If You Gotta Go, Go With a Smile: Prince, Batman, Painkillers, and Me

Warner Bros.

Originally published in Electric Word Life: Writing on Prince 2016 - 2021, available here.

Sometimes it snows in April, and sometimes the roads freeze over and your car slides into oncoming traffic and gets hit by two different cars, crushing you from the right side.

I remember shrieking, and a bright light shining right in my face. I remember waking up with a tube in my throat. I tried to finger spell a message to the nurses nearby with rudimentary sign language: My name is Jack or where am I? None of them could tell what I was trying to say.

A hospital bed is claustrophobic, worse when you can’t even turn your head. It feels like the world is just printed on a sheet of plastic, wrapped around tight until it fills your vision.

I was alive but only thanks to the efforts of a dozen people. I needed major internal surgery to stop the bleeding, leaving me with a scar zippered down the center of my chest and stomach. I was in a coma for a day, and once I was technically awake again, I spent a blurry week in the ICU. My pelvic ring was pulverized, so I couldn’t have stood up even if my leg muscles weren’t also recovering from the trauma. My right arm hung loose and unnatural for a few days until another, much lower-priority surgery to repair the break. Friends and family rushed from elsewhere in the midwest to check on me, doing their best to make conversation during my few waking hours. I didn’t have the energy to move anything more than my head from side to side, and even that tired me out fast.

One morning or afternoon or night, a gaggle of people wheeled in Mary, my girlfriend, propped up in her own hospital bed. She was in a similar state, so we said “I love you” at each other across the crowded room, with a lack of self-consciousness that only pain medication and a near-death experience can bring.

I had flown to Florida for the weekend to DJ a friend’s sister’s wedding. (I can’t find the playlist.) Mary rode shotgun with her dad in his Buick Century when the two picked me up at the airport returning to South Bend. We stopped for burgers and ice cream on the way home before the sun set and the roads froze. I was sitting behind Mary on the right side of the car during the accident. They both recovered, and I did too. I’m not trying to leave you in suspense about that.

On one of our first dates, I drove Mary to an Italian restaurant in South Bend in a borrowed car. On the drive home, she talked about her love of ʼ80s music. I was insistent on Prince’s greatness along with her favorite, George Michael. I put on “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and sang at least one chorus in my best falsetto. She liked it.

Mary Gring

I was in South Bend Memorial for two weeks, half in the ICU, half in a more conventional room upstairs. I was lucky. Everyone was very generous. Lots of flowers and handwritten notes. My room was piled with snacks my stomach couldn’t handle and books I didn’t have the mental capacity to read. I could sit upright for short bursts, and work my laptop and the TV remote with my unbroken arm. Family on my mom’s side hung up a Batman poster, signed with encouraging messages. A pseudo-Neal Adams illustration looming over me as a watchful guardian, a silent protector.

I always loved Batman, encouraged by my dad. He was a superhero fan and dedicated comic collector since seeing the Adam West/Burt Ward TV series as a kid in the late  ʼ60s. I grew up on an abundance of Bat-stuff, from comics, the movies, cartoons like Batman Beyond and Justice League.

I had weird dreams. Batman, some version of it, showed up a lot. I woke up feeling like I had been dropped onto a driveway from a great height. Which wasn’t too far from reality.

I was scrolling through my phone when I read that Prince’s plane had made an emergency landing in Moline, IL, just a few hours west of South Bend. His representative said he was suffering from flu-like symptoms. He was in the middle of his stripped-down Piano and a Microphone tour, and I had never seen him perform. I tweeted “@prince after my car accident two weeks ago I need a Chicago stop on this tour to truly heal me.” 

After two weeks in the hospital, I left South Bend, said goodbye to Mary and her family and the hospital staff, and rode strapped in the back of an ambulance to the physical rehab facility Marianjoy in Wheaton, IL, close to my family’s home in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago. My pelvis was too weak to support my weight, so I used a wheelchair when I wasn’t in bed. I had physical therapy sessions several times a day, exercises and stretches confirming I could still move my toes and grip a toothbrush. I was a little sharper, better at remembering my schedule and the nurses’ names.

Between exercises one morning, I saw another headline on my phone: “Police Investigating Death At Prince’s Paisley Park Studio.” And you can’t help but expect the worst, and within a few hours the worst was confirmed.

The world went silent for a few minutes before the afternoon radio DJs cued up “Raspberry Beret” and “Purple Rain” in tribute. My mom quickly commissioned her friend to rush to a local record store to grab whatever records she could find on my behalf. (“Kiss” 12-inch single. Great find.)

I was crushed. Riding in the backseat of my parents’ car in elementary school, I’d been shocked by the church sermon to rock ‘n’ roll to blues shredding arc of “Let’s Go Crazy” on the radio. I was totally sold when I watched Prince play the Super Bowl halftime show. I ripped all the CDs I could from my dad’s collection and the local library. I dutifully purchased each new album the artist released, starting with Planet Earth in 2007. 

I never got to see him perform live, and that ached. The closest I came was in 2014 when I left my cousin’s wedding reception in the suburbs of Minneapolis to visit Paisley Park, and ended up in a listening session for the 3RDEYEGIRL album in the studio with the band. Prince made a brief appearance on speakerphone from who knows where.

Mary Gring

The story soon emerged that Prince had died of an overdose. It was not a good time to be on painkillers. The doctors assured me that I would make a full recovery, but I dreaded a summer of dependence on the same class of chemicals that left Prince cold and alone in an elevator. 

I emailed my friend Erin, the editor of my school newspaper’s arts section, and insisted on writing an obit for Prince from bed. The rest of my college life was on hold, I would be making up assignments and exams all summer, but this couldn’t wait. I wanted to say that even though he’d long kept his music off the internet, his songwriting and aesthetics and beats were everywhere in modern music. I wanted to say something, at least, even if it hurt just to hold a keyboard in my lap. I knocked out 1300 words in a night and sent it off.

After that I spent my free time in rehab playing Prince albums, soaking up the thousands of words of reviews and obituaries and essays and remembrances, and rewatching the Batman movies at night. I couldn’t dance, but I could play the music loud and sing along, amusing and irritating the retirees that took up the rest of the rooms.

I played Prince’s Batman soundtrack a lot. It was one of the first Prince albums I learned front to back, the gleaming Bat symbol instantly comprehensible to my young mind even if the music wasn’t, with its talk of guilty minds and dark nightclubs. The album came from good old-fashioned corporate synergy; Warner Bros. enlisted one of their biggest musicians to promote their blockbuster, though few of the songs actually appear in the film. (In fact, Prince later said the initial concept was that he would write funk songs for the Joker, and Michael Jackson would write ballads for Batman, but his rival was too busy touring Bad, and signed to another label anyhow.) Caught up in 1989’s Batmania, the album went double platinum, and the lead single “Batdance” was Prince’s first #1 hit since “Kiss.”

The movie’s ornate Art Deco plus German expressionism aesthetic was a deliberate step away from the bright aesthetic of the ’60s show that still defined the public’s idea of Batman, and Prince’s album is a similar fusion of several styles. “Batdance” itself is a mess, several different tracks stitched together with vocal samples from the movie, but like “The Future,” it taps into the uptempo house groove that was starting to spread from Chicago to the rest of the world. “Vicki Waiting” is a pop song about getting in the way of your own relationship, with verses based on old-school sex jokes about small organs playing in cathedrals. “Scandalous” and “The Arms of Orion” are satin sheet ballads reminiscent of old Hollywood.

Though it’s distinct from past iterations in comics and movies, Prince’s conception of Batman is remarkably coherent: he’s a rich weirdo whose particular hang-ups manifest in a nocturnal double identity with black leather outfits. The Joker is basically the same guy minus any desire to hold onto a normal identity. The two aren’t enemies over anything moral or philosophical, it’s just that they both want to fuck Vicki Vale.

Dir. Albert Magnoli

“Electric Chair” represents the overlap between the two characters, Prince singing about lust strong enough to make any consequences worth it. The song runs on guitar sleaze, but the cleanest, most state-of-the-art sleaze that Warner Bros. money could buy. 

Prince remade the characters in his own image, the devout kinky pop star recluse. And in the music videos, he made that duality explicit with Gemini, a new character that was literally Batman on one side of the body, Joker on the other. I watched the “Batdance” and “Partyman” videos for the first time as they appeared online days after his death, collective grief overpowering the legal hurdles from the complex ownership of the Bat-franchise and Prince’s contentious history with the internet. 

I wasn’t watching and rewatching because I related to these characters. I didn’t unlock some new sexual kink or start fighting crime. If anything, I’m closer to Alexander Knox, the Gotham City reporter who pursues the story of the Batman even as his colleagues dismiss it as urban legend. But Batman was a good weird jolt, a way to mourn Prince and dancing, drinking, nightlife, sex, everything I couldn’t experience while recovering.

But I did recover. I moved back home and switched to out-patient therapy. Later in the summer, I took my first strenuous steps, wearing a support harness and clutching a walker, as my dad filmed. I got off the opioids and switched to over-the-counter pain relief. Mary and I both returned to school in the fall using canes to walk, but we no longer needed them when we graduated in the spring.

The following summer, a different cousin got married in the Minneapolis suburbs. The Sunday after the wedding, I returned to Paisley Park, now fully converted into a tourist attraction.

A chipper tour guide led our group of a dozen people from the lobby into an atrium. After a brief introduction, she pointed up to a foot-tall model of Paisley Park on display near the skylight. That’s a scale model of this complex, she explained, and it’s where Prince’s ashes are kept. 

I thought she was joking at first. Yes, he built Paisley Park into his own secret lair, but it was the building he died in. Now gawking at his mortal remains was a key part of the building’s tour. What a grim way to be memorialized.

It reminded me of the running gag on the ’60s Batman series of adding Bat- as prefix to everything: Batphone, Batcopter, Bat Shark Repellent. For adults, it’s a great joke. Who would be so insistent on their branding, while trying to maintain a secret identity, no less? But it doesn’t feel like a joke to a kid.

Prince once said that the ’60s Batman theme was the first song he learned how to play on piano at the age of 7. He didn’t perform the iconic theme live until 50 years later, during his final tour.

Batman never really dies, but Prince did, and I will too.

Originally published in Electric Word Life: Writing on Prince 2016 - 2021, available here.