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.