Every Little Step: My Story (3 page)

The next few weeks were a blur of tears and confusion. It turned out my mother had been selling dope for several years and none of us kids knew anything about it. I don’t think my father knew either, but I can’t be sure about that. We thought her entrepreneurial endeavors began and ended at fried chicken dinners. I might add that she was still a loving woman, the Mother Teresa of the projects. We just discovered that she was Pablo Escobar as well.

Because my father was at work and none of my older siblings were around when she got arrested, the authorities had to find somewhere to stash me and Carol. So they brought us to a local social services center that was somehow affiliated with the Catholic Church. The building had leering gargoyles on the outside and it wasn’t far from Orchard Park. I must have stayed there for at least a week, the whole time desperate to get away. After I had been there for several days, something horrible happened to me. One of the priests who worked with the children brought me into a room. To my utter shock, he tried to touch my privates and attempted to stick his finger in my ass. I punched him really hard in his
head and ran away from him. After that, they put me in a little room by myself and threw a blanket and pillow in there with me. I was so upset and aching to leave that place; it was all I could think about. I felt vulnerable and unprotected, wondering where my father was and how he and my siblings could let this man touch me.

I don’t really know why it took so long for me to be released from the center. The drug charges against my mother were eventually dropped, so it wasn’t like she did any jail time. I heard her and my father arguing about the drugs, so I know he was upset about the whole scene. After I got back home, I really wanted to tell my mother what had happened to me, but I could never find the words to do so. I think she could tell that something was different about me, but perhaps she felt it was due to her being beaten up and dragged to prison, so her guilt kept her silent. It’s been more than thirty years, but I can never let go of the horror I felt in that room with the priest. I can understand how victims of molestation develop deep psychological problems.

Even though she could be kind and funny as hell, my mother was the disciplinarian in our household. I was such a badass kid, always getting in trouble, shoplifting, stealing bikes. If she had found out half the shit I did, it would have been over for me. My father was the opposite: he’d be more likely to say, “Aww, Carole, leave him alone.” But my mother didn’t play that. When you messed up, she’d start reaching for extension cords, whatever she could find, to whup your
ass. And then she’d say, “Your father is gonna get you when he gets home.”

When my father got home, he’d take us in a room and act like he was yelling at us and whuppin’ us: “Boy, didn’t I tell you!” But in reality he’d be trying real hard to keep himself from laughing. And I’d be laughing too. My mother thought he was in there beating my ass. My father was really cool like that.

I can only remember one time when he really beat me. It was a crazy day that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. We were in Alabama at my grandmother’s and I walked way down to the country store, trying to find something to buy. I was about eleven. While I was wandering around the store, looking, the store clerk called me “nigger.” I lost it. I said, “You know what? I’ll be right back, motherfucker!”

I went back to my grandmother’s house and found my father’s army uniform—and his gun. I actually changed into that uniform. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it fit well enough. Then I marched back down to that store with the rifle in my hand. When I went back in the store, I pointed the gun at the clerk and said, “I’ll blow your motherfuckin’ head off!” I was talking like a grown-ass man, holding this gun like I was Clint Eastwood or something. The dude looked pretty scared. I went through the store, grabbing things that I wanted. Then I left, with the rifle resting on my shoulder. As I was walking, feeling damn good about myself, my father pulled up next to me in his station wagon. I saw the look
on his face and knew I was in trouble. My father got out, took the gun away from me, and proceeded to tear my ass up. When we finally got in the car, I told my father that the guy in the store had called me a nigger.

Yes, we were in Alabama, but this was 1980, not 1950. My father took me back to that store and made me give all the stuff I took back to the clerk. Then he turned his attention to the clerk, addressing the man by his name.

“If you ever talk to my son like that again, I’ll kill you,” he said.

When we got back in the car, I said, “Pop, I don’t want to stay down here anymore.”

That was the last summer we spent in Alabama.

In the 1970s in the Orchard Park projects, sex was everywhere. When I look back at that time, I can’t believe how young I was when I started engaging in sexual activity with girls in the projects, though I’m not even sure if we were aware we were having sex. I might have been as young as eight when I began to get together with girls. I was already having erections at that age and I would get naked and try to insert my hard penis inside of them. The girls were just as fast as the boys, though I think most of the girls I was messing around with were a few years older than me.

I got much of my concept of sexuality from the porn movies I would find in my brother Tommy’s room. Because he was nine years older than me, I discovered at an early age that Tommy’s room contained all kinds of wonders. I’d
pop the big videotapes into the VCR and disappear into the misleading world of sexual performance. I think that early exposure put me on a path of using sex as a substitute for feelings, as a way to show that I cared for someone rather than expressing real emotions.

We had to go back to Alabama in 1981 when my grandmother died. It was a sad time for our family, but after I got back to Boston I would experience the most traumatic event of my young life, even worse than the encounter with the priest. The trauma would actually propel me into forming New Edition. Right after my family arrived back in Orchard Park in the summer of 1981, spilling out of our car, I went looking for my best friend, Jimmy. Jimmy was kind of a badass kid who used to terrorize many of the little kids of Orchard Park with threats and intimidation—so naturally I was drawn to him like a moth to light. Ralph Tresvant later described Jimmy as a “bully,” and I guess from Ralph’s perspective the description might have fit, but to me he was a tough, fun kid who was never afraid to come along with me as we made each day in the projects a great adventure.

On this particular day, Jimmy and I decided to head on over to Dorchester and steal some bikes. Dorchester was right next to Roxbury and was a more stable, middle-class neighborhood filled with single-family houses and lots of white people. To me and Jimmy, it was like a candy store, a damn bicycle supermarket. We hopped on a bus that took us deep into Dorchester. We were about four miles from
Orchard Park when we spotted our prey, two bikes sitting in front of a white wood-frame house with a spacious front porch. They were leaning against the porch, with no locks in sight. Jimmy and I leaped into action. We ran over, jumped onto the bikes, and hauled ass down the block, our hearts pounding and our faces wearing big grins. New bikes! (Or at least new to us.)

We rode the four miles back to OP, laughing and having a ball along the way. When we hit the projects, we came upon a party somebody was having in a ground-floor apartment. We weren’t going to miss a party, not in OP. I could never walk away from any opportunity to show off my dance moves. So Jimmy and I went inside, leaving our new bikes leaning up against a fence. A short time later, we emerged from the party and caught a troubling sight—somebody was sitting on Jimmy’s new bike. It was a Puerto Rican kid; there were a bunch of Puerto Rican families who lived on the other side of OP. The black kids and the Puerto Rican kids didn’t get along so well—it wouldn’t be Boston if there wasn’t some racial tension.

“Hey, get off my fuckin’ bike!” Jimmy said to the kid. Jimmy rushed toward him, already swinging. He connected several times with the kid’s face, clearly beating his ass. Jimmy was already an experienced brawler; nobody really wanted to get into a fight with him. One of the other Puerto Rican kids threw a knife to the guy who was getting his ass whupped by Jimmy. He swung it at Jimmy and sliced his arm.
It wasn’t a real deep cut, but it drew blood. One of the guys in my crew reacted quickly and kicked the kid with the knife in the back, knocking him to the ground. Still clutching the knife, the kid lunged at Jimmy with it. To the shock of everyone watching, the knife plunged into the left side of Jimmy’s chest, right into his heart. Jimmy collapsed onto the ground. I was stunned, but I knew I had to do something.

“Don’t move him!” I shouted. I had heard somewhere that when somebody gets stabbed, you should keep them still so you don’t further damage any internal organs.

I hauled ass, sprinting toward Jimmy’s apartment to get his mother. While I was running, somebody called the ambulance. When I got to our building, my brother, Tommy, saw me and asked what was wrong. We were heading back down the stairs when we saw several kids carrying Jimmy into the hallway of our building. They didn’t listen to me and decided to move him despite what I told them, carrying him at least two hundred yards from the scene of the stabbing, across a courtyard. It was ridiculous that they carried him that far instead of leaving him there for the ambulance, but I guess they felt they had to do something. They couldn’t just let him die. When my brother and I kneeled over him, we could see that he was turning blue. Blood was everywhere. I started yelling for the ambulance. The high-pitched, terrifying cries of his mother filled the hallway as she watched her boy slip away. Jimmy died right there in our building, surrounded by family and friends. We watched the last breath leave his
body, like he had made a decision that this would be his last day. The ambulance technicians arrived shortly after, but it was too late. Jimmy was gone.

I was devastated, inconsolable. Thinking back on it, I was probably in shock. I had seen a couple of people get shot in OP by then, but that was the first time violence had struck somebody I knew, practically a member of my family. Most of us were still just little kids trying to have fun. We hadn’t made the transition to any type of killer mind-set, trying to end it for somebody. Hey, we were still watching fuckin’ cartoons. Yeah, most of us carried knives, cheap $10 blades that opened with a flick of the wrist, with “007” carved into the side, surely a reference to James Bond. But the knives were for our protection in a land of predators. We did not see them as tools for murder.

After Jimmy died, I was in such a state of depression, I almost ceased functioning. I sat in the pouring rain on the curb outside our building for two days straight, barely moving, my tears mixing with the water flowing into the gutter. I stared down the block, thinking that Jimmy was going to turn the corner at any moment on his bike, headed toward me wearing a grin. I sobbed so long and hard that my chest hurt and my eyes could no longer summon tears. I didn’t even move to use the bathroom. I just held on to a pole on the street, clutching it like it had the power to bring Jimmy back. My mother sat down next to me to keep me company, to show that she understood and shared my grief; she never
forced me to come inside. When she wasn’t outside with me, she sat in the apartment window and watched me from above. To her credit, she let me mourn in my own twelve-year-old way.

It seemed like Jimmy’s death led to a flood of young boys having their lives snuffed out—kids like Geno and Anthony, boys my age, way too young to be snatched away. There were too many fights, too much conflict, too much blood, with too many of us ignorantly deciding that our enemies were the kids on the other side of the projects, or in another project across town. The family of the kid who killed Jimmy had to leave Orchard Park after their apartment mysteriously caught on fire and was completely torched. I’m sure they were glad to go, fearful that the hostility we all felt for them would lead to one of them getting hurt or worse. The tension between blacks and Puerto Ricans in OP only intensified after Jimmy’s death.

Jimmy’s getting killed was a catalyst for me. After I emerged from my deep funk, I vowed to myself that I had to get out of OP and out of Boston. It was the only way I could see myself surviving to my eighteenth birthday. And I knew exactly where to find my escape route—music.

How did my friends and I form one of the most successful singing groups in R & B history? It still blows my mind how far we have come with this over these last thirty years. I mean, how many groups last in this brutal business even one decade, never mind three? We were just some nappy-headed little black boys from the projects. Making R & B history was the last thing on our minds.

It all started with Michael Bivins, me and a dance troupe called Transitions. There were seven guys in the group, but the other guys were a lot older than me and Michael—we were only about nine at the time. Mike and I met at the local Boys and Girls Club, where we played against each other in the basketball league. Mike was a really good basketball player. Ralph Tresvant played in the league too, but we were all on different teams.

Mike and I joined Transitions, and with them we performed in a lot of talent shows, but after a while Mike and I felt like we needed to get out. The rest of the troupe was just too old. They kept wanting us to do crazy things that nine- and ten-year-olds weren’t supposed to be doing. We were some badass little kids, but even we knew we weren’t supposed to be hanging around with fifteen- and sixteen-year-old guys. One of the guys in the group, Preacher, looked like a very short grown man.

One day Mike and I came up with a clever plan to get out of the group: we would start brawling. We went over to the house where most of the guys lived—they were brothers—and we started fighting each other. It was raining out and we kept beating on each other for what felt like at least an hour, kicking, punching, cursing. When the older guys finally came outside, they got mad at us for fighting. Right then they said we were kicked out of the group. Exactly what we wanted. We were happy as hell—so happy, in fact, that we then snuck into Preacher’s house and stole two of the trophies the group had won.

During the next couple of years, while I was beginning to imagine myself as an entertainer, I also discovered another passion: boxing. I kept showing up in the local gym, which was run by Bill Marshall. Along with other kids from the neighborhood, I would train and spar. Mr. Marshall told us if we stuck with it, we could go to the Golden Gloves in New York, one of the preeminent amateur boxing tourna
ments in the country. I stuck with it over the course of a year or so and got to be pretty good. I always could throw the hands really well. We had a big match at the gym to determine who would make the trip to the Golden Gloves in New York. I beat up my opponent, a kid named Michael Green, and knocked him out.

When we made the trip down to New York, my mother saw the kid I was supposed to fight in my first match. He was this big white boy, already cut up with bulging muscles at like age twelve. My body was starting to get cut up too, but I was still skinny. He looked like he was way bigger than me. Mrs. Carole Brown was not having it.

“Uh-uh. No, son, you’re not meant to do this,” she said to me.

I was devastated. I had trained hard for this, had lain awake at night envisioning the moves I would make in the ring, how I would be the twelve-year-old reincarnation of my hero Muhammad Ali. Now she was telling me no?

“Ma, please!” I begged her. I could feel boxing superstardom slipping through my fingers. “Please?!”

But her mind was made up, helped along considerably by the sight of that big white boy.

“You’re not going to be a fighter when you grow up,” my mother declared. “You’re going to be a singer.”

Now, I couldn’t really argue with that, but it didn’t make me any happier. When I wouldn’t fight, the kid I had knocked out back in Boston, Michael Green, who had made
the trip specifically for reasons such as this, stepped in to fight in my place. At the opening bell, he bounced out there to face the big, cut-up white kid with all the muscles. They sized each other up for a few seconds, then Michael threw his first punch. It connected with the kid’s big head, and he fell straight to the canvas. Knockout! I was stunned—and now even more upset.

“Oh my God! Mom!” I said.

“I don’t care,” she answered, refusing to budge. “Nobody’s gonna beat up on your face.”

And with that, she effectively ended my boxing career. It was a wrap.

I must say that the time in the ring was beneficial to me. It gave me more confidence in my physicality, which translated into my becoming a better dancer. When you’ve gone into the ring and come out alive, it gives you a sense of invincibility as you stride through the world. I’d always felt like I was the alpha in any room, but the boxing experience just multiplied that feeling. It’s like that movie
Fight Club,
starring Brad Pitt. These dudes from all walks of life confront some of their greatest fears by engaging in bare-knuckle brawling. That’s because every dude knows once you’ve been hit in the face, even if you don’t win the fight, you’re not really scared of anything. You’ve encountered one of your greatest nightmares and you’ve lived to tell the tale. You walk around with a different attitude.
If you bring it to me, I’m going to whup your ass—or even if I don’t, I’m not going to be scared.
It was an impor
tant lesson that I always carried with me after my Golden Gloves training.

After my adventure in the ring, I ventured off to do solo performances at talent shows around Roxbury, singing and dancing. I came in second place at one of the shows, singing the Delfonics song “La La Means I Love You.” Naturally I was upset I didn’t win, but after the show I got approached by the man who had sponsored the talent show, Maurice Starr. His actual name was Larry Johnson, and he was a local artist who had recorded a couple of R & B albums a few years earlier to little success. Now he was looking to put together some type of group. He told me I should go find some guys to sing background and dance behind me.

The first person I approached of course was Michael Bivins. I already knew he could dance because we had been in Transitions together. I knew Ralph Tresvant and Ricky Bell, two other local guys who had had a duet group together, so I asked them if they wanted to join us. They said yes. In that moment, New Edition was born—though we didn’t know it yet. We initially had another member, Travis Pettis, but he had to go down south the summer when this was all coming together and the ship sailed without him.

We only had one chance at a rehearsal before we were going on the stage together at the Hi-Hat. When we started that rehearsal, I thought I sounded a lot like Michael Jackson. This was 1982, and even though his
Thriller
album hadn’t come out yet, in the minds of little black boys in
Roxbury he was already the king. His album
Off the Wall
was still in constant rotation, with all those hits. Everybody wanted to sound like Michael, to dance like Michael, to move like Michael. I was just thirteen, so my voice still had a high enough register that I could close my eyes and imagine I sounded like Michael. But then Ralph Tresvant started singing. I was floored. He sounded
exactly
like Michael. He had that high Michael tone, with all the sweetness and energy Michael possessed, and that drew in listeners from the first note. Ralph had it all. I thought to myself,
This is really gonna work.

There was no doubt about Ralph being the lead. I was cool with being on the side because I knew I had a lot to bring to the table, particularly when it came to dance and movement. We all had different types of voices, different styles. That’s what makes a successful group—bringing all these different sounds together to form a beautiful whole.

I had a vast mind for music. I tried to listen to everything—from Buddy Holly and the Beatles to Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway, who were also my role models in addition to Michael. I just loved music and I knew there was nothing else in the world I wanted to do with my life. When we got the guys together to form a group, I think we all could sense that maybe this could turn into something special.

For our first gig we decided to sing “Holding On (When Love Is Gone),” the LTD song featuring Jeffrey Osborne in
the lead that had been a big hit a few years earlier. We came up with the choreography, calling out the steps—“Kick ball . . . cross step . . .” We ran through the entire song maybe two or three times during the rehearsal.

We tried to wear matching outfits, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Ralph and Michael had on brown slacks, I had on brown corduroys and Ricky had on some rust-colored slacks. Then I went out to a local store and stole some brown bow ties.

We did our thing out there on the stage of the Hi-Hat. It wasn’t perfect, but it was starting to look pretty damn good. We actually called out the steps onstage—but the crowd couldn’t hear us because they were screaming so loud. We were a big hit; it was exciting to experience the enthusiasm of the crowd.

We wanted to improve our dance moves, and we knew the man to see was a local choreographer named Brooke Payne. Brooke was at the Hi-Hat show, but we were afraid to approach him, arguing about who was going to do it. Finally Mike and I went over and asked him if he could teach us some dances. He had already seen us perform, so he was interested. He told us to meet him at the Boys Club in the Cathedral, which was the name of another project.

Once we got with Brooke, our little group started looking better and better. He tightened up our moves and committed us to the importance of practice. Then we entered a show called Hollywood Talent Night, another Maurice Starr
creation. This time the winner was supposed to get a recording contract. We did a Jackson 5 medley and we tore it up. The crowd went crazy. We just knew we would take home the top prize. But then this rap group came on, these two tall, lanky rappers who pop-locked while they rapped. They beat us. We were devastated; we were so sure we had it that night. But Maurice came over and told us he still wanted to record us, so our gloom was instantly transformed.

We were so excited, jumping around like we had won the lottery. I remember being filled with pure elation that night. And as for the tall, lanky rappers? We never heard from them again. So that recording contract must not have panned out for them after all.

On the Radio

It only took Maurice a few days to get us in the studio. He was a man in a hurry, anxious to bring his master plan to fruition. At this point, everything started happening so fast my head was spinning. Maurice had written this song called “Jealous Girl” and he wanted us to record it. He was obviously going for the Jackson 5 look and sound. He was pushing us like he wanted it pretty bad. Even our name referred to his idea that we were a “new edition” of the Jackson 5. Right after “Jealous Girl,” we recorded “Candy Girl.” Over the next few weeks we kept recording song after song. In a few short months, some of us were listening to a local college
radio station, WRBB, which is affiliated with Northeastern University. All of a sudden “Candy Girl” started playing. We were on the radio!

To understand how much of a shock this was, consider that Maurice hadn’t told us
anything
. We were just doing as we were told, singing the songs he told us to sing. There had been no discussion of recording contracts, terms, percentages, marketing . . . nothing. When we heard it, our first reaction was, “What?!”

As it was playing, we were all screaming and running to each other’s apartments. People in Orchard Park were blasting it out of their windows. Looking back now at that moment in time, before we even knew what the music business was, what we were experiencing was pure joy. I was just a thirteen-year-old kid, and my voice was playing on the radio! That was some crazy shit.

After WRBB played our song, it got played on WIOD, the AM station. Next it crossed over to KISS 108 FM, which was the big station in Boston at the time. In our minds, getting played on KISS meant you were big-time. But really we were happy to be on any station—happy that people knew who New Edition was. At this point, our mothers got together to try to figure out what this was all about—how we could have a song on the radio and not have any inkling of a contract. My mother was a beast when it came to that stuff, but we still wound up getting screwed.

Our first album, called
Candy Girl,
was released in
March 1983, when I had just turned fourteen, and it sold so many records it was hard for us to keep count. And how much did we make from it? We each got $500 and a VCR—a Betamax, so we could watch our own videos. We knew it was fucked up, but we were still happy—at least we were in the beginning. We all took our first paychecks and went out and bought mopeds. We were excited as hell, cruising around the projects on our mopeds, not having to ride bicycles anymore. But nobody told us we needed a driver’s license to ride the damn things. So we all wound up in a local jail after being arrested for operating the mopeds without a license.

Though at first blush that may seem like it would have been an unpleasant experience for me, I actually had a fabulous time that day. The police couldn’t put me in a cell with grown men because I was too young, so they decided to stash me over with the women. When I got there, I saw one of my sister Tina’s friends, a girl who was way older than me—she probably was at least twenty. But I guess in her mind I wasn’t too young for some sexual exploration. We found a hidden corner of the facility and had sex. After my mother showed up and got both of us released, we did it a few more times when we got back to OP. My sister Tina found out about it and was outraged; she’s still mad at that girl. Considering the law of the land, I guess she could have been charged with rape, though I was certainly a willing participant.

Around this time we took our first trip overseas, travel
ing to England and Germany. And let me say without hesitation that we
hated
it. We were just little kids from the projects, not open-minded enough to be able to enjoy different foods and cultures. After a couple of days in London, we all got sick from the food. We were desperate for a McDonald’s or anywhere we could get a familiar hamburger. In fact, Ralph was so sick that he wasn’t able to perform when we did
Top of the Pops,
a popular British television show. I had to step in as lead singer. I wasn’t nervous, but I wasn’t feeling too great myself, so I was worried about the bubbling in my stomach. As I recall, it wasn’t the greatest performance we ever turned in, but we got through it.