Every Little Step

by Bobby Brown

  MCA kept pushing me and Tommy to sign with the group, claiming they needed me to be under the same liability. But I refused—I was a solo artist with no interest in being considered the same entity as New Edition, with the same contractual deals and obligations. New Edition was in the midst of a legal battle with MCA over the terms of their contracts, so I wanted no part of that.

  I told my brother to inform Al Haymon, the tour promoter, that I needed a million dollars free and clear in order to agree to the tour. I felt it would be ridiculous for me to spend three months on a grueling tour and come back home empty-handed. When he agreed to that, I told him I had one more condition: he had to let me go back to the group members and inform them of my separate deal. The last thing I needed was for them to find out after we were out on the road and to think that I had set out to undermine them.

  After one of our rehearsals, I sat the group down and told them about my separate deal. As you can expect, they all exploded in anger. I thought that if I informed them of my deal, they couldn’t hold it against me—but I was wrong. They were immediately angry and resentful of me when they should have directed their anger at their management.

  Johnny Gill got it right away. “I knew we could have negotiated for more money!” he said, jumping up from the couch.

  While I understood their disgust, it’s not like there wasn’t a music industry precedent for what I was doing. You think Mick Jagger gets the same amount as the other members of the Rolling Stones when they go out on tour? They couldn’t have a real reunion tour without Bobby Brown, so I was just using the leverage I had to make sure I didn’t get screwed.

  Let me just say Home Again had to be the craziest tour in the history of music tours. I said up above that we were all older and more mature now, right? Well, let me amend that by saying we should have been more mature. Instead, all of us were fuckin’ wild and crazy. Up to that point, I had never done so much dope in my life as I did on that tour. We insisted on each of us having our own separate bus. We each had our own entourage; we even gave them sinister-sounding names. Mine was the Mad Mob. We even had jackets made up with the name splashed across the back. I brought back the old crew that used to roll with me before I got married. In total I had about seven guys on my bus. And each of us had a collection of guns—handguns, machine guns, about three pieces each. That meant I had nearly two dozen guns on my bus alone. You might ask what in the world we were thinking, packing like that when the bus could be searched at any time—especially considering how much the authorities always zeroed in on me. The answer would be, we weren’t thinking at all. We thought we were gangsters, serious OGs. So we had to have the hardware to go along with it. When I look back at it, we’re just fortunate that nobody got hurt or arrested. And we did come close a few times. My crew and Ronnie’s crew got into it once and guns were drawn. Some of us were trying to make extra money on the side by selling drugs. There was some kind of conflict, a stupid mix-up involving somebody selling on someone else’s turf, resulting in a few guys deciding that they needed to show their pieces.

  Whitney wasn’t eager for me to leave home to go on the tour, so she decided that she would come with me. This led to one particularly memorable scene out in the middle of nowhere, when the tour buses were barreling down the famous Route 66 somewhere in the Midwest. I was doing so much dope on this particular day that I was overtaken by paranoia; Whitney and I had been arguing and for some reason I seized upon the thought that Whitney was trying to kill me. In a serious panic, I ran up to the bus driver.

  “Pull over—I want her off!” I screamed, pointing at my wife. “She’s trying to kill me!”

  The driver, seeing the crazed look in my eyes, obliged me and pulled the bus over to the side of the road. I jumped off the bus, scaled a fence, and started running toward a house I could see in the middle of a big field. I had at least an ounce of cocaine in one pocket and a handgun in the other. Whitney was running behind me, yelling, joined by her friends.

  “Bobby, come back here!” I could hear her behind me.

  Because we each had our own bus, our tour consisted of a massive caravan. When the people in the other buses spotted me running like a madman through a field, they all started pulling over too. People streamed out of the buses, asking questions.

  “What happened—what’s going on?”

  “Bobby’s going nuts!” was the answer they got.

  Finally I reached the house that somehow I saw as the solution to my problems. But it turned out I was very wrong. A man was stepping through the front door, an older white man.

  “Excuse me, can you get me some help?” I said to him.

  What I heard next was the distinctive sound of a shotgun being cocked. Clack clack. Uh-oh, I thought.

  “If you don’t get your ass off this property, I will blow your fuckin’ head off!” the white man said with a snarl. I was still a distance from him, but I could see enough of his face to know that he probably meant it. I wasn’t really that shaken though. My primary conclusion was that he was not interested in helping me. So I turned and started running in a different direction, where I came upon a street. At this point, I had at least a dozen people chasing me, including Whitney and her friends and several members of New Edition.

  I got to another house before the group could catch me. I pounded on the door. This time I was ready when another white man came to the door: I pulled out my gun and pointed it at him.

  “Excuse me, sir, I don’t mean no harm,” I said, though the gun probably told him something different.

  “There’s somebody down the street trying to kill me. And they’re gonna be here any second.”

  Staring at the gun, the man was surprisingly calm. “Sir, you need to call the police,” he said.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “Call the police.”

  Mind you, I had a pocket full of drugs, I was high as fuck and I was holding an unregistered handgun that I had just pulled on a random white man. In my drug haze, calling the police seemed like a good idea. Luckily the crowd, which included the incredibly famous Whitney Houston, arrived a few seconds later and convinced me to leave the poor white man alone and come away with them. But I still was taken by the idea that my wife wanted to see me die.

  “Get my wife and all the rest of them off my bus right now!” I yelled.

  Whitney and her crew rode to the next tour stop on Ricky Bell’s bus. By the time we got there, I was still high, but I had calmed down enough to talk to Whitney. We sat down and I just told her, “Baby, you gotta go.” I booked her a flight and the next day she and her girls were gone.

  New Edition did go out again for a second leg of the tour to make money, but Michael Bivins—who had a lot of other business going on, including his discovery of Boyz II Men—and I sat that one out.

  How High

  Much of the attention paid to me and Whitney over the years focused on drug use. It was the subject of most of the attacks and media criticism we endured. Before we got married, we smoked weed together and that was the extent of it. Then after I saw her doing cocaine on our wedding day, eventually that was added to our repertoire.

  “Michael, what’s going on?” I said when I first asked her brother about the coke. “She shouldn’t be doing that stuff. That’s some bad shit.”

  “Nah, that shit will make you feel right,” he said.

  The next time she offered it to me, I did it with her. I’m not particularly proud of this, but my defenses weren’t exactly strong at the time. I had been smoking weed now for several years, so it wasn’t hard to justify a step up to cocaine. With coke, if you keep dabbling, you’re going to get hooked. I didn’t like it right away, but pretty soon I noticed that it made me feel extra sexual. It had the same effect on her. We would do it when we would go out to a party; soon we’d be all over each other, and by the time we got home it was a wrap. We would have some mind-blowing sex—which would only make us eager to do more of the drug. A little later, Whitney’s brother introduc
ed us to smoking cocaine, which is called freebasing.

  When I was about thirty, around seven years into our marriage, the drugs almost killed me. I had been doing way too much. It was a prime example of the damage that can be caused when drug addicts have millions of dollars at their disposal. This one particular day I was trying to come down off a three-day high. I still had maybe an ounce of crack and an ounce of heroin left. I was on my way to the kitchen to cook more of the stuff. I was smoking a crack-laced joint and sniffing heroin while preparing to cook more crack. I didn’t want to be too high, just high enough. In addition I was drinking Courvoisier and beer. As I said, I was doing too much.

  All of a sudden, as I was walking back toward my drug den, I lost all control of my limbs. Everything. I just fell out onto the floor. Whitney thought I was playing.

  “Get the fuck up!” she barked in that snappy Whitney way. “Stop playin’!”

  She bent over and took the drugs out of my hands and started using them herself, while I was still splayed on the floor. It was just a fucked-up scene. Later on that night, when it was clear I wasn’t playing, they took me to the hospital, where they did some tests and determined that I had had a stroke. The doctors were amazed I wasn’t dead. With all the bullshit I was putting in my body, I probably came close to dying four or five times.

  Believe it or not, after I was released from the hospital and it was clear I hadn’t lost the use of my limbs, I went right back to the drugs. My motto at the time was, Fuck it! The drugs were living for me; I wasn’t living for myself.

  This is around the time when my jaw got all crooked and affected my entire mouth. At first we thought it was the drugs sending my mouth in opposite directions, but eventually we realized it was my wisdom teeth. I had two big-ass wisdom teeth that were fucking my whole face up. I couldn’t chew right and kept biting on the inside of my jaw. But I was so high all the time that I didn’t even realize what was happening.

  For some reason Whitney’s drug use got worse after Bobbi Kris was born. Maybe it was because she had to stop using all those months while she was pregnant, but she resumed with a vengeance. The way our house was built, we could stay in certain wings of the house far away from our daughter. We had a room that had an airtight lock on the door and we would lock ourselves away inside while the staff took care of Bobbi Kris. I was adamant that we never bring any of our shit anywhere near her. I was self-conscious about washing my hands all the time, all day long, washing my face, downing breath mints. I felt like it was my job to leave the room and go make sure Krissi was all right. I would try to keep Whitney locked in the room, telling her she shouldn’t come in front of our daughter because of the way the drugs affected her. But I couldn’t police Whitney; nobody could police Whitney. She did what she wanted.

  While I often get the blame for introducing drugs into our lives, I was the one who decided I’d gone too far and went to rehab to get my life together. But the problem was, when I came back home, clean, Whitney was still using. That made me really angry. So she would hide it from me. She’d leave home for days at a time so she could do drugs. It was a terrible situation. Unfortunately I’d slip back into the habit, this time even harder than before, because I couldn’t control her and I couldn’t control myself.

  Our daughter was growing up in the middle of all of this. She often saw her mother and father high, and was around the two of us when we were fucked up. We tried to keep it away from her, but it was hard for us to see her only when we were sober. How much quality time can you spend with your daughter when you’re high all the time? I would get really mad at Whitney, scream and yell that I wanted a divorce. This went on for years and years. Our daughter saw it all. When I think about it now, I just feel enormous pain. We failed her.

  When my son Landon lived with us for a while, I felt like I failed him too. He was there but I was a distant presence because of the traveling, the tours, the drugs. We had a second house on the property where my father and Landon stayed. That’s where my studio was. So even when I would go there, it would be at night when Landon was asleep because he had to go to school the next day. I saw how it was affecting him spending all his time around rich white kids. The first time I saw him play basketball, he was just terrible. I was like, “Dude, don’t ever do that shit again.” That hurts my heart right now to remember that. We have a closeness now, but at the same time I just wish that the drugs were never in my life and I could get back that time I missed with him, teach him how to play ball, talk to him about life. But instead Whitney and I would be locked in a room together for weeks, off in another world.

  After I got stuck on the stuff, I was stuck. When you have the kind of money we had, you didn’t even need to leave the house. I would call up one of my boys, a supplier, and I’d say, “Yo, put the shit in the mailbox. Put me three ounces in the mailbox, the money is in there.” I had an incident at the House of Blues during this time that illustrated my complete lack of self-awareness when I was high. Whitney and I were in the audience enjoying the magic of Maze and Frankie Beverly, swaying to their blockbuster hits, like “Before I Let Go.” Apparently word had gotten to Frankie that I was in the crowd, so they decided to call me up to the stage. This is an honor usually given to celebrities, so I wasn’t surprised. But for some reason Frankie and his boys decided that they would ask me to sing along to one of their songs. I don’t recall which song it was, but I do remember it was a ballad. However, it wasn’t one of their signature songs. I had heard the song before, but I didn’t know the words. I’m onstage in a packed nightclub and they gonna throw me a curveball like that, without checking with me first? I was pissed off. So I started making up my own words as I sang along. This didn’t please Frankie and the band; they decided to abruptly cut me off.

  “Thank you, Bobby Brown!” Frankie said, stepping on top of me.

  Even though I was high, I felt the sting of embarrassment. As I made my way offstage, I wanted to do something to get a quick bit of revenge: I walked past Frankie Beverly and snatched the baseball cap off his head. Frankie’s baseball cap was his signature wardrobe accessory. Taking off his hat was a big-time no-no. And Frankie was not happy.

  “Awww, man!” I heard him say off mic.

  He had embarrassed me, so my response was to embarrass his ass. Frankie moved toward me and I handed the hat back to him. I could see the displeasure on his face. I knew I had done something silly, but at the time I didn’t really care. I figured that’s what he deserved for calling me onstage to sing some song that wasn’t well known. It was presumptuous, and I didn’t handle it well.

  When I went to rehab the first time, I made an important discovery about myself: I have bipolar disorder. The counselors were listening to me talk about my mood swings and drug binges and told me they wanted to run some tests. Bipolar disorder, which is caused by brain imbalances, is characterized by unusually intense emotional states that are a drastic change from a person’s usual mood and behavior. The moods can veer from an overly joyful or overexcited state, called a manic episode, to an extremely sad or hopeless state, called a depressive episode. During an episode, people with bipolar disorder may be explosive and irritable or exhibit extreme changes in energy, activity, sleep, and behavior. I found out that substance abuse is very common among people with bipolar disorder because they try to manage their symptoms and find stability. I can definitely attest to that one. Even now, sometimes I forget to take my medicine and I’ll end up in a depressed stupor, sleeping on the couch all day. When that used to happen to me before, I would resort to drugs to make me feel better. The diagnosis was an incredible relief to me, explaining so much about the mood swings I’ve experienced throughout my entire life. I had sensed that something was wrong with me; I just figured I was crazy. I never imagined that there would be a pill I could take to make it go away.

  I saw just how disruptive Whitney’s fame could be when Whitney and I desperately tried to help save my sister Elizabeth (Bethy) when she was dying from lung cancer.
We had heard about the Black Israelites and the healing medicines and magic they possessed, so Whitney and I brought Bethy over to Israel in a last-ditch effort to help her heal.

  But instead of focusing on my sister and her needs, these guys turned out to be charlatans who only seemed to care about spending time with the rich and famous Whitney Houston. They told us that a baptism in the Jordan River could be a powerful start to her healing. So Bethy and I held hands and dunked ourselves in the dirty, murky Jordan for a good forty seconds. It was a beautiful, spiritual moment for us—until we emerged from the water and saw that Whitney had gone off with the Israelites, who no longer seemed to care anything about Bethy. Instead of giving her healing medicines, they told us to have her eat vegan food. That was about it. I was incensed. I was desperate for anything that I thought might save her, and it broke my heart to see these supposed healers playing the fame game. We lost Bethy on June 21, 2003.

  A FEW WORDS FROM LEOLAH BROWN

  Over time, Whitney and I became close confidants. We had plenty of secrets we shared. She told me many things that she’d never told anybody before, things she needed to get off her chest. Whitney was very private; she kept things very close to the vest. But I saw how the people around her sometimes did things that really hurt her.

  There was one image that I’ll never forget. It happened one day when I was working as her assistant and we were about to go shopping and get our nails done. Whitney needed some cash. I pulled the car into the parking lot of that bank on the corner of Piedmont and Peachtree in Atlanta—the one with all the windows. I even parked in a handicapped spot because she said it was only going to take a second. After a while, I wondered why it was taking her so long to come out. When I walked into the bank, I saw a scene that will stay with me forever. Whitney was standing in the middle of the bank, talking real loud with her hands waving in the air. And people were staring at her with their mouths hanging open. Luckily we didn’t have cell phone videos at the time.