… and I was like, oh my God, she stuffs her bra!
My jaw dropped. Seriously? Diamond and Pearl turn out to be middle school mean girls? They were laughing at me. And sadly, I didn’t have my sword handy.
“Mayte…” One of the horn players passed by on the way to his room. I walked quickly toward my room, and he hurried along with me. “What up? Why are you crying?”
“I just heard what everyone’s been saying about me.”
“No. They didn’t mean it like that.”
“Yeah, right.” I went into my room and shut the door.
Prince called me a little while later, and he could tell I was upset. I didn’t volunteer the story right away, but he nudged for it in a way that made me feel like I was gossiping with a girlfriend rather than ratting out my coworkers.
“What exactly did they say?” he asked. I was embarrassed and didn’t want to tell him, but he said, “Don’t make me fish for it. Just tell me.”
“They said… they said I stuffed my bra.”
He cracked up laughing. “So?”
“Yeah. Hilarious. Because I didn’t get tortured enough in sixth grade.”
“Are you laughing or crying right now?”
“Both.”
“Stop crying,” he said. “They know their time is limited. I’ve moved on.”
Not long after that, while I was still trying to make sense of what I was to him and where I fit in, he wrote to me:
Our souls are the same. But our flesh is different. If we trip on things—material and worldly—then we will always trip on these things. One of the main reasons love and worship u is because u don’t have a history. And what’s more beautiful is that u don’t desire one. can’t begin 2 tell you how many women are jealous of u because they know u’re a virgin. They don’t want u around because they feel less than u. Their souls aren’t advanced enough 2 know that deep inside—beneath their ‘history’—we are all the same. Anytime someone ‘tripped’ on your presence was because of jealousy or fear. U had something they wanted. And whenever u ‘tripped’ with them—that’s when u were unhappy.
My relationship with Prince during the Diamonds and Pearls Tour quickly became a lot more stressful than the giggling phone calls we shared while I was living in Germany, living on my own terms and making bank as a belly dancer.
Understandably, he wanted everyone to look the way they did in rehearsal. That was the vision, and it needed to stay that way throughout the tour—as you would expect in any touring show. Costumes have to fit the same way at the end as they did at the beginning, which was easy for him because he was working up a sweat for 100 minutes plus the aftershow several times a week. I started to feel subtle changes in my body, because I’d stopped taking hours of ballet every day and danced only a few numbers in the show. I had access to a gym, but I never went, because my cell phone was useless in Australia and Japan, so I was glued to the hotel room phone waiting for him to call me. I was still in good form, but without the daily workout, I had to activate ballerina diet mode, eating leaves while Prince ordered fettuccini Alfredo and ate it standing up.
My makeup artist at that time had a fixation with whipped cream and soda and cookies, which she kept next to her station. Prince never walked into makeup—ever—because he had his own setup in his dressing room, but one night while I was getting my makeup done, there he was. Everyone was silently freaking out, standing very straight, trying to be cool. He had come in to see me, but the look on his face changed as he approached the station where I was sitting.
He eyed the whipped cream and said, “Is that yours?”
I would not have ratted this girl out, but to her credit, she stepped up and said, “No, no, no. That’s mine, sir.”
He looked at me skeptically.
“I’m not eating it,” I said.
He left without saying anything else. Twenty minutes later, the tour accountant came in and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m embarrassed to say this, but I have to dock your pay this week.”
I don’t remember if I was even able to form the word “What?”
“I know. I can’t believe it,” he said. “In twenty years, I’ve never been asked to do this, but… it’s not my call.”
I went back to the dressing room I shared with Lori and Robia, raging and crying. “I’m not going to let him humiliate me like that! I’m not putting up with it!”