Later that day I drove the car to Washington Heights with Nip riding shotgun to complete our mission to cop. Getting in was easy; the problem was getting out safely and with the goods. We clearly didn’t look like Harlem gals, so we had to be careful who we talked to. We parked the car and a nice-looking Latino guy around our age came our way and took us into a building and up three flights of stairs.
The building seemed vacant, but we could see bodies lurking in the shadows, lookouts in the hallway corners. He led us into an apartment where a man was sitting at a table with a scale, a lamp, and lots of white powder. Two other guys hovered nearby. I scanned the scene: a grayish, cloudy film filled the room, kind of like it was a dead space suspended in time, like you could get lost in it and left behind. I remember thinking that we must be out of our minds going up there. My mom would have had a coronary! These guys could have raped or killed us, or both, but all I could think was, I won’t be able to live with myself if something happens to Nip.
As I was thinking about how to back out of the situation, I caught a glimpse of Whitney sitting in a chair across from the dealer, already making the purchase. She looked so young and innocent, and I bucked up quick and went to her side. She got it to go, and go we did.
As we walked back to the car a trio of young men approached Whitney. “Eh, mami! Mami, I know you. Come here!” they pleaded. By this time, Whitney was beginning to do national ads for products like Scope mouthwash. Her name and face were getting out there, so I decided then and there that if we ever did a drug run again, I would go in alone.
The next time we went I told Nip that I was going up by myself and that I wanted her to stay with the car. “Soon as we get there,” I said, “I’m going to get out of the car and you should immediately get behind the wheel. If I’m not back in ten minutes, drive off, make a right at the corner, and then another right. The next block will be Broadway. I’ll catch up to you there.” It usually took about ten to fifteen minutes tops to score, and I felt better knowing that if there was any trouble, Whitney would be safe in the bustle and bright lights on Broadway. We talked about how we didn’t want to call too much attention to each other because we were two girls, and we rehearsed what we’d do if someone tried to mess with us. We planned to think good and fast on our feet and say something like “My brother and his friend are around the corner.” Luckily, it never came to that—the angels were working overtime.
It wasn’t all about drugs, but we were enjoying ourselves. Sometimes we overdid it. “This shit,” I said after a particularly long night of partying during one of our hotel stays. “I don’t like doing it all day. The world is passing us by.”
“Ain’t nothing going on out there,” Whitney said.
One time that summer, Whitney and I went to a gay club, a completely new experience for both of us. I couldn’t have told you where to find any kind of club because that just wasn’t my thing. But we got the idea into our heads, so we drove around and found one in Asbury Park. We walked up the wooden stairs and entered an intimate space that looked out over the beach. The interior was like any dive with wood paneling and a jukebox, but we felt comfortable. We played pool, listened to the music—which was honky-tonk—danced, and then slipped into the bathroom to do a few lines.
Whitney and I held hands and got close on the dance floor, but once we started kissing, we left. We made it to the car but couldn’t wait long enough to get back to the hotel. I parked the rental car alongside the water, and before long a cop knocked on the window. We were in there naked, but the windows were fogged up so he couldn’t see much and just urged us to move on.
Whitney was uncomfortable with her body, but I thought she was beautiful. I used to tell her, “God must have put you together piece by piece.” Every inch of her fit together so nicely to make her beauty whole. Her legs were slender and shapely. I would tease her and say they looked like baseball bats because they were strong and smoothly shaped at the thigh with calves that tapered at the ankle. And her megawatt smile lit up her face. Even when she was sad that smile of hers was like a switch flipped on in a dark room, instantly flooding it with light.
Whenever I spoke like this, Nip would simply say, “Thanks, Rob,” or sometimes look at me as if I’d just said something that she’d never heard, chuckle, and jokingly say, “You’re so crazy, Robyn,” or stare with that sweet, innocent expression she always seemed to maintain.
As summer drew to a close, I prepared myself to say goodbye and begin school at Monmouth. I was packing to leave when she phoned and said that she wanted to come visit me. I was relieved. Clearly there was something about me that made her feel comfortable and she wanted me to be part of what she was doing. I didn’t know exactly what my role would be yet, but I was sure I could fill it, that whatever it was, I was made for it.
Once I got to school, we spoke every night on the phone, and Whitney ended our calls by saying, “I wish you were here.” Larry would bring her to visit me, and the connection was still there. I missed her, too, but needed to focus on school and the team.
My dorm room was a sliver of a space, with a twin bed on one side. If I took two steps away from the bed, I could probably touch the opposite wall. It was pretty tight. Larry would drive Whitney up before tryouts and during the off-season, but she slept over only a few times. I didn’t have a car, so Bonita or another teammate who did would take us to the store to get something to eat and then the two of us would go our way.
While I was away at Monmouth, I didn’t do blow. I’d occasionally smoke pot with a bong that belonged to one of the guys on the men’s team, but that was about it. But after I finished midterms, someone was going around with these little light blue pills. I took one and remember calling home and talking to my mother, crying and laughing. I ran and hid with another female, because we thought a girl on the team was chasing us and was going to kill us. Whatever those pills were, I didn’t like them.
My mother immediately phoned Whitney and asked her to call me because she didn’t know what was wrong with me, and she wanted to get to the bottom of it. Whitney called me right away. I told her what I’d done, and she told me to get in my room and close the door. I did just that. Or I tried. I saw a person’s head squeezing through the keyhole, but Whitney’s advice played in my head, so I shut my eyes and eventually fell asleep.
I got into a new rhythm with my basketball team. A freshman by the name of Barbara Rapp from Pleasantville, New Jersey, was a white girl who played like a black girl. Rapp was tall like me and could handle the ball. Rosie Strutz was the power forward—that was a given because she was from the area, and she owned that spot. Bonita, or “Bo,” a lefty, was the point guard, and Rosie’s sister Tammy started as swing guard. Now, Rapp was good but she wasn’t going to start at the guard position ahead of Tammy, the hometown favorite. That left Rapp and me battling for the small forward position. I had to let her know she wasn’t starting over me. I loved a great challenge, and so did she, so we pushed each other during practice. I won the small forward spot but Rapp was the best utility player ever. She could do it all. We had a great team that year and a winning season. I love those ladies.
Everything was going well until the day we had to play my old school. I was anxious and asked Whitney to be there to support me.
The game was close throughout and came down to the wire. Bonita and Rapp fouled out, and we were forced to put in a guard who hadn’t played at all. We had no time-outs left with just seconds on the clock—ten or fewer. Having played a pretty solid game, I was in my head and decided it was best to keep the ball in my hands.
Someone took it out and tossed it to me, and I started dribbling the ball with urgency, heading toward the basket. I could see Tracey and her team waiting lined up on defense at the other end of the court. All of a sudden, my teammate Dee Dee Phillips appeared in my path, palms facing outward, asking for the ball. This is exactly what a guard should have done, but I waved her off. S
he hesitated for a moment, then turned to run; I glanced up at the clock and realized that the ball was gone. I stopped, turned, and looked to see it in the hands of an opposing player I’d just blown by. Two easy points to seal a win for them and a very hard-to-swallow defeat for us.
I fell to the floor. The gym was buzzing with emotion and the court was hot. Reality set in and I was exhausted. We were so close. After gathering myself, shaking hands, and getting some hugs, I saw Whitney coming toward me, wearing a taupe three-quarter-length shearling and oversize glasses with brown rectangular frames.
“It was a good game, anyway,” she said. And it was.
That fall Whitney had started her senior year at Mount St. Dominic Academy. She wasn’t happy about having to go back to school, but her mother said she couldn’t pursue her music career until after graduating. Whit hated school and wearing the uniform. She had flunked out during her freshman year because she cut classes and didn’t do her work. Each morning she rose and put on her uniform as if she were headed to school but spent part of the day in the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street instead. A friend of hers would find her there at the end of the day, sometimes arguing with the guy behind the counter about how best to make a strawberry shake. If her mother was away doing session work or performing in Manhattan, Whitney circled back home. When she got in trouble, though, Mr. Houston pleaded with administrators and was able to get her back in.
While we were still visiting each other, finding time alone was becoming difficult, and we needed our own space. We were sneaking around in hotel rooms, my dorm, her mother’s house or mine. Someone could have walked in on us, but it never happened, until the time my mother came home.
I was home on break, and after messing around, we cuddled up, talking in bed naked like a grown couple. Suddenly I heard the front door open and close. Nip jumped up and ran to hide behind the door to my room, which was slightly open. The sound of footsteps got closer and closer. My room was directly across from the bathroom, and through the crack in the door I could see whenever someone walked by or went in. I quickly pulled the covers up to my neck with only my head peeking out.
Mom sat down on the toilet with the door open, looking straight at me. I could hear her tinkling as she asked why I was in bed. All I could think to say was that I wasn’t feeling well, which wasn’t a lie because right then I was feeling pretty sick to my stomach. Picture this: Whitney Elizabeth Houston bolt upright behind the door in her birthday suit, and Mom staring at me from the toilet. It was a perfect visual split: Whitney in line with my right eye and Mom with my left.
It was a disconcerting sight, but I had to zero in on Mom so she didn’t notice my darting eyes. Finally, Mom got up, flushed, washed her hands, and took a few steps toward my room. I was sweating, and my heart was pounding so hard I worried Mom could hear it. I was praying and was certain that Nip was, too. Mom stopped in the doorway, eyes on me; lifted her arm; and pushed the door slightly. Then she backed up and walked down the hall and out the front door.
Needless to say, Nip and I dressed in a hurry and headed out for the rest of the day, and into the night. What would have happened? My Mom wasn’t into embarrassing people, especially her children. I suspected that she knew something was going on but she was giving me the benefit of the doubt, or respected me enough to just leave it alone. I don’t know why she didn’t probe or look behind the door. My mother was the kind of parent who trusted her children, and even when she did not approve of a certain behavior, she felt it was important to allow us to learn for ourselves.
Four
Separation Anxiety
In the summer of 1973 I developed a mysterious illness. Almost overnight, weird swellings sprang up on my feet, my legs, and my abdomen. My mother took me to the doctor, but no one could figure out what was wrong. Weeks turned into months, and the undiagnosed condition spread all over my thirteen-year-old body, becoming acute enough to land me in the hospital for almost the entire summer. My mother, the sole breadwinner, reluctantly left me in the care of the hospital for most of the day, stopping by before work with games, cards, books, and magazines—anything to help me pass the time and distract me from scratching my skin, making things worse. In those magazines, I discovered a world that I believed reflected my future: cities and countries to travel to, fine hotels to stay in, the best cars to drive, and special things I could acquire.
I used to say, “Mom, I’m gonna buy you a house in Rio Rancho. I’m gonna have a Camaro or maybe a Firebird.” My brother and sister never talked like that. They were never looking for something else, something more. I was. All the time.
My mother wanted things to be better, too. A year before that, she had furnished our newly constructed three-bedroom apartment with new, modern pieces. My father had cluttered our old home with used, mismatched furniture from relatives. Mom often called him “a satisfied man” who didn’t want much. I wanted to make my mother’s life better because she had worked really hard and been through hell. Once I paid $112 for a sixteen-carat gold necklace with an amethyst, which was her birthstone, and she told me to return it. I tried buying her other gifts and she would make me take back every last thing. When I began touring and making real money, I’d bring her back leather handbags from Italy, Hermès scarves, and other luxe pieces, which she happily accepted.
The mysterious swellings went away, only to return periodically when my mother traveled for her job as a consultant for an electronics company. I could tell she’d asked Marty on the phone how I was doing when I heard him say, “Swollen.”
Mom soon left the consultant job so she could spend more time with us and dedicate herself to her education. In the interim, she worked as a counselor at a drug rehab center and at an adult school where she helped students earn their high school diplomas. She attended Caldwell College, which shared a campus with Mount St. Dominic Academy. Years before we would meet, Whitney and I were frequently in the same orbit.
My mom was so wise and so strong. Looking back, I don’t know how she made it through the stormy times to raise us, work, and put herself through college and graduate school. She finished her BA in psychology at Caldwell and went on to earn her master’s degree in counseling from Trenton State. She was well respected by her colleagues, championed by her students, and described by her friends and family as an angel.
My mother was a good woman, so I couldn’t understand why she never found a decent man. Some of the men she dated weren’t very ambitious or seemed unworthy to me; others were married. I knew the Ten Commandments, and it didn’t jibe with what I was seeing.
The summer before I left for college, a year before I met Whitney, I would ride my bike to the Orange projects with my teammates. We would play Orange High School girls under the floodlights and whup their asses until late into the night. Other times I’d play one-on-one with Val for hours. My mother rolled back my curfew to ten o’clock after I came home at one in the morning. I protested: “Mom, I wasn’t getting into trouble. I wasn’t doing anything but playing basketball.”
“That’s too late,” she said. “You play basketball in the daytime.”
The curfew didn’t last long. I eventually wore her down and convinced my mother that I was safe.
We rode our bikes in a pack of five girls. Eventually we would branch off—three would go to the left and the other two would go right. Even if I had been alone, I knew how to stay out of the path of trouble.
Those street smarts stayed with me as I got older, and when Whitney and I were together, I would look out for her the same way. One time, Whitney had to bike home from my house at nearly midnight because we didn’t have money for a cab. I mapped the safest route to follow and she called me when she got home without incident. She stayed on the line while I stretched the long cord from the kitchen into my room and got under the covers with the phone. We talked into the wee hours. All of a sudden, the line went dead, and I peeked my head out to see my mother standing t
here with the cord dangling in her hand.
“Your power has been cut,” she said.
I told Mom everything. When she got home from work and wanted to know something, she’d ask me. I never lied, even if it caused me trouble, and I’d frequently take the heat for Bina because she was younger and probably following my lead. When I was feeling down about myself, Mom would tell me, “You’re beautiful, and you have a strong, confident presence. You should be aware that that can be intimidating to some.”
The relationship between Whitney and her mother baffled me: It was so different from what I’d experienced with mine. Whitney only had that summer counselor job where we met because Cissy said Whitney needed to learn some responsibility. Whitney proved herself to be responsible, but her brother Michael, who was also a counselor that summer, rarely showed up for work. For some reason his fellow counselors covered for him by signing him in.
In their home, I don’t recall Michael being taken to task for failing to follow through, but Whitney was always under scrutiny. She told me Cissy’s own mother died when Cissy was only a girl; she left South Side High School during her sophomore year, and when she was eighteen, her father died. I wonder if she never gave Whitney a break because for most of her life there had been no one to do the same for her.
When Whitney was young, Cissy’s good friend “Aunt Bae” would watch the kids when she was on the road, so Whitney did have Aunt Bae’s children to hang out with, but no friends from school. Her life was organized around going to church, choir rehearsals, and her mother’s recording sessions.
A Song for You Page 5