The Meaning of Mariah Carey

too much. I was beyond tired. I was in urgent need of sleep. Sleep, this basic human requirement, this simple comfort, became impossible to obtain. I tried to find refuge in the emptiness of my enormous new penthouse, but the label and “management” were calling me constantly, trying to convince me to do the video. I simply couldn’t do it. I had been working for years without a break. It was totally out of the norm for me not to show up, but I really didn’t have anything left. I couldn’t think. And they couldn’t hear me. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. No matter what room I was in—none of which were familiar or comforting to me yet—I could hear the phone, ringing and ringing. Wait. Did Tommy know where I was? Was Tommy trying to torture me too? Were his people following me again? I was getting scared.

I had to find a safe place. I had to find sleep. Who could I trust? No one working for me was going to help me find somewhere to go. All I was asking for was a little bit of time. All these people on my payroll, and no one lobbied for me to have one day off. I was trying to tell them I just needed a couple of days blacked out, some time to rest, recuperate, and procure a bit of beauty sleep.

In desperation, I went to a hotel near my penthouse. I thought if I could just get a room, draw the curtains, crawl under the covers, and go to sleep, things could be all right.

I had lived in hotels for long stretches of time, and found comfort in knowing people wouldn’t bother you. And I had stayed at this particular hotel several times before while my penthouse was being worked on. It never occurred to me to instruct the front desk not to contact my management or tell anyone I was there. Why should I have to? I stumbled into my room and promptly hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob. Even though I’d just been run out of my brand-new, spectacular penthouse to a modest hotel room, I began to feel relief. I drew a bath, slowly sank into the warm, scented water, and put on some soothing gospel (“Yet I Will Trust in Him” by Men of Standard), hoping some of the trauma would dissolve. I began to calm down. The TRL incident was still weighing heavily on me. I felt the whole world thought I had lost it. I wrapped myself up in the hotel bathrobe and curled up in the bed. But before I could shut my eyes, I heard a knock at the door. And then there was a bang!

I jumped up and stomped to the door, ready to cuss out whoever hadn’t read the sign. I opened it to a crowd of people—management people, Morgan, even my mother!

“What the fuck is going on?” I yelled. “I gotta go to SLEEP!” I was panicking. I was hysterical. I was caught. I began to scream—just scream. I couldn’t talk. A whole damn delegation had arrived to drag me back to work. All I wanted was a couple of damn days off. So I screamed.

Suddenly Morgan grabbed my arms and pulled me toward him. I became still. He stared at me and quietly said, “This whole thing is just birthdays at Roy Boy’s.”

I immediately snapped out of it. “Birthdays at Roy Boy’s” was an inside joke we had about our father, because he always mixed up our birthdays. Morgan brought me back to our innocent familial language: the jokes and the silly sayings that only we shared, the way we used humor to cope. The words that existed before all of this, all of these outsiders. In that moment I believed Morgan understood how I felt, that he even cared about my well-being. “Birthdays at Roy Boy’s” took me back to when I felt like he could be an actual family member to me. It was personal and funny, and I was in distress. It was as if he had given me the secret code for “I got you,” appearing like a lighthouse in the storm. Emotionally, I had cracked wide open—and Morgan slithered in.

I had been run out of my home and a hotel. There was an entire team of people hunting me down to pull me back to work, including my mother. I was beyond desperate and still in need of sleep. My record deal was an over 100-million-pound leash around everybody’s neck.

I needed to find someone without any business interests or investments in me—someone who knew me and cared about me, who would help me or hide me. My mind immediately went to Maryann Tatum, aka Tots. She’d been with me as a background vocalist since Butterfly, and we became like sisters after her sister died. She was one of my few friends who I thought knew how to contend with really fucked-up situations (and this one certainly qualified!). She was solid and came from solid folk. Tots grew up one of nine children in the projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn. And even though her mother had to deal with raising nine kids on her own, she was always clean, always put together. Tots was sweet and God loving but also knew her way around the streets. I thought she could help me get away from all the people coming after me, and help me get some sleep.

We decided I could go to her apartment in Brooklyn because no one would think to look for me there. By the time I managed to pull it together and sneak out to Brooklyn, I was riddled with anxiety. Not only did I know the label was looking for me, who knew if Tommy was following me too? It wouldn’t have been the first time. (Robert Sam Anson’s 1996 exposé “Tommy Boy” in Vanity Fair reported on just some of his antics, but it