Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  A man selling roses approached George’s window. Each stem was wrapped in cellophane and tied with a crimson bow. George bought one for Jessica and one for Lourdes. The man moved toward the next car. George called him back and said, “As a matter of fact, mister, give them all to me.” The man passed three buckets’ worth of roses through the tinted window. Jessica received them like a beauty queen. Roses covered her lap, and her mother’s, and some fell to the floor. They brushed the feet of her daughters, who’d fallen fast asleep, their bellies full.

  Not long after their first date, Jessica paged Boy George from a pay phone on the Grand Concourse. Snow was falling. Jessica hadn’t heard from him. She did not have a winter coat. The damp had crept from her penny loafers into her bunched-up athletic socks.

  She punched in her beeper code—176. Most girls used the number of the street nearest their block, as did the managers of Boy George’s drug crew. Sometimes the beeper numbers were messages, a dialect—911 (for an emergency), 411 (you have or need information), 3333*14 (Hi, baby), 3704*14 (Hi, ho). Similarly, if you read the screen upside down, 3704*550 roughly translated to “asshole” and 038*2**06*537 to “Let’s go to bed” (69 being a possible further specification of that). Boy George used 666. He got a kick out of the satanic implication of the code. He was known for having an evil temper, and by then had been involved in several shootouts, yet he never missed a chance to intimidate. One of Boy George’s workers returned the call from Grande Billiards. George went on with his pool game.

  “I’m calling for Boy George,” the worker said.

  “Oh, hello,” Jessica remembers answering in her softest voice, just loud enough to be heard above the traffic. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.” Jessica had opened many conversations in her life exactly like this. She’d request money, then explain for as long as necessary, facts toppling more facts like a snake of falling dominoes: she needed a ride; she didn’t have money for a cab; she needed a ride to a friend’s house to collect $20; the girl owed her the money; she needed the money to buy milk for her hungry girls.

  Boy George took the receiver. His voice was calm but sharp. “Listen, if you are calling me just for money, don’t call. Don’t you call me for money.”

  “Mnnn,” Jessica said.

  “Where you at?”

  “A Hundred and Seventy-sixth and the Concourse.”

  “Stay there. Someone will be by to pick you up.”

  The worker delivered her to Grande Billiards. She didn’t go in. She waited in the backseat of the car. Eventually, Boy George joined her, with three friends. Again, she asked him for money.

  His voice turned impatient. “I only like to say things once. If you calling me for money, don’t call.”

  “Fuck you,” Jessica snapped.

  In retrospect, Boy George thought he should have served her with a proper beating. Instead, he ordered the driver to head for Lourdes’s building. He dragged Jessica from the car and frog-marched her up the stairs. He noticed that she was wearing the same pair of jeans that Lourdes had worn to Victor’s Café.

  “Whose jeans are those?” he asked.

  “They mine,” said Jessica.

  “Why did your mother have them on then?”

  “It’s not like what’s mine is mine. We the same size. We—”

  “Shit,” he said. For the time being, he gave her a polo shirt he’d bought from the Gap.

  On George’s next visit to Tremont, he and Jessica sat on the sagging couch in the living room. The twins, in their crib by the drafty window, cried inconsolably. Scruffy barked. The TV blared. Cesar rolled through with some of his tough-looking friends. George despised disorder. He remembered thinking, “What the fuck is going on here? This is no type of an environment for a female to raise children in.”

  “I’m tired,” Jessica said.

  “Then go to sleep,” George said practically.

  “You sitting on my bed right now,” Jessica said with a trace of impudence.

  “It’s one of those foldout things?”

  No, it was just a couch. Someone had carved initials into the wood frame. The cushions had done double duty as a mattress for years. George inspected the kitchen. Chunks of plaster were missing from the wall. He opened the cabinets—roaches. He checked the refrigerator. There wasn’t even milk to shut those children up. “There was nothing,” he recalled. “There was nothing in that subway station.”

  Several hours later, two of his employees returned to the apartment. They lugged bags and bags of groceries from Food Emporium. Cesar rushed to his bedroom window and looked down to the street. Two Jeeps, parked on Tremont, were still stuffed with food.

  “There was so much food that the bags didn’t fit in the kitchen,” Cesar said. “There was food in my room under the bed.” Chicken, pork chops, and steak filled the refrigerator and the freezer. There was turkey and ham. Lourdes sobbed as each grocery bag passed under a lucky horseshoe she had nailed above the door. “No one ever done this for me,” she said, even though the bounty was intended for Jessica and her girls.

  “He got everything,” Jessica said. “Everything.” There had never been enough, and now, when a need was suddenly met, the assistance inspired suspicion and scorn. It was as if the gesture exposed a vulnerability so great that it immediately had to be dismissed. Jessica and Lourdes combed through each bag marveling, but also assessing whether George had overlooked anything. He hadn’t. He’d even bought a flea collar for Scruffy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Not everyone survives being rescued. Cesar’s nemesis lived in the tenement next door. Rocco was half-Italian and nine years older than Cesar, with thick, dark brown eyebrows that accentuated the funny repertoire of expressions animating his rubbery face. The first time they spoke, Cesar, who was then twelve, was crying on the stoop with his head in his arms. The public display of vulnerability surprised Rocco: Cesar was famous around the neighborhood for taking punches with as much spirit as he dished them out. Rocco had heard the stories—how Father Tom from the Christian Church had barred him from game night for breaking windows, stealing pool balls, and whacking other kids with the cues. Rocco had once watched Cesar take on a much older boy easily twice his size: Cesar barreled into him with everything he had and didn’t stop swinging until the guy left him in a heap. “He always had a black eye or swollen lips and was always running, with kids chasing him,” Rocco said, bemused. That afternoon, Rocco asked what was wrong; it turned out Cesar had a terrible toothache—probably from the candy he sometimes ate for breakfast. “I think from there I started liking that crazy little kid,” Rocco said. He would know Cesar for many years, but he never saw him cry again.

  The friendship took a while to develop. Rocco was training as a boxer, busy with his girlfriend, running around with a crew of guys his age, edging in and out of crime. Cesar was busy sprinting around the warm-up track of a criminal life—roofing other children’s balls, stealing bikes, fighting, fighting, fighting. Sometimes Cesar watched Rocco practice boxing in the back alley or in the basement; occasionally they played handball together on the corner of Anthony, at Cesar’s elementary school.

  One summer night, Rocco was going to night pool, and Cesar, who’d just graduated from sixth grade, tried to tag along. The older boys were strapped—carrying guns—because they were a group of Puerto Ricans and the swimming pool was in Highbridge, a predominantly Dominican neighborhood. Cesar begged to go, but Rocco said he was too young for trouble. But then a few months passed, and Cesar sprang up. “Damn,” Rocco said, “you got big, how old are you now?” Cesar lied and told Rocco he was sixteen.

  By the spring of 1987, as things fell apart at Lourdes’s, the boys were hanging out in earnest. Rocco had time for Cesar, and Cesar gave Rocco a second childhood. When Rocco had been Cesar’s age, his father wouldn’t even let him outdoors on summer nights; now they dropped eggs on unsuspecting pedestrians and hopped turnstiles and jumped onto moving subway cars and stole Chinese takeout and chased gi
rls. “I was twenty-two, going on twelve,” Rocco said. He’d rap on Cesar’s bedroom window from the fire escape. When they had money, they’d eat a late breakfast of beef patties in coco bread at Skeebo’s, a Jamaican restaurant on Tremont, then head up to Moody’s, Rocco’s favorite record store. Rocco taught Cesar boxing moves and brought him along to Gleason’s, his boxing gym in Brooklyn. Cesar jumped at any chance to prove worthy of Rocco’s friendship.

  Rocco’s role model had been his uncle Vinny. Vinny was a longtime heroin user with throat cancer and a fairly successful illegal career. Unlike Rocco’s father, who did nothing but work and come home tired, Vinny exuded seventies cool—dark shades, long black hair slicked back into a ponytail, jailhouse tales and tattoos. Vinny had had a tracheotomy; his raspy voice reminded Rocco of the Godfather. When Vinny told his nephew, “I’m never gonna die,” Rocco believed him: his uncle Vinny had been in and out of prison, shot at, stabbed, even hit by a city bus. Vinny told Rocco that he could succeed at crime as long as he stayed away from drugs and didn’t trust anyone.

  “Vinny raised me to be streetwise,” Rocco said.

  Cesar said, “Rocco raised me to be a criminal.”

  By the time Big Daddy left, Cesar and Rocco had renamed themselves 2DOWN and graduated to more serious crimes. Cesar didn’t make it to junior high.

  As it turned out, Cesar and Rocco were to be separated by a crime that neither of them had committed. During the long free days and endless nights, 2DOWN joined with other boys in other crews named Showtime and ABC. Both Cesar and Rocco happened to be in Echo Park one fall afternoon when an argument over a basketball erupted into a shooting spree. Usually, the cops weren’t so concerned about hoodlums shooting at one another, but this time a bullet had grazed a two-year-old. When the police started rounding up the kids in the neighborhood with reputations, Lourdes scuttled the boys to Spanish Harlem, where Cesar’s father kept an apartment. After only one night, however, Rocco suggested they move on: Cesar’s father had an outstanding warrant, and Rocco worried that he might try to get rid of it by turning them in.

  The following morning, Cesar returned to the Bronx; Rocco went to work out at Gleason’s, where his trainer, who’d read about the shooting in the paper, convinced Rocco to go to the police. Rocco was interrogated and released, and when he caught up with Cesar, he convinced him to follow his example. Shortly afterward, however, two Showtime boys were arrested for the shooting, and the word on the street was that Rocco had ratted. Cesar was incredulous. Until that point, his trust in Rocco had been total; now his disappointment was complete.

  After his break with Rocco, Cesar continued to hang out with Showtime and ABC. He was loyal, and now he carried a snub-nose .38. Guys invited him along when they needed backup for their beefs—or someone crazy enough to stay up front. But then, one night in Manhattan, a fight broke out in a Times Square arcade while Cesar was playing pinball; he tried to run, but the police caught up with him and confiscated his gun. Once he was no longer armed, the older boys weren’t so interested. Cesar was learning—by painful trial and error—that lots of boys talked a good game about the thug life, but when it came to taking action, they came up short.

  That winter was bleak; after the family’s dizzying encounter with Boy George, the cupboards were soon bare again. Jessica clung fiercely to her fantasy of being rescued. Cesar recalled how she paged Boy George constantly: “My sister burned that beeper up.” In the spring of 1988, George finally called her back and gave her a job. He needed more millworkers to process his new shipments of heroin. Cesar helped Elaine bag groceries at C-Town, and she gave him food money, but she had other problems: Angel had been arrested on a drug charge and was stuck in a Massachusetts jail. After Elaine bailed him out, Angel went to work at George’s mill. Even Milagros worked the table. Cesar asked George to hire him, but George refused; Cesar was too young.

  Street life warmed up with the weather and, more than ever, Cesar wanted to get away from his block. Trouble never finished. He wanted to avoid the messes he’d started, the awkwardness with Rocco, the familiar boredoms, and the burden of having to fight anyone who bad-mouthed his family. Sometimes he rode his bike to visit Hype, a boy he’d met months earlier at a party. Hype ran with The Andrews Posse—TAP—whose turf was at the other end of Tremont, but he also did his own thing. Hype’s independent streak appealed to Cesar, and the feeling seemed mutual. Cesar was also on the lookout for new girls.

  Girls tended to stay close to home, as if they were literally tethered to their blocks. Some hung around in front of their mothers’ buildings. Others weren’t allowed outdoors at all. Girls were anchored by younger siblings or their own kids or the unspoken laws of being girls. “Girls don’t go as far,” said Tito, one of Cesar’s Tremont friends. “Boys want to see the sights. We like pioneers.” Beautiful sights were girls on their way to buy groceries for their mothers, or girls wheeling laundry to the Laundromat, or girls taking little kids to the park. Boys roamed. Girls stayed inside and cooked and baby-sat. Girls had responsibilities. Boys had bikes.

  One afternoon that fall, Cesar wheeled his bicycle into the hall and carried it down the four flights to the street. He pedaled by the triangular white building on the Grand Concourse that reminded him of a slice of cake, glided down the slope on the other side of Tremont, and headed west.

  Strangers stood out in Coco’s neighborhood: religious missionaries, immigrants hawking clothes, the occasional reporter scribbling about recent disasters and the stymieing toll of chronic injustice and bad luck. Music was always playing somewhere—salsa, merengue—and there were always customers looking for drugs. The dealers stood on the corners; some wore nameplates around their necks, like gold-dipped nametags for upscale mug shots; others wore coveted charms of guns and dollar signs, and medallions—as big as oversize cookies—of patron saints. The boys tended to hang around the dealers, while the older men sat on milk crates in front of their stoops repeating tired stories, their watered-down hopes dribbling out as the sun warmed their beer. Cesar called attention to himself just by appearing. He sported a red leather jacket with a collar trimmed in what looked like real rabbit fur. Coco was an ebullient girl with a taste for excitement. She noticed him immediately.

  Like Cesar, Coco was looking for distraction—anything but the same people doing the same old things. She wasn’t a church girl and she wasn’t much of a schoolgirl, either, but she wasn’t raised by the street. She was a friendly around-the-way girl who fancied herself tougher than she could ever be. She liked action, although she preferred to watch from the periphery. Boys called her Shorty because she was short, and Lollipop because she tucked lollipops in the topknot of her ponytail; her teacher called her Motor Mouth because she talked a lot. Coco’s friendly face held the look of anticipation even in repose.

  That afternoon, she and her best friend, Dorcas, were looking out of Dorcas’s mother’s third-floor bedroom window, as they often did after school—knees balanced on Dorcas’s mother’s sinking bed, elbows planted on the ledge. The window overlooked University Avenue, a main artery that ran through Morris Heights, where Coco lived. The bedroom window gave the girls a good view of the bodega on 176th near Andrews Avenue, “right where they sell drugs at,” Coco said. Sometimes Coco propped herself up and out of the window altogether, her square upper body pushing out from the brick wall as if she were a wooden figurehead jutting from the bow of a ship. But her brown eyes weren’t squinting to see the horizon. Coco lived in the present; she was looking down, over the street. The bodega’s appeal for the girls was the boys their own age fooling around out front: boys talking to other boys, boys eating Cheez Doodles, boys idly bouncing basketballs, boys in cleats, boys with their boom boxes, on the way to Roberto Clemente Park for handball or to Aqueduct to finish twelve-hour shifts dealing drugs.

  In other windows were grown women—mothers in their twenties and grandmothers in their thirties, older women weathered by years of poverty’s slamming seas. These women rested their fatt
ening elbows on flattened pillows, cushioning the edge of the window frames. The much older women—the great-grandmothers in their fifties—had lost interest in the drama: they kept the curtains closed. Coco, however, courted consequence; she was still a girl, and she still assumed a connection between what she was doing and what she wanted and what might result. And what she wanted right then was the fine light-skinned boy in the red leather coat on the street below, straddling his bicycle seat.

  Cesar’s friends called him Casper because he was so white. His graffiti tag names, which he’d scrawled in fat letters on most of the buildings near his mother’s block, were LC (Lone Cesar) and PBC (Pretty Boy Cesar). He also used Big Rock, but he preferred PBC. He covered a mole on his substantial forehead with the band of his baseball hat, which he always turned to the back. He was self-conscious about his ears. He thought they were too small and that they stuck out. Coco knew only what she saw—an agile boy with full lips, serious brown eyes, and a flat nose, who knew how to dress. Cesar’s sneakers were scuffless. His clothes were pressed and clean.

  “Damn,” Coco said to Dorcas. “That guy look good.” He wore his curly blond hair short, in an Afro. He walked sexy, dipping his slender hips as he loped. He squinted as though he had just sucked on a lime. Coco could not quite keep him in view because he kept moving and cars kept driving by, getting in the way. He went into the bodega, then reappeared. She lost him in the cluster of boys by the battered pay phone. She caught sight of him again. Then he was gone.

  Some days later, Coco and Dorcas left their window post and stood out in front in the shade of Dorcas’s mother’s building, across the street from the bodega. The move was strategic; they stood at boy-level now. Coco may have been shameless about flirting and flaunting her chubby body, but she liked whom she liked and, in her own time, she would let the lucky boy know. When Cesar showed up again, she smiled her crumpled smile and gave him her best eye—a raccoon eye, because Coco outlined her eyes with liner, applied as thick as crayon. But Cesar didn’t seem to notice her. Coco’s boyfriend, Wishman, foiled the next attempt, and Cesar had left by the time she’d shooed him away.