Every Little Step: My Story (8 page)

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 got 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.

Even though he held the championship for the last time in 1996 before losing it to Evander Holyfield, I can personally attest to the fact that Mike still hits harder than a mule kick. One time we were working out together, doing some sparring. I’ve always been pretty confident that I could do some damage with my hands. I had already sparred with Tommy Hearns. I felt like I knew what I was doing. Mike was letting me hit him, but I slipped up and hit Mike in the face with a right cross. With my bare fist.

Suddenly, all motion stopped. Mike looked at me like I was crazy.

“Bobby, why did you hit me so fuckin’ hard?! What’s wrong with you? I will hurt you, Bobby!”

But I was still delusional, so I didn’t take him that seriously.

“Yeah, whatever,” I said, all cocky. “You just getting slow.”

Yeah, that’s right, I was arrogantly mouthing off to the man many consider the greatest, scariest fighter of all time. Not smart.

Mike crouched down, came toward me, and
boom boom boom
. He hit my ribs on my left side in rapid succession. I
thought I was going to stop breathing. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt. I dropped to the floor and curled into a fetal position.

“See, Bobby, I told you to stop playing!” Mike said.

Now in our middle age, Mike Tyson and I will sometimes sit around and talk about how much of a waste it can be to give hundreds of millions to a kid barely out of his teens, as our society does with athletes and entertainers. We were let loose on the world with no direction, no financial advisers who really cared about us, not enough people watching our backs. To most of the people around us we represented a paycheck—not somebody they should be looking out for. Because if we had people who were really watching our backs, they would have quietly stashed away money in a trust somewhere so that later on, when things got tough again, they could come to us and say, “Hey, man, guess what? You’re not totally fucking broke! I put a hundred million dollars over here in this account just for you, just for this very moment.”

But of course, ultimately it was our responsibility, what we did with our money, how we squandered it and failed to do any long-term planning. I’ll be the first to tell you we were stupid and immature, lacking the type of role models who might have advised us properly.

When you’re young, you want to surround yourself with as many people as possible. I’m not even sure why having an entourage adds to the fun, but it does. I had a whole lot of people out there on the road with me; all my boys were on
the payroll. Everybody on the tour would get their weekly checks, plus a certain amount per week for food—I think it was about $300. But we would always have food backstage, so many of them were pocketing most of the per diem too. I know one dude who never even cashed his per diem checks—he was always with me when I went out to eat, and he knew I paid every restaurant bill.

When the tour stopped in Japan, I wound up dining at the emperor’s palace, which is where I developed my lifelong love of sushi. I sat down inside that unbelievable place and stared at a plate of brightly colored food, looking unlike anything I had ever eaten before. I had a smile on my face, but my mind was thinking,
What the fuck is this?
But I had already learned to allow myself to accept new things, new cultures. When I picked up one of the pieces, it melted in my mouth with an explosion of incredible flavors. Oh my God, it was so damn good. After trying sushi for the first time at the emperor’s palace, one might think it would all be downhill from there. On a few occasions I have had sushi to rival that, but it hasn’t been often—and I’m still on a constant quest. After sampling sushi all over the world, ironically some of the best sushi I eat now is at a less-than-fancy little joint in the San Fernando Valley called Sushi Spot, which is in a strip mall next to the 7-Eleven. They are one of the few places I’ve come across to serve
toro,
which comes from the fatty belly part of the tuna. That stuff is unbelievable. And though I’ve been looking for more than twenty years, I still
haven’t found tempura as good as what I had that night at the emperor’s palace.