by Mayte Garcia
He told me to take over. He said whatever I thought we should do, he would do that. I ran up to the room and found the pills exactly where he’d told me they’d be. I sat next to the toilet and cried for what felt like eons. Sorrow surged through me—for our son, our pregnancy, the loss of connection to the love of my life. What would I do if I lost him? No answer came. I flushed the pills down the toilet, pulled myself together, and went downstairs. We stayed on the bus all night and went to the airport the next morning, but I flew back to Spain by myself.
“I just have to do these last two shows of the tour,” he said. “Then I’ll meet you there.”
Several weeks later, I was still waiting. It comforted me a little to see his clothes in the closet and his piano in the living room. Eventually, he did come for a few days, but then he left again. This became a dance we did. He’d say, “I’ll be back Monday. Just wait here for me.” A few weeks later, he’d pass through again. Between visits, he’d call me almost every day and talk and talk and talk about what the study group was studying. I was more than irked by the Manuela thing, but I figured that would pass. I’d seen my parents survive affairs and infidelities. It didn’t surprise or threaten me.
This religion thing was another story. He was hard core into it and had gotten it in his head that God was displeased with the life he had lived when he was younger, and Amiir’s death was part of the price he had to pay for that. He talked about David and Bathsheba and how David’s sin had cost him the thing dearest to him, his son Absalom.
This was a place I couldn’t go to. I could not go there with him, no matter how hard he tried to make me see that path.
“There was a time when you said our love was your salvation,” I reminded him, thinking of the seven versions of himself he kills off in “7”—and together we’ll love through all space and time. The man who once wrote to me, “U are my Jesus… Ur love is my salvation,” now saw those words as blasphemous and ugly. But now, if I expressed any disagreement with the teachings of the study crew—well, I’ll quote their own literature, Watchtower, October 1998:
Opposers try to hinder this work by mocking. Sometimes individuals interested in the Kingdom message give up because they cannot endure the ridicule… Jehovah’s people long for the time when God will triumph over all his enemies. This will start with the destruction of “Babylon the Great”—a figurative city that embraces all forms of false religion.
I had disobeyed my husband when it came to my health care decisions and refused to embrace the Gospel According to Graham. I was the enemy now, the opposer, who wanted to drag him back to the sinful ways of Babylon.
I missed my husband with all my heart, but I had hope, because this was also the man who wrote this to me:
… am married 2 my music. It never frowns at me. t’s the one thing know can depend on. My music has proven itself—time and time again. shouldn’t be asked to compromise… write what comes to me. U’ve seen the process. U know it comes easy 4 me.
Spirituality had always played a role in my husband’s music, and this new path was no different. There are moments where it seeps into the lyrics. But creating music was, for him, a spiritual experience. Never had a spiritual path come in such conflict with the sexual nature of his music, and I felt certain the music would win out in the end. He would never compromise that, and no one was going to oppose it, because that’s where the money was. I believed that if I just waited out the Manuela thing, if I stayed steadfast and faithful to our marriage vows, we’d return to that place where we were at the end of “The One”—bound together, on this plane of existence and all others.
During his brief visits to Marbella, we’d sit up at night and talk and talk and talk, but the long, soul-searching conversations we’d always enjoyed took a dark, baffling turn. I’d fall asleep trying to make sense of it and wake up to find he was gone again.
In October 1998, as he began the Newpower Soul Tour in Europe, my husband came to Marbella for a press conference at the Plaza de Toros. He looked weary but well enough. He held my hand as we walked in, but we started out with a measurable gap between our chairs. It started with the usual questions and answers. I answered some in Spanish, which everyone in the room loved. Someone asked about a rumor that we’d purchased a house in Marbella, and he was evasive.
“My residence is the world. I’m happy anywhere.”
Someone else asked how he balanced his professional and personal lives, and he said, “For the past twenty years, I consider work my personal life. Being married has taught me a lot about taking better care of time and realizing that recreation means re-creation of self, so I think I may take a vacation soon.”
I smiled when I heard that. I felt a surge of hope when he moved closer to me, took my hand, and wove his fingers through mine.
There’s a tragic aria in Madame Butterfly. The soprano sings, “Un bel di…” as she looks out over the sea, waiting for her lover. One beautiful day. I looked out at the sea from my house in Spain with the same heart full of longing. And at some point in my waiting and longing and wondering, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten a lesson I learned my very first year at Paisley Park: The girl in Minneapolis is the girl on her way in. The girl who leaves Minneapolis is the girl on her way out.
I guess I shouldn’t have taken it so hard. Carmen Electra was replaced by a sixteen-year-old belly dancer. It took God Almighty to get me out of Minnesota.
eleven
Here’s another Internet fiction alert for you: For almost twenty years, I’ve been reading that our marriage was “annulled” in 1998, but in fact, a legal marriage is not annulled just because an eccentric rock star says it in a press conference. That’s like you saying your marriage was annulled because you took off your ring before you hit on someone in a singles bar. That is not a thing.
This press conference—at which my husband and I were wearing our wedding rings—took place in Spain in mid-December 1998, while he was on the European leg of the Newpower Soul Tour. In the car on the way to the Santo Mauro Hotel, where the conference was being held, he enlightened me on his “revelation” about contracts. Everyone knew that he was against them when it came to record companies, but now he had been contemplating the contract we had signed when we were married, and he was against that, too.
This was baffling to me. He was the one who’d asked me to marry him when I had been perfectly happy with the way things were. He was the one who wanted the traditional vows and the half million dollars in flowers and the whole church wedding experience. But I already felt estranged and didn’t want that rift to grow, so I sat quiet and confused.
When we walked into the press conference, I had my game face on, hoping it would turn out like the press conference a few months earlier; when pressed to think about what truly mattered to him, he had admitted that our marriage made him a better man. My husband talked about his vision for NPG and how he was working to elevate and empower other artists. He gave his spiel about masters and slaves and not believing in contracts—something they’d heard before but knew the importance of—and then he announced that he and I were going to have our marriage annulled so we could renew our vows and “continue our marriage in a less traditional fashion.”
I felt my eyes go wide. I sat with a frozen smile on my face as the assembled press tried to climb over the language barrier to make some kind of sense of what he was saying. I willed him to look at me so he’d see the questions in my eyes: What are you saying? How do you expect me to sit here and listen to that?
I played Princess Mayte for the rest of the press conference, but in the car, I was hurt and furious. “Why would you do that to me? You made it sound like our marriage is a mistake—like it doesn’t mean anything!”
He went off on a long, alarming rant that lasted late into the night. Hour after hour, as I cried and argued and tried to reason with him, he quoted scripture and dragged me through the minutia of the Biblical teachings he’d been wallowing in. He wanted us to declare our
marriage annulled and then renew our vows on our anniversary, February 14. He wanted us to be baptized the same day. He wanted me to sign a paper that said I agreed to all this, that our vows were annulled, and we were free from the chains of that contract.
Now, stay with me here, people: I refuse to be cynical about this. I don’t believe this was him trying to avoid divorcing me so he could get out of a financial settlement. I think this is proof that he loved me and didn’t want to lose me. I think he was struggling with the whole Manuela flirtation. She tells me now (and most days I believe her) that they still weren’t intimate until much later. She says they were friends. But I was familiar with the “friendship” choreography; it wasn’t so much a platonic buddy relationship as it was an elegant sort of tantric delayed gratification. In any case, it was well beyond the boundaries of okay for a married man. I think he was looking for something—anything—that would make him feel less guilty about betraying me, and the “annulment” concept allowed him to feel like he was still The One guy as opposed to the not the one guy.
I tried to read that stupid paper, my eyes blurry with tears and exhaustion. It wasn’t anything official or legally binding, but just on principle, I didn’t like the implication with regards to Amiir. Even if it meant nothing legally, it was saying that Amiir’s parents were never truly married. Frankly, I wouldn’t have fought him over money, but this? Now you’re messing with Mama Bear.
“What—are you saying he was born out of wedlock? Is that what you want to say about our son?”
“No! I want to say I love you, and you love me, and we don’t need this piece of paper telling us how to live. I want us to be baptized and renew our vows and be newly married in the eyes of God.”
“It’s your eyes I worry about. You can’t seem to keep them off Manuela.”
And so on and so on, hour after hour. The words coming out of his mouth seemed coached and contrived. I don’t know if he believed it any more than I did, but he bullied me until four o’clock in the morning. I was desperate to lie down and even more desperate to make him shut up and lie down with me. Eyes burning, ears ringing, I let him put the pen in my hand. Defeated, numb with weariness, I scribbled my name on the paper. He was calm then. Before we fell asleep, he talked again about renewing our vows with a baptism in February. Maybe we should do it right here at our beautiful house in Spain, he said. When I woke up, he was gone.
New Year’s Eve was the moment Prince fans had been anticipating for sixteen years: time to party like it’s 1999. I was with him in LA, and for a moment we let go of everything that had been going on. On New Year’s Day, he played the MGM Grand in Vegas for a couple of days, and then we all went back to Paisley Park.
Over the course of the following year, there was never any mention of the annulment or a renewal of our vows. He continued to refer to me, publicly and privately, as his wife. I kept flying to wherever I had to go to meet up with him for red carpet and press events, and he kept promising to take time off to be with me in Spain. I continued to wait and hope, traveling back and forth, from one continent to the other, from happiness and hope to disappointment and despair.
Sometimes I’d show up after a performance and sit with him while he sat up discussing scriptural minutia and rambling philosophy with Larry and Tina and others from the Jehovah’s Witness crowd, all of whom seemed thrilled to be hanging out with the mysterious and wonderful at three in the morning. I wasn’t willing to chime in on these conversations. I didn’t believe any of it, and I wasn’t willing to pretend.
I would have been thrilled to be hanging out with him myself. I got lonely sitting there in Spain. As soon as the Witness crew clued in to the fact that I wasn’t buying it, I felt a steady campaign to separate and alienate me. When Larry and Tina first came to Paisley Park, my husband asked me to direct a music video for Larry, and I was excited about doing that. The guy’s a brilliant musician, and we came up with a great idea, and had a roller rink rented out and—I don’t know what happened. It just never materialized.
I want to be clear: I thought Larry and Tina were wonderful people. Their daughter is a lovely person. Everyone in that crowd—including Manuela—I’m sure they’re all just wonderful, wonderful people at heart. I respect their beliefs. But as the year went by, I felt less and less welcome in my own home, and I saw changes in my husband that worried me. Every once in a while, he’d ask me to meet him somewhere, and I’d race to wherever that was. Sometimes it would be like a breath of oxygen; we’d connect and make love and laugh and talk about sane, meaningful things. Other times, it was as if I were meeting a stranger.
Once he called me to meet him in Paris and took me to Le Crazy Horse, which is the classiest, most upscale strip club you can imagine, but a strip club nonetheless. I know it sounds odd, because my husband’s music was largely about sex, and I’d done some pretty out-there stuff as a performer, but not like this. This was full-frontal, nipples-in-the-wind stripper stuff that reminded me of the scary, sad Joel Grey parts in Cabaret. I sat there with tears in my eyes, thinking, How are you bringing your wife to a strip club? He was acting loopy and strange. I felt like I had two choices: drop dead or start drinking. Three hours later, I was throwing up drunk in our hotel room, and he was on his way back to Minnesota.
In September, I met him for the MTV Video Music Awards in New York. He was introducing TLC, so we were expected to make an appearance on the red carpet and at a number of after parties. When we were planning what we should wear, he said, “You know what would be cool? You should wear that red belly dancing outfit.”
“What?” I laughed, thinking he was joking, but it became clear that he wasn’t. He wanted me to wear the costume, and his eyes went wide when I said, “No. That would not be cool. It would be stupid.”
It crossed my mind to tell him what I thought of his corny little braids with blue ribbons, but I wanted to make peace and please him. As a compromise, I wore the belly dancing getup to the after parties, but I was horribly uncomfortable, and when we got back to the hotel, we started fighting about whether he would come to Spain with me and what was going on with Manuela and how angry I was to be locked out of my own life. He was feeling guilty and defensive and kept coming back with all this claptrap about me not being an obedient wife, refusing to wear the belly dancing getup on the red carpet, refusing to drink the study group Kool-Aid.
Finally, I pressed my hands against my face and screamed.
“What is it going to take to get through to you?”
I picked up a wine bottle and hurled it against the wall. It smashed and dribbled, and it did surprise him, but the feeling wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I had hoped.
The next day, we went to our separate corners, but we talked on the phone. He’d call me when he felt low, and most of the time, I tried to listen without saying anything I’d already said a thousand times. We kept talking about spending quiet time together in Spain, but for the most part, I was there by myself. Sometimes I’d go to Miami to visit Mama, or I’d fly her over to visit me. I continued the family tradition of outrageous phone bills, talking to Mama in Miami, Daddy in Texas, my grandmothers in Puerto Rico, and Jan in New York.
Jan was going through some heavy stuff. She’d been with her partner, Myra, for about three years. They were very much in love and totally committed to each other. (They still are. They were married in California as soon as it became legal in 2008.) Jan and Myra were the best thing that ever happened to each other, and I was so happy for them, but when Jan came out to our parents, Mama practically had a stroke. I don’t think she was completely surprised, but she wasn’t ready to have her friends know that her daughter was a lesbian, and she was terrified when she thought about how her own iron-clad Catholic mother was going to react. She basically turned her back on Jan, and that made me furious.
It was a glorious, sunny day on the coast of Spain, so I took my phone and paced the patio outside my office, calling Mama out for how she was treating Jan.
“This
is who you are as a mother? Do you understand what I would do to have one hour with my son? But you’re going to shun your own daughter because she found a good woman to love? I do not accept that! This is your baby! You call her on the phone right now, and you beg her forgiveness! You tell her that you are her mama and there is nothing—not one thing—about who she is that you do not love. You do not accept her, like you’re doing her a favor. You love her. Unconditionally. Because you are her mama.”
In tears, Mama agreed that I was right, and we hung up the phone so she could call Jan. I was ready to take on anything, so I called Grandma Nelly. Standing in second position, feet apart, ballet legs strong, I kept my eyes fixed on the Rock of Gibraltar and said some things I’d been wanting to say to her since I was a little girl.
“You are a terrible mother. You belittled and criticized and humiliated my mama all her life, and she is one of the most magnificent women you could ever know. She was your perfect little baby—gorgeous girl, amazing dancer, amazing woman—but you made her feel unworthy of love and incapable of showing affection. You tried to make her a judgmental witch just like you. Well, she’s not! She’s a beautiful, loving soul who would do anything for her daughters. She’s a better mother than you even tried to be!”
I clicked off the call and stood there feeling my anger running through me like an electric current. I allowed myself to feel the sear of everything I’d put up with and smiled through and danced over. No more. Things were about to change. I pocketed my cell and turned to go back into the house.
My office was engulfed in flames.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!”
I’d been standing in the hot sun, raging at Grandma, so I hadn’t felt the heat on my back. The swiftly spreading fire went up the drywall behind my desk and licked at the heavy drapes. A layer of thick smoke billowed in a tornado around the ceiling fan. I started to run toward the house. Realized that was crazy. Then ran to a patio wall.