Every Little Step

by Bobby Brown

  After she went to California with her mother, I went out there to spend time with her. My dad was with Alicia at this point, so Alicia was the one who dropped me off at the hotel where Krissi was with Whitney. That’s when I met Nick Gordon for the first time. He was there with Krissi, Whitney and one of Krissi’s friends. They introduced him to me as one of Krissi’s friends. He looked a lot older than Krissi; I asked her how old he was. She replied that he was older than me, which I thought was strange. I remember wondering why she was hanging out with a guy with a mustache and beard who looked like a grown man. At some point we went shopping at a boutique, but Whitney didn’t go with us. When we returned to the hotel, things got real strange. They all started smoking pot together—Nick, Krissi, the other teenager and Whitney. Yes, she was smoking with them. I started to feel super uncomfortable, so I called Alicia to come get me. When she picked me up and I got in the car, I started bawling my eyes out. I don’t even think I was very close with Alicia yet, but I told her what I saw there. She was trying to console me. I never told my dad about what I saw that day.

  As I tried to communicate with Krissi about what was going on with Whitney, at one point I realized Krissi was being told that I was out there cheating on her mother and that’s why we broke up. In trying to defend myself, I told her about the relationship her mother was having with Ray J, the younger brother of the singer Brandy who became famous from his sex tape with Kim Kardashian.

  “Your mother is cheating on me with Ray J actually,” I told her. “If you think I’m doing something wrong, I’m not.”

  “No, he’s her friend,” Krissi said back to me. “He’s just her friend.”

  It might have been wrong to throw something like that in the face of a fourteen-year-old, but I was desperate to defend myself and redeem my standing in my daughter’s eyes. I couldn’t have my daughter looking at me like I had been the one who destroyed her family, when I knew the truth.

  When things began to heat up with Alicia, my meetings with Whitney got even weirder. I think she was still intent on our getting back together, but I knew I had moved on. I was just focused on my daughter. I was feeling like I was missing some of the most crucial years of her upbringing, when she was becoming a teenager, with her own views of the world and a growing sense of her independence. As it turns out, I was missing a whole lot because this is when that guy Nick Gordon started coming around, though I knew nothing about him. But I’ll get into him more later.

  I can’t say enough about how thankful I am for the role that Alicia played during this time in my life. She was extremely understanding about what was happening with Whitney and Krissi and she continued to encourage me to stay as close to Krissi as I could. Her own parents had gotten divorced when she was a teenager, so she was sensitive to how difficult the ordeal was for Krissi.

  We started out with my sleeping in a rental car in Alicia’s driveway, then she let me come into the house. At some point, but not right away, sparks began to fly. After all, it had been the clichéd love at first sight for me when I first saw her nearly fifteen years earlier when she was a teenager, but she didn’t like me in the same way back then. She was just seventeen and not ready for the big celebrity trip. Now I had gotten another chance.

  Eventually it occurred to me: I was in love again. It was so very special between us. Alicia had become my best friend, my rock. She understood exactly what I had gone through, saw me pick myself up from the dirt—when I had no reason to be in the dirt in the first place. I was down because I felt I had lost the love of my life. Eventually I realized I was meant to lose that in order to gain what I have now: love, respect and honor from a woman.

  A FEW WORDS FROM ALICIA ETHEREDGE BROWN

  Over the years after he got married to Whitney, I ran into Bobby on a few occasions and I usually came away pretty worried about him. The first time was when I was still studying at Howard University. I was at a club in DC called the Ritz with a friend. The club was packed, sweaty. Bobby was up on the stage with the DJ and they acknowledged that he was there. He wasn’t with his wife. My friend knew I was friends with Bobby, so she suggested I go say hi to him. My friend took me back to where Bobby was. He didn’t see us come up, so I touched him from behind. When he turned around, I said, “Bobby!”

  He looked at me in a fog, obviously high out of his mind. I had never really seen him look like this. He stared at me with no idea who I was, like I was a ghost. I tried again.

  “Hi!” I said.

  I really was happy to see him. I hadn’t seen him since his wedding and I considered him to be a good friend. But I was kind of in shock from what I saw. That’s when I knew he wasn’t doing well. It took him a minute, but he eventually recognized me. When he wasn’t reacting to me, I was like, Are you kidding me? But when he realized who it was, his demeanor changed right away.

  “Oh my God, Alicia!” he said, giving me a hug. But I was very sad. This was in 1996, about three years into his marriage.

  In 2000, my friend Tiffany Washington suddenly passed away at the young age of twenty-five. In the midst of my extreme grief, I tried to track down Bobby to let him know, since Tiffany had been his friend too. She was the one who stole her parents’ invitation to Bobby and Whitney’s wedding and took me with her. But Bobby was in jail at the time so I couldn’t reach him.

  I remember watching Michael Jackson’s thirtieth-anniversary special at Madison Square Garden in 2001 and being stunned when I saw Whitney and Bobby. She looked so bad, so skinny. I thought, Oh my God, what are they doing?

  One night a few years later I was at the bar at the Mondrian hotel on Sunset Boulevard having drinks with some friends. Sunset was an infamous spot for me when I was younger. For Bobby too. We would hang out at the clubs and bars all up and down the strip back then. One of my friends, Carrie, said she heard Frankie Beverly and Maze were playing at the House of Blues, which was right across the street. We both decided we would like to go over there and see if we could get a glimpse of anything. I’m sure at the time we were pretty tipsy. So we ran across the street to peek in, see if we could get into the Foundation Room, a more intimate bar/lounge inside the venue. There was a side door in the back of the club that someone had cracked open. We walked over to the door.

  “Are you going in?” I asked.

  The woman at the door turned around and it happened to be Louanna Rawls, Lou Rawls’s daughter. When she turned around to look at me, she had tears in her eyes.

  “What’s going on? Are you okay, Louanna?” I asked. I was thinking maybe she was a little drunk, but quickly I realized it was more than that. She was staring through the door. Bobby and Whitney were inside, apparently looking extremely high.

  “Bobby’s in there with his wife,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Bobby,” she repeated. “Bobby and Whitney.”

  “Oh, are they?” I said. “But what’s wrong?”

  “He’s a fuckin’ asshole!” she said. Now she was bawling as she walked off.

  “Okay, honey, get home safe,” I said as I watched her walk away. But in my head I was thinking, What the fuck was that? I found out from Bobby later on that he had stayed with Louanna for a while in LA during one of the times when he and Whitney were fighting. It probably had happened not very long before that night. It was all very weird and disconcerting for me. He later told me that was the night when he took off Frankie Beverly’s hat. All I could say was, “You took off his hat? Who does that?”

  I watched him on the TV show Being Bobby Brown, and I really enjoyed it because it was like I was seeing my funny, crazy old friend on the screen. I would watch it sometimes when I was around other people and I would hear their negative comments, mostly blaming him, saying he had made Whitney the way she appeared on the show. But I would tell them he was just being himself. I didn’t know her at all, but as I was watching him do things like not being able to get his shoe off his foot because the laces were stuck, I felt like I was seeing my old friend again and it
was good—because the last time I had seen him he’d looked really bad. Now he seemed like his old self.

  The next time I saw him was a few years after the House of Blues, when he performed at the Greek in 2006. It was a summer concert series so there were a bunch of different acts performing, including Bobby and Damian Marley. They had just recorded a song together, “Beautiful.” When he came out to perform that song, he looked great onstage with Damian. I was jumping up and down so hard when Damian was waving the Jamaican flag that the heel on my stiletto broke. After the show we were hoping to see him, so my friend and I went backstage. Guy also performed, so Teddy Riley was down the hall in another room. I went to see him, his girlfriend and their new son. We were waiting in Teddy’s room when finally Bobby opened the door. Superhead—a.k.a. Karrine Steffans—was with him in the dressing room. I was taken aback. Luckily I held in the gasp that must have been close to my lips.

  My first reaction was to apologize for disturbing them, but I truly was happy to see Bobby. When we went into his dressing room, he called me “Britney,” teasing me about my shoes and how ridiculous I looked barefoot. A bunch of other people came in the dressing room. We told him we had to leave because we had other friends waiting for us.

  “Hey, give me your number,” he said.

  “Where are you now?” I asked him.

  “I’m out here in the Valley,” he said.

  “No way! I just bought a house in the Valley,” I said.

  “Yeah, I live right up White Oak,” he said.

  “No way—my house is right up White Oak!” I said. When I told him my address, he said, “Yep, I’m two blocks down. That’s crazy! It’s so good to see you.”

  A few days later, Bobby called me. And that’s when this thing officially began. He said he was living in LA with his brother and Pops and he wanted to hang out with me. So I went up the street to where he was staying at this big house on the hill owned by a guy named Sal Vincent, a music industry type. We all went out to eat—his brother, his dad, Bobby and me.

  At that time in my life I had just bought a house, where I lived with my dog, and I was doing artist management, traveling quite a bit working with artists like Macy Gray. I had worked for several labels earlier in my career, but I decided I liked the artist management side. It’s way more personal and a natural fit for me: I can talk to people, they trust me, I have a little bit of sense, and I also like to collaborate on the music side of things.

  At first it was just me and Bobby working together. He was asking me to help him out, which was natural. I thought he was an unbelievable artist. If I could help him in any way do what he needed to do to get back, I would. What I love about what I do is being passionate about the artists I work with. I need that if I’m going to spend all my hours with them.

  I was in my early thirties and had traveled the world and done a lot of crazy things, sown my wild oats, so to speak. So I was coming into that phase of my life where I was definitely thinking about being in a long-term relationship. I was thinking about kids more and starting to consider maybe doing it by myself. By this time most of my friends had been married or had kids.

  I started looking into Bobby’s situation and saw he and his family were living in this house up the hill with this guy because he had a recording studio. The whole idea was that Sal Vincent had Bobby come out here to record some music. So I came around and started asking questions, trying to protect my brother. That’s how I’ve always been with Bobby. Bobby was also shooting this movie, playing an old man. I can’t even remember the name of the film now, but Bobby was uncomfortable with the terms and wanted me to take a look. He hadn’t yet signed anything, but he desperately needed to make some paper.

  He told me he had left Whitney and moved to LA. But I knew Whitney was also in LA. I was trying to figure out what was really going on. They were all just squatting in this house. They gave Pops the bedroom and Bobby and his brother were sleeping on the couch. All of Bobby’s clothes were in black trash bags. This was not a good situation at all. He was trying to do his best, but he was really sad, really depressed. He explained to me he hadn’t been doing anything for a very long time, but he was ready to get on again.

  During this time, I felt like I wanted to be there for my friend. I still didn’t know the full story yet of what had happened between him and Whitney, but I was feeling protective and hopeful about getting him to a better place. Over the next several months Bobby was trying to see me and stay at my place as much as possible. I understood that he was trying to escape his situation, but I had to tell him, “This is where I live. When I go to work, you have to go home.”

  During this whole time Bobby, his brother and Pops were going house hunting almost daily because the guy they were staying with said he would help them find their own place. But it was taking way too long. I started getting suspicious.

  I loaned him my car a couple times to go see his daughter Krissi. He was always talking about going to see them. Early on, things were very pleasant between him and Krissi; she would be happy to see him. I got the sense that he was unsure what he wanted to do. I told him, “Listen, if you have an ounce of wanting to fight for this situation, if you want to be with her, it’s worth it.”

  He hadn’t yet told me of all the horrors in his marriage, but he was miserable without his daughter. Having been a daughter whose parents went through a difficult divorce, I was telling him, “No matter what you and Whitney are going through, just show up for her.” There were days when he was a sobbing mess, talking about how much he missed his child. You never want to see your friend go through that.

  I introduced him to this guy who rented him a Benz for thirty days, so he had this little Benz he was driving around in and that’s the car he slept in in my driveway. There was still nothing going on between us, but I was starting to ask, Why is he back in my life? Let me just say this was not a man who was in an attractive situation for me. He wasn’t in any shape to be in a relationship with me. And I wasn’t interested in that from him.

  It took maybe a year of being around each other, him sleeping on my couch, going through his divorce, actually moving into my house, before anything happened between us. How did the romance start? It was just a process of us growing closer, sharing intimate things. I just realized I loved him and adored him. It grew on me. There was a point where we asked ourselves, “Are we really going to do this?”

  He’s very charming and very sweet; he’s always been that way. I think I put Bobby in the “brother” box early on. It’s not that I didn’t like him. Even though I’ve said he wasn’t my type, it was more that I didn’t think he was ready for me. But watching Bobby go through the process of ending his relationship with Whitney, and his fighting to be a better person, I grew to love him again and in a different way. He makes you feel like you’re the only person who matters. And he was willing to do anything to get himself to a place where I would consider being with him. It’s like being open to a new level with an old friend you always loved. It was magical.

  That’s not to say it was easy. There was a whole lot of baggage there—the drugs, the drinking, the tabloids. We went through quite a lot of struggle. It was scary too. But at a certain point it didn’t matter because I was in love.

  When you’re with Bobby, you’re never going to get stable. I was never convinced things would be stable. I was never thinking, Yeah I’m going to settle down and have kids with Bobby. He’s always been exactly who he is: crazy, loving, persistent, passionate. Never boring. I realize now that was what was attractive to me. I wanted him to be in a better place and I was willing to take care of him. At some point it was like I got swept off my feet. He worked really hard to show me he wanted to be with me, wanted to be better. He was constantly working on himself. That was interesting to me.

  One day in the middle of all this, my phone rang. It was a girl named DeeDee on the other line. She was an old friend of mine who also was friends with Bobby. She started in with what sounded like smal
l talk, but then she started asking me about Bobby.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “When have you seen him?”

  “Where is he staying?”

  I was taken aback by all the questions.

  “Wait, why are you asking me these questions?” I asked her.

  But then I heard Whitney’s unmistakable voice. “Does she know I’m on the phone?”

  I realized that DeeDee had called me to ask questions about Bobby while she had Whitney listening in on a three-way call, like seventh grade. It was so bizarre. Then DeeDee said, “Nippy, calm down. So, Alicia, listen, Whitney’s on the phone.”

  I had a few things to say to Whitney: “First of all, you’re here questioning me. I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t know you. You don’t know me. Your husband and I are friends. But I don’t have any information to give you about him.”

  Whitney kept talking like she couldn’t hear me but she could hear the other girl. So I tried again: “DeeDee, I can’t believe you called me with her on the phone.”

  Then to Whitney: “I know your husband. He’s just a friend, and I’m just trying to help my friend out. If you want to talk to him, you guys need to have your conversation. I’m out of this.”

  All things considered, I believe I was pretty polite. I immediately called Bobby, going off on him.

  “I fuckin’ can’t believe this! Your ex-wife was just on the phone calling me. I don’t want a part in any of this shit!”

  Bobby was stunned.

  So I slowed down and explained to him what had just happened. “This is too weird. You gotta handle your shit,” I said.

  At first when Bobby finally got the divorce papers, he said, “I just need to fight so I can see my daughter.”

  I noticed that things seemed like they had started to change with him and Krissi around this time. Whenever he went to see her he always came home very distraught. Or he’d tell me there was a fight, there was a scene. I would tell him that wasn’t good, that when his daughter was there he and Whitney needed to keep it together.