Every Little Step: My Story (17 page)

When it was time for me to get out, I was amused by the hilarious antics of Chris Rock, who had launched a “Free Bobby Brown” campaign on his HBO show. Of course the humor came from the fact that he was making fun of me, comparing me to historic freedom fighters like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. I was fully aware that all my scrapes with the law served as a punch line for his parody. But the one thing I’ve always been able to do is laugh at myself—and I had to admit that the segment was damn funny. He even had a little plane flying over the jail with the banner “Free Bobby Brown.” He had the crowd sing an acoustic, country-western version of “Don’t Be Cruel” while he interviewed a
whole bunch of folks and asked them if my imprisonment was racially motivated.

“Nah, he just fuck up,” one lady said.

When I walked out of the jail, I wrapped Rock in a big hug.

Reporters asked Rock why he had decided to stage the protest. He said, “People ask me to get involved in causes all the time. I just felt I needed a cause I could believe in. So I sat down and really thought about it and I said to myself, ‘Self, what can I believe in? Who never let you down?’ And I came up with one person, Bobby Brown.”

My next encounter with law enforcement came three years later, in an incident that still haunts me. Whitney and I had our share of arguments, sometimes really nasty, ugly stuff, lots of cursing, lots of name-calling. But up until a fateful night in 2003, I had never hit her—or any other woman. I adore women; I believe they are precious creatures who must be cherished and protected. The idea of some dude laying hands on one of my daughters drives me insane. So it will forever disturb me that one of my long-lasting legacies, one of the Bobby Brown tales that will exist forever on the Internet and in the public consciousness, is that I abused Whitney Elizabeth Houston.

On this particular night in early December 2003, we were both intoxicated. We weren’t high, just drunk. Whitney thought I had left the house with my brother to take a flight, but I was still home. So she came back in the house and had
some guy with her. Even worse, it was her drug dealer, one of the people whose presence in her life was torturing me because I had been trying to push her to get clean. I couldn’t believe she would bring this dude home with her. So I confronted her and things just exploded.

“Who the fuck is this and how you gonna come into my house with some other dude?” I screamed at her.

We started yelling back and forth, cursing. I put hands on the drug dealer, really roughed him up. I was in an unstoppable rage. Whitney tried to stop me from beating up the dealer, but I was not having it. I turned around to her, drew back my hand, and smacked her across the face. The moment it happened, I was stunned and full of regret. I knew I had stepped across some line, a step I would never be able to undo. The circumstances of the blow, how much she might have done to incite me, wouldn’t matter. From that moment on, I would forever be a wife beater. At that moment, all I wanted to do was get out of the house. I went out and got into the car with Tommy and we drove off. After I left, someone in the house called 911 and reported a domestic disturbance at our home in Alpharetta.

Stories in the media said that Fulton County police officers came to our home at eight-thirty p.m. in response to the call. Whitney didn’t identify herself on the phone call. When police arrived, Whitney calmly told them that we had been arguing and it escalated into a physical confrontation that ended with me hitting her on the left side of her face with an
open hand. The officer claimed that Whitney had a bruise on her cheek and a cut on the inside of her upper lip.

The news stories made it look like I hopped on a flight to escape arrest, when I had actually left for the trip that Tommy and I had planned weeks before.

In the end, as you saw if you watched our reality show,
Being Bobby Brown,
after Whitney refused to press charges, the matter was reduced down to a misdemeanor and a $2,000 fine. But the damage was already done; in the public’s mind I was Bobby Brown, Wife Beater.

When I watched the interview Whitney later did with Oprah Winfrey, I was horrified. I felt like she threw me so far under the bus that I would never get out from under. She said I hit her and spit at her in front of Krissi, but that never happened. I never spit at her and my daughter was upstairs sleeping during the fight. But I sometimes wonder if the things that later happened to Krissi, the domestic abuse that she may have later suffered, perhaps was the universe in some way coming back to destroy me for raising my hand to her mother.

That drunk-driving arrest from 1996 continued to haunt me over the course of the next decade, as I kept getting thrown into jail because the system decided again and again that I hadn’t abided by the terms of my probation. In 2004 I was sent to jail in DeKalb County, Georgia. I was especially hot over this one because I didn’t understand why I was still paying for a DUI from nearly ten years ago.

My lawyer this time was a black woman named Phaedra Parks, who went on to become a reality television star on
The Real Housewives of Atlanta
. Her later television stardom didn’t surprise me because she always seemed like she was craving attention and publicity. Every time I stepped into the courtroom when she was my lawyer, there would always be a host of television cameras. It was as if she had her own traveling media contingent. I even complained to her about it, telling her I didn’t like having the press there every time I approached the courthouse. But it didn’t seem to deter her.

I won’t cast aspersions on her lawyering skills, but I will say that when she was my lawyer, I usually wound up going to jail. I haven’t had much luck with my legal representation over the years.

When it was determined that I had to spend thirty days in a Georgia prison for yet another probation violation, I was so damn frustrated. I did not think I deserved to be there. I thought I might get some help or at least a little leniency from the Fulton County district attorney, Paul Howard, considering that Whitney and I threw a campaign fund-raiser for him at our house that raised more than a million dollars—with more than a half million coming from my own bank account. But Howard refused to pardon me or take any kind of special interest in my case whatsoever. So much for the legal system tilting in favor of the rich and famous.

From the second I walked into the prison in Decatur, the experience was different from Florida because I knew so
many of the guys locked away. These were guys I had run into in clubs and bars around the city of Atlanta over the years. There were more black guys in the Georgia prison—no Aryans to worry about there. I was also treated better by the COs in Georgia—at least by the black COs. They would do little things to help me out, like sneaking me a cigarette now and then and letting me smoke, even though there wasn’t supposed to be smoking in the prison. The white COs were quite different; they had the attitude like the last thing in the world they would ever do is treat me better because I was Bobby Brown.

Over the month I spent there, I had a job that allowed me to go outside as part of a small crew and sweep. I relished this outside time and felt fortunate that I had been assigned to the crew. When I was inside, we spent a lot of time playing spades. We played just as loudly and aggressively as we did back home, talking a whole bunch of smack. I also played a considerable amount of basketball, putting me in the best shape I had been in years.

Whitney came to visit about three or four times over the month. As opposed to Florida, we were able to touch each other, though it couldn’t go any further than hugs, kisses and caresses because there was a CO standing over us the whole time. The visits took place in the warden’s conference room, which afforded us some privacy. I know the other inmates didn’t get to visit with family in the warden’s conference room, but it was much more for Whitney than me.
They wanted to keep her away from the prying eyes of the other visitors.

The food was the same nasty crap that I got in Florida, this time with no special deliveries on Friday. But we did get pizza on Friday, which wasn’t bad. Wednesdays it was chicken cacciatore—I still have the schedule committed to memory all these years later. Because I had plenty of money in my commissary, I was able to gather the ingredients to make a special jail soup that I learned to love. You needed Slim Jims, cheese sticks, Cup-a-Soup, Doritos and some hot water. You would bite the Slim Jims and the cheese sticks into little pieces and put them inside the Cup-a-Soup. Then you’d crush up the Doritos and put them in the cup, along with some hot water. You put a book on top of the cup and let it sit for ten to fifteen minutes. Once it was done, it was this delicious mix of cheesy, crunchy pepperoni soup. I got so addicted to it that after I got out I continued to make it for about two weeks. Then one day in the middle of preparing my jail soup, I stopped.

“What the fuck am I doing?” I said out loud. There was no reason for me to eat jail soup, and I hoped I’d never have to again.

After I got out, strangely I didn’t want anything to do with human contact. It’s odd because at the same time I craved sex and intimacy, just like the stereotype of the just-released felon. But the dichotomy is that while you want sex, you don’t want anybody to touch you. In jail, nobody
touches each other; you don’t even shake hands. You come out in a weird state, both repelled by and drawn to touch. I would take long drives in the car with the sunroof open and all of the windows rolled down, staring at the trees and feeling the strong breeze on my face. I just wanted fresh air.

Starting the Reality Show Wave:
Being Bobby Brown

When I was about to get out of prison, my family members started urging me to do a reality show. My kids had seen Flavor Flav’s show, so they thought it would be fun for me to do my own. My brother, Tommy, also thought it would be a great way for me to show the public what I’m really like. When he first proposed the idea to me, while I was still behind bars in Georgia, I was reluctant. Why would I want to let the world into my private life when we had spent so many years trying to keep the world out? It didn’t sound right to me. But then I started thinking about my desire to clear my name, to show the public that they were wrong about me.

I was also thinking about my future. I was clean and free, pleased to be moving forward with the rest of my life, with fresh eyes. I was happy to be going home, happy to be with my beautiful wife again, happy to be with my kids.

“Why don’t we just film it?” Tommy said. “You’re being real about everything in your life. Let the public see the real you.”

We hooked up with Tracey Baker-Simmons, who became an executive producer, and we started filming. Eventually we sold the show to Bravo, who quickly jumped on it. My thinking was, let’s just film everything, so that nothing could be misconstrued or taken out of context. I wanted to be out in the open about everything.

I had read so many articles that made me look like this beast, this asshole, this person who didn’t respect anyone or anything. I had even seen people calling me a pimp. I thought it was outrageous, crazy. I was just a loving husband and loving father. My life wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t perfect, but I wanted the public to see who I really was.

Originally my wife was not even supposed to be a part of the show. I know she told Oprah that she appeared on the show because I asked her, but that wasn’t true. When we first started planning it, the cameras were just going to follow
me
around. But after I got out of jail, Whitney didn’t want to leave my side. Every time I planned to film, she wanted to be there. So even though it wasn’t planned as an examination of our marriage, that’s what the show became. When we went out to dinner together, or traveled to the Bahamas or London, it became a show about our zany relationship.

Though a lot of the television critics blasted the show, the ratings were huge when it first aired in the summer of 2005. Whitney and I had been public figures for a long time and our marriage, thirteen years old at this point, had become a permanent fixture in American pop culture—but for all the
wrong reasons. It was clear that the public was eager to see what it looked like on the inside, since for so many years the view they got of us was provided by gossip columnists and tabloid magazines. One of Whitney’s favorite expressions, “Hell to the no,” even entered the public consciousness and became a permanent part of American pop culture.

People wondered whether we were embarrassed by our depiction on the show, but we laughed our ass off throughout the whole thing. Not only was it fun to do, it was therapy for us. We had a chance to see how we acted around each other, how we responded to situations, the mistakes we made. But all along, we were just being ourselves. If people thought Whitney was something different, they got a clear glimpse of who my ex-wife was through that show. She was a down-ass, horny chick. She was the woman I loved; I was the man she loved. That’s what the show was about—not drugs or anything else. We basically loved, lusted after and adored each other for real, in so many ways. We enjoyed each other’s company tremendously. We laughed, we talked, we screwed, we did everything together. And it was beautiful. Everybody else tried to make it into something strange or laughable or ridiculous, but it wasn’t. Whitney later told Oprah Winfrey that I was her drug. And I can honestly say the same was true of me—she was my drug. When you watch the show closely, you see that at its base the show is about how difficult it can be to be in love and be famous.

As far as how the show affected her “image,” I don’t really think Whitney saw her image of being America’s
sweetheart as something different from her true self. If anybody knew her, they knew Whitney was for real, straight up and to the point with anything she talked about, anything she had to say. There was no biting her tongue for anybody. That’s who she was. She wasn’t going to pretend to be something different or put on any airs. The way she thought was,
As long as I’m sharp, as long as I look good when I walk out of this motherfuckin’ room, then we’re good
. That’s how we both felt—as long as we took care of our business, nothing else mattered.