Neal Karlen - This Thing Called Life: Princes Odyssey, On and Off the Record

I pray to God Prince was dead by the time he hit the floor.

I pray Prince wasnt cognizant, even for a mite of a moment, that he was dying alone in a nondescript elevator, in a Wonder Bread suburb of the racially-fractured city that was one day too late in telling him his hometownblacks, whites, the whole Crayola box of colors and ethnicitiesloved Prince as much as he loved Minneapolis.

Because theres one thing Im positive I know about Prince. After knowing him in forever-alternating cycles of greater, lesser, and sometimes not-at-all friendship over the final thirty-one years of his life, until our final peculiar phone conversation three weeks before he died: His greatestand perhaps onlyfear was dying alone.

Prince didnt care if the end came in a Chanhassen, Minnesota, elevator inside a building where he owned all the buttons, or in an opulent prime ministers suite in a Paris hotel, inevitablyand idioticallyredecorated for his arrival by a clueless management apparently determined to re-create for his pleasure Liberaces living room.

He just didnt want to die alone.

Yet he always accepted what was coming, and was trying to prepare, he told me as far back as 1985.

Of course the questions must be asked whenever someone says anything about what Prince actually said, or thought, or did: How do you know? Why would he tell you? Did you see that?

Well, personally, on this and several other topics, in a wide array of settings, yes, I witnessed this and saw that. Once upon a time, in what feels like a previous lifetime, I wrote a gaggle of articles and interviews for Rolling Stone and then the New York Times with Prince and about Princehis thoughts, worlds, bands, and best friends of the moment, what he wore on his head and the height of the heels on his feet.

I still am not sure why he chose me to occupy one compartment in his lifethe most compartmentalized life Ive ever seen, trapped inside the loneliest soul Ive ever met. Few of his real friends knew who each other were, or even if they themselves were real friends. He didnt like many people, and I still have no real idea why he abided me.

And then, in the 1990s, I quit.

I didnt quit Prince, I just quit writing about him or hanging around his world. I still dont know if I was brave or an idiot to walk away from the only real scoop rock and roll had to offer in those days.

I was still young enough to believe it was worth trying to be a real writer, writing real things, or at least running away to join other circuses besides entertainment journalism, where life was the proverbial high school with moneyand the entire world reduced to the simple binary equation of thats cool or thats not cool.

If I didnt quit, I knew way back, I would never be taken seriously as anything more than Princes bobo, a slur in the baseball world denoting a professional sycophant to a superstar player. In rock and roll, I figured, the equivalent bobo might be, say, the only reporter someone like Prince would give interviews to, or hang around with, or divulge the inner meaning of his heels. (I dont wear em cuz Im short, the five-foot-two musician told me in 1985. I wear em cuz the women like em.)

These are the first words Ive written about Prince since back in the day. Until now Ive kept a promise to myself that I wouldnt write about him anymore. In the years after the interviews, he asked me to write a couple of things with him, and I assented. The projects sounded so ridiculous I figured no one would believe they existed anyway.

In the nineties, I wrote the libretto to a rock opera called The Dawn, retitled for direct-to-video release in 1994 as 3 Chains o Gold. Prince had released the experimental set of narratively interconnected videos on the marketplace as a present to Mayte, the first of his two ex-wives. For a story, he gave me a couple of details of what he wanted: a setting in the desert, and a princess being courted Valentino-style by an inscrutable, magicalahemprince.

He also gave me the indescribable experience of catching a true genius in the act of being a genius.

Will you pay me? I asked.

If he did, I knew, Id be set free if I ever wanted to sell out. I knew I could never write another article about him again, at least not in the guise of an objective journalist. I would have to include so many caveats, full disclosures, and conflicts of interest as to render any scribbling about Prince worthless.

No, I wont pay you, Prince said. But you can say you wrote a rock opera with me.

Good point, little purple guy, I thought. And damn, looking back half a lifetime ago, that was the most profitable thing Ive ever worked on, karmically speaking.

I also wrote a manifesto, composed as if I were writing a real third-person magazine profile, explaining why Prince was on the verge of changing his name to that goofy glypha fact then known only to him, his manager, and me. He told me the manifesto was for a time capsule to be buried on the grounds of Paisley Park with, among other things, his will. I have no idea if it ever was, though there is proof that such a time capsule exists.

I put my copy of the manifesto on a last-century floppy disk in a Minneapolis storage locker where I kept memories I didnt know where to put.

I always told Prince I knew he didnt honestly consider me a friend, but as one of the few people in Minneapolis who was probably awake, the way he always was, in the middle of the night, and was Willing and Able, as my favorite song of his is titled, to talk about loneliness and death.

I even rubbed it in, in the opening of my third and last Rolling Stone story featuring Prince on the cover, published in 1990.

The phone rings at 4:48 in the morning.

Hi, its Prince, says the wide-awake voice calling from a room several yards down the hallway of this London hotel. Did I wake you up?

No, you jerk, you never woke me. Well, actually you did a few times, but I was always happy to hear from you, even when you were so lonely and depressed you could barely speak. I told him I wanted to be a real writer, not the bobo formerly known as Neal. I wanted to be Nathanael West, and though he had no idea who Nathanael West was, he seemed to understand completely.

And we stayed in touch.

Sometimes we talked on the phone several times a year in the middle of the night for between several minutes and several hours. Sometimes I got letters, sometimes on purple stationery. Two of the eight times I published what I thought were real books, I received anonymous purple flowers. Over thirty-one years Id guess we saw each other in preparation for published profiles on a couple of dozen occasions, saw each other socially thirty or thirty-five times, and talked on the phone a few hundred times in the middle of the night. About fifty unanswered (or unheard) calls from an unknown number registered on my phone during the hours when only Prince would call.