DIED 2016
THE FIRST TIME I saw him, 1999 was far in the future and we were as bad as we would ever be. My sister and The Carpenter, The Skater and me, high as kites at Radio City Music Hall, in our terrible eighties clothes and our big pink hair. He sang “International Lover” from a flying bed. When it was over, we found the car sitting right where we’d parked it on Fifth Avenue, despite having left the keys dangling in the door.
The next time I saw him was again with my sister. It was the new millennium, and our luck had flip-flopped several times: both the boys from the first scene were long dead, and she had ten years clean. We were with our third and second husbands in the very last row of the Meadowlands. He was far away, a five-foot-two vegan Jehovah’s Witness from Minneapolis with a genius as big as the moon.
The last time I saw him was shortly after the Baltimore uprising, when he gave a concert for peace on Mother’s Day. As if I knew it was my last chance, I paid $1,000 for my daughter and me to sit in the third row. The fog machine started blowing, the purple lights came up, and then they poured out one after another, the top ten on my subconscious jukebox. The swelling, melancholy chords of “Little Red Corvette,” the skittering riff that starts “When Doves Cry.” Ten thousand voices singing You, I would die for you, and it felt like something good could happen in this maddened city. I was bent over, sobbing. Mom, said my daughter. Watch the show.
I was so proud to have been born in the same year as him. Prince, Madonna, Keith Haring, Michael Jackson, and me, I used to say. Now Madonna and I are holding down the fort. I could not believe he died of an overdose until the autopsy came out. The original straight-edge, taken down by shattered hips and platform shoes. He saw it coming, had called a doctor who was on the way to take him to rehab. For weeks, I couldn’t stop searching for articles about it, as if one might have a different ending.