The Most Beautiful

by Mayte Garcia

  “What’s the origin of it?” he asked

  Rather than go into the whole story of Mama and the telenovela, I opted for the short answer. “It’s Basque. It means ‘beloved.’”

  He seemed weary and deflated—the opposite of his presence onstage—and obviously had a miserable cold.

  He asked, “Can I get you anything?”

  “Don’t get up,” I said. “I’ll make some tea. Can I make some for you?”

  “Sure. Thank you.”

  When I brought him his tea, he declared it was exactly right, exactly the way he liked it. I assumed at the time he was being polite, but in fact, he told me for years that I was the best tea maker. “It’s not as straightforward as people think,” he said, and I agree; there’s a precise color and chemistry to a good cup of tea with honey.

  Neither of us said anything for a long while, but the silence wasn’t awkward. There was music playing on the roadie box stereo, and between tracks, there was the soft hiss of a humidifier and the occasional clink of my spoon in my teacup. We sat together without needing to do anything more. Every once in a while, he reached over to rub my face with his hand, as if he were checking to see if I was actually there or just a fever dream, and I’d giggle and relocate to a spot on the floor or side chair. The quiet minutes stretched to an hour, and the hour stretched to two hours.

  “On the phone you’re a firecracker,” he said. “Now you’re here and you’re not talking.”

  “It’s because I’m dying right now. I don’t know what I’m feeling.”

  Impulsively, I got up to hug him, but he said, “No.”

  “I was just going to give you a hug. I’m glad I’m here. That’s all.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

  I hugged him anyway. After a moment, he hugged me back, and then we snuggled together on the sofa. The closest feeling I can compare would be crowding onto the sofa in front of the TV with Gia and our dogs. I felt safe and at home, and he seemed to feel the same way, because as we sat there together, he settled his head back, listening to the music, drifting in and out of sleep. I didn’t understand at the time what a luxury it was for him to be so quiet and unguarded without being alone.

  Before I left, I hugged him again, and at the last moment, we got the trajectory wrong and our noses brushed together in a way that might have led to an accidental kiss if we hadn’t both pulled away and laughed.

  Infatuation, from the scientific point of view, is a chemical reaction that intensifies perception and floods the body with endorphins, and Prince tried, in his way, to say something to me about this after I returned to Germany.

  “I’m sending you a song I want you to dance to. It’s called ‘The Dopamine Rush.’”

  “What’s dopamine?” I asked.

  He laughed and said, “Look it up.”

  I did look it up and figured out that dopamine is a chemical that blitzes through your brain, making you feel deliciously happy—exactly the way I was feeling at the time. My world was more colorful. The sky was bluer. The sun shone with a very personal intensity. The rain had a secret message for me. My own skin reminded me of gold and roses. It was a high I’ll never forget. I was rushing on that sweet dopamine, and he was letting me know he knew it.

  The “Dopamine Rush” cassette arrived. The track was part of a suite Prince had started working and reworking two years earlier in Europe and was now producing for an Eric Leeds album called Times Squared. I tried my best to work with it, but it was a smooth type of instrumental jazz, and something about the timing just didn’t sync with my style.

  “Where’s my ‘Dopamine Rush’ video?” he asked me the following week.

  “I can’t dance to it,” I said. “I don’t know why.”

  He didn’t question or comment on that. He just said, “Okay.”

  He sent me another track from the suite, an unpolished piece called “Amsterdam” that sounded sad and a little lonely, but there was an honest rhythm to it that moved me. I danced to it, only vaguely aware that this was a form of communication we were developing, a secret language in which he would tell me—or try to tell me—what he wasn’t always able to say in words.

  He liked what I did with “Amsterdam” and was very into the ballet videos I was sending.

  We flirted, we giggled, but in the beginning, I didn’t feel that I was being courted. Later on, when I was being courted, believe me, I knew it. This was not that. There was an immediate mutual affection between us, but we did not have a sexual relationship. I know this is difficult for some people to wrap their heads around. I’m not naïve about his famous appetite for sex or the fact that I was rockin’ the mature body of a professional belly dancer. He never denied that the occasional impure thought crossed his mind, but the truth is, he was too wise and decent to take advantage of a sixteen-year-old, and I was a self-determined girl who intended to remain a virgin until I felt ready to be something else. There’s nothing like dance to give a girl a sense of owning her own body. Because I always worked on the weekends, I had very little dating experience, and that was fine with me. Boys my age didn’t understand or interest me at all. They never said ridiculously cool things like, “Charts, awards, and grades at school are a sociopsychotic illusion.”

  At that time, I knew about the various women in his life. I don’t know what they knew about me, but it didn’t matter; I couldn’t see myself ever being part of that mix. I was thrilled to be Prince’s friend and honored that he considered me a fellow artist. The oddly magical summer of 1990 ended. Jan went off to college in Maryland, and within days, I missed her horribly. School started in the fall, my third and final year at General H. H. Arnold High School. I hurried to class with a wink at Priscilla Presley but told very few people about the unusual relationship that had developed between my American friend and me. Only my family and my two best friends knew that this dialogue had become a huge part of my life.

  After our meet-up in Switzerland, Prince and the Nude Tour had moved on to France, England, and Japan—eleven performances in twenty days—before he went home to Minnesota. As autumn went by, he continued to call me several times a week. We rarely spent less than two or three hours on the phone. Being a sixteen-year-old on the phone with a rock star, I logged each call in my diary. He called again! We had a looooooong talk. He is so funny. I laughed my head off. Now I eavesdrop on those conversations in my memory, thinking, What I wouldn’t give for just one of those hours back…

  “Do you sing?” he asked me one evening.

  “No,” I answered automatically.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Well, just—I take chorus class. I always wanted to be a triple threat like Rita Moreno.”

  It briefly crossed my mind to mention the demo, but the fact that they’d decided not to release it didn’t exactly boost my confidence, and I wasn’t sure I could easily lay my hands on a copy of it anyway.

  “I have this song I want you to sing on,” he said, “but I need to hear you sing.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t sing for you on the phone.”

  “No, I really need you to sing. Like this…” And then he started singing it.

  “Oh. Yeah. No. Don’t do that.” I was afraid if he kept singing, I would remember who he really was, and I was happy thinking of him as my friend. But he kept singing, and I kept refusing to sing. After an hour or so, per his request, I put the phone on the floor and stood way across the room and sang.

  “Why were you so scared?” he asked when I picked up the phone again. “That was really good.”

  “Thanks. Can it be over now?”

  “I need you to come to Minneapolis and record this song. I’ll let you know when it’s happening. I want you to be on it.”

  “What?”

  “It has an Arabic vibe. There’s some Arabic notes in it.”

  “So you want me to sing.”

  “Yes.”

  If he’d said
he needed me to dance on the video, I would have gone through the roof. That was something I knew I could do well. This I wasn’t quite so sure about, until he said that. Something I would learn about him over the years: He had a way of speaking things into being. He’d say, “You know what would be cool…” in a way that made people believe they could do it—whatever it was. He saw potential in people before they saw it themselves, and not very many people I ever saw had the will—or the lack of will—to say no when he challenged them this way.

  Randee St. Nicholas is a good example. She’s a photographer first and foremost, but he loved her creative eye and started asking her to direct music videos and shoot hundreds of hours of footage. When he first saw Sheila E in concert with her father in the 1970s, he told her that he and his bassist were fighting over which one of them would marry her, but more important, he vowed that she was going to be in his band someday. Over the years, their creative chemistry had a huge impact on his work and hers. He told me more than once how much he admired Wendy and Lisa because he could lay down some kind of foundation—or even an idea—go watch a movie, and come back to find that they’d spun it out into a song that had string arrangements and chords and different colors.

  He sent me tapes so I could learn the music for “However Much U Want,” and I sang in the shower and in my car and in my head. The rest of the time, I was busy dancing at restaurants like Pamukkale and Taverna Aspendos and at various events. I was also preparing for an exam I would have to take in order to receive a certificate that would allow me to continue dancing professionally in Germany after I graduated. My plan was to get a work visa so I could maintain a home base with Mama and Daddy in Germany between my contracts in Cairo, but this exam was no joke. I would have to perform a classical piece, a modern piece, and a folkloric piece in front of a panel of judges. In my head, I saw them sitting, bored and frowning, behind a stark wooden table like the panel of judges in Flashdance.

  I made videotapes of myself practicing in the cafeteria at school so I could critique myself, and then I sent the tapes on to Prince, because he always asked to see what I was doing. He began sampling the music from these tapes and incorporating them into various ideas he was working on. FedEx-ing things to him from Germany took two days and was hideously expensive, but at that time, I still had the money to spare, and he was spending a lot more than that sending cassette tapes and letters to me.

  I turned seventeen in November 1990, just before the opening of Prince’s movie Graffiti Bridge, a hyper-stylized sequel to Purple Rain, in which The Kid makes a bet with Morris Day: whoever writes the better song gets the deed to the other guy’s nightclub. The Kid’s place is called Glam Slam, and Morris’s club is called Pandemonium, and somehow Mavis Staples is in there, and her club is called Melody Cool. Sometimes you’ll see on the Internet that I was considered for the role of Aura, but that’s not true. The movie was made the year before we met. Prince told me that he originally wanted Kim Basinger, but she turned it down, and after much discussion, he cast Ingrid Chavez, a waifishly lovely unknown. When he first told me about all this, I said, “It sounds cool.”

  General H. H. Arnold High had homecoming, just like any high school in the States, but it was a Friday night, so I was booked, of course. The only part of the festivities I was available for was a midnight movie. They were showing Graffiti Bridge. The anticipation level was high, because we had all grown up adoring Purple Rain.

  “I’ll get to see it!” I told my dear friend on the phone. “I’m super excited.”

  I like Graffiti Bridge. The visuals are dark and saturated with color, and there’s some good music in it. Mavis Staples kills—kills—a throaty version of “Melody Cool.” George Clinton, Tevin Campbell, and Rosie Gaines are incredible. I see the avant-garde intentions, and I love the sentimental message about romance and art and la vie Bohème. I’ve watched it with Gia a few times, and we enjoy every campy, over-the-top minute, especially the tragic climax where Aura gets flattened by a big red Jeep Cherokee.

  Critics universally panned Graffiti Bridge. Even today, most audience reaction ranges from “WTF?” to outrage that their beloved Purple Rain now had this stupid sequel attached to it. Back then, I would have loved it no matter what. I would have loved it if he’d stood there reciting his ABCs; he was my friend. At the midnight showing on homecoming night, I found myself sinking deeper into my seat, as all my classmates laughed and jeered with loud homecoming pep rally spirit. It broke my heart, because I knew what he was hearing back in the States must be this magnified a million times over.

  When Prince asked me if I’d seen it, I tried to be as diplomatic as possible.

  “Yes…” I hedged, “and I really, really loved… Mavis Staples! She was so awesome. Seriously. I loved that part. And the part where… the umm… oh! ‘Elephants and Flowers’! And ‘Tick, Tick, Bang’! Yeah, that choreography was like… wow.”

  I sat there on the phone, barely breathing, not wanting to say anything that would hurt him. This was pre-Twitter, thank God, but I couldn’t imagine what it felt like to put your work out into the world and get horsewhipped by the media. Prince didn’t have to imagine it, of course. He’d been in this business, which can be a brutal business, since he was a kid like me. He told me about getting booed off the stage when he opened for the Rolling Stones ten years earlier at the Memorial Coliseum in LA. He was on the roster with George Thorogood and The J. Geils Band, so it was kind of an odd mix, but the Stones were known for that. Prince came out onstage wearing tiny underpants and a trench coat and started his set with “Bambi” and “When You Were Mine,” which were already not sitting well with the crowd when he launched into “Jack U Off,” and then things really got ugly. He tried to soldier on with “Uptown,” but by that time, people were hurling beer bottles, food, and garbage at him, yelling, “Get off the stage, fag!” and the road manager pulled the plug.

  Twenty-five years later, when Prince died, Mick Jagger said in a series of tweets, “I am so saddened… Prince was a revolutionary artist, a wonderful musician and composer. He was an original lyricist and a startling guitar player. His talent was limitless. He was one of the most unique and exciting artists of the last 30 years.”

  He must have seen all that in Prince back in 1981, because they kept him on the tour. I don’t know if they encouraged him to wear pants after the LA incident, but I do know he never changed anything about himself or his music to please an unhappy audience—whether it was an audience of one or an audience of ten thousand. When it comes down to it, I was probably more deeply wounded than he was by my classmates’ response to Graffiti Bridge.

  “I’m sorry,” I said with a lump in my throat. “They just didn’t get it.”

  “Nah, it’s okay.” He sighed heavily. “You can’t look at yourself through other people’s eyes. When you’re working at a certain level, you find that people live through you, and if you don’t act like they expect you to, then you’re the bad one.”

  It was an educational moment for me, how he didn’t wallow in it. He was already on to the next project. Sometimes, when he was very excited to share something with me, he’d buy the package an airplane seat, and I’d have to drive all the way to the airport in Frankfurt to pick it up, as if it were an unaccompanied minor.

  “You could send it FedEx,” I tried to gently suggest.

  “I wanted you to have it today.”

  “But it must have cost hundreds of dollars. To send a cassette tape. Seriously.”

  “Yeah, but did you listen to it?”

  It was the seed of an idea for a song called “7.”

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “What do you think I think? I was like, Are you kidding me? I get to hear this? It’s beyond insane.”

  That’s as far as it sank in then, but when I listen to it now, I hear a strand of myself: a Middle Eastern vibe and an almost scriptural sort of storytelling, a mythology spun from threads of our many long conversations.

  I h
ad a lot of holiday parties in December, and I danced on Christmas for triple pay. The next day, I had a long talk with Prince, and before we hung up, he said, “I’ll call you in a few weeks.” But the next day he called me and said, “Can you get on a plane tomorrow?” This was something he did from time to time. There were many spur-of-the-moment excursions, starting with that impromptu trip to Switzerland, but this one stands apart in my heart. It was my first visit to Paisley Park.

  It irked Prince when people asked him why he stayed in Minnesota or expressed that it was an odd place for a rock star to have a home base. “Music is music. A place is a place,” he used to say to his friends, but he’d say to the person interviewing him, “The cold keeps all the bad people away.” When I visited, I finally got the joke. Germany is cold in the winter, but not Minnesota cold. Minnesota cold reaches into your chest by way of your tingling nose and tightens every muscle in your torso. It stabs your little legs. I was trying to be cool and sophisticated, but when I walked out of the terminal building at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, I sucked in a deep, freezing breath and screamed all the way to the limo. I was wearing a short skirt and a jacket, which was fine for winter in Wiesbaden. Not so much for Minnesota.

  That was my first time in a big limo, so I couldn’t keep myself from pushing buttons and exploring the fancy accessories. When I accidentally raised and lowered the window between us and the front seat, the driver asked, “Would you like me to close it?”

  “Oh, no. That’s okay,” I said, looking around for something else to experiment on or play with.

  We passed by Paisley Park on the way to Prince’s house in Chanhassen. I wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of it. I knew the song “Paisley Park,” of course, and when I asked Prince what it was about, he told me, “It’s my studio where I record and work.” This was before the days of Google, so I had no mental picture of it, but I knew it the moment I saw it. It was off by itself, surrounded by rolling slopes and tall fir trees, very different from any other corporate structure I’d ever seen. The white walls and tinted glass soared like an ice sculpture above the snow-covered landscape. Once again, I felt myself consciously separating the enormous reality from the calm, quiet voice of my friend on the phone. I didn’t want to lose him in all this.