The Most Beautiful

by Mayte Garcia

  There was no “casual Friday” at Paisley Park. Prince expected us to come dressed to play, and these amazing people helped make that possible for me. They also made it possible for my husband to steal my clothes—and not in a good way. If I bought a pair of amazingly cool tailored pants or a hot jacket, he’d take them to Wardrobe, have the pants hemmed up, and tell them to put shoulder pads in the jacket so he could wear them. A few days later, I’d pull on my brand-new pants, find them two inches too short, and say, “Hey! Why are my pants shrinking?” He thought this was hilarious. And somehow he rocked these outfits just as well as I would have.

  The music in Purple Rain defined the summer of 1984. I spent dozens of hours dancing to it on my grandmother’s tile floor. In Puerto Rico and back home, the singles—“When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” and the rest—dominated radio and MTV. Prince was now a bona fide superstar. You’d hear that opening vocal grind from “Doves” as people washed their cars. “I Would Die 4 U” banged from open windows as you walked down the street.

  The music spoke to me, certainly, but beyond that was the emotional impact of something very intimate Prince was able to share in Purple Rain: what it is for a child to witness the psychological warfare between his parents. This was something I could definitely relate to, something that connected him and me in that moment and later on, when we envisioned the sort of parents we wanted to be. We both loved our parents, but we wanted to break that cycle of crazy, dysfunctional behavior. We wanted to be a united front, committed to loving each other and creating a tight, semitraditional family unit. This vision of family is a world away from The Kid climbing in the window of his basement sanctuary, but throughout the movie and the music, you can feel his yearning for it.

  I watched Prince’s very first television interview (not counting one painfully awkward American Bandstand moment when he was nineteen) on a bootlegged MTV tape Grandma Nelly recorded in 1985, the year after Purple Rain. It seems unthinkable in the present age of social media. Everyone has their “platform,” and fans expect to be fed a steady stream of witty banter and smiling selfies. He had a belly dancer’s sense of mystery; he said everything he wanted to say through his music. So this MTV interview was a huge deal. All eyes were on Prince, who was famously reclusive, shrouded in Victorian lace and artistic mystery. I watched the tape over and over until I could practically recite it word for word.

  First, the VJ introduces him, explains that the questions were being asked by his manager, and says, “Now, Prince is not alone here. The interview was shot at the filming of his new video ‘America’.…” and a bunch of other stuff I’d try to fast-forward through until the video cuts to a vision of Prince looking excited, innocent, and fresh. He’s surrounded by his castmates, friends, and dancers, like a landscaper sitting in the middle of a rose garden. Oh, how I envied those dancers. They sat there with serious expressions and big ’80s hair and consciously casual clothes, hardly breathing, hanging on his every word. Prince wore a ruffled white shirt with a tawny tweed greatcoat, that same tasteful dash of eyeliner that worked so well for Amir, and a perfect mole in exactly the right place on his cheek. I loved that mole most of all.

  He spoke softly, deliberately, choosing his words as quietly and carefully as I would later hear him choose the lyrics of a song. Long after I became one of those dancers, when I was his wife and his baby was doing slow stretches and bicycle kicks in my belly, I’d wake up and hear him at the piano. I’d pull the sheet off the bed and wrap it around myself like a sari and sit on the piano bench next to him while he found what he was looking for. You see a more formal version of that understated search for words when you watch that MTV interview. He’s so young; it makes me ache to look at him. Our son would be almost that same age now, with his father’s full lips and dark eyes, and I like to think he would have been as thoughtful about expressing himself.

  “One thing I’d like to say… is that I don’t live in a prison,” he says. “And I’m not afraid of anything. I haven’t built any walls around myself. I’m just like anyone else. I need love and water, and I don’t really consider myself a superstar. I live in a small town, and I always will, ’cause I can walk around and be me. And…” He shrugs his shoulders inside the oversize coat and laughs a little.

  “That’s all I wanna be. That’s all I ever try to be. I didn’t know what was gonna happen. I just tried to do my best, and somebody dug it and…” He purses his lips and finishes the thought with an air kiss, assigning his remarkable existence to the kiss of fate.

  He goes on to talk about how James Brown influenced his style, but when he’s asked how he feels about people comparing him to Jimi Hendrix, he says, “A lot had to do with, I could say, the color of my skin, and that’s not where it’s at—at all. It really isn’t. Hendrix was very good, but there’ll never be another one like him, and it would be a pity to try. I strive for originality in my work, and hopefully it’ll be perceived that way.”

  The interviewer says, “Some people have criticized you for selling out to the white rock audience with Purple Rain and leaving your black listeners behind. How do you respond to that?”

  At first, Prince clowns around: “Aw, come on. Come on! Cuff links like this cost money, okay? I mean, let’s be frank. Can we be frank? If we can’t be nothin’ else, we might as well be frank, okay?” But then he says, “Seriously… I was brought up in a black and white world, and—yes, black and white, night and day, rich and poor. Black and white. And I listened to all kinds of music when I was young. And when I was younger, I always said that one day I was gonna play all kinds of music and not be judged for the color of my skin, but the quality of my work. And hopefully that’ll continue. I think there’re a lot out there that understand this. They support me and my habits, and I support them and theirs.”

  I find it interesting in retrospect that he felt compelled to end this interview by saying, “I believe in God. There’s only one God. And I believe in the afterworld, and hopefully we’ll all see it. I have been accused of a lot of things contrary to this, and I just want people to know that I’m very sincere in my beliefs. I pray every night, and I don’t ask for much. I just say thank you.”

  “I’m going to marry Prince,” I told my mother. “Or Luis Miguel.”

  She laughed, but I was completely serious. This wasn’t just a tweenager’s “someday my prince will come” fantasy or the fact that I generally had a thing for guys with green eyes. This was a plainspoken certainty I felt. I had absolutely no logical reason to think that this was remotely possible, but I had seen it in my mind’s eye, or perhaps remembered it from that soul-spiral—all possibilities at all times—and I knew it would happen.

  Years later, this sort of premonition would be a recurring theme between Prince and me. I’d feel something in the air when he was about to call. Somehow the mailbox had a different personality when there was a letter from Prince in it. I remember watching a television special on Herb Ritts when I was a teenager, and I thought, I’m going to shoot with him. It was odd that I saw this at all, because we were living on a military base in Germany; there was only one TV channel, and this wasn’t the type of thing we usually saw on it.

  A day or two later, Prince called and said, “Wanna come to Minneapolis and shoot some pictures for Vogue?”

  “Who’s the photographer?” I asked.

  “Herb Ritts.”

  I felt that small, satisfying ping you get when synchronicity happens. This sort of thing came up all the time, and we’d laugh about it. We didn’t find it spooky or illogical at all, and we never felt the need to validate it or prove it to ourselves or to anyone else. We simply accepted it as coincidence or fate, just a little shout-out from the universe, reminding us that we were exactly where God wanted us to be.

  But there have been other times—moments when God seems blind and everything in the universe feels hopelessly out of sync.

  In the midst of the Purple Rain craze, my parents officially divorced, and Daddy was tr
ansferred to Wiesbaden Army Airfield (WAAF) in Germany. It was decided that Jan and I would move to Maryland with Mama. Her boyfriend had already moved there. They’d rented a big, lovely house.

  “Your room is painted pink,” Mama told me. “You’ve always wanted a pink room, right?”

  I felt more miserable every time she told us how great it would be. Daddy drove us to Maryland, where we joined Mama’s boyfriend—a white guy with white hair, which threw me for a loop somehow. When it was time for Daddy to leave, Jan and I stood there at the door with our arms tight around him, not wanting to let go. And Mama stood there with big tears rolling down her face. She was clearly every bit as distraught as we were.

  “She loved him. He loved her,” I told Prince years later. “Why—why—was that not enough?”

  He had no answer, but now I think back on that moment in Purple Rain, when The Kid’s father turns to his mother with reproachful tears in his eyes and says, “I would die for you.” He thinks it’s the ultimate sacrifice, but in truth, it’s living for someone that presents the far greater challenge.

  I sat in my pink room in Maryland, not knowing what to do with myself. I was twelve years old, and I’d been dancing professionally for more than half my life. Now we were far away from the places that hired me on a regular basis, and even if Mama had scoped out the gigs, I didn’t have Daddy to drive me there and manage the sound and play the tablas and just… be Daddy. When my parents lived together, they fought like cats and dogs, but they’d done pretty well as a separate but equal team, going along on parallel tracks with Jan and me securely between them.

  Mama didn’t have loud shouting matches with the white guy. If there was some disagreement between them, they’d go into the room they shared and shut the door. When Mama and Daddy argued, I’d be hunkered down in a corner eavesdropping, taking in every word, but I didn’t even want to know what Mama and her boyfriend were saying to each other in those low, intense voices. It seemed so unnatural. Mama is Puerto Rican to the tenth power. To me, she always embodied the vibrant, loud voice of that culture. I didn’t want her to tone that down for anyone.

  Right away, Mama researched all the dance studios and companies in the area and decided I should take classes at the prestigious Washington School of Ballet (WSB), where Shirley MacLaine and Goldie Hawn had studied. Under the umbrella of the Washington Ballet, WSB accepted a limited number of students who were expected to work hard, be diligent about the barre, and serious about classical studies—all of which I craved. It was expensive and not terribly convenient—about ninety minutes away on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, DC—but Mama thought it was the best place for me. She took off work early so she could take me there three times a week.

  Belly dancing has always been my thing, personally and professionally, but I was a ballerina first. Dance, for me, began with ballet class, and I’ve always stayed grounded in it. When I wasn’t at ballet, I stayed in my room, reading and dancing. My home situation was enormously depressing, and I got off the school bus one day to discover I’d gotten my first period. Awesome, right? I was already dragging through the most awkward school year of my life. Now I was in the throes of puberty as well, the only non-white kid in my class and the only girl in gym class who wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or shave her legs, no matter how I begged. I absorbed several weeks of taunting and teasing—“You could braid that hair on your legs” and that sort of thing—and then I decided to take matters into my own hands.

  I’d seen Mama use Nair on her upper lip, so I crept into the bathroom one day after school, read the instructions on the back of the bottle, and slathered it on my legs. Within minutes, the guilt got to me, and I quickly got into the tub and rinsed it off. When the dark hair washed away with it, part of me celebrated. The rest of me withered at the thought of facing Mama with my smooth, smooth—oh, so wonderfully smooth!—but soon to be broken legs. By the time she got home from work, I’d developed a strategy: play for sympathy, and then try to get off on a technicality.

  “Mama, these girls at school—you don’t know what these girls are like,” I said. “And you told me I couldn’t shave. You never said anything about Nair.”

  She laughed. See, she did know what those girls were like. Mean girls are a force of nature that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries. I was an easy mark, because I was different, and not just because of the color of my skin. I was that kid who always got hit in the face by the dodgeball ball. Instead of going to cheerleading practice and after-game parties, I went to ballet and ballet. And ballet. Jan, meanwhile, was that girl who could play anything—volleyball, basketball, or soccer—and quickly attract a posse of friends wherever she went. I felt more alone with each passing day.

  Jan and I really didn’t interact with my mother’s boyfriend at all, so I was surprised to hear him rap his knuckles on my door one afternoon. I think his intention was probably some inexpert attempt to be what in his mind was fatherly.

  “Mayte, this room is a mess,” he said. “It’s not acceptable.”

  My dad was a military guy, too; I understood the concept of “shipshape,” but Jan and I had never been made to clean and do laundry as if we were in boot camp. I wasn’t open to the idea that I should care whether my personal space was acceptable to someone else, so this didn’t start well, and it quickly went downhill from there. I wasn’t about to discuss things with him in low tones. Things escalated to a real confrontation, and I went a little Puerto Rican chica in his face. Apparently not used to being disagreed with in this way, the guy bellowed back at me, shoving me with the heel of his hand. I staggered back, stunned, and then stood in the middle of my pink room, shaking and furious. I was thinking, Oh, he’s in trouble now. I was too afraid to say it out loud, but there was not a shadow of doubt in my mind. Mama always had my back.

  He slammed the door and stormed down the hall. When I knew he was gone, I crept down to the kitchen and called my mother at work, tearfully telling her, “He put his hands on me. He is not allowed to put his hands on me.” She took the story in with surprising calm, and I don’t know what went on between them after that, but I never saw the guy at the house again. Within days, Jan and I were on a flight to Germany. I never even had the chance to retrieve my ballet shoes and towel bag from my locker at WSB.

  Mama packed our things, closed up the house, and joined us a week or two later in Hainerberg, an ungated American community on a hill in Wiesbaden, where we would all live together for six years. Mama and Daddy’s unorthodox relationship didn’t seem odd to Jan and me at all. We didn’t give it much thought, really. We were old enough to understand that Mama had made a huge mistake, and while we may not have had the security every child fantasizes about, we learned that mistakes aren’t necessarily forever. Second chances happen. This belief stayed with me, a blessing and a curse. Thinking my husband and I would eventually remarry kept me from feeling bitter toward him, but it also prevented me from fully moving on as long as he was alive.

  The summer after we moved to Germany, Jan and I went to see our grandmothers in Puerto Rico. A few weeks later, our parents showed up for the customary family visits, and while we were all hanging out one afternoon, they casually announced that they had gotten remarried.

  Jan and I were surprised, to say the least. “What… why? When? How could you do that without telling us?”

  On the one hand, we were delighted that the typical child-of-divorce fantasy was happening to us—our parents were back together!—but the memories of the war zone were still pretty fresh. We worried that things were going to go back to the way they used to be. Mama and Daddy explained that it was just so she could be in Germany on his benefits. And weirdly, that made it okay. We knew they were never going to have the fairy-tale romance; it was a relief for everyone that they didn’t feel the need to pretend. They cared deeply for each other, and the piece of their relationship that worked—our dysfunctionally functional family—was worth preserving. They were willing to sacrifice some pride for
it and let go of the pieces that didn’t work.

  Life on base away from the United States was a bit of a culture shock. Because they divided the grades differently, I was outraged to find myself back in middle school while Jan went to General H. H. Arnold High School. We were free to venture out and explore the country around us, but most people seemed scared to do that. I wasn’t about to be stuck at home all the time. Struggling through the language barrier that kept most of my classmates on base, I researched the schedules and took the bus into Wiesbaden, a bustling city famous for its grandly ancient architecture and natural hot springs.

  In Germany, the arts were highly respected and well funded. Every town had a big theater, so I joined one and started picking up some German. Before long I was conversational, working toward fluent. Mama searched out a challenging ballet class for me and then went around to all the Turkish and Moroccan restaurants, asking, “Do you hire belly dancers?” The response was more enthusiastic than we could have imagined. Turns out belly dancing was even more popular in Germany than it was back home, so I was soon back to a steady schedule of appearances. Mama danced, too, but we were rarely at the same place at the same time.

  I danced at birthday parties, weddings, and corporate events. I danced at hotels, restaurants, and convention centers. I learned the difference between the Turkish customs and the Persian customs, and tailored my style to accommodate the two completely different styles of dance and dress. The money rolled in. I usually got paid in cash, and for lack of a better idea, I kept tucking it into a little metal lockbox. If I wanted a book or a record or tampons, I just peeled a little off this wad of cash and tucked it away again. I was too young to understand or care about the money—I just loved dancing—so Daddy did all the bookkeeping. When I had several thousand dollars sitting there under his desk, he took me to the bank to hook up my own checking account and then to the PX to write my very first check, which the cashier assumed was fake.