dance floor and its perimeters and I found him. There he was. There was Prince. He was in a chair. In my memory it was like a throne. It wasn’t a normal chair, that’s for sure. He was sitting in a throne behind a velvet rope. Again, my memory. It was definitely a barrier between Prince and the rest of us and in my head it was a velvet rope. I’d left the band and I was drawn to him, blindly and like a convert or one of the minions or a worshipper at a temple, I approached the edge of the rope and there was Prince. Sitting there in the chair, looking at no one at all. Through those eyelashes. It was the eyelashes more than anything. That was the expression of Prince to me, to anyone, I’d felt compelled and convinced to acknowledge, Prince’s eyelashes. Like they were fake but they weren’t, they were long and alluring and sexy and suggestive and he batted them slowly and calmly, it dictated his every gesture. He led with the eyelashes.

‘Can I… may I?’ I had to address his bodyguard who was on the other side of the velvet rope. He was invisible, a thick man in a suit with a walkie talkie clipped to his lapel and nervous and of course, protective, doing his job. I explained to the bodyguard, ‘I’m in the band Faith No More, we’re playing tomorrow at the festival and I just, I just wanted to say hi….’ The bodyguard didn’t look at me at all, he went directly to Prince in the chair and leaned over and into Prince’s ear said what I had said. I couldn’t hear this, the disco music was playing loudly and it was hard to hear, but I knew that this was going on. The bodyguard was saying what I had said into his ear into the ear of Prince as I waited on the other side of the velvet rope for Prince to respond.

I mean, that’s enough right there. To be right specifically there. To have said something that is being parlayed to Prince in a throne behind a velvet rope as you wait? What else is there in life? Why go on? Why wait for an answer? What could possibly happen or occur that could live up to that expectation or want? Nothing. I considered just walking away. What a statement that would have been but also I was absolutely smitten. I was staring at Prince as he listened and watched him, watched his eyelashes, his legs were crossed in the fem style, his boots were pointy beyond belief, he adjusted subtly and slowly in his chair and he nodded to the bodyguard. Prince nodded and in a flash too fast to even clock, the velvet rope was removed and I was expected to approach Prince.

I did, I approached Prince. It was maybe four steps and there was me standing before Prince. He looked at me directly and unwaveringly from his throne and I wanted to do that thing with my arms where I do a kind of a roll with my hands in a present of ‘I am a peasant and you are nobility’ and I’m not saying this in any sort of judgmental hierarchy, I am saying this because it is what it was. I was standing in front of Prince and Prince is a miracle and a deity unlike no other. He was in a throne and he was looking directly into my eyes. The first thing I noticed, even before I collected myself and focused in on his eyelashes was his smell. The smell of Prince wafted off of Prince. It was an aura and a cloud and a periphery of purple. I can only describe it as such. Prince smelled of purple. What else would Prince smell like? It was lavender, it was a floral, it was a spice, it was anything but bland, it wasn’t of Brazil, it wasn’t of a space, it was a fervor of a flavor that was wild and punctuated with ripeness and a sexuality but it was most definitely more than anything… purple. I basked in it and I looked back into Prince’s eyes and god damn. Prince was not just looking at me, he was making eyes at me. I’m not exaggerating or speculating, Prince and I had chemistry. There was no doubting this. We were looking into each others eyes and his eyelashes, those dreamy too long lashes were batting, slowly batting, and his lips pursed out a tiny bit and out of a very fast heart beat I began my pitch to Prince.

‘I’m in Faith No More, my name is Roddy, I play the keyboards, I’m such a big fan, I’m a huge fan. We play tomorrow night. Did you already play?

Prince took me slowly up and down and his lips pursed some more, just a little bit and he said, ‘Yes.’

Prince was ok with the silence that followed. I looked at him and he looked at me and nothing was said. It was like a game of chicken that I was not going to win, I was nervous and in the presence of a spirit, clearly, I gave in.

‘So,’ I kind of stammered, ‘you’re all done, that must be a good feeling, What are you gonna go back to…’ and I pretended like I was trying to place in my mind where it was he was from or where he’d going back to when, obviously, I knew, we all knew. ‘Minneapolis?’

Prince got me. We had something. He could see right through me and he liked me. He smiled just a tiny bit and then said the most he’d say.

‘Argentina.’

And it ended somehow. I think it was my nervousness that exited me out of the conversation and the situation, I can’t completely recall, it was as if a dream and I went away and I don’t think I stayed at the party because how much more could there have been? I’d done it all, all that mattered.

I might have said, ‘good luck,’ to Prince. I can’t remember how we finished up. As if Prince needed my luck but I don’t know. It’s so great to hear, ‘good luck,’ from absolutely anyone. It felt amazing to say, also. Like me and Prince, he’d already performed and was moving on and we were just two people, checking in with each other. I love Prince so much.