Every Little Step: My Story (14 page)

“How are you doing, Dad?” I asked, excited to be talking to him.

“How the fuck you think I’m doing, I’m in jail!” he responded.

I was always very sensitive, so I started crying. Whitney had me lie down with her and she started rubbing my head.

“It’s okay, baby,” she said to me. “He’s just frustrated.”

She was pep-talking me out of my tears. That’s when it hit me—with all the people talking in town, all the media and newspaper reports about my father’s behavior, I understood. People don’t get that he’s human; he has to deal with human things. The world wants him to be crazy, they like when he acts that way, but at some point it’s just too much for him to handle. It was the same with their relationship. Everybody wanted to know about their relationship, but with a lack of privacy and
way
too much attention, a relationship is stressful.

In September 1995, when I was twenty-six, I went up to Boston to visit family and friends. I stayed in a hotel near where Kim lived with LaPrincia and Bobby Jr. I spent as much time as I could with my kids. But at night I hung out with my boys, driving around town in my cream-colored Bentley Azure, which had been a gift from Whitney. One night we went to a little spot called the Biarritz that was owned by some police officers, so cops hung out there all the time. One of my dudes was Steven Sealy, who was actually engaged to marry my sister Carol.

We all walked into the joint and assumed that the whole group had made it inside. Little did we know that Sealy was being held outside because he didn’t have the proper ID or something minor like that. Sealy reacted by beating up the cop who wouldn’t let him in.
Boom boom boom,
he hit the guy
at the door and fucked him up. We heard the commotion and so we went back outside. Sealy was talking a gang of shit.

We grabbed our friend, got out of there in a hurry and went back to a friend’s house, got high and drunk together, and all fell asleep.

I had been hearing about this nasty gang war that had been going on in Roxbury. Most disturbing, it was taking place between guys who were all from Orchard Park. That really upset me; these guys were not supposed to be fighting and killing each other. So I told my people to get them all together so that we could have a gang summit of sorts and try to bring an end to the bloodshed. A couple nights later we went back to that same cop club to hold our summit. It was a beautiful gathering. I gave them a little speech. Not exactly MLK, but it got the job done—or so I thought.

“This is Bean, nigga. Boston. We supposed to be together; we ain’t supposed to be fighting each other. Y’all from OP? We used to fight other fuckin’ projects. This is some bullshit—we can’t kill each other, man.”

Everybody agreed with me, we all toasted, everything was good. We commenced to partying in the spot and everybody had a great time. As we were leaving, my cousin started arguing with me because he wanted to sit in the passenger seat of the Azure, which I was about to settle into.

“Dude, really?” I said. “Just get in the back and let’s go.”

As I’m getting out of the car to let my cousin into the backseat, Sealy leaned over to me and handed me a gun.

“Hold on to this,” he said. “Some shit might pop off.”

“What?” I said as I took it from him.

As I got back into the car, I heard
pow pow pow
. Somebody had come up right next to the car and started shooting. I ducked down into the seat and realized that Sealy had been shot in the head. The gunshots were still slamming into the Bentley and my mind was in overdrive. I crawled into the area under the steering wheel next to the gas pedal and the brakes.
Pow pow.
More bullets hitting the car. I pulled Sealy down on top of me, out of the line of fire. But he was already gone. I moved up enough to see out of the windshield. I cocked the gun he had given me, looking out to see if I could find the shooter. I saw the shooter—he was an old friend of mine from OP! I could see him straining to figure out where I was. More bullets whizzed by the steering wheel. Clearly, I was the target.

I decided I needed to get out of the car. If he was gunning for me, I was too easy a target inside the vehicle. So I rolled out of the passenger door and crouched next to the car. My cousin and another friend were still hunched down in the backseat. I immediately felt pain. Turns out a bullet had just grazed me. I still have that scar.

I waited until I heard the guns click, meaning they were out of ammo. I took off running, turning and firing behind me as I ran to make sure they couldn’t return fire. When I was convinced I was out of danger, I tossed the gun toward a fire station.

Sealy was brought to Boston City Hospital. He had been shot several times in the head. I stayed at his bedside the whole time, praying he would wake up. But he was gone. The newspaper stories reported that I stomped around after the shooting, punching walls and shouting, “They got my boy!” Police also said I talked to them right after the shooting, but I have no recollection of that conversation.

My sister Carol was devastated—and she blamed me. She didn’t speak to me for many years after that. It was upsetting to me because we had always been so close. But at the same time, I knew his death wasn’t my fault. I understood her pain, but I was trying to bring these guys together and stop the violence. I had great intentions, but the result was horrible. A dude named John Tibbs was eventually convicted for Sealy’s murder. Carol only started talking to me again a few years ago; now we speak at least a few times a month.

Home Again

When the guys in New Edition started making noise in 1995 about having me rejoin the group for its next album and tour, I was ready to get out of the house. Krissi was about two and I had spent the last couple of years at home as a father and husband and also managing Whitney’s affairs. I had gotten the break from performing and traveling that I had been looking for; now I was ready to get back out there.

It had been a decade since I walked away from New Edi
tion. The only group member I’d kept in contact with over the ensuing years was Ralph Tresvant. He and I remained close as ever, but I didn’t speak to Mike, Ronnie or Ricky for many years after the breakup. I admit that I still held on to quite a bit of animosity. After all, they had allowed management—in fact, the same people who were managing me for my solo career—to talk them into voting me out of my own group, the group I started. That didn’t go down easy for me, so I was pissed off for a long time.

But over the years my bitterness had subsided. I started to ask myself,
What the fuck am I mad about?
I had gone on to a hugely successful, groundbreaking solo career. I was married to one of the most beautiful, talented artists in the world. I had an adorable baby girl and three other wonderful kids. Life was looking real good for me.

The members of New Edition couldn’t deny my success, so they granted me the respect I hoped for when we came back together. So many years had passed that the tensions were mostly gone. We were grown men now, so we had developed maturity and perspective. As for me, I didn’t need the reunion. I didn’t need money, and I certainly didn’t need any more fame or notoriety. I was happy to get back out on the road with my old friends.

Right away, when we started talking about money I was brought back to the early days of New Edition. The first thing I heard was that the tour would have thirty dates—but the group members weren’t going to make any money. We
would have to do a second leg of the tour in order to clear any money. My brother, Tommy, and I thought that was absurd. This tour was going to be a major event, just like the album release. The
Home Again
album sold 441,000 copies in its first week, debuting at number one on the
Billboard
charts. It eventually would sell more than two million, demonstrating that there was tremendous fan interest in our reunion. But yet, the performers on the tour wouldn’t make any money?

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.