Excerpt from Chapter Five: “Daddy Dearest I: The Bad Son” from Formerly Known As by Neal Karlen
“That’s what time it is,” Prince said, our second day in each other’s company. He slowed his whalebone-white 1966 convertible Thunderbird to a crawl, threading his way through North Minneapolis, his native stomping grounds, and my native stomping grounds, on weekends with my grandparents when I was a kid.
“My father named himself the ‘Fabulous Prince Rogers,’” Prince said, with a cackle. “Now if you’re James Brown, it’s alright to name yourself the Godfather of Soul, because he’s James Brown, you feel me?” Prince asked. “It ain’t braggy if you can do it.”
There it was, the Minneapolis. “Braggy!”
“Satchel Paige said that,” I chimed in faux-helpfully.
“Who made you a Negro, who taught you how to tell time?” he asked dismissively. “These are my streets,” he said.
I looked out the passenger window at all the familiar sights. Every weekend I’d go to my grandparents’ house, only a handful of blocks from Prince’s home while we were both growing up. I remembered my father’s peasant parents, who never learned English in fifty years in America.
Prince drove like a proper Minnesotan: a good citizen, driving under the speed limit, hands at the ten-and-two positions, stopping completely at four-way intersections, indicating his turns with his blinkers, even when no pedestrians or automobiles were in sight.
His old neighborhood was brimming with life—jump-roping girls, men stuffing impossible shots into hoops. Prince kept trilling memories, real and/or imagined and/or bullshit, as we drove toward his old man’s house.
On Oliver and Plymouth, I said, “That’s where my grandparents lived. Right there.” “When?” asked Prince.
“You were there,” I said. “A few blocks up on Plymouth.”
“What them old Jews, your grandparents, doing staying here north?” he asked.
After walking across Europe and somehow ending in verkakte Minneapolis, I explained, they decided they’d walked far enough, and refused to move from the North Side, even when the summer riots of the 1960s burned down the neighborhood they’d shared in poverty and relative peace for half a century with their African-American and Slavic brethren. My grandparents’ synagogue was still in necessary walking distance.
I started drifting off, still sleepy from Prince’s and my long first day together yesterday. I was still thinking of my grandmother, and of the only thing I understood that she did or said in the twelve years I was alive before she died.
Professional wrestling, a.k.a., rasslin.’
Every Friday night, we’d sit and watch All Star Wrestling live, the professional matches on independent television station 11, broadcast live from the Calhoun Beach Manor adjacent to Lake Calhoun, smack in the middle of Minneapolis.
. . .
One interlocutor innocuously asked Calvin Griffith, owner of the Minnesota Twins baseball club, why he’d decided to move his Washington Senators to Minnesota in 1961. The most recent census had put the white population of the state at 99 percent.
"It was when I found out you only had 15,000 blacks here,” Griffith said. “Black people don't go to ball games, but they'll fill up a rasslin’ ring and put up such a chant it'll scare you to death. It's unbelievable. We came here because you've got good, hardworking, white people here."
It was a thoroughly unsurprising remark. Though Minneapolis’s Tass-like publicity machine has painted the town as a bastion of progressive liberal harmony, it is by far the most racist, segregated city I’ve ever lived in.
But I was also irritated by Griffith’s remark for the disrespect it show wrestling least of which was that both I and my immigrant grandmother loved watching rasslin’ on her and my grandfather’s black and white Magnavox television in the living room of their tiny North Minneapolis home located at 1251 Oliver. I never understood a single word she said in the 13 years I knew her, but our shared love for professional wrestling transcended language.
…
Blocks away, young Prince Rogers Nelson was watching wrestling too, live from the Calhoun Beach manor.
“Moolah,” I said back in the present, my head bobbing back in exhaustion—Prince had picked me up at home at my parents’ house at 7:30 that morning. “The Fabulous Moolah.”
“What?” Prince said, sounding at first delighted. “Did you say the Fabulous Moolah? How do you know the Fabulous Moolah? The women’s champ! She didn’t even wrestle here.”
“Right,” I said, still groggy from Saturday night sleep deprivation, hoping Prince didn’t notice that I might have fallen asleep for a second, talking up a cyclone, trying to distract him. “We had midget wrestlers. Remember the Indian midget, Billy Red Cloud?” I said.
“Him and Little Beaver,” he said, the Indian midget tag team champions,” he shot back knowingly.
“But we didn’t have no women wrestlers, no Fabulous Moolah. How do you know the Fabulous Moolah? You must have got the magazines,” I said.
Prince looked at me as he drove and said, bemused. “Shit, I thought I was the only one who got the wrestling magazines. I was the only mamma jamma at John Hay Elementary who knew who Bruno Sammartino was, or The Sheik.”
“Los Angeles territory,” I said. “The champ babyface and the champ heel,” I shot back, using the professional wrestling jargon for, respectively, a “good” guy and a “bad” guy.
Sometimes the babyfaces, or faces, turned into heels, I noted, still hoping to divert attention from my profound exhaustion. “Remember when good guy Cowboy Jack Lanza turned into bad guy Blackjack Lanza overnight?”
Yeah, Prince affirmed, he remembered, delighted to have someone he could talk intricate pro wrestling details from the early 1970s with: he’d been playing “kayfabe” with his whole life for virtually his own life—“kayfabe” being wrestling’s inviable code of never-let-the-rubes- unsuspend-their-disbelief that all this theatrical hoo-ha was fake.
But Prince was more astonished at catching me falling asleep before him, even momentarily. Prince always knew when my mind drifted from his thoughts, on those occasions when he chose to be fully engaged, even for just a sentence.
“Mamma jamma, you listening to me?” he demanded.
“‘Course I’m listening,” I said, a terrible liar. “Bruno Sammartino. And we’re off the record now anyway.”
“You said that, not me.”
“I got what I needed. I got much more than I needed.” I paused. “And I was betrayed.
They’re getting much more than they deserve.”
“Yes, they are,” Prince said. “They wanted to give you up, get their music editor to be you,” he said laughing, one of the most famously disloyal humans on earth having stuck up for me in ways unheard of before my own bosses.
“Still,” he went on, “everyone dying to hear me talk, and you falling asleep on me.” Prince laughed loudly, half Jerry Lewis, chump, half Muhammed Ali, champ.
“I was resting my eyes,” I said. I don’t mind late nights, but just because he wants to go cruising around town again at 7:30 a.m., not for Rolling Stone anymore, but for . . . interest’s sake didn’t mean I had to indulge him.
“Yes, it does,” Prince had said before dropping me off at my parents’ home the night before, when he told me the itinerary for tomorrow morning. “What else you got to do?”
?
True that. So maybe I did fall asleep while the world’s biggest rock star was talking.