Every Little Step Page 7

  She and Landon stayed in the house with my family for a bit, but soon it was time to move out. I got them an apartment that I called our new home, where we could try to be a little family unit, but I still wasn’t ready. I was still cheating, leaving for long periods on the road. Understandably, Malika eventually couldn’t take it anymore. She needed to be free, to stop pretending we were in a serious relationship.

  Next thing I knew, she was dating a friend of mine, the actor Carl Payne. They eventually got married and had four kids together. They’ve now been married more than twenty years. At first I was upset that a friend of mine would move in on my woman, even if I wasn’t being faithful. What made it worse was that he lived in the same building where her apartment was located, so I figured that he had been eyeing her while we were still together. This was after his appearances on The Cosby Show but before he became a star on Martin. Eventually, I got over it, though, and was happy for my girl. When things ended with Malika, I went back to Kim in Boston, my first love. Over the next few years we wound up having two children, LaPrincia and Bobby Jr. Of course, I love them both dearly.

  Through it all, I tried to make sure I took care of Landon. I would frequently take him on tour with me for extended periods of time, even when he was very little. I’m sure it was a pretty crazy life for him, to go from the normal day-to-day with his mom to becoming part of my entourage traveling around the world. He was growing up to be a very good-looking young man—and I could tell because one day when he was still in junior high school, I noticed some of the women on the tour looking at him extra hard. I couldn’t believe it. I told them, “Girl, I’ll fuckin’ kill you if you go near my boy!”

  But I knew that stuff was right around the corner. I couldn’t believe how fast the time flew, how quickly Landon became a man. Now he’s damn near thirty years old—a grown-ass man with a wife and an adorable little girl who is only a few months younger than my son Cassius. Yeah, Bobby Brown the grandfather. Has a nice ring to it.

  A FEW WORDS FROM MALIKA (WILLIAMS) PAYNE

  When I suspected I was pregnant, I called Bobby and told him. He didn’t lose it or anything. We had become really good friends, aside from being intimate.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked me.

  “That’s what we need to talk about.”

  So after some discussion, we decided we would have the baby. His mother was not very happy about that. That was understandable—she didn’t know me from a rock. As for my mom, she wasn’t happy about being a grandmother so young. My stepfather was disappointed, but he didn’t go crazy or anything. I think Bobby’s family was a lot more upset than mine was.

  Back then you couldn’t go to a regular public school if you were pregnant, so I had to do most of eleventh grade living in a residential dorm for pregnant teenagers. I would go home on weekends and spend weekdays in the dorm while attending classes. Bobby actually came to see me while I was in the dorm. He would come and hang out with me. But I would always make sure we were away from the building because I didn’t want Bobby Brown up there around all these teenage girls. This is when he was going through all his turmoil with New Edition and parting ways with the group, so his name was in the gossip columns and teen mags all the time. It would have been ridiculous if Bobby Brown had walked into that dorm. I didn’t even tell anyone who the father of my child was. It would have been way too much drama.

  When the baby was born, Bobby wanted me to name him Jimmy, after a best friend of his who got killed. He also offered up the name Terrad. I don’t know where he got that one from. My sister said maybe he thought it was “terribly radical.” My son hates to hear the story about where I actually got his name: There was a report on the news about a missing child. He was a little Mexican boy who was the cutest thing I ever saw. His name was Landon.

  I knew Bobby was with other women all the time. In fact, he was kind of in my face with that stuff. It was kind of like, when he’s here we’re together but when he’s not, we’re not. He was still very young and he was doing whatever he wanted to do. I’ve always been an old soul, even when I was young, and I had an understanding of how things worked. He had a lot of money, he was very famous, and women would literally be throwing their panties at him everywhere he went. And he would succumb to all of that—over and over again. At some point I got tired of that. If we weren’t going to have a real relationship, which I knew we weren’t, I didn’t want to do it anymore. At one point he even asked me to marry him. We were having dinner at a restaurant and he said, “If I asked you to marry me, would you?”

  I said, “No, because you’re a whore and I don’t see you ever wanting to be with one person. I think you will always be this way.”

  His mouth just fell open.

  “Did you really just say that?” he asked.

  “Yes I did. It is what it is.”

  Eventually it was just over between us. It wasn’t a formal thing. We didn’t sit down and talk about it and mutually decide to end it. One day after he popped up again and expected us to be together, to be intimate, I just told him, “Look, you can’t keep doing what you’re doing. I’m not doing this anymore.”

  After Bobby and I went our separate ways, we stayed in contact with each other over the years. We had a child and now have a grandchild together, so we were able to remain really good friends. Throughout it all, I’ve always thought Bobby was an awesome person. I love him to death and I would never want to see anything bad happen to him. Behind closed doors when there’s nobody else around, he’s a good guy. But his intentions and his actions have not always matched. I think from a young age he always had freedom to do whatever he wanted. There really had never been anyone around him who could control him. With most of us, when we were young and dumb, there was somebody around to say no.

  Bobby has been a breadwinner since he was fourteen or fifteen years old. So he’s always called the shots. And from a very young age he’s been on his own, not home with his mom and dad. He was a young teenager on the road by himself, figuring out how to be an adult. Nobody gave us lessons on how to be an adult, how to behave. It was something you made up as you were going along. As a result, for many years he was wild and crazy.

  But he’s a different person now. I tell him happy Father’s Day and happy birthday every year, and he always calls me to say happy Mother’s Day. I think we’ve been able to maintain a good relationship.

  Around the World

  In the early days of New Edition we used to have contests to see who could get the loudest screams onstage. Ralph always won—nobody could beat him. The girls were in love with that crazy motherfucker. But I tried—and I was always a strong second. Ralph had the voice, the smoothness, so I had to use my sexiness. It was always there. But when I went solo, it was like a beast was unleashed, like someone had opened a cage and just let me out. I guess in this analogy the cage is New Edition. When I went solo, I had total control—of my music, my show, my moves. I sometimes asked Brooke Payne to help me with the choreography, but most of it was me—an entire routine sprouted from my imagination.

  On January 25, 1989, four days after the Don’t Be Cruel album hit number one on the Billboard chart, where it stayed for six weeks, I was arrested by a police officer in Columbus, Georgia, for violating the city’s “lewd law.” It had only been on the books since 1987, when the city council came up with the ridiculous law following a crazy Beastie Boys concert. The Columbus ordinance prohibits performers from “simulating sexual intercourse” onstage. At the time I was outraged, thinking it was extremely unfair since I hadn’t even touched the girl the police officer said I was dancing with in a lewd way. It was a regular part of my act, bringing a female fan up to dance suggestively with me onstage. I know offended authorities had threatened to arrest Elvis back in the 1950s for the way he danced, claiming he was corrupting America’s youth, but I incorrectly figured we had made progress in the three decades since then. I got arrested in the middle of my Columbus show and dragged down to the p
olice headquarters. After posting $652 bail, they let me go—and I went back to the arena to resume my concert an hour later. Surely that was one of the strangest intermissions in music history.

  Although I was highly pissed at the time, I eventually realized that the arrest was the best thing that could have happened to me when it came to album and ticket sales. With all the media attention that was directed at me due to my arrest, literally overnight I became more famous than ever. Another layer was added to the “bad boy” persona.

  In 1988, just as Don’t Be Cruel was being released, I embarked on a national tour with my old bandmates New Edition. Joining us was Al B. Sure, who was also blowing up that year with his huge album In Effect Mode, which included the hits “Nite and Day” and “Off on Your Own (Girl).” There was a bit of tension with the New Edition guys. In fact, when they heard that we were going to record my stage performance of the hit “Roni” to use as the song’s music video, they insisted that their show also be filmed. But I don’t think anything was ever done with the New Edition footage.

  When promoter Al Haymon approached me to splinter off on my own separate tour for Don’t Be Cruel, I was ready. I got some really talented dancers—four girls, two guys—to back me up, and we dove into the minute details that make up a tour and a stage show. The money was rolling in at an unprecedented rate, and we decided it made sense to buy all the stuff we would be bringing out with us—speakers, system, instruments, wardrobe—rather than rent it and wind up paying a lot more. We changed about three or four times during the show, so we also needed lots of clothes. I laid out a lot of cash to launch that tour.

  One of my signature moves during the stage show was when I yelled, “Are you ready?”—then I leaped off a platform that was about twenty feet high, spread-eagled while in the air (like Michael Jordan on one of his signature dunks), and landed onstage in a crouch. My brother would go on the platform when it was being set up and be afraid to drop down—and then he’d try to persuade me to stop being so risky. I did that stunt every night for three years and never once did I stumble or bust my ass. But I do have painful shin splints now, I’m sure from doing crazy moves like that back in the day.

  Putting together a tour takes a considerable amount of work, but if you do it right and there is a great demand, you can make a ton of money—as long as you have the right people on your team who aren’t trying to rip you off. After the experiences I had had with New Edition, the only person I really trusted at the time to negotiate on my behalf was my brother. So we would go into most of the meetings together, and usually emerge with exactly what we wanted. My mother was also involved in looking after my money. For this tour, we had a sponsorship from Budweiser and guarantees from the venues. If we sold out, we would pull in an additional $200,000 per night. We made more than $700,000 per night on that tour. Of course we had significant overhead, more than $50,000 a night, but I was still walking away with stacks. Actually, I was carrying a lot of it around with me in briefcases. It sounds crazy now, but my trust level was really low at the time. And for some reason having the money in my hand boosted my confidence and made me feel even more invincible. Maybe this is related to growing up in a poor neighborhood, surrounded by a community of people who didn’t have anything. But I don’t even need to get all Freudian—that shit just felt good. In total, I made at least $30 million on that tour.

  I’ll admit that I began to take the fame and fortune for granted, perhaps because it came when I was so young. I threw so much money away on silly shit. Don Cornelius once asked us on Soul Train, “What are you gonna do with all this money?” My answer? “Spend it.” And I surely followed that philosophy. Saving was just not part of my makeup at the time. Once I started making the big money, I didn’t ever think I could or would go broke again. My thinking was, I can always do another show. Some people who come into big money after being poor hold on to it like it’s giving them life, but I had the opposite reaction—losing money wasn’t scary to me. Still, I’ll admit that I was ridiculous with it, literally tossing cash out the window.

  Like a lot of the newly rich, one of my obsessions was buying cars. I had a bunch of young guys who hung around me all the time and we were just crazy as hell. We would leave cars everywhere, and that became one of my things. When I was touring, if I saw somebody driving a car that I liked, I would get off my tour bus and ask them if I could buy their car. I’d be traveling with hundreds of thousands in cash, so meeting their price was never a problem.

  Once when we were in San Antonio, I saw this guy driving a gorgeous white Benz, a four-door 500, and I fell in love. Oh my God—it had beautiful rims. I am pretty sure the brother I bought it from was a drug dealer.

  “How much you want for that car?” I asked him.

  I can’t remember exactly how much I paid. I think it was somewhere around $50,000. At this time I was messing around with a girl in San Antonio whom I saw every time I passed through. Sometimes I’d fly in to see her even if there wasn’t a concert. My favorite hotel had an ice-skating rink inside of it, so she and I would go ice-skating and do little-kid shit like that.

  After partying and driving around in my pretty white car, it was finally time to leave. Mike Tyson was with me. Mike and I spent a lot of time together back then. We were both young (though Mike was three years older than me), extremely rich, and trying to fuck everything that moved. That was enough to create a bond between us.

  When we got to the airport, I didn’t know what to do with my new car. I hadn’t made any kind of arrangements to get it back to my LA mansion.

  “Bobby, what are you going to do with the damn car?” Tyson asked me.

  “Let’s just park it here,” I said, pulling up to the curb right outside the terminal. “We’ll come back for it later.”

  I never went back for it. I don’t even know what happened to that car. It was probably towed somewhere and auctioned off. Somebody made out like a bandit. Or maybe they gave it back to the drug dealer—who knows.

  This is when Tyson was still champ, so when we hit a city, it was ugly. Together we just knew we were the shit. We thought we could do whatever we wanted. He would follow me on tour; I would go to his fights. One time when the tour was in Cleveland, Mike pulled up to the hotel in a Lamborghini truck. The thing was enormous.

  “Man, I’m too fucked up to drive,” he said as he climbed down from the driver’s seat.

  “Nigga, I’ll drive this motherfucker!” I said, getting behind the wheel.

  I should point out that it was the middle of the winter in Cleveland and there was about a foot of snow on the ground. But of course that didn’t deter us. After all, we were in a giant Lamborghini truck. So we bounced around Cleveland in the snow, with no security, just me and Tyson, hitting the clubs, drinking, hanging out. On the way back to the hotel, we heard a loud noise. Clearly, I had run over something. When we got out to inspect, we realized it was a small car. That’s how big this fuckin’ truck was—you could run over a small car and just feel a little bump in the road.

  “It’s all right, Bobby,” Tyson said. “I’ll get that fixed tomorrow.”

  I can honestly say our friendship took me by surprise. From afar, Mike didn’t seem like the kind of guy you would bond with very easily. When he was champ, he had a reputation as mean and ornery. But we hit it off right away. He had come to one of my concerts and wanted to meet me, so they brought him backstage.

  “Damn, champ, what’s up?” I said.

  “Bobby Brown! Oh shit!” he said, extremely excited. “Man, your concert was awesome!” He did some kind of dance move, I suppose imitating me—but he can’t dance at all.

  “What are you doing later?” he asked. “Let’s go out, do something, have drinks or something.”

  “You can’t drink—aren’t you in training?” I said.

  “Bobby, I been busting everybody’s ass for the longest. I can handle a few drinks,” he said.

  And thus a great friendship was born.

  We g
ot so close that it almost felt like he was part of my family. Actually, he almost was a part of my family—he dated my older sister Leolah for a time. At first I was worried, like, “Hey, hold on. You can’t be dating my sister and doing all this wild shit.” But they got pretty serious. Mike was crazy about her. And he was always very good to her. My father became a father figure to him; that’s how close they were.

  The night before Mike got beaten by Buster Douglas, we had been partying together in Japan. I was there because I had just done a show in Osaka. Mike’s fight was in the Tokyo Dome. We were up literally all night screwing a room full of Japanese girls. I was staying in a huge, expensive hotel suite that took up the whole floor, and it looked like the suite was absolutely filled with beautiful Japanese women. And we were trying to get with every single one of them.

  At one point I looked up and saw it was somewhere around three in the morning, so I said, “Hey, Mike, you gotta get some sleep, man. You don’t need to be fucking all these girls. You ain’t supposed to be doing that the night before a fight.”

  His response was vintage Tyson: “Bobby, that’s nothing but a fuckin’ myth. They just say that to fighters to try to control us. That’s ludicrous, Bobby. Just watch me. It’s Buster Douglas. The fight will be over in three rounds—if I allow him to go three rounds.”

  So on the night of February 11, 1990, just six days after my twenty-first birthday, I watched the fight at a huge mansion in Osaka that belonged to a friend of ours. My show was later that night. When Mike went down in the tenth round and couldn’t get back up in time, I cried like a baby. My heart just fell out of my chest. I felt like it was my fault. I had kept him up all night partying after my concert. I called my dad and he was crying too.

  Mike would later admit in his 2013 autobiography, Undisputed Truth, that he had been doing way too much partying and not nearly enough training in the weeks leading up to the Douglas fight, almost as if he wanted to lose to relieve the constant pressure on him. But that didn’t take away all the guilt I had been carrying around for twenty-three years.