Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (66 page)

Mercedes refused to listen to her teacher.

Could someone collect Mercedes from detention?

Mercedes fought with a classmate.

Mrs. Rodriguez, we’ve suspended Mercedes again.

Again the school demanded that Coco get Mercedes into counseling.

Coco did not believe in counseling. Her family had been required to go into therapy after their father died, when Coco was eight years old. The therapist had continued to see Hector individually, and he’d placed Hector on Dilantin, but Hector remained the most volatile one in her family. Foxy’s condition hadn’t improved in the six years of weekly therapy since her three-week stay in what she called “psychiatric.” As far as Coco was concerned, the doctors had only made Foxy’s drug use more dangerous; in addition to the cocaine, now she took prescription pills. Coco didn’t think her mother was equipped to be her own pharmacist. Besides, pills turned into their own problems. If Iris didn’t take her antidepressants, she became frighteningly ill. Said Coco, “I see how it brought my brother down, I see how it brought my mother down, and how my sister can’t be without it.”

When Coco finally did take Mercedes to a therapist, Mercedes spent the first session hiding beneath her coat. That counselor told Coco that giving in to Mercedes’s demands was unproductive—an observation that Coco found obvious. “I give in with all my girls,” Coco later said. “I guess they always going to end up blaming me, anyway. It’s a waste of my time. Mercedes won’t say nothing. Counseling ain’t for me.”

For Mercedes, counseling presented different obstacles. To speak forthrightly with a therapist meant navigating a minefield of secrets, which meant betraying her mother and placing her sisters in jeopardy. Welfare couldn’t know about Frankie, because Coco could be disqualified for her housing subsidy and cash benefits. And what about the drugs that Frankie sometimes hid from Coco in the house?

F
or the first few years of prison, sitting in his cell, Cesar had imagined a limited future: He’d get out and go back to what he called his “crimey ways.” He’d reappear on Tremont, stronger than ever, and exact revenge upon those enemies and former friends foolish enough to have written him off. He’d enjoy lots of girls. He could already hear the comments women would make about his chiseled body. “Damn, he been in nine years and he come out looking
young.
He look brand-new!” If he blessed Coco and Roxanne with a nighttime visit, they would remember why they should have waited for him.

But the length of the enforced separation from Tremont and the distance from the day-to-day struggles of his family had granted Cesar an unanticipated reprieve. He hadn’t been able to see the shape of his life until he’d been removed from it. Giselle’s lack of interest in Cesar’s toughness had also cleared a way for him to explore less familiar parts of himself. While Cesar was growing up, if Lourdes or Jessica or Elaine ran into trouble, they would say, “Cesar will take care of it.” His friends expected him to resolve their beefs; Cesar remembered the time Rocco got into a fight in the pool hall on Mount Hope and Cesar pulled out his gun, after which Rocco disappeared. Mighty had been the only one who equally shared the burden of being the tough guy. Cesar had gone into these situations willingly, but now his naïveté disturbed him; he’d begun to wonder whether his friends’ and family’s dependence actually qualified as love. In the box Cesar couldn’t intimidate, protect, or save anyone; his physical powerlessness was complete. The box had also forced Cesar to contend with what he later called his greatest demon—the terror of being alone. He thought about the comfort he’d received from all the girls who he’d been with. Sleeping with a girl beside him, he said, “was the only time I felt safe, at peace.” The enforced solitude had also made him reevaluate what it meant to be a son, a father, and a man. “The box gives you time to think why your kids act the way you do,” Cesar said. Protecting family was too large a responsibility for any child. Mercedes was weighing heavily upon Cesar’s mind.

The proximity of his new prison to the city also made it much easier for family and friends to reach him, and his clarity about his old life and his
resolve about the future improved as he had more contact with the outside world. Elaine visited with her sons and her new boyfriend. Giselle took the shuttle, which was less expensive than the longer bus rides, and the frequency of their visits made them less charged. Since their reconciliation, she’d been talking about having a baby, although Cesar wanted her to wait until he was released. He wanted to help the children he already had. Rocco would ride up on his motorcycle and play a game of chess before he reported in for the night shift at his software company.

Rocco, who continued to vacillate between the criminal and the straight worlds, was feeling guilty about his good luck. He’d been thinking about his old crew. Mighty was dead. Tito was still serving time in Sing Sing, and he wasn’t doing too well. Rocco had visited Tito a few times and found him paranoid. Tito believed the authorities beamed voices to taunt him from his transistor radio and obsessed over a farfetched theory for another appeal he couldn’t afford to wage. Cesar was locked up, too, but at least he was surviving. “In a way, I started them all,” Rocco said. “Why am I still here? Why am I with my family? Why did I manage to get married? Why are things so cool for me, when I am the main dude?” He wanted to make it up to Cesar. “I’ll show him Windows 95, Windows 98, I’ll show him DOS—so that he won’t get lost again,” Rocco said. “I’m on this new route.” Giselle’s vision of the future also included Cesar as a family man. That’s who he was during their visits. “I don’t care if he works at McDonald’s as long as we have enough to pay the bills and have a roof over our heads,” she said.

Cesar didn’t let on, but he sometimes believed Giselle’s love for him was close to miraculous. During visits, he’d watch her cross the room and wonder why such a beautiful woman stuck by him. She did not need Cesar in the ways to which he’d been accustomed to being needed. His ability to physically protect her was limited. Trailers were the only time Cesar could satisfy her sexually. She earned her own money. Said Giselle, “I can do for myself. I don’t need to be with someone because of what they can do for me.” She performed her wifely duties but did not become intimately involved with his family. She called to wish Lourdes her happy birthdays and Mother’s Days; she passed through at Christmas and Thanksgiving; she called Coco on his behalf and checked up on the girls; but she left Lourdes to handle Cesar’s tenuous relationship with Roxanne. Giselle visited Cesar, but when she didn’t, she did not apologize.

Shortly after Cesar got off keep-lock, he stopped the drugs cold turkey and used the remainder of Rocco’s money to pay off fines he’d incurred
from the recent charge. He stepped out of the mix and kept to himself. Cesar said, “I was either gonna end up killed or murdering someone, and I thought about how that would make my daughter feel, to come to my funeral for that.” He confessed to Giselle that he’d been using and devoted himself to her in earnest. He stopped writing other girls. He signed up for a parenting class.

Meanwhile, Jessica was slowly establishing herself on the outside, struggling to balance the needs of her current life with the habits of the old one. She showed photographs of her Boy George days to her current George. He couldn’t relate to the bejeweled girl in leathers and fur coats. “I see her as simple. The pictures didn’t seem right. She’s just Jessica,” he said. They didn’t go to expensive hotels; they snuck over to his mother’s empty apartment. Jessica no longer lounged in Benzes and BMWs, smug on the ostrich-skin passenger seats; now she amicably ducked beneath the dashboard to avoid being recognized by fellow probationers when she accompanied him on his rounds.

The couple had more privacy when Jessica moved into her own place in May 1999 and George quit his job. The owner of the company where Elaine and Jessica worked had helped Jessica find the newly renovated studio apartment, which occupied the basement of a privately owned home on a pretty block in Pelham Parkway in a middle-class neighborhood. Elaine had shared her worries after Jessica showed her the apartment she’d originally planned to take. “No sister of mine is living in a dump like this,” Elaine said of the moldy cave in a dismal building in a dangerous neighborhood. “You served your time,” she told Jessica. “You don’t have to live like this anymore.”

Still, Jessica spent some harrowing nights alone in her new digs. The couple who lived upstairs had brutal fights, which she could hear through the ceiling. She’d curl up in bed and try to drown out the sound of the children’s screaming, covering her head with a pillow that Serena had embroidered with
Welcome Home.
Other nights, Jessica distracted herself from the stillness by calling whomever she could think to call—Serena, although she had to watch the long-distance; George; her prison pals Ida or Miranda; or Talent, Boy George’s old friend, whom she’d bumped into at the halfway house.

Since Jessica’s release, Boy George had been trying in vain to reach her. He’d written letters in care of Lourdes, but the last address he had was Mount Hope, and Lourdes had moved five times since then. He had also written Jessica in care of his mother, but they hadn’t kept up after Jessica’s
initial visit. Jessica wasn’t interested in her old lifestyle, but she did miss the anchor Boy George had provided. She was doing what she was supposed to—working, trying to reconnect with her children, trying to make a lasting relationship with a man—but a lot of the time she felt unmoored. She was still dating George, who had become a security guard. His wife was pregnant, but Jessica still hoped for more than he was giving. She worried constantly about money. She’d promised to help Cesar and to send her ex-girlfriend, Nilda, her box—Nilda was about to be released—but Jessica was barely getting by. The children always needed something; Jessica wanted lots of things herself.

A few times, George drove Jessica upstate to see the children; Jessica had lent George $3,000 of her $5,000 settlement to repair his car. On one trip, they ran into Coco and Frankie and Coco’s girls in the park. From a distance, Coco mistook George for Serena’s boyfriend because they were holding hands. Coco and Jessica exchanged hugs, but neither had much to say. The encounter disappointed Coco, who attributed its awkwardness to Jessica’s allegiance to Giselle. Coco later said, “Jessica falls in love too fast.”

The warehouse where Jessica worked shut down for a month in the summer. She invited her daughters to come to the city and share the vacation with her. The twins weren’t as eager to spend time with her as they had been when they were younger, but Serena seemed excited, and Jessica wanted to act like a mother, even though she wasn’t entirely sure how. In anticipation of the visit, she hung three new toothbrushes on her bathroom wall.

That July, the girls bused down to Jessica’s. Brittany and Stephanie quickly grew homesick and returned to Troy, but Serena stayed on. Jessica dyed Serena’s dark brown hair blond. They spent afternoons at the swimming pool at Roosevelt Park. They went to the clinic, where Jessica had a pregnancy test (it came out negative). She and George doubledated with Serena and Frederico, George’s younger friend. They went to Coney Island, Serena said, “about a million times.”

Serena sometimes placed calls to George on Jessica’s behalf—as a lure, or as a front to bypass George’s wife. Jessica’s openness in the company of her daughter surprised George: “Jessica treats her like she’s thirty. Certain things you shouldn’t say—in a way it’s good, but in another way it’s taking away childhood.” At the same time, George counseled Serena about the dogging ways of men. “Mostly I would tell her what I would think if I saw a girl,” he said. He invited her along with
his friends and their dates: after they’d dropped off the girls, George would let Serena overhear the deprecating comments the boys made about the girls they’d just been sweet to in the car. Serena celebrated her fourteenth birthday in the city; George treated her and her cousin Tabitha to the movie
American Pie.
Afterward, they all went to a diner, and Serena received a cupcake with a candle. The waitresses sang.