DARLING NIKKI

In 1984, when I was ten, my father died. He was a small man, five-five tops, jammed with energy. I understood. Energy felt to me then, as it does to so many kids, like an unstoppable force run through a kaleidoscope of affect—at times electric, then liquid, popping, burning. Above all, it felt uncontainable. The miracle is that our skin contains it, for the most part. Was I sexual at ten? I don’t know. I know my father died, and then, suddenly, there was Prince.

1984 was also the year of “Purple Rain.” We saw it in the theatres and then my sister and I watched it innumerable times downstairs in our TV room. Our lair. I had already watched and would watch a lot of rock musicals—“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “The Song Remains the Same,” “Tommy,” “The Wall.” I liked parts of these movies and had moments of cathexis, but nothing really stuck. Maybe because they were full of white British men whose angst was fundamentally inscrutable to me, and seemingly tethered to Margaret Thatcher, whoever that was, or grossly thefted from American blues. Maybe it was because the girls in the movies were sticks—who wanted to be Strawberry Fields, chained up while Aerosmith sings “Come Together” at you menacingly? And while, God knows, I wanted to be the hippie chick conjured in Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California,” I already knew that was just some guy’s dream, because the hippie girls I knew that fit the part either had to go along with their hippie-fascist boyfriends in a haze of suppressed agency or they spoke up and the dudes lost interest “pronto.” Anyway, that girl was pretty and probably liked to get fucked in a field of flowers, blond ringlets spread out on a velvet blanket strewn with empty goblets, but she wasn’t seething with electric energy, she didn’t talk, she didn’t grind.

Then there was “Purple Rain.” Did I want to be Prince or be with Prince? I think the beauty is, neither. He made it O.K. to feel what he was feeling, what I was feeling. I wanted to be a diminutive, profuse, electric ribbon of horniness and divine grace. I bought a white shirt with ruffles down the front and wore it with skintight crushed-velvet hot pants, laid a full-length mirror on the floor, and slithered on top of the mirror, imitating Prince’s closing slither on the elevated amp in “Darling Nikki.” Yeah, he’s telling Apollonia to come back, but you can tell he doesn’t really give a shit about Apollonia. He’s possessed by something else, his life force onstage. Half naked, wearing only black bolero pants and a black kerchief tied over the top part of his face, his torso slick with sweat, Prince is telling us a story. An important one.

The story is of a woman whom he meets while she’s masturbating. I guess you could say she was a sex fiend. Not a slut, mind you. A sex fiend. Yes, that’s it. No word in high school for that, because to be a fiend is to be beyond shame. You can make fun of someone whom you think has been humiliated by sucking dick on the playground, but what can you do with a sex fiend? A sex fiend who knows how to pleasure herself. A sex fiend who wants to, knows how to, grind.

I wanted to grind. I didn’t want to be dominated or to dominate; maybe that would come later. In 1984, 198And5, 1986, I wanted to grind.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of Wendy and Lisa. That they were just there, the first women I’d ever seen as fundamental parts of a band, a band that shredded. They were the stoic dudes keeping it together to Prince’s histrionic grace. But that’s not even right. I never saw Prince as womanly or manly or even androgynous. He was just beauty, grace, energy, sex, light. He came undone and left it all on the floor, and also moved in tight formation, choreographed chic. The opening chords of “Purple Rain,” they’re the opening of a conversation. A plaintive, resigned, questing conversation. (I might add that they’re played, at least in the movie, by Lisa.)

He was a hot little guy, the kind of guy whose profound sex appeal none of the other guys, certainly not Morris Day in “Purple Rain,” can understand. Day and his macho buddy roll their eyes and shake their heads as Prince starts in on “Darling Nikki.” Prince is doing that weird thing with one of his hands that we all imitated, where you make one hand look like it’s the hand of another, creeping down the side of your face. It’s Nikki’s hand, it’s one’s own self-pleasuring hand, it’s creepy, one’s own body made other. It’s self-seduction, a magic trick. It’s the masturbatory dream, that one’s hand could feel the way the hand of another feels on you. I think this was another of Prince’s gifts—to keep self-seduction and allo-seduction on a rollicking continuum, like those rectangular boxes that contain a bright-blue wave rolling back and forth. Why decide between onanism and obsession, when you can just celebrate the root energy of each?

No accident, then, that by 1986, when I started to want to be touched and touch someone besides myself, I picked out an incredibly small guy who wore eyeliner and lipstick and most definitively was an unrepentant sex fiend. Not in the way that so many teenage boys are, with their gross language about “boning”—you know, all the Brock Turners or medium-grade Brock Turners of the world. A sex fiend is someone who actually likes sex, not just the getting-off part but the dirty parts, the salty mess of it. And so my androgyne boyfriend liked the mess, and so did I. Grinding that’s good enough you don’t need to tell anyone about it. He certainly didn’t tell anyone about it, because the other eighth-grade boys mocked and ostracized him for being small and femme and freakish. But he was the only one getting it. I’m telling you this now because I hate the way this possibility of experience for boys and girls and everyone in between gets drowned out in moralistic crap about power and consent, all of which is necessary but eclipses the real divine electric dirtiness that is possible between excited young bodies who have accepted that they have desire and somehow manage to find each other. I want people, especially girls, to know that that’s possible. It’s possible even when you’re thirteen, fifteen, and it can be great.

I recited “Darling Nikki” for two years like a prayer. Then, there was high school. The “Purple Rain” moment had passed, but I am here going to credit any good sex that happened over the next few years to Prince. He was so many things besides a sex symbol for suburban white girls like me, so please forgive me my momentary narrowness. I’m just struggling to give my thanks. I imbibed it then without naming it, but I can see now how important it was that his feminism and queerness and blackness all blazed together, implicit, a streak of insistence on what’s possible, a rejection of the paltry ways of being that pretend to be all that’s on offer.

It may bear interjecting here that friends who’ve watched the movie more recently—I haven’t seen it for more than thirty years—have told me that it isn’t nearly as female-friendly as I remember. Indeed, as one friend told me this, the image of a jabbering woman being thrown into a dumpster came to mind. I asked, grimacing, “Oh shit, does a woman get thrown into a dumpster?” “Oh, yeah,” she said. “And that’s just the start.” Other images then flickered back: the humiliation of low-to-no-talent Apollonia, with Day’s dog collar around her neck, The Kid’s mother cowering from her husband’s blows, and so on. So I guess the more complex question is, How does a girl figure out, amidst the crushing misogyny all around her, how to pick out the avenues that will prove most emancipatory, pleasure-giving, and life-sustaining? I’m sorry to say that this skill remains as urgent now as it ever was, so maybe I have “Purple Rain” to thank for that, too.

In any event, Tipper Gore had it so wrong. Of all the music, all the forms of sexuality that might have been on offer to the youth in 1984, “Darling Nikki” was first-rate. Female autonomy, mind-blowing, consensual, victimless perversion, and a dirty little Prince who wants to grind grind grind grind grind grind grind grind grind grind. Did Tipper ever listen to that strange hymn at the end of “Darling Nikki”? You have to play it backward—hallmark, in other realms, of the Satanic. My sister and I played it. We knew what it said. Do you know? It says, The Lord’s coming, Prince is coming. And somehow, with his help, we learned how to come, too.