We went to the garage and got into a Jeep Cherokee with deeply tinted windows. I wasn’t usually one for tinted windows like this (driving his tinted-out BMW in LA not long after this, I hit a curb and flattened two tires), but he loved driving around in his car, knowing he could see out but no one could see in. It wasn’t exactly incognito; everyone in Chanhassen knew it was him, and he’d honk and wave. For a moment, they’d be startled—Hey, why is this car honking at me?—and then they’d realize it was him. Who else would be driving around a small Minnesota town in a turquoise or canary yellow BMW?
Instead of going somewhere to eat, we drove around listening to Diamonds and Pearls, his first album with New Power Generation, and talking about the music. He took me to Lake Calhoun, which was frozen solid. I’d never seen people walking around on a lake like that. There was an arboretum near his house, so we went there and listened to the whole album again. He drove into Minneapolis to show me the city, which was all decked out with holiday decorations, and then we went back to Paisley Park.
This was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so the building was closed, and there was no one else there when he unlocked the door near the stairway that led to his office. We went to the main lobby, which felt like a cathedral, and visited the white doves, Majesty and Divinity.
“Are they boys or girls?” I asked.
“One of each,” he said. “I got them when we were building this place.”
His office was like another whole house, and a lot like his office at home. He went there when it got late—or early—and he just needed to close his eyes for a little while before heading back into the studio. The skylights and stained-glass windows filled the place with natural light. The kitchen offered the standard fare: Tostitos, an assortment of Celestial Seasonings teas—mostly the spicy, cinnamon ones, Earl Grey, something with a tiger on the box—and plenty of honey in plastic bears.
He showed me Studio A and Studio B, where music was recorded, and Studio C, which was like a dance studio. We went to the soundstage, where movies and music videos were filmed and tour performances rehearsed, a space taller and wider than any military airplane hangar I’d been in.
“Wow. This is big,” I said, and my voice echoed somewhere in the dark high, high overhead.
He didn’t work too much that trip, but I could tell he was having a hard time being away from it. I wandered around by myself, exploring for a while, paid another visit to the doves, and played with Paisley, the building cat who’d been there since Paisley Park opened. I went back to the studio to quietly observe as he continued to finesse the music we’d listened to in the car. The jet lag was starting to catch up with me, but I was only there for two days and didn’t want to nap away any of my time.
I’d brought music and a belly dancing costume, because it was strange to me that he’d never actually seen me dance. (No, videotape is not the same.) Somewhere between my Wonder Woman turn and the final clang of the zills, I felt a shift in the energy of the performance. I’d always danced as an act of personal power, not seduction. This was the first time I was more focused on the person I was dancing for than I was on myself. The sensual undercurrent took me by surprise. I noticed when I stopped that he had taken a pillow from the sofa and was holding it in his lap.
“You should go change,” he said.
I went to bed fairly early and woke up in the Cherry Moon bed. We made pancakes, and we loafed around a little and then went to the movies. The Godfather III was playing, and he was very into the whole Godfather saga. He brought me up to speed on the way to the theater. “See, Michael Corleone meets this girl—half Greek, half Sicilian,” he told me. “And Apollonia is the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. He’s struck by what they call ‘The Thunderbolt’—meaning he immediately has this passion for this woman, this longing that only she can satisfy. So he marries her—she’s a virgin, and it’s a very big deal—and then she gets killed by a car bomb.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yeah. And he remarries—Diane Keaton—but she ain’t no thunderbolt, and his hunger for revenge ends up destroying the whole family.”
“So in Purple Rain—that’s why you called her Apollonia.”
“Originally, I wanted Vanity to do it. She said she wanted a million dollars. I said that wasn’t possible, and she said, ‘Then I’m not in it.’ That was it. Broke my heart. I started watching audition tapes. No. No. No. Hell no. Then I get to this one. ‘Yes. She’s cool.’ Opening day we hid under the table at a hotel like little kids. Just got kind of freaked out.”
“Why?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It was such… magnitude. But that was a long time ago.”
“Seriously,” I said. “I was eleven when I saw it.”
“Eleven.” He made a sound that was slightly pained. “She had to say it.”
Our tickets had been purchased ahead of time, and we waited for the lights to go down before we crept to our seats. I was holding our bucket of popcorn in my lap, and as the previews were playing, he dumped a box of something into it.
“Hey! What was that?” I whispered.
“Goobers,” he whispered back.
“What are Goobers?”
“They’re chocolate-covered peanuts. Don’t tell me you never had Goobers.”