My pinup, p.3
My Pinup, page 3
I met him when Lovesexy came out. We worked at the same advertising agency. I was drawn to him because he was irrefutably colored in a “professional” world where no one wanted to understand that, let alone translate it. The rings and head rags, understanding George Herriman, more than getting Zora Neale Hurston’s style. I have always loved translating. When I was little my younger brother did not speak. I told the world—our mother—what he wanted, what he might be thinking, based on the permutations of his silence. Later, as a student, I translated what authors meant in their novels. What a lady’s train meant in one chapter, what her tears meant in another. But to return to our story: Within weeks my Princelike friend and I were out in the clubs. Those clubs looked the way New York felt then: poor and dirty and permanently crepuscular as we all danced under pain of death (AIDS) or smoked cigarettes dipped in brown junk. In those clubs the lights went down or were turned up bright; a siren blared and hands shot up. I inched closer to him as he danced to you, Prince. But already he was you, Prince, in my mind. He had the same coloring, and the same loneliness I wanted to fill with my admiration. I couldn’t love him enough. We were colored boys together. There is not enough of that in the world, Prince—but you know that. Still, when other people see that kind of fraternity they want to kill it. But we were so committed to each other, we never could work out what that violence meant. There was so much love between us. Why didn’t anyone want us to share it? We wanted to have a good time. Our good time: reading Adrienne Kennedy and Gertrude Stein, looking at pictures by people like Jean-Paul Goude, and walking around Manhattan (the lower half)—and sometimes people wanted to kill us for that. They tried to kill us separately. White girls, sometimes. They didn’t like it. The white girls we knew said to us individually: Who is he? Aren’t I enough? Who is he? We never asked each other that question; we were colored together. We wore spectators and hats, we knew how to dance, we loved our mothers. The more I knew him, the more I walked with him, the more I wanted him to ask me to be his girlfriend. He loved it when you asked, in “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” “Would u let me dress u / . . . Would u run 2 me if somebody hurt u / Even if that somebody was me?” But he only sang that song to white girls. Unless I just didn’t hear him. Was he singing to me?
This was so long ago. Once, I heard this story about you, Prince: You liked a girl so much, but all you wanted to do was touch the shoes she wore and sleep at the foot of her bed. You treated your love for her like a dream other people wouldn’t think was worth having. Did I do the same? Was my dream to be his girlfriend, his Dorothy Parker, a dream, or an appropriate response to love, pure and not so simple? There was the rub. I rubbed against him, but I moved away right quick: I was a sad bug crawling in the folds of his Princelike harem pants, or the wrong light combed through his “good” Princelike hair. In 2005 he moved away from me to spare me my love—perhaps. But it was too late. I was married to him, forever. In between meeting him and his leaving, I met you, Prince, but you were already gone as you talked to me because he was gone.
Where did you two go off to, Prince? In those years—the years he was my brother and I wanted him to ask if I might be his girlfriend—I introduced him to a woman who eventually became his Dorothy Parker, a woman who, in fact, had sometimes worked as a waitress and sometimes sported a fringe and didn’t have enough distance from language to be a wit but was an observer. I introduced him to her because I knew he needed a woman, Prince, in the way maybe you need a woman, a Dorothy Parker. My female friend held fast to his love, Prince, and she held fast to me. She made him scrambled eggs, and he ate those too. He liked them better than my limp and rubbery eggs, but who knows. He ate all the eggs that were put before him. He took photographs of her because he did not want to misremember her in his love; she changed her mind, and thus her shape, all the time. His photographs of her were poems—Prince songs. She loved you too, Prince, but I don’t know if she saw the Prince in him that I saw; nevertheless, that didn’t preclude her loving you, Prince, or him. We were all colored boys together, and she loved, as a white girl, being outside what she felt about our difference from her and our not-difference from her; our coloredness and complicated boyness were what she loved looking at onstage. Then the curtain closed. The houselights came up. She died.
As she lay dying, her white skin took on a number of shades or different colors, as if she had absorbed those aspects of Prince’s race or my race that belonged to her beloved’s race too. Once, my colored friend sat at her feet as she sat up dying; he was applying a salve to her swollen legs. That salve was the exact color of the makeup Prince sometimes applied to his skin in the old days so that it would show up more vibrantly onstage as he stood stock-still in something larger than a pin spot.
Hilton Als, My Pinup
