Grammy Award-winning singer Bobby Brown isn’t shy about his difficult upbringing nor his once-private struggles with substance abuse. During a recent appearance on his best friend Mike Tyson’s podcast “Hotboxin,” the former New Edition bad boy opened up about what he claimed was close brush with death at 9 years old after making a critical culinary mistake.
While walking down memory lane with Tyson and co-host, former NBA star Matt Barnes, the Boston native claimed he once mistook his mother’s cocaine for flour while frying some chicken.
“If you go through the book, [ Every Little Step], there’s a story about when I was younger my mother used to deal. She used to keep the coke in the freezer in a plastic bag, and I thought it was flour…and I didn’t know it was, you know,” the entertainer explained. “I was about 8, 9 years old. I called myself, you know, cooking for the family,” he added.
Tyson chimed in, “you were the only one that ate, huh,” to which the legendary singer laughingly replied, “I was the only one that ate,” before adding, “I was dead. They had to rush me to the hospital.”
Barnes asked Brown if the chicken was good before his subsequent trip to the emergency room, and the singer admitted: “The chicken was bomb.” However, the experience was not as pleasant as the meal prepared.
“They [family] came in the house, and I was like, what the f–k,” the 53-year-old explained. “I was paranoid and scared at the same time; heart beating out of my chest.” Elsewhere, the reality star marked the incident as “early OD.”
Brown told the story once before in his 2016 memoir, “Every Little Step,” where he recounted the incident quite vividly, including “the strangely pungent smell emanating from the pan” and “feeling weirder with each bite,” according to an excerpt from Uproxx.
The “Mr. Telephone Man” singer recalled seeing his mother who “At first she was smiling at the idea that her little Bobby had made dinner. Then her gaze swept across the kitchen as she got hit with the full brunt of the scene, the smell, the mess, the powder.” Brown recounted that “With horror, she realized what I had done. I fried chicken in her cocaine — a radical new addition to the family’s culinary offerings. Cocaine chicken.”
