Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (67 page)

The tentative changes that Cesar began in the box accelerated with the crises that hit him back to back in the spring of 1999, within weeks of turning twenty-five years old. First, Rocco had a devastating accident: he was riding his motorcycle on the Grand Concourse when a woman made a U-turn in front of him, and he smashed into the side of her car. The crash left him permanently paralyzed. One week later, Lourdes suffered the first of two major heart attacks. She was admitted to the same hospital as Rocco. Cesar had long feared that Lourdes would die while he was locked up, and he didn’t want his mother to leave the world disappointed in him. He became even more determined to figure out a way to help the people in his life, even from prison. “My mother’s health had a lot to do with it,” Cesar said. “My wife. My children. I had to make a list of my priorities.” Cesar couldn’t reach Rocco on the phone during the months of his hospitalization, so Cesar befriended an inmate who was wheelchair-bound and started educating himself.

Giselle took Mercedes and Nautica along with her son, Gabriel, to visit Cesar that summer, but Mercedes returned home morose. She’d overheard Gabriel call Cesar Daddy.

“Why you calling him Daddy? He ain’t your father,” she’d said, and Cesar had reprimanded her. She’d been taught that she wasn’t supposed to call Frankie Daddy; she was supposed to teach Nautica that Cesar was their father, and she had always taken the responsibility seriously.

Cesar didn’t even know where to start; if Mercedes was confused, what about his other children? Mercedes had visited him since birth, and they’d had those precious seven months together between Harlem Valley and his current bid. What about Nautica, whom he’d rarely seen? Or Justine, whom he was just beginning to know? Or Whitney, the daughter he’d yet to meet? How would he explain yet another sibling to his daughter? For, unknown to Mercedes, Giselle and Cesar were trying for a child. Cesar held serious doubts about the wisdom of Giselle’s timing, but he felt he was in no position to refuse. He wanted to reassure Mercedes, but he was also disturbed by her attitude. Giselle advised Cesar to be gentle with Mercedes. She told him, “Mercedes only does what she
sees.” His job, as her father, would be to counteract it, to show her another way.

As Cesar groped for new ways to help his troubled daughter, Rocco was in a state of shock. He only began to sense the gravity of what had occurred through the reactions of his friends. “Stone-cold murderers, killers, crying, ‘Yo, man, I can’t see you like that,’ ” Rocco remembered. He still couldn’t take it in: “‘Is it bad? Get out of here! Is it that bad?’ ” In a panic, he checked himself out of the rehabilitation hospital months ahead of schedule.

Rocco’s wife, Marlene, was immediately overwhelmed: she was working full-time, going to college, raising their daughter, and now nursing Rocco, who was home and at a loss as to how to manage the most basic tasks. Within months, their credit cards were maxed out by all the charges for the medical supplies. Marlene started drinking and chainsmoking cigarettes, and despairing that her life would never be hers again. She said, “He is his own person. He will survive this and I’ll lose my mind.” Rocco had finally given himself over to his family, but his surrender had come too late: “He straightened out. Because he’s got no choice. He can’t go anywhere. He can’t do anything illegal. He’s in a fuckin’ wheelchair,” Marlene said.

That fall, she put Rocco’s name on a waiting list for a wheelchair-accessible apartment, signed him up for SSI, found him a good doctor and a bearable home health-care aide, installed him back in his old bedroom in his parents’ apartment on Tremont, and left. Cesar criticized Marlene’s disloyalty: “Your boys are still there, but Marlene left.” Rocco defended her: “But my boys haven’t been through what Marlene’s been through.”

Rocco didn’t listen to music because it made him want to go outside, and he couldn’t go outside unless his brother carried him down three flights of stairs. He couldn’t roughhouse with his daughter. For a time, he couldn’t even manage the bathroom alone. Rocco began wondering if this was his punishment for all the bad things he’d done. He wanted to die. During their phone conversations, Cesar didn’t offer consolations; he respected the immensity of Rocco’s loss. But his letters and phone calls helped bring his friend back from the edge.

Mercedes was also having a hard time, but she didn’t have Cesar’s counsel; Coco couldn’t afford collect calls to her phone. As it turned out, Coco
was
having a boy, and her baby shower was to be the summer’s big event. Coco’s cousin Leo, whom she’d asked to be the baby’s godfather,
had gone all out and reserved a picnic area in a park: there were games and a sound system and a pile of gifts and balloons and tin trays toppling with food and a huge cake and a barbecue. An enormous pacifier dangled down over Coco’s wicker chair, which was decorated in baby blue. Then Frankie got arrested and ruined everything. During the festivities, he slipped away to buy weed for some white kids, anticipating a small cut for himself. On the ride back from the pickup, a police officer pulled them over and Frankie got so nervous that the officer became suspicious and conducted a search of the car. Instead of opening the gifts alongside her baby’s father, as Coco longed to, she sat miserably beside Iris, who gleefully ripped open the packages before passing them on to Coco, undone.

Coco encouraged Mercedes to return to Ramapo Camp, which she did, for two weeks that July. She learned to swim underwater and jump off a diving board. But as soon as she met up with her mother in the Bronx afterward, Mercedes’s family responsibilities returned. When Octavio, the drug dealer who managed Foxy’s block, made a nasty comment about Coco, Mercedes bravely told him, “Shut up.” Octavio then swatted her—only half-jokingly—and she hit him back with all of her might. Then she spent the rest of that night baby-sitting her sisters in the waiting room at Bronx Lebanon because Pearl had fallen in the bathroom and seriously cut herself.

Mercedes was baby-sitting even more than usual because Coco was supposed to be on bed rest. Coco’s doctor had expressed concern about this delivery, and he’d scheduled a cesarean for the early fall. “How you be on bed rest with four children?” Coco asked. Frankie, who had been released after the drug charges were dropped, was nowhere to be found. Or he’d appear when it was too late to do Coco much practical good. “Ma, you want something to eat?” he asked sheepishly at two o’clock one morning, trying to pat down Coco’s anger as she lay beached on the floor at Foxy’s among her daughters and the rumpled sheets.

“What do you think? The girls had oatmeal for dinner, with a package of hot dogs! I have a belly to feed!” Coco yelled. He stood dumbly, still waiting for the order. She screamed,
“Chicken and cheese!”
Mercedes was relieved when they returned to Troy.

At home, Mercedes escaped to the street and rode her bicycle to visit her Títi Iris. Like Mercedes, Iris loved upstate life. She could walk to the store and not worry, “Is someone gonna take my money?” Kids didn’t ride bikes around the kitchen, but on sidewalks and lawns. But even Iris’s didn’t remain the refuge Mercedes needed. In August, the Troy Housing
Authority police raided Iris’s apartment, which they’d mistakenly targeted instead of the drug dealer’s across the way. During the bust, the police grabbed Mercedes’s uncle, Armando, who was watching TV in the bedroom, shoved him to the floor, and handcuffed him. They told Iris, who was screaming, to shut up as they rifled through closets and upended bureau drawers. Their oldest son ran all the way to Coco’s: Coco knew it was an emergency because Iris’s kids were never allowed on the streets alone. Only when one of the police officers saw the award from the tenants’ association on the wall did he recognize Iris from the community center and call the raid to a halt.

After the raid, Armando became more rattled than ever; Iris’s kids started having difficulty sleeping, afraid that the police would break in and take away their father. Iris quit college and fell into a depression; her determination didn’t return, even after the family moved. Her doctor put her on an antipsychotic medication called Risperdal. Mercedes’s formerly ambitious aunt now stayed locked up in her apartment and started putting on weight. Iris couldn’t tell how much of her anxiety came from the trauma of what had happened, or from the fear she felt about her new neighborhood, which was around the corner from Mercedes’s school; every fourth or fifth house was condemned or abandoned. Drugs always managed to wreck her life no matter where she went.

S
erena returned to Troy in time to start high school. After the summer with Jessica, Serena and Milagros argued more than usual. To Milagros’s consternation, Serena now called Jessica’s boyfriend “Daddy George,” and she had a photograph of herself and George in a frame inscribed
Daddy’s Little Girl.
Milagros said, “Don’t you tell me that every man your mother gets involved with, you’re going to be calling them Daddy.” Serena got angry; she told Milagros Jessica and George were getting married, that he called Serena his daughter, that he called her on the phone. Milagros told her the relationship wouldn’t last. She warned Serena, “Believe me, your mom is gonna be with a lotta guys before she even settles down.”

That same September, Serena met her first boyfriend. Cristobal sported a profile from a Roman coin. He professed true love for Serena. Milagros proclaimed that a nineteen-year-old with earrings and a tattoo wanted a fourteen-year-old for just one thing. She ordered Serena to end the relationship. “All she was doing was caring, but caring for me in the wrong way,” Serena said. She and Cristobal snuck around. Milagros found out and confronted Cristobal’s parents, reminding Cristobal’s father that Serena was underage; she threatened to call the police. “I wasn’t going to give Serena up for anything,” Cristobal said doggedly.

“I grew to love him, I had to see him,” said Serena. “I’d call him when she was in the bathroom, tell him, ‘Meet me at Video World.’ ” She would run through Corliss Park, taking the dirt path that led behind Family Dollar, and jump into his idling Sunbird. He whisked her to McDonald’s and treated her to her favorite Value Meal. “He always made sure I had, regardless,” Serena said.

Coco scrunched her small nose disdainfully at Serena’s choice. “He too ugly for Serena—she’s beautiful, God bless her,” Coco said. But Jessica supported the relationship. Love mattered more than looks. The threesome spent hours on the telephone; Jessica switched between Cristobal on one line and Serena on another, consoling him and chastising her.

Jessica got scolded for making calls at work and Milagros grounded Serena for failing all her classes. Serena spent much of the lockdown
scribbling in her journal. She called the black-and-white Mead composition notebook her portfolio. Cartoons and magazine cutouts and pictures of her friends and family decorated the Magic Marker prose. She copied poems and passages from her favorite authors—Maya Angelou, John Steinbeck, Gandhi—and her favorite teacher, Mrs. Morace.

She composed a letter to her dead father, Puma. She interviewed classmates and cousins. She practiced spelling and played solitary games of tic-tac-toe. She penned poems. She listed what she liked (“sleeping, nice people, amusement parks, bright colors, food, money, jewelry, boys”) and what she hated (“meatloaf, homework, racism, preps, stuck-ups, snobs, dumb people, scrubs, and nappy hair”). She honored her favorite people—Kevin’s baby son, Coco, and Milagros—naming the sketches “The New Baby,” “My Older Friend,” and “My Second Mother,” respectively. She wrote this, in part, about Coco:

She has four girls and a unborn baby boy. Her son’s name is gonna be La-Monté. She is a very nice person. She is always there when I need her no matter how much it is. When I’m confused she helps me out a lot and I thank her for that. I used to live with my aunt when she lived with my grandmother, and that was like the funniest days of my child hood. When we moved up here I almost died cuz my aunt was not near us. Until she moved up here and moved in with us and then that was even funnier then before. . . . My aunt is like my second mother cuz when nobody was able to listen to me my aunt did no matter what time it was. If I was ever to decide to move out of my house or run away I will go to her house with the quickness. Well my aunt is the bestest of them all and that is why I love her so much.