Every Little Step: My Story (16 page)

I was amazed by some of the incredible things I would see my brother do when I was around him. People really just don’t understand how big his heart is. Bobby would walk around with a checkbook and write checks for anybody who was in need. There are many people who wouldn’t have finished college without him. Young people, even strangers, would walk up to him sometimes with stories about how their parents didn’t have the money this month for their tuition. Bobby would ask how much and write them a check. He’s paid people’s rent; he’s paid for people’s funerals. He would never ask questions or ask for proof. And the public would never hear about any of it. It didn’t matter if you were white, black—he didn’t care.

One time in Atlanta it was getting cold outside and we saw a homeless guy sitting there on the ground without any shoes on his feet. Bobby saw him and asked the driver to pull the car over. He literally took his sneakers off and gave them to the man. Then he went and bought him some food and gave him hundreds of dollars in cash.

I remember another time there was this bum we used
to see all the time when we went to downtown Atlanta. So Bobby had had enough. He went back home and got a bunch of clothes, stuffing them into bags. He brought the bags back to the man, along with some food. You should have seen the look on that man’s face. He was so shocked and so happy.

One time Bobby, Whitney and I wanted a quick bite to eat, so we went to the Buckhead Diner on Piedmont, a longtime Atlanta institution. When we walked in, there were two white guys sitting at the bar. The guys immediately said hi to Whitney, but they didn’t say anything to Bobby. As we sat down, they kept looking over at him and saying nasty things, like “Whitney shouldn’t even be with you” and “Get out of here” and “She should leave you.” Finally Bobby got up and walked over to them. I kind of held my breath because I didn’t know what to expect. It had the potential to get bad in a hurry, depending on how Bobby handled it.

Bobby sat down at the bar next to them and said, “You know, I’m not a bad person. You’re yelling and saying all this foul stuff to me, but I haven’t done anything to you.”

The guys at first stared at him without saying anything. Then they started talking to him and wound up having a great conversation. They eventually apologized to him, telling him he was really a nice guy. He could have handled it differently—he would have been justified in giving them the same kind of nastiness they were giving him. He could have said, “Fuck you, let’s take this outside.” Bobby is from OP—he’s certainly capable of taking it there. But he didn’t do that.
He sat down and calmly spoke to them with kindness, to the point where these two white men said, “Sorry.” That’s who Bobby really is.

Bars

In our society, stories about the horrible things that happen to men in prison are passed around so frequently that they have become almost a cultural cliché, particularly in the African-American community. So when a guy faces a prison sentence looming in front of him, he has to prepare himself for all varieties of hell that might be coming his way.

In the summer of 2000, I found myself being carted away to a Florida prison. My crime? A judge decided I had violated the conditions of my probation stemming from a DUI in 1996 in Hollywood, Florida. I believe our nation’s probation system is a scam, giving the authorities complete discretion in deciding if and when you have violated your terms. A Florida judge decided that I hadn’t completed the one hundred hours of community service that were a condition of my parole, and that I had violated my probation by attending the Grammy Awards in California and traveling to the Bahamas. Mind you, these trips were years after the actual DUI.

So one minute I’m enjoying a fabulous Bahamas vacation with my family, the next I’m being thrown into a jail cell in Broward County, Florida. The whole time I was out
raged, feeling like I was being treated unfairly because of my name and reputation. I knew I was doomed when I watched my lawyer in action. This guy, who was retained by Whitney’s people, was fine when we were consulting before we went into court. He sounded like a normal guy. But when he stepped into that damn courtroom, this dude turned into the stuttering lawyer from
My Cousin Vinny
. If you don’t remember the scene I’m talking about, Google it to refresh your memory. And then imagine my fate in that guy’s hands. In my defense he told the judge: Just because you hear that Bobby Brown beats his wife, that Bobby Brown does drugs, that Bobby Brown is a menace to society, we’re not judging him on that.

I sat there absolutely stunned, thinking,
Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?
His defense was to throw me so far under the bus that you couldn’t even see me anymore. It was no surprise when the judge sentenced me to seventy-five days in jail. I had already done more than half of the time awaiting the hearing, so I had to do thirty-six more days.

I truly spent the next decade being punished for that 1996 DUI arrest. My cause wasn’t helped by the fact that I had also gotten arrested in April 1995 at a Disney World nightclub after my boys beat up a guy who had spit on me. I tolerate a lot of crazy entreaties by fans and members of the public who are definitely
not
fans of mine, but the one thing I will not tolerate is somebody spitting on me. My boys jumped on him and really messed him up. I wound up having to pay the
guy about $30,000 in an out-of-court settlement. When the Orlando police carted me away in a squad car, I already had to go to the bathroom. I told them repeatedly from the back of the squad car that I had to go pretty bad, but they ignored me. So what did I do? I took my hands, which were in handcuffs, and managed to slip them underneath my legs—I was a lot skinnier and more limber then—so that I could reach my zipper. I unzipped my fly and proceeded to piss in the back of the police car, unbeknownst to the cops. They pulled me out of the car and carted me off to a cell, only discovering later that I had pissed in the car. Yeah, in retrospect it sounds quite crude and immature—I was twenty-six at the time—and I’m sure I wouldn’t do something like that now. But hey, I
told
them I had to go.

When I was sent to jail, knowing all the stereotypes about what it was like, I walked in there preparing to fight. I didn’t want to fight, but if it came to that I was mentally ready. But it turned out that my fears were unfounded; I never had to raise my hands to anybody. I think the most important thing for me was to stash away any sense of superiority, so that nobody—fellow inmates or corrections officers—got the impression I thought I was better or entitled to any kind of special treatment. I could sense instantly that the quickest path to trouble for me was to act like I expected special treatment because of who I am. My attitude was that I should keep my head down and get this time over with.

The biggest benefit I derived from those two and half
months in jail was that I got clean. I finally beat the dope I had been hitting hard for nearly a decade, out of necessity. I had spent time at a rehab facility in Minnesota, but it wasn’t until I had to sit there in that fuckin’ cell every day that I finally beat my addiction. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t pretty, but after a couple of weeks I knew that I didn’t crave it anymore. I had emerged on the other side.

I was my usual self while I was in there—the clown, always trying to keep people up. In that way, I made a ton of friends. Most of the other inmates were fans of mine, so they treated me with respect. We had just one television, which was often tuned to video shows, so whenever one of my videos came on there would be a loud uproar throughout the cell block. Guys would be yelling and talking shit to me and about me, but in a good-natured way. I would laugh and play along with them. I got even more popular when I used my money to make sure everybody in the block ate well on Fridays. If we had money in our kitty, the corrections officers (COs) would let us order food from the outside. So I would pay for the entire block to get food delivered from this barbecue joint. We’d be feasting on ribs and chicken and other delicious fare. That nearly made up for the rest of the week, when the food was warmed-over garbage—and sometimes not even warmed over—consisting of things like salami sandwiches and peanut butter and jelly. I went from a private chef preparing mind-blowing meals for me and Whitney to peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. And I’m not sure who
their food supplier was but we’re talking the cheapest kind of peanut butter and jelly you could imagine.

I should point out that my time wasn’t spent in some low-security summer camp with white-collar criminals. No, my fellow inmates were dudes awaiting sentencing or trial for some hard-core crimes, like murder. I chose not to go into protective custody because PC wouldn’t have given me the opportunity to reduce my sentence. I wound up getting out about two weeks early because I stayed in the general population, where I worked doing jobs like cleaning the showers and toilets and collecting the trash.

We had a condo in South Florida where Whitney stayed the entire time I was locked up. In 2000 we were both in a bad way, spending way too much time high. But there was still a lot of love between us. Whitney came to see me every week, but I never let her bring Krissi, who was only seven. We always had separate visitation from the other prisoners, so she never had to interact with everybody else. We would sit facing each other in the visitors’ room with thick glass between us, so we never got a chance to touch. Whitney would talk about business, about Krissi, and constantly tell me how much she missed me. My brother came to see me once but I didn’t get many other visitors. I didn’t want my parents or other family members to visit me. It was just too painful when they walked out of the jail and I had to stay.

I had my only conflict with another inmate at the prison. I was on my bunk, lying back and reading, when a white inmate walked into the room and came close to my bed.

“Did you fuckin’ tell the COs?!” he said, loudly and aggressively.

This guy was a member of the Aryan Nation, a gang of white supremacists with shaved heads and scary-looking tattoos all over their bodies. He had this look on his face like he was there to inflict some type of damage. I slowly rose up from my bed so that I was facing him. I knew that whatever was about to happen, lying on the bed while he stood over me was not the most optimal position.

“Nah, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said to him, looking him in the eye. “I didn’t say nothing to nobody.”

He stared at me for a few more seconds, and I stared right back. He turned around and walked away. And that was that. I don’t even remember what those Aryan guys were upset about, but they got the idea in their heads that I had snitched on them, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I had no interest in getting in the middle of some white supremacist bullshit.

“You handled yourself really well,” my cellmate said after the Aryan dude had left. “If you had stayed on your bed, he would have tried to kick you or something. You did the right thing.”

My cellmate and I got to know each other fairly well. He had been charged with murder and was awaiting trial. He had been offered bail on a murder charge; I was denied bail on violating probation for a DUI. I couldn’t believe the stupidity of that. The prosecutor had claimed that I had the
means to escape. My incompetent lawyer’s counter? I wasn’t a flight risk because I was such a “notorious individual” and therefore couldn’t be incognito if I tried to disappear somewhere—as if the judge would be swayed by being told how bad I was.

“If you watch my back, I’ll watch yours,” I told my cellmate. “And I’ll bail you out as soon as I finish my time.”

I followed through on the promise, posting his $1,500 bail as soon as I was released.

I tried to attend a Bible class in prison, but the philosophy of the instructor was problematic to me. He was trying to tell me that I didn’t know God when I was using drugs. But I disagreed. I told him that when I was high, trying to get closer to God was one of my primary preoccupations. That might sound crazy, but if you’ve ever gotten high you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Drugs can give you a sense of serenity and peace that feels very spiritual. I would even take it a step further and sometimes read the Bible when I was high. But this guy told me I was a liar.

“You know what? I can’t even be here,” I said.

So I got up and walked out of the class.

I channeled my energies into trying to help the younger guys, the ones in their late teens and early twenties. I started the Young Guys Study Group, an informal gathering for the younger cats who were in there on drug charges. I would mentor them, talk to them about their lives, advise them about the moves they needed to make going forward to turn
around their trajectory. We related to each other because they knew I wasn’t talking in the abstract; I had come from the same places, been on the same rough streets, as them, but I had gotten lucky and escaped because I could hold a note and move around a stage.

There is a mind-numbing monotony to jail, a daily battle against time, which turns out to be your greatest enemy. How do you fill up the twenty-four hours in a day without driving yourself crazy? In Broward County, the battle was made even more painful by a giant clock placed in the middle of the block. So, even if you tried to avoid clock watching, you couldn’t; you’d look up and see that only five minutes had passed since the last time you looked. I spent as much time as possible reading—the Bible mainly, or books by old-school street-crime writers like Donald Goines.