Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (34 page)

Next, Coco went to see her friend Vanessa. Perhaps Vanessa could go out. Coco waded through the knee-high trash at Vanessa’s mother’s to get to the orderly oasis of Vanessa’s room. It was crowded with girls, putting on makeup and talking about Vanessa’s dilemma: she no longer wanted to be a virgin, but she was still in school. Her friends, most of whom had already dropped out, encouraged her to wait. Virginity and school were discussed as though they were inextricably linked; the loss of one seemed
to guarantee the abandonment of the other. While Coco waited for Vanessa to figure out that she couldn’t come dancing, she let Vanessa’s niece play with her keys. Then Coco heard that her friend Terry had $9, and therefore might be willing to go out. Coco found Terry in the cavernous lobby of Angie’s building, standing in a fog of somnolent girls, sipping beer from a Dixie cup. Coco’s excitement almost felt like an intrusion. The girls silently shared one cigarette.

“Give me twenty minutes, Coco, so I can drink this and go upstairs and do what I gotta do,” Terry said. What she had to do involved drugs. Coco didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs. She had tried alcohol and weed when she was younger, but didn’t like how either made her feel.

“I’ll be back after I go visit my mother-in-law,” Coco said. Lourdes would fuss over Coco—even on regular, boring days, when Coco visited, Lourdes made a scene.

In Lourdes’s building on Mount Hope, someone had finally had it with the rickety elevator. Even when it worked, the buttons required slamming and improvisational rewiring. Now the button panel dangled. Coco pushed what remained of the fourth-floor button and the elevator jerked her up to the fifth. She hurried down to Lourdes’s door. A cap covered the peephole—the top from one of Lourdes’s favorite juice drinks, Sunny Delight.

Her new apartment was a tiny studio next to the building where she’d last lived. The super snuck the dark space in between the known apartments and didn’t give the landlord the rent. The airless room was crammed to the ceiling with objects that suggested former or future promise: speakers, stereos, toolboxes, car radios, an exercise bicycle, TVs, VCRs. A Honda bumper nosed out of the wall; cameras hung, awaiting precious moments; even a Nikon was resting below the feet of Lourdes’s statue of Saint Lazarus. The bed was center stage. The apartment door had to be closed to get into the refrigerator; a pair of handcuffs hooked the handle. There was a sink and a hot plate, no stove. Lourdes mourned the lack of a functioning kitchen. She couldn’t even cook.

But the evening of Coco’s birthday, the room had a festive air. The electricity, illegally wired through a neighbor’s, had been cut off, and there were candles everywhere. Lourdes, holding forth from the bed, explained the predicament to Coco. The neighbor was a gay man with a crush on Domingo; a single visit to the gay man by her handsome husband would restore their light. But Domingo, she said mockingly, was frightened. When he left their apartment, he ducked beneath the peephole of the gay neighbor’s door. “He’s scared of a faggot!” she hacked.

Tucked into a space beside the refrigerator, an older man sipped from a bottle of beer wrapped in a paper bag. Beside him, Domingo leaned against the refrigerator, pretending to ignore Lourdes’s taunts, which she hurled in English so that he couldn’t understand. Domingo worked full-time at Hunts Point unloading vegetables from trailer trucks; he moonlighted dealing drugs. A recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic, he saw Mount Hope as a pit stop, and, it seemed, Lourdes as a lover-mother, who was becoming more burdensome than useful. But he didn’t have any better place to go, nor did he want to lose the extra income from the dealing (Domingo later said Lourdes threatened to keep the business if he dared leave). His dream was to learn English and get his trucking license. Lourdes boasted that Domingo wanted her to give him his first child. She’d claim she was pregnant, then mourn the miscarriages that inevitably followed. When Jessica spoke to Elaine, she would say, “Howse Mommy? Pregnant again?”

Lourdes talked on, flapping her sling for emphasis. The flames from the candles flickered. She bragged about her long hair and her fine ass and her Puerto Rican power, how when she danced she didn’t even need to flirt to get a man. Domingo raised his eyebrows mischievously at Lourdes, jingling the handcuffs hanging from the refrigerator handle like a prison guard. Lourdes scrambled off the bed and grabbed a wedding picture of her son Robert and his wife. She shook it like an angry fist. “You get married now, Mami,” she said, nudging Coco with her bad arm. She claimed she’d filed a lawsuit. “When I get the money from this, I’m going to give you a fucking church wedding.”

Coco burst into tears. “Why are you crying, Mami?” Lourdes asked, alarmed. She shot an accusing look at Domingo along with a blast of Spanish and demanded,
“Why is she crying?”
In what seemed like a single, fluid gesture, Lourdes then shooed Domingo away, ordered the old man off the only chair, sat Coco down, and knelt before her in the impossibly small space between the table and the wall of shelves.

“I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m gonna cry, then I’m gonna laugh, then I’m gonna cry. I’m happy and upset. I don’t know why I’m crying at the same time,” Coco blurted out.

Lourdes understood the difficulty of birthdays. Milestones were unhappy times. Her forty-third birthday was only weeks away. She raised Coco’s chin and placed her good hand firmly on Coco’s wet cheek. In a throaty voice, she launched into a bluesy rendition of “Happy Birthday,” putting her whole soul into the song. Then she broke into “Sixteen
Candles,” refusing to let Coco’s brown eyes wander, until she ended abruptly with her own applause. “Oh, I
love
that song!” Lourdes said. “
I love that song!
Don’t you love that song, Mami?” Coco smiled shyly. “Happy birthday, Mami! Happy
birthday
!” Lourdes nearly shouted, pumping up her deflated hopefully-future-daughter-in-law. The decibel of the promises made up for what they lacked in conviction. Lourdes then announced in a normal tone of voice that Domingo would get Coco a winter coat. A guy he knew sold them from the back of a truck.

“I don’t want to get my hopes up, because when my hopes get up, they always come down,” Coco said, streaming down the stairs. She had not had a winter coat in years. Two little boys played soccer on a square of landing.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” one said to her.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” she said back. She wrapped the windbreaker she’d borrowed from her mother around her and pushed out the heavy door. She scurried down Mount Hope Place, as she had so many times before, and into the light of Tremont Avenue.

Back at Foxy’s, Coco checked in on the girls, then went back down to meet up with her friend Terry. It was so cold that only the drug dealers were out. Coco yelled to her little brother’s bedroom window, “Hector! Throw down Mommy’s scarf!” The scarf sailed down. Coco inhaled it as she wrapped it around her. “I smell just like my mother when she’s smoking cigarettes and booter—ugghh!” she said. “I think I dressed too baggy tonight. I feel fat. I real skinny but I feel fat.”

“You buggin’, Coco,” Terry said.

“Coco!” Hector yelled. He tossed down another missive from his room. To a matchbook he’d taped a free pass to a local club called The Fever. It stood on the corner of Webster and Tremont: Coco passed by the place whenever she took the 36 bus. Lourdes used to go dancing there when it was called the Devil’s Nest. Now black streaks of lightning flashed across the sign: “The Fever—Catch It!” Coco hoped that she would run into Roxanne. Fights made things vivid. It was her birthday. Something had to happen. Something had to change.

The Fever occupied the basement of a decrepit building close to where Mighty had been shot. Bouncers haphazardly pat-frisked the customers. It cost an extra $5 to keep your coat, and a dollar to wear your hat. To parade in one’s name brand must have been worth it, because
most of the teenagers kept on their winter gear, even though the temperature climbed toward the tropical. Only the go-go girls were dressed to sweat, in leather hot pants and sequined bras.

Coco, in her topknot, looked vulnerable leading her friend Terry through the crowd. The girls danced without much enthusiasm. They whispered and danced some more. They stepped to the side of the floor and watched. Boys who could afford the $5 drinks clustered around the bar that surrounded the runway the go-go girls danced on. Bored, the girls flung their legs over the boys’ hat-covered heads. Coco bought a drink that she still hadn’t finished by the time they left, three hours later.

Back at Thorpe House, Coco realized that she’d forgotten to retrieve her keys from Vanessa’s little niece. She was locked out, but she wanted to take advantage of her daughters’ absence and clean. Although Coco would not admit it, she wanted to make a comeback on apartment check. She and Terry banged and body-slammed the front door of Thorpe for fifteen minutes and finally woke the security guard. He shuffled off in search of the master key. Coco slid down to the floor, while Terry perused a Thanksgiving bulletin board in the hall.

Terry scrutinized it closely. She needed glasses: her nose practically touched the paper turkeys stuck there. The nuns had prepared a photocopy that began,
I’m Thankful For . . .

“She says
plane
instead of
place,
and she cannot even spell
God!
” Terry marveled at the errors of one essayist. She read Coco’s aloud:

I’m Thankful For . . . My three pride and joy’s Mercedes Nikki & Nautica. I thank god to have three beautiful girls. I’m thankful for having a great family that care for us a great deal. I’m glad to have a Mom thats there for me & understands me. I’m also greatful for the husband I have. He gives me headaches at times But we all go through that.

Most of all I’m glad for finally being (living) on my own & being my self & finally I thank god for my girls to be one step ahead at a early age (school)

Coco had drawn a smiley face with arrows pointed to the word
school.

“I should go to jail,” Coco said self-consciously. “Oh, they come outta prison smart. Cesar learned so much in there. You should see how much he knows.” The Thorpe House guard must have fallen asleep downstairs, but Coco and Terry seemed neither to notice nor to care. They reminisced about their childhoods.

“I took my problems to the street,” said Coco. “That’s one thing, I never kepted them to myself. I guess it was because I wanted someone to talk to.” She paused. Her mood seemed melancholy. Her habit of annotating her own life was another way to tuck in the wild strands. “I can’t wait till my girls are old enough and I can talk to them about everything.”

Finally, the security guard returned; he could not find the key. Back at Foxy’s, the block was eerily still. Beside Foxy’s building, on what had for years been abandoned lots, stood brand-new single-family homes: the city’s latest attempt to improve the beleaguered neighborhood. The pastel units had outside light fixtures and driveways. The families parked their cars and checked the locks on their driveway gates, after which they slipped through barred doors and disappeared. In the middle of the neighborhood, the houses presented a surreal facade of cheer. They might have been intended to inspire, but the impossibility of acquiring something so close somehow had the opposite effect. The proximity made the failure pointed and personal.

It was five o’clock in the morning. Coco scanned her mother’s windows. The apartment was dark. “My brother’s asleep,” she said. Terry wandered off toward her own mother’s building. Coco collected the courage to go in. Her head pounded—she’d tied her ponytail knot too tight. “I feel so old,” she said, hugging herself against whatever awaited her, on the cusp of her twentieth year.