No Woman No Cry (23 page)

So I said to him, “Okay, you do what you want to do.” He said he wanted a bigger house. But I wasn't going to give up so easily. I said, “Okay, but the one I found has a nice acreage of land, and my lawyer said, if I'm gonna choose it I have to fill out the papers before I go, because there are other people who are interested, and I should leave an advance.”

I didn't push it at first, because I thought I might be getting too … too demanding maybe. But then I got really determined, thinking, he's not leaving me. I asked him to come up to see the place. When he arrived, with Diane Jobson, Bob looked around, and his response was that the place was nice, but it was too small for his children. So I said, “Well, it could be bigger. This is a big property. I mean, we can develop on it if you want; make more rooms when we get back from the tour.”

But he said, “No, I'm not interested.”

Later, when we were alone, he explained more about what he was doing in Nine Miles, which is actually where his mausoleum is now. He was preparing that place to live, he told me, because this would be his last tour, his last deal with Island Records. The contract was up, and he was to be on his own, definitely on his own with his music. So he was making a decision for his life. Where to go from here, after his last album for Chris Blackwell. He'd be a better father, spend more time with his children, he'd be a better husband, he'd be a better friend … blah blah blah. We laughed and talked all night. Promises, and oh …

“Okay, Bob,” I said. “But in the meantime, I'm going to buy this house.”

Before this, I was always able to keep an eye on him. And he was happy for that. I was his eye, I was his pain; when things were not right, I would be the shoulder. I created home for him anywhere I was. And he loved that. He loved to know he could get away, especially after he became public property, and
oh
they would pick on him. And when I looked at him, I'd see him getting skinny, I'd see when he started to fret, I could tell when he wasn't happy. Even the whole woman thing was becoming a problem for him. They might enjoy sex, but he wasn't enjoying his life. Sex is one thing, but what happens afterward? What can you give? What is your contribution? And that's what was lacking in most of Bob's relationships; the one-night stands were becoming physically and spiritually boring—that took a lot out of him.

The day after I had decided to buy the house on the hill, I drove up there (in the BMW Bob had bought me—I guess as a consolation—when he became more friendly with Cindy). I looked around again and said to myself, wow, I'm taking a chance. But hey, it's a positively savvy chance, I told myself, when you consider you
have
to do it, you just
have
to do it. Buy yourself a home that you love. Girl, if you don't make it happen, nobody's gonna do it for you. Make up your mind; Bob seems to be on a different trip. Something felt strange, I could feel a different vibe. But I'd been through all that. There were enemies, and it was an easy thing to have enemies. And I had friends. Just a few. Real friends were a few.

So I took the advance money for the tour and I told the manager, “Don't pay me on the road, just send the money straight to this lawyer in Jamaica.” Because, after all, that was me. I'm not gonna live in the darkness, I told myself, I have to be where the light shines. And I'm gonna live in the house on the hill.

I
N SEPTEMBER 1975
, during a football game, one of the players wearing spikes stepped on the big toe of Bob's right foot. The injury was somewhat severe, but he refused to give it much attention, because Bob was Bob, who never gave in to pain, and a hurt toe wasn't as serious as other things that needed looking after. So he took it very lightly and continued to play on the foot even though doctors recommended that he rest it and not run around for a while. I would be the last one who saw it most evenings, when he came home and took off his sneakers and socks. He was hurt enough to complain—ouch!—and I could see the toe was not healing. I kept saying, “Bob, it's still not looking good, you have to quit wearing these kinds of shoes and give up the football for a time.” He'd say okay, and he'd stop for a day or two, and the next day he'd be out on the field again.

Eventually, after he reinjured the toe in 1977, the nail fell off, and then malignant melanoma developed, ironically, a disease that rarely occurs in people of color. But Bob felt the doctors who made this diagnosis were lying, even Dr. Bacon, a black doctor in Miami who loved Bob and who said to me, “If Bob would allow me to get rid of the toe, we could stop this thing.” After the doctor spoke to me I spoke to Bob about it, but Bob thought I was crazy, because he believed that if he consented to this he wouldn't be able to stand up during performances. “How would I go onstage? They won't stay looking at a crippled man!” He spoke angrily to me, as if I were being deliberately negative. So I thought, okay, this is not a time for him to feel that way about me. I felt I had to support
his
will because I didn't want him to feel as if I were trying to weaken him when he needed strength most of all.

In any case, the decision wasn't left to me. My influence was more and more limited in that hothouse, superstar atmosphere where rumors flew about his illness and people told him this and that. Naturally, I had my opinion about some of the things that were said, but I didn't try to make a fuss, to publicize my feelings.

Bob was told that Dr. Bacon was lying, that it was only a sore toe and would get better soon, that he should come out of the hospital where this diagnosis had been made. Which he did.

So that final tour went on, and we traveled from one country to another, one city to another, doing the same thing we had done for almost seven years. Night after night, city after city, crowds of fans—thousands of people—came out to see Bob; for them he had become more than just a singer; they wanted to hear the message in his music, what he had to say. Along with this every aspect of his life was inspected—whatever he did, whatever he thought, whatever others thought of him.

This meant an openness, with many more people having access to him. When he became that accessible, because of the growing demand, I started to lose him, physically as well as morally. And with that loss of his presence came the loss of his feelings toward a lot of things. I felt I'd lost his respect, his attention, his value. Yet all the while these public demands became more important than his personal ones, I continued to be there as one of the I-Three and not as his wife. I still felt the situation demanded it. He was not very happy; his toe never healed; there was no time for that.

As usual on tour, we had separate rooms, which at first I had enjoyed. But now, because Bob had the additional responsibility to give interviews and the like, the record company took control of his daily life—when he went to bed, the time he had to wake up, eat, and go. He was on a hectic, more pressured schedule now; when everybody else on the tour was able to rest a little later into the morning after a concert, he had to be up for a 7
A.M.
or a 9
A.M.
interview. If so-and-so was going to call you from another part of the world, you had to be up to catch their time, even though you had just fallen into bed.

As the lifestyle changed, the women kept coming—the beauty queen or the Miss So and So. Every city we went to, he had to meet the Miss So and So for a photo shoot; it was a part of the promotional thing. “Hello Bob, Queen of the So and So is coming down to the hotel to take pictures with you.” And then I would find that she came to take pictures during the day but at night she's there, in the bedroom, and trying to see him again the next night. That made a difference because of his health, which I could not stop my feelings about. I was still concerned about that. All this time the sickness was moving, according to what the doctors later said. The toe grew worse, aggravated by his wearing boots every night for performances. Sometimes we did two shows a night, and then there were the after-show parties. Next night same thing.

I remember one night—I think it was in Paris—that he came back to the hotel with his toe all hurt up, draining, and then the next morning we had to call in the doctor. Along with the doctor came the picture on the front page of the newspaper, of Bob dancing with the beauty queen. I kept saying, “You really didn't have to. After the concert you shouldn't have gone out dancing with your sick toe, or if you're going dancing, wear a slipper.” That's when I realized that he wasn't thinking of himself anymore, because self-preservation should come first. As for the one-night stands, the flings, I would say to him, “If you do this you can't do that, because you're weakening one aspect of yourself. And along with the weakness you lose your resistance. The more you can rest is the best for you.” And he'd say, “Oh, you're getting jealous now …! Now you're acting like a wife, huh?”

We'd have arguments like that. And people even tried to turn him against me. But then I said to myself,
tschoo
, if I'm gonna be thought badly of, and treated so, then forget it. Because if you don't take care of yourself, then you don't love yourself, Bob, and if you don't love yourself, you can't love me. Because you have to love yourself, don't let other people love you more than you love yourself. That's a mistake. And though some are real fans who love you for your message, others are vampires sucking your blood, your energy, and they're only saying they love you because you're in the
Daily News
.

Then I realized, oh, this is what happens when you finally lose control. I was losing whatever control I'd had, and just as I'd been warned early on, it came with success, with stardom, it came with “I'm too busy for you.” And the excuses: “There are things that I have to do, that I
must
do, to be somebody, to make money to send the kids to school. I
have
to work this way.” Though I knew Bob was on a mission, he had gotten sidetracked in so many different ways by all the “yes” people—whether he was right or wrong they said yes to him. Still, I said, “We're losing the spiritual aspect of our dreams.”

Then there came a time when the whole vibe started to change. This began to happen after Don Taylor had been fired from his job as Bob's manager. Danny Sims, along with Alan Cole, was now managing the tour—Danny Sims, who took our demos over the years and sold them and claimed most of Bob's publishing rights from the early days. And I'm there thinking, wow—what's going on? After Bob had signed with Island, I didn't participate in his financial or managerial decisions.

Then everything began to unravel. At the end of September 1980, we arrived in New York to do a show with the Commodores at Madison Square Garden. The other members of the group were separated from Bob—we were put in the Gramercy Park Hotel downtown, and he was at the Essex House on Central Park South. We had never before been booked into different places like that. I heard later that some hustlers, dreads from Brooklyn who had attached themselves to the tour, had offered him something, though I don't know whether or not he took it.

After the show he'd stayed up all night, Bob told me later. I called him the next morning, which was a Sunday, to ask if he wanted to go to church, because ordinarily whenever we were in a city that had an Ethiopian Orthodox Church, we had been making sure to attend. Pascalene from Gabon answered. When she got on the phone I thought, wow, what's she doing there so early? Then Bob picked up and said he didn't want to go to church, which was unusual, and he didn't sound like himself, so I said, “What happened, you didn't sleep last night?”

He said, “Not really.” Then he went on to say that he was fine, but that he couldn't make it to church and he was going to send the limousine for me. Still, something in his voice sounded strange and distant.

Minnie was with me, and I kept having the feeling that something wasn't quite right, so I said to her, “You go up there and see what's happening because I keep having this nagging feeling …” All along something just didn't seem right.

When Minnie got uptown and went into Bob's room, she looked at him and—she told me this years later—she saw Death. To her, he looked like a ghost. Eventually they told us what had happened, that Bob collapsed while he was running in Central Park. He and Alan Cole had gone jogging to “energize” Bob, who in mid-run had suddenly felt his body freezing up on him. When he turned to tell Alan that something was wrong, he couldn't move his head or speak, and fell down. Now they were waiting to see Danny Sims's doctor, but Bob wanted us to go ahead to the next concert location, which was Pittsburgh, and he would see us there.

Nobody had said anything to me about Bob falling, which I thought was so disrespectful and suspicious. But then I guess the lifestyle had so broadened, and so many people were riding on our earnings, that he wasn't in control anymore over who knew what or when. Other people had taken over his life completely, and I didn't know—maybe he didn't even know—what he was eating or smoking. I still don't know, though over the years I've heard a lot of stories about what had been going on without my knowledge.

So I did go on to Pittsburgh, even though I knew something wasn't right. During the night I dreamed that Bob was inside a fenced-in place that could have been a hospital, but it had bars and he didn't have any hair on his head. He came to the fence to say something but we were separated by this grill thing, and I woke up thinking again that he didn't look right to me, something had still not been explained. The next morning I called Marcia and Judy and told them about the dream, and then I decided to call New York and see what was happening. When I reached Bob's number there, the phone was answered by a Jamaican journalist named Fitz, who was doing public relations for the tour. When I said, “Fitz, what's happening there?” he said, “Man, it doesn't look right …”