The Onion That Didn't Want to be Peeled

Brown was solitary, secretive and moody, but he covered it up with jokes, chattiness and sarcasm. I always knew there was more to him than good loving, loud laughter and a UPS job. But getting to know the real him was something that happened crumb by crumb.

Over time, the bare-bones facts of his life began to emerge.

• Brown was 39 years old, divorced and the father of three kids.
  
  
• He'd grown up in L.A. He'd gone to high school with both the children of rock legends and with classmates who would later become rock legends.
  
  
• He had served in an elite branch of the U.S. military – the kind that did secret missions. He'd been parachuted in the middle of the night to unnamed foreign countries. He was a skilled marksman. And yes, he had killed people.
  
  
• At one point, he had briefly dabbled in selling drugs. He'd stopped when his ex-wife started to show a little too much liking for cocaine.
  
  
• He had a functionally dysfunctional relationship with his ex-wife. Once, I found myself waiting outside while they had a knock-down, drag-out screaming match. But for the most part, they got along for the sake of the kids.
  
  
• They had three kids. A mischievous 12-year-old boy who thought I was pretty, a seven-year-old girl who didn't want to share her daddy with me and a two-year-old boy I'd never met. I asked Brown how in the world he and his ex-wife had gotten back together long enough to produce the baby, and he replied, "A quickie."
  
  
• He was smart and multi-talented, an artist at heart. As a kid, he had played the violin. He had a beautiful singing voice. He watched every movie known to man. In short, a frustrated actor or writer who had never really attempted to give it a shot.
  
  
• Brown had a secret dream of going into interior design. His UPS route was one of the most exclusive furniture and design centers in Los Angeles, where architects and designers shopped for the rich and famous.
  
  
• He made twice what I made as a secretary. UPS paid bonuses based on package weight, and Brown cashed in because he delivered furniture, rugs and other heavy items.
  
  
• Brown hated his job. Several months before, he'd been falsely accused of stealing $50, an insult to his intelligence as well as his integrity. He'd been exonerated, but now he was permanently disgruntled and hanging on just for the paycheck.
  
  
• His dad had been a major lover-man playboy. (It was genetic.) He'd died the year before, and Brown was taking it hard.

Learning what made Brown tick was an almost impossible task, but learning how he felt about me was easy. He loved me. He was crazy about me. He worshipped me. It was one fact he never even attempted to hide.

(Brown Diaries Part 6 of 18: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 | Lessons Learned 1-3: 1 2 3)

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