Every Little Step: My Story (19 page)

A FEW WORDS FROM L
A
PRINCIA BROWN

With my little sister Krissi, there was a three-year age difference, so I was always her big sister, her protector. The two of us were very close. We used to spend a lot of time playing with dolls when we were very little. When I was about seven and she was four, we were obsessed with these sing-along kid videos that we used to watch all the time and sing along to. We had this thing we called Sis Stars, where we did a lot of skits and plays. We would perform them for the rest of the family. She was so much fun—super bubbly and happy.

She started changing when she was a teenager, after her mom and my dad split up. I hadn’t seen her for quite a while and she came up to Massachusetts to stay at my mom’s house for a month around Christmas. I was eighteen and she was fifteen. It was awesome having her there, but I realized after the fact that I probably did a lot of things I shouldn’t have when she was there. I brought her with me when I went out drinking with my friends. I feel bad about it now. But I think she was already drinking at home. She brought Everclear with her to my house, which is this really high grade of grain alcohol, basically like moonshine. She pulled it out of her bag to show to me, like “Look what I have!” I didn’t tell my mom or my dad. Maybe I should have. We tried to drink some of it; we poured a capful into a big jug of orange juice. It tasted terrible; we didn’t even consider trying to drink more of it. I should have thought more about the stuff I did with her.

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.