{"id":98087,"date":"2016-05-13T10:30:24","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T14:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=98087"},"modified":"2016-05-16T09:36:43","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T13:36:43","slug":"you-think-youre-special","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/13\/you-think-youre-special\/","title":{"rendered":"You Think You\u2019re Special"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Prince<\/a>

Prince Pizza Aktion restaurant, Innsbruck, 2013. Photograph by author.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

I have 294 records of showers of living things \u2026 there\u2019s no accounting for the freaks of industry.<\/p>\n

\u2014Charles Fort, Book of the Damned<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

While My Guitar Gently Gets Bent at Pizza Hut<\/strong><\/p>\n

The florist sat drunk in the corner booth of a Pizza Hut in Myrtle Beach. \u201cErotic City\u201d quietly grinded away on a jukebox over near the bathrooms. For the past three hours, I\u2019d been feeding the florist cans of Coors Light while he drove his son and me across South Carolina. Purple Rain<\/em> played the entire route. \u201cLet\u2019s Go Crazy\u201d in Pageland, \u201cThe Beautiful Ones\u201d in Ruby, \u201cComputer Blues\u201d through Cheraw, \u201cTake Me with U\u201d to Aynor.<\/p>\n

That October of 1984, my friend\u2019s listening habits skewed toward Pyromania<\/em>. Mine: keytars, eyeliner dudes, and black radio\u2014whatever Les Norman, \u201cThe Night-Time Master Blaster,\u201d happened to be playing on WPEG. I remembered Leppard for their one-armed drummer arrested for spousal abuse. Meanwhile Prince played, like, twenty different instruments while having sex in the backseat of taxicabs, ducking the Antichrist<\/a>, and shouting for gun control. Also: girlfriend on drums. What\u2019s fair is fair. <\/p>\n

The Pizza Hut was empty, giving the jukebox a moment to itself to play something besides Night Ranger. \u201cErotic City\u201d appeared on a bent note, a split end for the sinners who didn\u2019t care. Prince\u2019s guitar string seemed to resonate at the frequency of a tiny antenna of hair, both high on the neck. Then a scrape of beat in reverse, sweeping beneath the red-checkered tables. This was my first time hearing this song about a first time that apparently went all night. And I was barely hearing it at all, as if from my subconscious\u2014a lo-fi, suppressed environment in itself. (My subconscious was already a bit freaked by then, between puberty and side 2 of 1999<\/em>.) (Subconscious: U have no idea<\/em>.) At the time, I hoped my voice would go deep. Maybe not \u201cBob George\u201d deep, but at least \u201call of my purple life\u201d deep. Prince modulated his voice throughout \u201cErotic City,\u201d at times on a squeak-toy high. Filtered through a pizza chain in off-season deadness, Sheila E. sounded like an attenuated memory of herself. That is, until cherry bombing the chorus (\u201c \u2019til the dawn\u201d), unable to contain the giddy\u2014a reminder, just in case you didn\u2019t know who was having the most fun in Pizza Hut that night. How we wish we felt the same, duh.<\/p>\n

\u201cErotic City\u201d always seemed quiet to me, maybe because now I listen too hard, trying to shut out everything else but its memory. I wonder how it sounded in 1988 from inside the trunk of a Thunderbird, onstage in Charlotte, when I saw Prince open with \u201cErotic City.\u201d Kat crawled out. Then Sheila E. I might have blacked out after that. So long, Pizza Hut. So long, big plastic red cup that made my Coke look purple.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Prince\u2019s Baby<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a good friend who claims to be Prince\u2019s baby, but only on a first-name basis, a joke at the end of a song about crack addiction and a spaceship we\u2019d witnessed exploding in the AV room of the same library where my older brother had been caught engaging in what the dean and the Motion Picture Association of America referred to as \u201csexual intercourse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before \u201cSign o\u2019 the Times,\u201d Nate had named himself after Nate McMillan, a point guard who played under Jim Valvano at North Carolina State and ended up in the Pacific Northwest corner of the NBA. After \u201cSign o\u2019 the Times,\u201d Nate was signing his letters, homework, and jump shots as Prince\u2019s Baby.<\/p>\n

The day Prince died, I saw a sky-clad toddler run out of a herbarium\u2014or off the cover of Houses of the Holy<\/em>\u2014and down the sidewalk toward me. I wish we all were nude<\/em>. The day Prince died, a close friend gave birth to a girl not named Nate. The day Prince died, I received a poem in the mail from my mom, written to me as an infant in 1971. It ended with two requests: Wake up and forgive me.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Forever in My Faceplant <\/strong><\/p>\n

I woke up one morning in Prince\u2019s Baby\u2019s basement and could\u2019ve sworn it was the end of \u201cAutomatic.\u201d There had been a prewedding party and someone had the good drunken sense to leave 1999<\/em> on repeat in the next room. The room where I slept was windowless, deprived of light and time, leaving me in an anesthetic haze of hydraulic wheezes, tarmac jet hiss, someone in scrubs with his finger Krazy-glued to a synth, crying, promises of torture, Prince talking about his damn dreams again. In the video for \u201cAutomatic,\u201d a bed taxis across the stage under its own power, waved in with conical runway lights. Prince is lashed to the posts. Commence bed spins. I swore I heard a gnome saying he was an automatic fool\u2014in the same voice that wanted to touch you there, right there in \u201cIf I Was Your Girlfriend.\u201d All confusing in a half-woke state and happy to consider what silence looked like, if it was ever quiet enough.<\/p>\n

I had slept through a stream of absurdity, through the end of the world, through all the critics but Dorothy Parker, through Vanity\u2019s cries for help (\u201cJerk!\u201d), through all the hippies singing together, through the song that made my mom not like Prince so much. I learned this could be because she confused Prince for \u201cSex Dwarf,\u201d a song by Soft Cell that is as depraved as you might think. Maybe she had glam-slammed them together. The \u201cSex Dwarf\u201d video might have clarified things had it not been banned. Prince never had chain saws and trans-sex workers writhing in maggot-laced meat in his videos. (\u201cI mean it\u2019s \u2018Sex Dwarf.\u2019 What are you gonna do?\u201d said director Tim Copeland.) The recurring bad-dream presence of the \u201cdumb chauffeur\u201d always made me laugh and then feel weird about it.<\/p>\n

Perhaps my mom worried about the heavy breathing. Egyptian Lover credits Prince for the invention of heavy breathing while Prince might credit heavy breathing to a tireless work ethic and the women in his life, the sound engineers, dancers, singers, guitarists, poets, lovers, dreamers, and drummers who helped make it all happen. It could\u2019ve been because she came home one afternoon to me blasting \u201cLet\u2019s Pretend We\u2019re Married,\u201d with doors and windows flung open. Prince had deliberately twanged one of those f**ks in reverb, less disguise than accentuation.\u00a0Another f**k, the sincere one, left our new neighbors pondering what it means to do it until losing one\u2019s sense of taste. I imagine my mother walking up the sidewalk after a day teaching at the community college\u2019s writing center, hearing a house she found on her own possessed by a group of overdubbed Prince voices, declaring it was going to having fun every motherbleeping night. Or as much motherbleeping fun a sixth grader could be having at the time.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Something in the Bath Water (Extended Version)<\/strong><\/p>\n

My mom has long since revised her stance on Prince, only shocked that he didn\u2019t leave a will. \u201cYou really need to do your will,\u201d she told me over the phone on Mother\u2019s Day. \u201cBecause if we both get hit by trucks on the same day, your possessions will go to the state.\u201d Would this include my freakabyte of unreleased Prince songs?<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve now moved past the deep-album-cut stage of grief, the import-only Mazarati B-side stage of grief, to the handwriting-analysis stage of grief. In a letter shared by Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, Prince appears to be really good at cursive, as if writing ruffle-wristed with a feathered quill. Such legislative flourish! \u201cNew breed of leaders stand up organize,\u201d he demands in \u201cSexuality.\u201d One of the headlines on the back cover of Controversy<\/em> declares that the nation\u2019s capitol has been moved to a better place, one of absolute sexual freedom, where people\u2019s lives aren\u2019t being molested by the local state legislature.<\/p>\n

Then to the open-up-the-vault-already-damn-we-know-you\u2019re-in-there stage of grief. We\u2019ve already been haunting the dream factory for alternate versions, ever since knowledge of the Black Album<\/em>\u2019s existence. Prince was a living breathing fucking alternate version of himself to whatever version you wanted to be, from LGBTQ to that sect of straight, white, \u201cPurple Rain\u201d men just in it for the air shredding. And when those vault doors opened (after drilling a peephole first), you can imagine all those versions not even bothered. Don\u2019t mind us, we\u2019re all just a-freaking<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That version of \u201cDo Yourself a Favor,\u201d which went to Jesse Johnson and is the perfect empowering walk-your-ass-on-by breakup song.<\/p>\n

That falsetto acoustic version of \u201cThieves in the Temple.\u201d<\/p>\n

That eleven-minute forty-two-second version of \u201cDance Electric,\u201d which is no less end-all than \u201c1999,\u201d not to mention Andr\u00e9 Cymone\u2019s mighty \u201cDance Electric,\u201d seeing as Andr\u00e9 let Prince live in his basement and play Peanuts solos and bring girls there and later played bass on Dirty Mind<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That thirty-minute version of \u201cI Would Die 4 U.\u201d (Seriously, not interested.)<\/p>\n

That version of him singing \u201cScreams of Passion\u201d at sound check while coaching the band. (\u201cThe lighter you touch it, the more it does.\u201d)<\/p>\n

That Gary Numan\u2013ized version of \u201cJerk Out.\u201d<\/p>\n

That original version of \u201cExtra Loveable,\u201d but cut it before the awful \u201crape U\u201d part.<\/p>\n

Those twenty versions of songs with references to baths and showers. (Prince did a lot of his best thinking in the tub, pants on, pants off.)<\/p>\n

That version of \u201cWhen Doves Scream,\u201d which does not out-scream \u201cSomething in the Water\u201d but would\u2019ve dropped a few Tubmans in 2002 Prince\u2019s cuss jar, since being alone in a world that\u2019s so f**king cold sounds even colder, yet it\u2019s a world that\u2019s missing that key, singular one-off grunt I like so much toward the end of \u201cWhen Doves Cry.\u201d Huh!<\/em> (This is one of my all-time favorite grunts, with respect to Sissy Spacek\u2019s mock-barf I-hate-tomatoes grunt in 3 Women<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

That rabbit-familiar version in The Witch<\/a><\/em> striking a curious pose. (Huh?)<\/p>\n

That \u201cErotic City\u201d demo that sounds no different than Pizza Hut \u201cErotic City.\u201d<\/p>\n

That spool of tape with the endless synth riff that showed up on Stevie Nicks\u2019s \u201cStand Back.\u201d<\/p>\n

That version of \u201cBaby A Go-Go\u201d which is weirdly in out-of-tune with \u201cPop Life.\u201d<\/p>\n

That acoustic cover version of the Clash\u2019s \u201cTrain in Vain (Stand by Me).\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time you read this, the vault will have been cracked. There will be a life-size bear mascot suit, BMX gear, and an untitled EP with Kim Basinger, Ween, and Ozzy Osbourne. There will be a shelved video with Channing Tatum \u201cin character as a breakdancing, space rollerskating werewolf.\u201d<\/p>\n

And there will be squabbling. Be glad that you are free.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tell Me If You Still Care<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was able to hear all those songs by virtue of being friends with someone involved in an unusual trade. Joseph Patel had managed to get his hands on the DMX\u00a0drum machine that Rick Rubin used when producing Beastie Boys and LL. He offered it to Questlove for an undisclosed amount of unreleased Prince tracks. I\u2019ve told this story many times, if anything for the sheer joy of repetition. (Live eleven-minute version<\/a>, again please.)<\/p>\n

I then considered the type of person who\u2019d consider trading Rick Rubin\u2019s DMX for Prince\u2019s LinnDrum machine. Or how Rubin\u2019s Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer might tilt the value.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis of the Time had grown attached to the 808 while working with S.O.S. Band in Atlanta, perhaps happy to take a break from Prince\u2019s signature Linnsanity. Irked that they were stepping out on the Time, Prince fired them for missing a flight out of Atlanta while on tour. The official statement from the control tower may have been ice on the wings. But I\u2019d love it if the 808 took partial credit\u2014you know, the written, arranged, composed, performed, et cetera\u2014for those two empty seats on Prince airlines. Like he said in \u201cHousequake\u201d: the kick drum is the fault.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Breakfast<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not trying to demystify anybody\u2019s high school jump shot here, but Prince did such a good job of NDAing his life that any whit of \u201cPrince is normal\u201d info sounds otherwordly. The bit rate at which I\u2019ve been consuming evidence of his non-purple music activities almost feels like an invasion of privacy. Let the man have a thing for breakfast in peace.<\/p>\n

\"Prince_BreakfastClub\"<\/a>In the director\u2019s cut of Breakfast Club<\/em>, Ally Sheedy uses the switchblade she stole from Judd Nelson to pick a locker in the teacher\u2019s lounge. She begins trashing its contents until coming across a copy of 1999<\/em>. She stares at the cover. The artwork could\u2019ve been drawn by psychedelic children\u2019s choreographer Remy Charlip. Part of Prince\u2019s name is spelled out by a pair of pants with a diagonal button fly. The C<\/em> is a half moon with a chip-toothed smile. There\u2019s the Rude Boy button he was wearing on the cover of Controversy<\/em>. I\u2019m currently running a trace on Prince\u2019s eyeballs, lifted from his stare and pasted to the 9<\/em>\u2019s. Ally steals the record and shows it to Repo Man. \u201cKnow what this means? They\u2019re human.\u201d She\u2019s talking about a bullying teacher, but we\u2019re thinking about someone else.<\/p>\n

Prince liked Doritos. Prince gave his backup singer a wedgie. Prince crashed some very happy kid\u2019s senior prom in Macon. Prince also died. Considering all that he gave the world, both to our ears and in silent philanthropy, this was a perfectly human thing to do.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You Productive Motherf**ker
<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the way to Myrtle Beach, I remember hearing \u201cPass me another Silver Bullet, Dave\u201d over the reverse-mirror phantoms at the end of \u201cDarling Nikki.\u201d It turns out that wind and rain pretty much sound the same to and fro, unphased by shifts in the time-hump chronicles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Appropriately, Prince\u2019s death has inspired prolific masturbation with the printed word, through computer blues and purples. It can be exhausting\u2014a friend has complained of suffering from \u201cPrince fatigue.\u201d You think Prince wasn\u2019t tired? You think Prince isn\u2019t<\/em> tired of continuously doing it to death, performing for us in clips of live performances<\/a> that won\u2019t be left alone to their memories and decay, as if still unreleased in the hold he has on us? (I have to pause in the middle of a video of him doing an invisible toothbrush dance to read about ant consciousness<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Prince got shit done, even when idling. He once recorded an entire album while waiting for his car to warm up. It\u2019s a spoken-word jazz record with Ingrid Chavez. I learned about this from Eddie Miller, an engineer who worked at Paisley Park Studios. (I\u2019m now at the track-down-the-assistant-engineer-who-worked-on-Lovesexy<\/em> stage of grief.) Miller, who started Prince\u2019s car that night, had showed up onsite already a huge fan. It was a waking dream job. He doesn\u2019t remember sleeping during his two years behind the boards at Paisley Park.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Ballad of Mrs. Lit<\/strong><\/h4>\n

I\u2019d only heard \u201cAnother Lonely Christmas\u201d once, on the radio on Christmas Eve. Wasted on banana daiquiris, Prince opened up and shared an unknowable grief, and a story about skinny-dipping. I was far more acquainted with middle-school grief. Our principal was a fearsome Russian woman from Detroit, no taller that Prince, even in bootlegged leather heels. Her name was Mrs. Litwinchuk. Being scared even of her name, we called her Mrs. Lit. Back then, I\u2019d get clowned for dressing like the Time, wearing pleated gray pinstripe baggies. I once busted my ass outside the lunchroom in a pair of Stacy Adams, recommended by Morris Day despite poor handling in wintry conditions. Better on ice, Mrs. Lit walked by and asked if I was okay. I was, save for the purple bruise on my rear.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

May You Live <\/strong><\/p>\n

My Prince epigraph in the senior yearbook was \u201cMay U live 2 see the dawn,\u201d oblivious to Matthew 4:16. Prince said it, so it must be cool. In retrospect, I can\u2019t tell if it was shortsighted or in service of the high school rager. \u201cMay you live to funk until the dawn\u201d would\u2019ve been a revision no less biblical. May you live to see Prince doing James Brown covers live at an after-party at Plum Crazy Sports Lounge in Raleigh. May you live to see Prince perform \u201cForever in My Life.\u201d (Does YouTube count?) May you live to get to that Pizza Hut in Myrtle Beach because the driver is out of Silver Bullets. And if you do, may you live to spend all your Galaga quarters on \u201cErotic City. Take a deep bend.<\/p>\n

I now hear the beginning of \u201cErotic City\u201d as a pinched-nerve ping, a cue for the twinges of ageing. This is what it sounds like. (Also: perfect text notification.) The note may begin high on the neck, but it resonates all over. Mind, iliac, hip. A different sort of ache. I hear it whenever my body surprises me with news both acute and unexpected. Freeze and wait for what might follow. Must be something. But if it\u2019s not a place where one could make or buy some time, then I don\u2019t want to know.<\/p>\n

Dave Tompkins is currently writing a natural history of Miami Bass and archeopsychic bottom. His first book, <\/em>How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop<\/a>, is still out there, in paperback and on 99% Invisible<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have 294 records of showers of living things \u2026 there\u2019s no accounting for the freaks of industry. \u2014Charles Fort, Book of the Damned \u00a0 While My Guitar Gently Gets Bent at Pizza Hut The florist sat drunk in the corner booth of a Pizza Hut in Myrtle Beach. \u201cErotic City\u201d quietly grinded away on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":330,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[22343,11549,22342,22348,22347,8246,5023,22355,22344,22339,22341,22354,22346,22351,22338,46,1329,1331,22349,22350,22340,11987,22345,22352,22353,6884,17313],"class_list":["post-98087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-22343","tag-ally-sheedy","tag-automatic","tag-beastie-boys","tag-channing-tatum","tag-controversy","tag-dorothy-parker","tag-eddie-miller","tag-egyptian-lover","tag-erotic-city","tag-houses-of-the-holy","tag-ingrid-chavez","tag-jesse-johnson","tag-jimmy-jam","tag-les-norman","tag-music","tag-prince","tag-purple-rain","tag-questlove","tag-rick-rubin","tag-shiela-e","tag-stevie-nicks","tag-susannah-hoffs","tag-terry-lewis","tag-the-breakfast-club","tag-the-clash","tag-vanity"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYou 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