A Song for You

by Robyn Crawford

  Back in the early nineties, AIDS was a heavy load for gay men or men who slept with men. They were labeled and saddled with the disease—and as far as the public was concerned, many felt gay men had gotten what they deserved. The perception was also that they were the only ones who had it, which wasn’t true. With its apathetic response to the crisis, it seemed as if the country was punishing gay men. With the focus solely on men, it took a while before it was determined that gay sex wasn’t the only way to contract HIV. My mother was proof of that. Women were getting it from men they believed were straight. Because HIV/AIDS was considered a gay men’s disease, the research that was being done concentrated on men and their response to various treatments. No thought was given to women’s bodies, which often respond differently.

  I came home one day to find my brother pretty upset because my mother would not discuss how she became infected. Instead of sharing her own story, Mom asked him why he’d waited so long to tell us. “I didn’t want to be a burden,” Marty replied. For me, how wasn’t really all that important at this point anyway. They both had it, and I wanted them to live.

  Sometimes I feared that my family was cursed. For a time, I would not sleep with anyone. I didn’t want to be touched. Later, I ran to my doctor’s office if I simply kissed someone. I was flipped out. One time, after I showed up at his office to get another HIV test, my doctor said that perhaps I needed to go talk to someone. “You’re fine, Robyn. I know it’s really unfortunate what has happened to your brother and your mother, but that’s not how this virus works. You’re fine.” I was juggling so much, between what was happening with both my family and Whitney and the demands of my job. But I wasn’t ready to talk to a therapist. I didn’t feel that I could be honest with a stranger. I’d been so conditioned not to disclose anything about Whitney, and it didn’t seem that I could open up without sharing everything. So I kept it all in.

  That summer, Marty and I wanted to see Angels in America, which everybody was talking about, so I got a pair of tickets. We were both big into theater, and as children we had watched television productions of shows like Gypsy, Funny Girl, Summer Stock, and other musicals and classics.

  He didn’t feel well that evening, but we hoped he could get through it. Sadly, his cough was so persistent we had to leave during the second act. I had the driver I’d hired head toward home, but at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, Marty announced that he didn’t want to go through it and breathe the fumes. “Well,” I insensitively said, “you’re going to have to hold your breath. We can’t turn around now.”

  Patience has never come easily to me. My mother used to say, “You’ll never be a teacher,” because I didn’t have the patience, and Whitney told me I had more patience for strangers than for my own family. Looking back, I wish I’d had more patience with and connection to what was going on. I think I was detached, but Marty was detached, too. We shared that method of self-protection.

  I gave my brother shelter and love, but he still was very secretive. His way was quiet and private, and that could have been for a number of reasons. One of them had to be the way men were often treated if they were perceived to be gay—particularly black men. Marty had lived a whole other life when he was down in North Carolina, pursuing straight men he and his friends referred to as “trade.” According to his roommates, Marty would return home sharp as could be in his uniform and go straight into the bathroom. Soon after he would emerge in short shorts they called his “little poom-pooms” and a tank top, hair dyed dark brown with Miss Clairol, brows arched, and mustache trimmed. He had beautiful legs. And though he had a car, he chose to walk everywhere in those poom-pooms.

  Marty was vain and didn’t want anyone to see him not looking his best. One night, he was on the phone with his friend Paul and I overheard him crying. When I asked him what was wrong, Marty said Paul wouldn’t come see him. I don’t know why not, because he never talked to me about the details, but that’s the only time I saw him display emotion while his health was failing. I’ve never been one to dig for information. If he wanted me to know, he would have told me.

  That summer, Marty decided he wanted to talk to my father. His visit with Dad quickly went south. Marty phoned Mom to pick him up, and when he got in the car, he was trembling. “Just get me out of here, he’s disgusting.” My father had been rude and evaded any attempt at a real conversation. These were my brother’s last days. Shortly after returning home and finding out what happened, I went into his room. Marty said, “I’m not gay. I spent all this time thinking I needed approval from a man, and I didn’t need it.”

  Marty was never who my father thought he should be. He grew up wounded by that, searching for what would make him feel whole. Marty was funny and talented; he knew fashion, how to fix things, how to cook and sew. He was a good writer, he played multiple instruments—so many things. Some people say he was ahead of his time. But he would never be the athlete my father was. Dad saw my brother as soft and weak and not like him, and he couldn’t stand that. He was right. Marty wasn’t like him. He was so much more complex, so much more accomplished.

  While he was living with me, Marty watched me get ready for work every morning. On September 23, 1993, as I was preparing to leave, I heard the sound of him pushing buttons on the phone. Beep, beep, beep, beep. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to call the doctor.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to go to the hospital.” Palisades Medical Center was two minutes from the house, but Marty made it very clear that he didn’t want to go back there. A few weeks earlier, he’d checked himself out of there and as he and I were exiting the doctor yelled behind him, “If you leave here you’re gonna die.”

  “Fuck you,” Marty had retorted.

  My brother preferred Morristown Memorial, an hour away. It was a very forward-thinking institution where they were compassionate and committed to caring for people suffering with AIDS and comforting their families. The rooms were bright and clean, and nurses came in with smiles on their faces. People needed to feel like they had a chance at life and were part of society, and to be treated with dignity, love, and respect. The staff at Morristown understood that. AIDS was a death sentence in 1992, when my mother and Marty got their diagnoses, but they were still among the living and wanted to continue living.

  Marty had been in and out of hospitals so regularly that this time, I called him a private ambulance to take him to Morristown and continued getting ready for work. I watched out the window as the attendant secured his wheelchair, and Marty gazed up, a discouraged look on his face.

  I was called to the hospital a few hours later, and arrived to find Marty on life support. I so desperately wished that he would get better that I chose to ignore what was right in front of me. To this day, when someone is sick, I refuse to think the worst.

  Marty’s navy-blue sweatshirt with “Whitney Houston” embroidered in white block letters had been cut right down the middle so electrodes could be attached to his chest. Mom, Bina, and I gathered around the bed, joined by the nurse who was monitoring him. He had been sedated while the nurse hooked him up to a ventilator, and she said it would wear off soon. When Marty woke up, he lifted himself slightly and looked at each of us. His eyes went from my mother to Bina, and then to me. He sucked his teeth a little bit and put his head down in disappointment as if to say, “I’m still here?”

  Then Marty closed his eyes and never opened them again.

  Getting clearance to take him off life support was a struggle, but we were all in agreement, my mother, my sister, and I. We had to wait for the doctors to arrive to make the determination. He had wasted away, and he’d had enough. “Didn’t you see his eyes? He doesn’t want to be here,” I said. The lifeless image of him was searing into my brain, and I didn’t want to remember him that way. Bina was steady and quiet as the doctors talked while examining our brother. One of the physicians said his lungs were full bu
t his heart was strong. After a chain of doctors came through, one of them finally removed the cords from the respirator.

  My mother stood silently, watching her son go.

  I felt relieved he wouldn’t have to be in that state any longer. My mother didn’t want to see him endure any more, either. But I can’t imagine how she felt at that moment. She didn’t say a word. When we got home, she said she would have given anything for him to live. She wouldn’t have cared what he wanted to do, or be, in his life. Her firstborn was gone.

  My father showed up late to my brother’s funeral. He hadn’t made it to the wake. Mom said that as far as she was concerned, my father was dead. Sitting in the car before the funeral, Mom was broken. There was a lengthy, steady procession of cars carrying folks there to pay their respects. “Look at that long line,” I said. “Look how many people love him.”

  On August 31, 1997, almost four years after Marty passed, I was at home in bed when a special report came on the late-night news. Princess Diana had been in a terrible car crash. I left the TV on for updates, drifting in and out of sleep. When I opened my eyes again, Princess Diana’s picture was on the screen. To the left was her birthday: July 1, the same as Marty’s, and she died at the same age, thirty-six. When I saw the dates, something Marty had said hit me like a revelation. One day out of the blue he’d told me that Diana was just like him. When I asked, “How so?” he said, “Misunderstood and searching for joy—simple happiness.”

  Eighteen

  The Trouble with Angels

  The day after I buried my brother, I was at home in the shower, and as the water rained down on me, I wept. Marty wasn’t here anymore. I had a lot of mourning to do, but I sheltered myself from it by diving into my work. Mom was doing well on her treatment plan and was safe with Bina, so within days of Marty’s funeral I rejoined the Bodyguard World Tour in Tokyo. After Tokyo, which marked the end of a month of dates in multiple cities in Japan, the tour continued on to Italy.

  Bobby and Bobbi Kris eventually joined us on the road. Months earlier, before Bobby’s own tour jumped off, he had stayed behind. Whitney, out of distrust, tried to monitor his whereabouts from afar. The whole thing was like watching a foreign movie without subtitles. It was difficult and frustrating to see my friend allow herself to be disrespected, demeaned, and then discouraged from doing what she knew was best for herself and her baby: leaving a fool.

  What circumstances led to Whitney’s telling Bobby about our romantic past remains a mystery. During a break in the second leg of the Bodyguard tour, Whitney decided to take her family on a vacation to Bali. Silvia and Shelly, Aunt Bae’s youngest daughter, accompanied them. Nippy loved the islands—the humidity, balmy winds, fresh fruit, top-notch comfort, peace, and water that was the bluest blue. Our trips were serene, luxurious, and rejuvenating. It’s sad that I can’t recall a single trip Whit and Bobby went on without my hearing about some crazy stuff going down. Whatever force was behind this union revealed itself like a ball of confusion. And the fun-loving friend I knew was allowing herself to become someone else.

  So I was relieved when I didn’t hear one report of drama or bad news from the family’s first vacation together. But shortly after they returned home, I was at the house and couldn’t ignore the silence in the normally busy kitchen. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Whitney since they had left for Bali, and now it was about a week after their return.

  I cornered Silvia away from the kitchen and asked, “What the hell?”

  Sil replied, agitated, “Come on, Robyn! You see the way Bobby is treating you?”

  “What?” I was absolutely clueless.

  According to Silvia, she and Whit, Bobby, Shelly, and Krissi (who was about two at this point) were having dinner in the restaurant at the Four Seasons, where they were staying. Silvia could tell right away that something had gone on between the couple, and Bobby was fuming. He abruptly rose from the table and stormed out while the other diners looked on. Whitney, Krissi, Sil, and Shelly followed. Once they were all in the hall, Bobby dragged Silvia by the arm and demanded his passport. He wanted to go back to the United States, solo.

  “Give me my passport,” he repeated. Then he shouted, “And you knew all this time?”

  Sil responded, “Knew what? What are you talking about?”

  “You knew about Robyn and Whitney?” Bobby asked, and Sil replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bobby.”

  “Aunt Bae told Whitney to tell me the truth, and she did,” said Bobby.

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” Silvia truly did not have any idea what he was referring to. It was so long ago, before her time with us.

  For some reason, Whitney and I never got around to sitting down and discussing our lives and how we felt about all the gossip and its effect on us. Instead, we just went through life without ever making time to talk about it, though we should have. Back in the early days, Nip and I talked about everything, from our families to retirement and ways to make money other than singing. She had a vision of one day long down the road buying a compound on an island, similar to the famous Kennedy spread in Hyannis Port. In this dream, she, Silvia, and I each would have our own home, but we’d be together.

  I was tired of being alone, and one evening in the summer of 1993 I thought about Lisa Hintelmann. When we had worked together, that was my focus. While there definitely was something about her, it was a feeling I had not allowed myself to explore because I wanted to stay professional. She had gorgeous long, curly dark brown hair, and was slim and well dressed with a classic French flair—straight out of preppy Boston College to the edgy downtown of New York City in the early nineties. She had a together, no-nonsense way about her that made me a little nervous. I was sure that she wasn’t lonely, and I knew that if I made any kind of move and she responded, I had better be sure about what I was doing.

  Lisa had moved on from the PR firm to GQ, where she was now special projects editor. I remembered where she said she lived and worked up the nerve to call her from my car on my brick-size early-issue cell phone. When she picked up, I told her that I “happened to be” in her neighborhood. I didn’t want to assume she drank, so I said, “I was wondering if you’d like to go out for a hot chocolate.” Lisa said she had a really bad cold so she couldn’t join me. I felt the sting of rejection but pressed ahead. “Do you have everything you need?” I asked, offering to bring chicken soup.

  “I have everything I need, thank you,” she said. I was plummeting, but just before I hit the ground, she pulled me back up by saying, “I’ll take a rain check.” She called me a few days later and we met somewhere in Chelsea for a drink and started getting to know each other better.

  In February 1994, Whitney threw Bobby a twenty-fifth birthday party at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. She was trying to do everything to make him feel worthy and important. I invited Lisa, and she came dressed head to toe in black, even taller than usual in three-inch-high suede boots. Everybody had a blast—hundreds of guests enjoyed unlimited drinks, plentiful spreads of food, and music that kept everyone moving.

  I had a driver, so at the end of the night, I offered Lisa a ride home on our way back to Jersey. When we pulled up in front of her building, I asked if I could use her bathroom, and when I came out, she was standing by the front door of the apartment to see me out. Without allowing myself to give it any thought, I went in for one dynamite kiss! Late the next morning, I tentatively dialed her number, nervous that my big move may have blown everything. But Lisa was warm, and I could hear her smiling through the phone.

  We started seeing each other regularly, and one of the first times I spent the night, we awakened to a silent Manhattan street blanketed in two feet of snow. No one knew that I was on the third floor of a charming Chelsea brownstone all snuggled up, cared for, and protected. But it wasn’t the apartment that made me feel at ease, it was Lisa. My mother could call, but no one else kn
ew where to find me. Lisa would set the table, cook dinner, and pour us glasses of wine. She introduced me to some of her favorite music. Over candlelit dinners, we talked about life, travel, our families, her, me—and it was just us.

  Lisa wasn’t intimidated by anything, but I remained hesitant about bringing her into my world. As soon as I entered her space, it felt as if my life with Whitney stopped. We didn’t talk about that. But keeping away from the topic of work and Whitney had an effect on me: In that cozy apartment, I felt freer and closer to myself than ever before.

  I loved walking around the city with Lisa. She had lived there for years, knew it well, and loved it. She was always flipping through Time Out and other magazines, identifying fun places and events for us to experience together—plays, museums, bars, and clubs. She would say, “Guess where we’re going today?” I truly enjoyed getting to know the city with her—until she tried to hold my hand. “Please don’t do that,” I’d say inconsiderately. It made me uncomfortable to do that in public. For so long I’d been conditioned to see myself as an extension of Whitney Houston.

  I also wasn’t ready to be serious. I was still on the fence about commitment. I needed to figure out where I was and make up my mind.

  Nineteen

  Exhale

  Meanwhile that winter, Whitney ruled the 1994 award shows. She took home three Grammys, five NAACP Image Awards, five World Music Awards, eight American Music Awards, and eleven Billboard Awards. At the Soul Train Music Awards, where she’d been booed five years earlier, she won R&B Song of the Year for “I Will Always Love You” (a decidedly non–R&B song) and was honored with the Sammy Davis Jr. Entertainer of the Year Award. Accepting the award that bore his name, she spoke about the racial discrimination Davis experienced and what it was like for black performers in his time. Then, after thanking her family members, she addressed me: “To my dear friend and executive assistant, Robyn Crawford: How do you thank someone for loyalty and devotion and love? Words cannot express. . . . So I say to you, thank you, and I love you. Your vision has not gone overlooked.” I don’t know what prompted her to single me out that particular evening. But on that night as she won the top Soul Train award, she honored me, too.