There were a butt-load of mysteries I toiled over as a sleazy kid growing up. Such as, did women sleep in their bras? Could a girl pee if she was wearing a tampon? And why did women, other than hookers and dominatrices, wear wigs? Fortunately, I discovered the answers to the first two a few years ago. But it wasn't until I met Whitney Houston that I was schooled in the ways of the wig.

"This is the deal," she whispers, not knowing whether she should call her husband, Bobby Brown, in to give me a royal beat-down, or walk out of the Los Angeles rehearsal studio where she's finally agreed to meet me (more on that later). "My hair is very fine and very thin. It's baby-fine. If you do anything to it, it'll be on the floor. I don't want to be bald when I'm 60. Most of the females in my business don't mess with their hair. Some of my colleagues, we talk about it all the time -- we're onstage with the lights, the heat, the frying. You wouldn't believe how many people wear wigs," she confides.

Relieved to hear that Whitney is neither a hooker nor a dominatrix, I ask her if she changes her wigs depending on whether she's feeling motherly one day and downright nasty the next. "No one's ever asked me that," she says blankly. And no one's ever rocked a wig like Whitney. Except for my grandmother. And she's a complete nut, too.

THE DIVA WIG
I'm not sure what the exact definition of a diva is. My guess is it's an artist who initially agrees to let you into her home to do an interview and then changes her mind. But I could be wrong. Maybe it's a woman who invites you out to dinner, then decides she's too busy and cancels an hour before she's supposed to meet you. When Whitney mysteriously "passed" on the first round of the fast food of female belters, VH1's Divas Live, everyone wanted to know why. Her initial response is to say that she missed it because it was "kind of, like, thrown together." But like any good diva, she shared a few more thoughts on the subject: "If you looked at the first one, the only true, true, true diva was Aretha. The rest were just babies, crawling to get walking. They're learning. If they think they're big, think they're bad, think they're stars, they got another thing coming." You can kind of understand Whitney's thinking when she explains, "I've lived through a range of different cultures, you know, different statuses."

Have you ever met with a president?
"Sure."
Have you ever hung with a junkie?
"Sure."

Which one was more gratifying? "Just the same. The president gets off on the country. The junkie gets off on a couple of hits. They're the same, both cut from the same cloth, they're just men, you dig?"

I dig. (I think.)

I'm a hundred percent sure, though, that a diva is also a woman who shows up for a photo shoot such as ours four hours late. (Her reason: She had a cracked tooth and had to go to the dentist. And although I wasn't there, the folks who directed the shoot said that when Whitney arrived, she was extremely unfocused, had trouble keeping her eyes open and kept singing and playing an imaginary piano on the table. I guess laughing gas can do that to you.) I'm also pretty sure that a diva is a person who gives me 26 minutes for an interview.

It's the night before the Grammy awards, and Whitney's in casual mode-jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt and a beanie on her wigless head. She walks into the rehearsal studio's break room and says, "You sit there, I'll sit here." She busts out her compact to freshen up and then gives me a nod to let me know she's ready to take the stage. Yes ma'am.

THE TABLOID WIG
Not even her impressive work for the Whitney Houston Foundation for Children, the Children's Diabetes Fund or St. Jude Children's Research Hospital earn Whitney a little slack from the tabloids. They are truly the biggest followers of all of her extracurricular works. If it's not her brother Gary Garland Houston, who was arrested for crack possession a few years ago, then it's her husband, Bobby, who crashed Whitney's Porsche, his blood-alcohol level almost three times over the legal limit. He was also charged with sexual battery for slapping a teenager's ass (that charge was later dropped), and he kicked a hotel security guard in the back during a party (no charges were filed, and there was a settlement afterward). Add another charge of drunk driving, and oh, yeah, he had a woman in the car, and it wasn't Whitney. Finally, he was arrested again after a brawl at Disney World, of all places. But this past January, it was Whitney herself who made the front pages. Security guards at a Hawaii airport seized a half-ounce of pot from her carry-on bag. Authorities said Whitney wasn't panicked: She just left the bag and hopped on her flight.

"It wasn't anything like it went down, that's all I can say," she says. "My name got slashed, slapped on there, so I'm not even gonna talk about it. It's like in here [points to her heart]. I want to get it out, but I can't because it's gonna cause a lot of shit." It's hard to tell exactly what she means by that, but it doesn't matter anyway, because Whitney was never arrested. "Our job is to keep weapons off the plane, not hassle people about a little bit of pot," explained one security officer.

"It's fucked up, it's fucked up," she adds, speaking against the advice of her lawyers. "You can't say anything, you can't do anything, because it incriminates you even more. So you just kind of sit there and let it [incriminate you] until you can say something," she yells. "People pick on me, but they don't know me, they don't know me as a person. You could analyze me all fucking day and I'm the same person. What do I care? They don't live with me. They don't wake up next to me in the morning."

And that's another thing. The identity of the person who sleeps next to her has also been the subject of a bit of talk. Whitney and her executive assistant/childhood friend Robyn Crawford have been rumored to be having, as Whitney terms it, a "lesbo" affair for years. Whitney flatly denies it. Robyn is a tall, sexy woman who doesn't have much to say, but is polite enough to shake my hand when I meet her. I couldn't tell anything from that brief meeting and I don't have good gaydar. (I did, however briefly and wrongfully, picture myself all greased up and sandwiched between the two, singing lines from "I'm Your Baby Tonight." What can I say?)

THE WICKED WIG
Earlier in the day, I sat on a couch directly in front of Whitney, having not actually met her yet, but enjoying her Grammy rehearsal. It's silly, but it feels as if she's playing only to me at my 13th birthday party. Whitney runs back and forth from band member to band member, singing and laughing, dancing like my very own James Brown with tits. It's the kind of dancing most of us do only in our kitchens when nobody's around. I have been given the opportunity to see her do something her fans never have -- cut loose.

"I'm not as serious as everyone thinks I am. I'm a fun girl. Nobody would know that... I'm the fun girl," she laughs. Sitting in the break room after she runs through her 45-minute singing session, she explains that she's not all high fashion and champagne. In fact, she's eating fried chicken and Bobby is drinking Budweiser. Doesn't look any different from dinner at my house.

"I love beauty, I love glamour," Whitney says. "I love the magic of show business. But I'm a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of girl. I'm not as gown-and-sequins as they think I am." Another common misconception is that there's a rivalry between Whitney and Mariah Carey. Whitney laments the idea that the world wants the two to hate each other and claims that the press dreamed up the whole thing before they ever even met. "She calls me Lamb, I call her Chop... it's an endearing thing," she says.

Even though I tend to think that's bullshit, because that's the kind of thing responsible celebrities say, it might be true. Whitney's a tough broad. She won't hesitate to tell someone to shut up -- as she did earlier when the dancers kept talking while she was singing -- and she's admitted to smacking the shit out of Bobby in the past, though I'm sure he's no pushover. "I don't bite my tongue," Whitney says. "I don't do that. I will approach a person." I wouldn't try to take her on.

THE MOTHERLY WIG
While Bobby was building up his rap sheet, Whitney turned her attention toward home. "It came down to priorities," she says. "I had a life to lead, a soul to look after, a mind to guide." She's referring, of course, to her daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown. Mothering the now 7-year-old child of a celebrity family such as this is no easy task. Whitney doesn't want her daughter to learn who her parents are through the TV and papers, so Bobbi gets only three hours of tube time a day. "I don't want her to look at TV and think that's real. It's bullshit. Like this whole pot thing. Reading about it would make her crazy, it would make her friends go crazy... she has to go to school."

After the so-called pot thing, Whitney went to her daughter's school and explained the situation to her teachers. She told them that everyone knows her name, but she doesn't know any of theirs. That she's the famous one who has to take all of the shit, not Bobbi. "I had to sit with my daughter and ask her, 'Do you want to go to school?' She said, 'Yeah, I do.' I asked, 'Are you afraid?' She said, 'Yeah, l am.' I said, 'Then we'll go together. If I have to sit in class with you, if I have to sit there in first grade with you, I'll go, so nobody fucks with you. And I'll be the biggest first-grader they ever met, to protect my child.'"

THE BUSINESS WIG
Later that night, on our way out of the rehearsal space, Whitney stops in the lobby when she sees Will Smith. She and Bobby chat with him for a few minutes. When she comes back, she tells me, "Will and I have been going over a script for a year." It's called Diva, a flick about a prima donna in Paris who gets involved in drug smuggling. She's got to be kidding. The Bodyguard was a fluke for me," she admits of her first, and so far most successful, movie. She was already a big time singer. ("The American dream come true," she says. "I don't think anybody thought a little black girl out of Newark would come out with love songs like lightning." Wha'?) Then all of a sudden, bang! She was a movie star, too. "I don't want to be a movie star," Whitney says, "but my agent wants me to." In fact, her agent just finished reading 12 scripts for her. They must not be that good -- Whitney mentions that she and Kevin Costner are talking about a Bodyguard sequel.

Is he a good kisser? He seems stiff.
"He's great," she laughs.

The bottom line when it comes to Whitney's approach to business and her employees is that it's their job to know what to say and on what day, or they're getting the ax. "They gotta know what happened to me the day before and the day before that. My stress builds up... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Boom! Thursday, Friday -- it hits me. I fired someone not too long ago." I'm glad she doesn't sign my paycheck. I can hardly understand what she's saying, much less know what she's thinking.

POSSIBLY-SO-TIGHT-IT'S-SQUISHED-HER-BRAIN WIG
There's a very flashy signature bracelet, gold and covered in diamonds, on Whitney's wrist. "I bought this when I first signed with Arista," she says as she points to it. "I asked this Jew guy on Diamond Row in New York [to make it]." Boing! Did she just say what I think she said? Honestly, that comment doesn't surprise me. A week after the interview, I mention our wig conversation to someone close to Whitney (can't tell you who because he'd definitely kick my ass, but it's not Bobby). He concurs as to Whitney's explanation by saying, "Yeah, with all that heat her head gets nappy." Boing! Whitney and her handlers sure have a way with words.

"You don't know quite where where I am, right? I'm probably pretty tough to write about," Whitney says as I'm leaving. For some reason every gossip column in the world has proved that theory wrong, but I agree with her. I'm still a little stumped.

"That's the mystery, that's what I love. All the bullshit -- my husband and I have learned to play on it and make it work for us." Well, after 26 minutes, I know Whitney like I know Eve and her three faces. "You do," she reassures me. "You know me better now."

Well, then do you change your wigs depending on whether you're feeling motherly one day and downright nasty the next?
"Sure."

Screw this. From now on, I'm just gonna stick to questions about bras and tampons. The answers are much easier to understand.