Dear Kurl,
I’d told Bron to take you to the memorial, not me. I’d been really clear with her about not wanting to participate. Nonetheless she showed up at my house at seven last night and marched up the stairs and burst into my room in a shimmery purple dress and said she wasn’t taking no for an answer. I looked out my window to make sure you weren’t sitting out there in the Escalade—I wouldn’t have put it past Bron to engineer a trick like that—and felt the usual mixture of relief and disappointment at your absence. Mostly relief, this time.
“You have Prince in your blood,” Bron said. “It has to be you. My other friends don’t even get it. They’d be going for all the wrong reasons.”
On our way out the door, she grabbed Lyle’s mando from its peg. She put it on the back seat of the car. “We are not discussing this,” she said. “This is not negotiable.”
We parked at the Chanhassen Walgreens and walked the half mile or so to the gates of Paisley Park, which to our surprise were standing wide open. The Facebook event page had been very specific: They were not going to let us in; we would be holding the whole memorial right there in front of the gates. Instead there were already about fifty people inside, in the parking lot, and it was all set up like an impromptu festival: string lights, banners, flags, lawn chairs, coolers.
Rich and Trudie and Scarlett were there, and a number of other musicians I recognized. More and more people arrived, I suppose as news spread online that they’d opened the gates for us. Bron said probably people were hopeful of being let into the building. She said even if they did open the doors, she wouldn’t enter.
There were masses of flowers, ribbons, and stuffed toys. Everyone was singing “Happy Birthday” to Prince over and over, even though his birthday technically isn’t until Tuesday. There were lots of tears. Everyone wore purple, of course. I was glad Bron had made me wear a purple velvet bow tie and purple suspenders; anything else would have felt disrespectful.
I drank some champagne from a bottle being passed around. Bron flagged down some green, but she wouldn’t share it with me.
“You need to stay sharp,” she said to me. “This is crucial. This is important.”
Less than twenty minutes after we arrived, she shoved the mando into my arms and dragged me over to Rich. She bent down and switched off some guy’s boom box. “Play ‘Alphabet Street,’” she ordered me, and then stood and waited, hands on her hips, ignoring the guy’s girlfriend saying, “What is your problem? Turn that back on.”
I started to play “Alphabet Street,” and after a minute Rich took it up on the guitar. As soon as people nearby recognized the tune, they started to sing. Another guitar joined in, and before the song was over, an upright bass had appeared out of nowhere.
So it became an acoustic jam. There was a trombone, a harmonica. Scarlett had her tambourine, so that was the next song: “Tamborine.”
“Sing it, Jojo!” Bron yelled, so I went ahead and sang it—I just let all those high notes loose on that crowd, and I suppose people liked it, because there was loud cheering afterward.
At one point while we played, Bron gave one of her revival-tent speeches: “Prince changed us; he altered our DNA. Prince flows in our veins. Prince changed life on Planet Earth.” The gospel according to Bronwyn Otulah-Tierney. People loved it, though. There was so much weeping!
Later, Trudie came over to me and took a photograph out of an envelope in her purse and handed it to me. She said she’d brought it in hopes of seeing me today.
It took me a few seconds of staring at the image to recognize Raphael standing there on the sidewalk between Rich and Cody. There was hardly any of her left. Her white legs stuck out of her skirt like broomsticks. The black dye had grown partway out of her hair, and the lighter-brown part lay like dead grass against her scalp. Her face under her makeup was a skull.
“We tried to bring her home,” Trudie said.
“She’s so skinny,” I observed.
“She was very fucked up, honey.” Trudie put her arm around me and looked at the picture with me. “We went to LA four times over eighteen months. Lyle went alone, the first time, but she wouldn’t see him. So the second time he bought a plane ticket for me to go with him. Rapha and I were pretty good friends, once.”
I saw Bron and Rich heading our way, and I tried to give the photo back to Trudie, but she said I should keep it. I didn’t really want it, but I slid it into my back pocket so Bron wouldn’t see it. I didn’t want anyone else to see that horrible picture, ever.
“Lyle kept begging us, and buying us the tickets,” Trudie said, “and so we kept trying. It took us longer to find her every time we went down.”
I’d started crying, and I turned my back to Bron and Rich to hide my tears from them. I kept my voice low: “Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because you need to forgive your dad, honey.”
I looked at Trudie. “For what?”
“He’s really hurting right now. He knows Shayna blames him for your mom’s death, and he’s worried that you do, too, and just aren’t saying.”
“I don’t blame Lyle,” I told her. But even as I said the words, I realized that I am quite angry with my father. Savagely angry, in fact.
On the way home I told Bron about it—not about Trudie’s photograph, but about being angry with Lyle.
“You didn’t realize you’re angry at Lyle?”
“Why would I be angry?” I said.
“Because he tried to control the story,” Bron said, “obviously. He lied to you guys for basically your whole lives.”
“To protect us, though,” I said.
She shrugged. “And look how that’s worked out.”
Yours truly,
Jo
PS: Mark must be amused at all these old-fashioned letters arriving in his mail. Did Bron tell you she’s started writing letters to Shayna in Moorhead? She’s sent three or four already and swears she’s going to keep doing it even if Shayna never replies. The US Postal Service is abuzz with the missives of sad, solitary, estranged teenagers.