Not long after Gia’s first Christmas with us, she was mine—signed, sealed, delivered—and life settled into a lovely routine. Daddy (aka Buelo) said I won the lottery. Actually, he said, “You won the fucking lottery,” but we don’t use that sort of language in front of Gia, who is whip-smart. By the time she was two and a half, she was articulate enough to parrot bad words she heard.
The first few years of her life went by in a blissful blur of creating, coloring, singing, storytelling, dancing, jumping, thinking, and asking questions. She filled my life with a specific brand of Gia-flavored joy I could not have imagined, piles of blessings I never even knew I was praying for.
She’s four—almost five now—so she hasn’t seen Purple Rain yet, but I showed her the “7” music video a few months before Prince died.
“Mama, what’s this song?” she asked.
“It’s called ‘7.’”
“Why?”
“Because seven mysterious assassins chased after Princess Mayte, and Prince smoked them all with an intellect and a savoir faire.”
“Mama, you’re a dancer.”
“Yep.”
“Mama, who’s that?”
“That’s Prince with the guitar.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yep.”
“Mama, did you have a baby?”
Every once in a while, she stops my heart. I don’t know where these things come from. Maybe that particular question was because of the children in the video, but I didn’t shy away from it.
“Yes,” I said. “Prince and I had a baby boy.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s in heaven.”
“With Boogie?”
“Yes.”
Thank God for Boogie, Gia’s guardian angel.
Hollywood Exes ended after a couple more seasons. I was grateful to have it last as long as it did. A steady gig is a precious commodity in this town. You’ve gotta open a lotta clams to find a pearl like this one. I kept going out on auditions and developed a belly dancing seminar much like the weekend programs Mama and I used to do when I was a kid. I was working hard and loving it, but being a single mother—let’s just say it has a way of clarifying one’s priorities.
When the house in Spain was sold, I was left with the chore of packing and moving all the personal belongings left in it. Ever since then, I’d been maintaining climate-controlled storage for the ton of clothes my husband left in his closet there. He never asked for any of it back at the time or answered when I repeatedly asked him, “What am I supposed to do with all this stuff?” In the fall of 2015, I decided to pull a few pieces from Prince’s wardrobe and auction them off online.
“I know I’ll get a lot of blowback from people online,” I said to Dave.
“So what?” he shrugged. “You ain’t made it till ya been hated.”
This I knew from years of celebrity life, and anyway, my alternatives were limited to:
Keep paying for storage. (Not.)
Donate the clothes to charity. (For all the size extra-petite rock stars living on the street?)
Dedicate 90 percent of the closet space in my house as a shrine to the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. (See option 1.)
Bottom line: According to the divorce settlement, the house and its contents went to me in lieu of a cash settlement. In the beginning and at the end, all I wanted was my husband. Before we were married, I asked him if he wanted me to sign a prenup, and he said no. Naturally, his people tried to get him to do a prenup. He wasn’t having it.
“This is my soul mate,” he told them. “We’re not getting divorced.”
I walked away with my dignity and never regretted it.
But now I have a child to support. I loved my ex-husband, but I couldn’t afford to be sentimental about his cast-off clothes. These were bell-bottoms and boleros, people, not sacred relics. I wanted to talk to Prince about it and ask him if there was anything he’d like to have back, but I wasn’t the one with the private numbers anymore. I called and emailed several times but didn’t hear from him. I wonder now if my messages ever made it past the front door.
In January 2016, I heard through the grapevine that he wasn’t doing well. I kept hearing rumors that he was sick and had alienated several people who cared for him. I reached out to our mutual friend Randee—the one who shot all that amazing footage in Egypt—and told her, “I’m going up there. I want to see with my own eyes that he’s okay. I just need to know if you think I should take Gia. I really want him to meet her, but if things are weird…”
Randee assured me that the rumors were just rumors. She said Prince was fine and there was no reason for me to come up to Minnesota. I accepted that reassurance the same way I had once accepted my husband’s promises that the thing with the pills would never happen again. It was easier to postpone the visit when I thought about Gia’s little legs in the unrelenting cold of a Minnesota winter.
“Maybe next summer,” I said. “After school gets out.”