Every Little Step: My Story (20 page)

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 small 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.

“I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “It’s just not worth it. Whitney’s messed up. I can’t help her anymore. I need my daughter out of that scenario. I want to see her regularly.”

In February my friend Djata and I went with Bobby to Boston. We were all excited because we were going to his daughter LaPrincia’s cheerleading competition. We drove to Kim’s house, and when we got there, Kim gave us the address. LaPrincia had already left, but Kim told us, “She knows you’re coming.”

So we drove way out somewhere in Massachusetts. It was freezing, icy, and pitch-black. When we got out of the car, Bobby was elated to see LaPrincia. But as we were about to walk into the place, up rolled undercover officers and they arrested him right there on the spot for child support. Was it a Kim setup? Absolutely. It just seemed so cruel. That was so spooky for me. He was obviously upset. I was frightened, freaked out, panicked. I stayed there in Boston until he got out, maybe three or four days later. Most of that time I was on the phone with his lawyer. I didn’t understand.
You owe her
money, but how can they just arrest you like that?
I was not used to this weird relationship Bobby and Kim have. This was jail we’re talking about, which to me was traumatizing. I was really shaken up. That was a big wake-up for me—
What the hell am I in for?

But we stayed the course. Bobby began working more. After we got home, I took over sending out the child support payments. I started to manage his life in the way that I did for all my clients. It had been a long time since he had that because in his marriage everything was focused on Whitney. Artists are very interesting people in what they decide to take care of and what they don’t. They do expect somebody to take care of a lot of the mundane details. If you’re a good manager, you build the teams around the artists that will help them manage their lives. It definitely helped with Bobby that I understood the mind-set of the artist. With a lot of this stuff, a regular wife would be like,
Oh hell no
.
But I think this is definitely a part of why it works between us. It’s an incredible help to us that I’ve worked with artists all these years. I accept that part of him and understand who he is.

One of the most enjoyable developments in my life after I moved back to Los Angeles was the opportunity to grow extremely close to my father. Over the years our relationship had changed dramatically as I got older. We began to understand each other and see how much we were actually alike.

Admittedly things were a bit rough between us when I was younger. By the age of fourteen I had become the family’s main breadwinner, in a sense displacing my father before I was even old enough to shave. He didn’t look on this development with fondness. He was a proud man with very strong ideas about how a family is supposed to work. A teenager being the family’s main financial benefactor was not the proper order of things to my dad. I think he carried a grudge against me for quite a few years after my career took off and the big dough was rolling in.

For my part, somewhere in the back of my mind I think I still blamed my father for allowing me to get molested by the priest back in Boston. Not to get all Freudian, but I suppose I saw it as a father’s job to prevent that sort of thing from happening to a young child; they’re supposed to protect us, aren’t they?

I was raised in a household surrounded by a multitude of women; it always seemed like they were the ones who loomed large and in charge in my mind. When a male authority figure finally did step into my life in a meaningful way, it was my brother, Tommy, not my dad.

Somewhere along the way, time gave my father the opportunity to understand that my career was a profound blessing for the entire family, not some sort of judgment on his masculinity. Considering the plight of so many of my male contemporaries in Orchard Park—in prison or in a grave—it was clear that I was lucky to have made it out in one piece. In fact, my success allowed all of us to make it out.

So when I got the news that my father had been struck by the big C—lung cancer—I was devastated. He had stopped smoking more than thirty years earlier—how could this happen? Just as we were becoming best friends, I was faced with the possibility that he could now be taken away. He was a strong mule of a man, a former construction worker who wasn’t afraid of anything. But now we would have to step into that world of hospitals, doctors and debilitating health issues. In what seemed like a cruel act of fate, in the same
week I found out about my father’s cancer, Alicia discovered that her father, Henry, also had cancer—his of the prostate. We were fortunate that we were there to comfort each other, but I was not looking forward to the coming months and sitting by my father’s side as he fought off this horrible disease. While Alicia’s father was lucky the prostate cancer was caught early, in stage 1, my father was already at stage 3.

I knew my family had some unpleasant months ahead of us—but I had no idea how truly horrible it would all turn out to be.

Alicia was helping me get more gigs now, so I was pleased to be working regularly, bringing in some cash. I realized how much I’d missed the stage. I had spent my whole life training to conquer that stage, to stalk it like a beast—and then I had just walked away from it for the better part of a decade. When I was back up there performing, it was like I had flipped a switch and reignited an essential part of myself. I realized I wasn’t whole, I could never be totally happy, if music and performing weren’t in some way closely connected to my life.

Whenever I got some cash in my pocket, the first thing I thought about was the well-being of my father. I was able to get an apartment for him and Tommy. I needed to make sure his apartment was well stocked with food, that his medicine was right, that he had everything he needed. Luckily he was a vet, so his medical needs were taken care of through the VA.

After Alicia and I got together, I had already started hear
ing rumblings from my mother in Atlanta that she wanted to relocate to Los Angeles. With me, Tommy and my father in LA full-time, I think she was feeling like she was too far away from the action. But when she heard about Pop’s cancer, it was set: Ma was moving back to LA.

“I’m coming out to be with him,” Ma told me over the phone. I wasn’t even sure I had heard her correctly. After all, it had been years since they had lived in the same house, even though they had never divorced.

“I need to get there,” she said.

When Carole Brown made such a declaration, the matter was done. I told Alicia the news. She had never seen my parents living under the same roof, so she was a bit confused.

“Wait, your mom is actually moving out here?” she asked me.

“Yeah, we have to move her out here,” I said.

I got back a puzzled look.

Even though the two of them had been living apart for many years, there was still a great deal of affection between them. So, we got my dad a two-bedroom house so that he would have room for his wife; Carole Brown moved across the continent, back to a place she had moved away from more than fifteen years earlier when we all went to Atlanta.

My mother was still a strong woman, but she had also started to slow down and experience health issues at this point. Because of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), she now required an oxygen tank to help her
breathe. All those years of smoking had caught up to her too. And she was moving a lot slower. But she was ready to help care for her husband, despite her own challenges.

I was happy that my mother was in Los Angeles when my son Cassius was born. She was a strong presence for Alicia when she went to a doctor’s appointment on a Friday and was shocked to learn that she had to have an emergency C-section that day instead of waiting until the following Tuesday, when they had planned to induce labor. The doctors told Alicia they were bringing her across the street to take the baby out of her belly in forty-five minutes. It was the first doctor’s appointment during her entire pregnancy that I had missed and it turned out to be the most important. I was out with my brother when Alicia got that news and for some reason I didn’t have my phone with me. So she started calling everybody. My mom was there to help her, as well as Alicia’s sister, Kim. My mother finally reached Tommy and me and we hauled ass to the hospital. I was walking into the hospital just as Cassius was being born. Everybody was there with us—my mom and dad; Alicia’s mom and dad; my sister Carol and brother, Tommy; Alicia’s sister, Kim. It was a glorious day for both the Brown and Etheredge families.

Over the next year or so, my dad was getting progressively worse. He was in and out of the hospital, slowing down, getting weaker. I was still convinced he was going to beat the disease. I mean, this was Pops, one of the strongest cats I knew. How could he not beat cancer? He was still en
tertaining us with his sense of humor, always quick to crack a joke to keep everybody in stitches. As long as he kept us laughing, I was convinced everything would be fine.

But Mom was showing some signs that had me concerned. She was less interested in going out, being social. She even stopped going to church, which was not a positive sign at all. Alicia would bring her clothes and try to get her out of the house, but my mom would be content to stay inside, staring at the television. I think she was also depressed about my father’s deteriorating health. She came to Cashy’s first birthday party in May 2010 and she was in good spirits that day. She was happy, beaming, enjoying the antics of her hilarious one-year-old grandson. It’s the last visual image I have of her being out in public and enjoying herself.

Later that year we bought her a set of fancy cooking pots because she said she wanted Tommy to cook some fancy dishes for her and my dad in the house where the three of them were living together. She was even teaching Alicia how to make her famous mac and cheese—one of the delicious dishes that used to bring a steady stream of neighbors to our door back in Orchard Park. I was feeling that vague sense of dread that you constantly carry around with you deep down in the pit of your stomach when your parents are starting to get sickly. It means that your world is never perfect; there’s always something amiss in your spirit. But I was trying to stay hopeful. While my mother’s decline was a bit unsettling, it was my father who drew nearly all of our concern. He was not
getting better; he was not beating it. He had too many stays in the hospital. A part of me knew it was just a matter of time, but I didn’t want to face that reality. So I kept telling myself and everybody else that he was going to be fine.

Then one night at about ten, I got a call from Tommy. He told me I needed to come to the hospital, quickly. He wouldn’t give me any more news, but he sounded upset.

“We have to go to the hospital,” I told Alicia when I hung up the phone.

I saw the stricken look on her face. “Oh my God, Pops?” she asked.

I shrugged, trying to fight off the dread that was threatening to wash over me.

We got in the car and rushed to a hospital in the Valley that was nearby. There wasn’t much traffic so luckily it didn’t take long. I was desperately trying to hold it together, but as we got closer I was getting increasingly more frantic. Alicia was driving, since I didn’t have a license. Because I had struggled with DUIs, I was no longer allowed to drive.

“My brother didn’t sound good,” I said to her. “I can’t believe this is happening to my dad. It’s so fuckin’ crazy.”

When we arrived, we saw Tommy waiting for us in the parking lot. My sister Carol was with him, as well as Tommy’s son, Tommy Jr. We got out of the car and rushed over to them. Tommy motioned for me to follow him as he walked away from the hospital, which I thought was odd.

“Bobby, she’s gone,” he said. “She’s gone.”

I thought I had misheard him. Did he say “
She’s
gone”?

“What do you mean,
she’s
gone?” I said. “Who the hell is
she
? Where’s Pops?”

Tommy turned to me with an incredibly sad look on his face, like he was fighting back tears.

“Ma’s gone,” he said.

It hit me like a fuckin’ horse kicking me in the head. I felt myself drowning, grasping. I think I fell into Tommy’s arms, sobbing. It was a total shock to my system. I had just assumed I was rushing to the hospital to see my dad. Now he was telling me that my mother was dead. Gone.

Tommy and I stood there in the parking lot holding on to each other tightly, crying, unable to come to terms with the unbelievable, unexpected loss. His son Tommy Jr. started explaining to Alicia what had happened. Through my grief, I was able to follow along: Tommy had made dinner for her earlier that night, something fancy that he had gotten her excited about trying. He brought it to her in the bedroom, setting her up in front of the television. She took her medicine and started eating as she stared at the television, watching one of her favorite shows. Tommy went back into the living room, where he was watching television with Pops. A few minutes later he heard Ma start coughing, almost like she was choking on something. When Tommy ran back into the bedroom, she was keeled over, facedown in her food. She had had a massive heart attack. She died on January 20, 2011, at age sixty-nine.

Anyone who has lost a mother knows how massive the
pain is, the hole that is torn in your heart. My mother was my rock, the dominant presence I knew was always out there somewhere thinking about me, caring for me, watching over me no matter what craziness was going on in my life. No one’s love is as perfect, as unconditional, as all-consuming, as a mother’s. Carole Brown made it her job in life to do all she could to make sure everything was all right in Bobby Brown’s world. She was a strong presence there at the start of my career, and she was an important adviser to me even after I had grown so big that I needed a whole team to watch over my interests. I had no idea how I would be able to even function without knowing she was within reach.

After I got Tommy’s news, I had to see my mom myself, to touch her, to say good-bye. We walked into the hospital and they led us to her room. She had a peaceful look on her face, like she was sleeping. Her lovely hair was down, her graying waves spread out around her head. I went up and took hold of her hand. I bent over and kissed her face, her cheeks, her forehead. I reached down and rubbed her head, stroking her hair, trying to store as many memories as I could of these last moments, wanting to remember everything. I was crying the whole time, but I don’t even remember that. I felt like I was floating in some horrible dream, aware of being in the room and having people around me, but not totally conscious either.

We stayed in that room with her for at least forty-five minutes, not wanting to let go. Her body was still warm to the touch, tricking us into entertaining the thought that
maybe she wasn’t gone. Carole’s children sobbed for her—me, Tommy and Carol—refusing to accept the monumental loss. Pops had stayed home when the ambulance came to get her. He didn’t want to be there to participate in the mourning. He stayed home and mourned on his own.

The next few weeks were a dizzying procession of painful decisions and heart-wrenching memorials. We planned a viewing for her in Los Angeles, then wanted to have her funeral and burial in Boston. We had to pick a casket, arrange travel for the body, choose the clothes she would wear, put together a program, write an obituary, plus handle a million other tiny details. If you’ve planned a funeral, you know what I’m talking about. I was so fortunate to have Alicia by my side, taking care of everything I couldn’t. She and my sister Carol actually consulted with a stylist to choose Ma’s outfit and they collaborated on creating the program. In addition, we had relatives calling from all over, looking for me to help them travel to Boston and put them up in a hotel. My sister Carol was in communication with Whitney, who said she wanted to attend the funeral. At first she said she would like to sing, then she told Carol she’d changed her mind. We weren’t sure whether we should include her on the program. It went back and forth several times and I grew frustrated. “Listen, none of this is necessary,” I told Carol. “Just her being there is fine. It’s enough.”

I was still outraged by some of the things Whitney had said to Oprah on national television a year or so earlier. She had painted a picture of me as this mean, nasty, spiteful guy
who abused and terrorized her, while she was a fragile, innocent victim. I was amazed at how I became the aggressive wild-eyed drug abuser in every one of her stories, spending her money on other women, cheating and spitting on her in front of my daughter. I had stopped using drugs years before we split up while she was still heavy into the drug use. As for the cheating, as I’ve noted, she was just as guilty as I was. And though she portrayed me as neglecting our daughter by continually failing to visit her, the reality was that she constantly acted to keep Krissi away from me. She kept telling Oprah that some of the things she was saying were going to make me mad—well, hell yeah, because she wasn’t telling the truth.