Dig If You Will the Picture
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Barrelhouse Magazine Dig if You Will the Picture Writers Reflect on Prince First published by Barrelhouse Magazine in 2016. Copyright © Barrelhouse Magazine, 2016. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any others means without permission. This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy. Find out more at reedsy.com Contents Prince Rogers Nelson v The Beautiful Ones 7 The Birthday Suit 9 Freak 13 When the Cicadas Were Out of Their Fucking Minds 16 Two Poems After Prince 19 Try to Imagine What Silence Looks Like 24 And This Brings Us Back to Pharoah 27 Chant for a New Poet Generation 29 Trickster 31 Let's Go Crazy 36 Seventeen in '84 39 Elegy 41 Could Have Sworn It Was Judgement Day 43 Prince Called Me Up Onstage at the Pontiac Silverdome 47 Backing Up 49 The King of Purple 54 What It Is 55 I Shall Grow Purple 59 Group Therapy: Writers Remember Prince 61 Anthem for Paisley Park 77 Liner Notes 78 Nothing Compares 2 U 83 3 Because They Was Purple 88 Reign 90 Contributors 91 About Barrelhouse 101 Barrelhouse Editors 103 Prince Rogers Nelson June 7, 1958 – April 21, 2016 (art by Shannon Wright) In this life, things are much harder than in the afterworld. In this life, you're on your own. v 1 The Beautiful Ones by Sheila Squillante We used to buy roasted chickens at the Grand Union after school and take them back to Jen’s house. We’d sit at the kitchen table with the plastic container between us, pry off the dome-shaped lid and just rip through the skin and into the meat, slick with grease between our fingers and burning hot, still, through to bone. We were fourteen years old and neither of us had ever kissed a boy, though we both would soon, and we used to, after eating the chicken, go up to her room and turn on Culture Club and cry real earnest tears about that lack which felt—as things do when you are fourteen—like it would be eternal. After we were through with our carnal snack and lament for the afternoon, we’d indulge in another kind of hunger. Jen would pull out her newest album—the one she bought after we snuck into the movie a few weeks earlier. The movie with the rock star her sister, four years old and definitely kissing boys, had told her about. Did Jen's sister buy our tickets for 7 DIG IF YOU WILL THE PICTURE us? This seems likely, but she must have left us there. I know she wasn’t in that dark theater with me and her baby sister, my best friend, watching, yes, but mostly absorbing a new energy, synthesizing, and forming our nascent sexualities. We mostly ignored the plot (not hard to do) and let the music and the movement push us straight over the edge of adolescence and up against the bleachers or the wall under the stairs near the band room or the set backstage after play practice, grinding and throbbing, all lips and ruffle and tongue and oh my god Jen will you look at that ass! Jen and her family had moved to my town the year before from Minneapolis, Minnesota. The rock star, of course, was Prince and the album was Purple Rain and we, like countless other soon-to-be-kissed fourteen-year-olds in 1984, wore that vinyl out. My favorite track was “The Beautiful Ones,” because, oh how badly we wanted to be even though we were quite sure that we weren’t. I haven’t seen Jen in more than twenty years, but I do have her email and we check in every so often. Yesterday I wrote, “Remember how we snuck in? God, remember your hair?” and she wrote back, “I’m listening to it now. Lump in my throat. Do you remember the chicken?” Apparently he was a vegetarian. Still, I feel like Prince would dig the picture of two young girls (or maybe middle- aged women) using their hands to grab hard and sure at something they wanted. Something hot and ready, delectable and sustaining. 8 2 The Birthday Suit by Alia Volz Don't believe I was ever happy fiddling with dolls. Or skipping around the yard, tra-la. Adults invented the myth of the carefree childhood. As an only kid, I remember realizing—I must have been five or six—that no one would ever see who I truly was inside. Heartbreaking. Also, I remember hungering. Being so small and powerless, not even knowing what it was I wanted, just wanting, wanting. Then I heard him. Mom cranked it up while she painted. Her studio occupied the brightest room in the house. There were gobs of oil paint hardening on the braided rug, rags reeking of turpentine. Music so loud the windows shook. Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain. He moaned and screeched from Mom's boombox, falsetto riding high over that funk. His hunger bottomless like mine. Does six years old sound too young to feel lust? I tell you it's not. 9 DIG IF YOU WILL THE PICTURE This was years before my first crush on a classmate. Before gender turned into a trap. Before masturbation. There were My Little Ponies and there was Prince. I ached for him. I filled my first sketchpad with hearts drawn in Crayola Royal Purple. Sloppy work, all of it. Rounded tops bulging unevenly, lines failing to kiss at the bottom. I would start with a small, timid heart, and then fix it and fix it and fix it and fix it, until it consumed the whole page. I stole Mom's cassettes and hoarded them in my attic bed- room. Mine. Back then, we lived deep inside the Emerald Triangle. Weed land. I remember the earthy isolation of that place, the secrecy. My best friend Juniper was also an only child of the boonies. One summer day, we raided my mom's wicker costume trunk. I piled everything on at once. A clown suit, two gauzy negligees, a sequins evening gown, plaid golf pants, several crinolines, a 1950s prom dress, a Mexican poncho, a cowboy hat, a rubber Ronald Reagan mask, a plastic gorilla mask. Outfit after outfit, layer after layer, until the costume trunk sat empty but for a broken safety pin. “Get ready for the biggest show of all time,” I told Juniper. She sat cross-legged among the stuffed animals lined up on my bed. The attic was sweltering. I sweated under those layers of old clothes. Eyes itching from mold and dust allergies, nose dripping behind the multiple masks. The stage set, I shuffled in too-big high heels across the carpet to my tape deck, rewound to the beginning, and pressed play. I knew all the words. “Dearly beloved,” I began, extending my arms in a clumsy ballet pose. I serpentined my hips, making Juniper laugh. “And if the elevator tries to bring you down,” I said, chucking the gorilla mask across the room, “go crazy.” 10 THE BIRTHDAY SUIT Had a babysitter told me what a strip-tease was? Had Flashdance come out yet? Where I'd heard about stripping, I don't know, but I loved the notion: that you would begin in disguise, and slowly bare yourself, driving people mad with desire. I stumbled out of a crinoline, fell down, staggered back up. Leaned against the dresser and threw my head back, knocking my cowboy hat off. Kicked one leg in the air. It was important to take it slow, one item at a time. Because even then I knew “Darling Nikki” was my jam, and that was the last song on Side One. I shed the pink negligee and then the blue one, the sequins dress, the plaid pants. Juniper giggling and giggling while I clowned. The two of us so innocent, and yet not. Because there's nothing innocent about stripping to Prince, even at six. “I knew a girl named Nikki,” I squeaked. “I guess you could say she was a sex fiend.” And, no, I didn't know the meaning of the word fiend. Or what masturbating with a magazine entailed. Or even what sex was, though I had my theories, mostly dead wrong. But I did know it was naughty and secret and gorgeous and powerful, and that it had everything to do with eyeliner and a cocky smirk. And that it made that beautiful creature shriek. Twirling, leaping, crawling around the room. I danced myself dizzy for Juniper and the stuffed animals—for Lion Bion and Peggy the Pegasus and White Cloud the Cat—until all that was left of my elaborate costume were my little girl underwear. White cotton with small pink flowers. Then I squirmed out of those, too, using hands and feet like a monkey. I stood there, all gangly legs and pudgy kid belly. Hair sun- streaked and wild and never combed enough. Face wet with sweat and snot. Buck-ass nude. 11 DIG IF YOU WILL THE PICTURE But in my mind, it was different. I tell you, I wasn't a naked kid in my mind. Underneath all those costumes, I was wearing a studded purple suit. The studded purple suit. My Jeri-curled hair was swished forward, half covering one smoldering eye.