Everything was going great at Karamo Brown’s swanky pre-Emmy Awards soiree until a friend busted out the cocaine.
As Brown recounts in “Karamo: My Story of Embracing Purpose, Healing and Hope” (Gallery Books), the “Queer Eye” culture expert and life coach had spent his late 20s battling a disastrous coke addiction, which he overcame.
Even so, staring down the white powder in a lavish, Ritz-Carlton suite, the 38-year-old admits that he considered just snorting it.
“I was thinking . . . maybe!” Brown tells The Post. “This is a party environment, people won’t know. It’s been years!”
Thankfully, he managed to resist temptation. Brown asked his friend to leave, and hid in the bathroom to collect himself. He finds that taking a few minutes alone can help him cope with stressful moments like these — moments that inevitably spring up in Hollywood. “When you’re thrust into a world . . . of press, of fame, of not being around your family, it can be difficult,” he says.
It’s a hard-earned lesson, and one that dates back to Brown’s first stint in the spotlight: In 2004, Brown was cast on MTV’s “The Real World: Philadelphia,” which aired in 2004. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ll go and have a good time, maybe ruffle a few feathers,’ ” he says. But then, as the show started filming, “it became dark really quickly.”
Brown felt exposed living life under the lens, and compensated by getting confrontational with his cast mates. In one now-infamous scene, he made a joke about slitting a fellow roommate’s throat if they ever found themselves together on a desert island.
His behavior earned him the “horrible” nickname Crazy Karamo, which followed him for years after the show aired.
Karamo Brown (left) joins other “The Real World” franchise alumni Janelle Casanave, Tonya Cooley and Zach Mann at a reunion event in LA in 2008.Katherine Christine/WENN
Although he majored in business and did peer counseling in college at Florida A&M University, Brown says his time on “The Real World” hurt his chances of getting a regular job. And so he did club appearances — partying with drunk college students for $10,000 a pop — and developed a new, nasty drug habit to fuel his lifestyle.
“Cocaine made me feel more on top of things, because I have a Type A personality. I’m like go-go-go,” says Brown. “But it was actually making me more depressed, more alone, more hurt and more ashamed.”
Brown says the trauma of growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father was catching up with him. At his worst, he writes, he was using constantly, getting violent with his boyfriends and disrespecting his beloved mother. Once, he even attempted suicide.
“I just felt alone and lost,” he says. “I think I would have kept going until it was ‘Karamo, dead at 26, former ‘Real World’ star.’ ”
But then, at 25 years old, Brown was shocked out of his downward spiral: He learned that he had a 10-year-old son, Jason, from a high-school fling. She moved away soon after they slept together, he came out as gay and they fell out of touch.
‘I think I would have kept going until it was ‘Karamo, dead at 26, former ‘Real World’ star.’ ‘
Reeling from the news, Brown did drugs in the airport bathroom at LAX before boarding a flight to Texas to meet Jason.
But the Houston native says that meeting his son had a profound effect. “That’s when I started to realize I have to be better not only for myself, but for him.”
Brown got clean from drugs that same year — though he still has an occasional glass of wine or a beer — and took full custody of Jason, now 22, along with adopting his half-brother Christian, 18, in 2010. Though he misses them and fiancé Ian Jordan when he’s on the road with the Fab Five, he’s in a much better place now to handle that stress.
“I have a wealth of people now, counselors that I work with and my own therapist that I talk to,” he says. “I’ve figured out what to do when I’m feeling pressure and anxiety . . . I just make sure I tackle it head-on.”
