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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Years later, during his testimony at Taz’s trial, Rascal remembered the escalation of fear within the Obsession organization that followed Beatriz’s murder. George reminded workers that if they came up short, or slacked off, “a Taz special” could be easily arranged. Nearly everyone was subjected to these threats, Rascal said, but “Jessica in particular.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  That December, Lourdes was facing eviction from her apartment on Tremont. She owed rent and the super claimed she ran a den of drug activity. Robert was no longer there; he had moved to Florida and become a Jehovah’s Witness. “There was no way I was going to have a criminal record, guilty by association,” Robert later said. Elaine and Angel moved in with Angel’s mother, who lived around the corner. To help out, George agreed to float Angel a brick of heroin on consignment. But impatience got the best of the family business team. Instead of diluting the dope and bagging it for a 120 percent profit, they immediately unloaded the brick for $30,000 and the family went on a spending spree. Lourdes celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday with two gold wedding bands: she married Que-Que legally, and the newlyweds abandoned the apartment on Tremont for a new start in another run-down tenement on a street named Vyse. The relocation wasn’t much of an improvement, although Lourdes hooked up a telephone and some of the rooms had rugs. But just having the means to move boosted Lourdes’s spirits. She threw herself a wedding reception to celebrate—a weeklong party that spent down what remained of the cash, much of it on coke.

  George blamed himself for the fiasco and claimed that he would have killed them all for disrespect if they had not been Jessica’s family. Lourdes had proven herself to be a straight-out fiend, he said, and had only Jessica to thank for her life. From then on, he avoided Lourdes’s apartment; if Lourdes was that heedless of her daughter’s safety, she wouldn’t think twice about setting him up. Lourdes said, “I didn’t even know where my daughter lived.” George also wanted Jessica to stay clear of Vyse. Sometimes, when he left the apartment on Henwood, he locked Jessica in from the outside. He tolerated Jessica’s occasional visits to Serena but didn’t want the child underfoot. Children were unwitting messengers, and Serena was three—old enough to answer nosy questions but too young to hold to a lie.

  Jessica did, however, trust Cesar with her address. The basement apartment sat on a dead-end street, not far from Tremont. Jessica generally shied away from Vyse after George’s beatings, but one day, Cesar surprised her. He inquired about the bruises. Jessica assured him, “Me and George just had a little fight.” She didn’t want Cesar to get involved; she knew that her brother was crazy enough to try to set things right. Cesar had his own code of chivalry: he’d always defended her reputation on the street regardless, whether or not the gossip was true.

  Cesar’s own reputation might still have been small-town to Boy George’s big-city standard, but Cesar was recognized and avoided on East Tremont. That winter, he’d reunited with Rocco, and together with two other boys, they’d formed their own little crew. The boys called their street family FMP—Four Man Posse. Besides Cesar and Rocco, there was a short, quiet boy named Mighty, and a worrier named Tito. Each boy, in his own way, came from Tremont—Rocco still lived next to Cesar’s old building; Mighty lived around the corner, on Echo Place; Tito lived across the street. “That was a nice little rugged corner of the Bronx that breeded a lot of jailbirds,” Cesar said. The boys knew every corner where the ghosts of notorious local crimes still hovered, legendary acts committed by boys who were now locked-up men. If place was identity, years of scaling rooftops, dangling from fire escapes, and riding bicycles through the narrow alleys had made Tremont theirs. Tremont raised them up.

  The boys played Manhunt and Knock-Out. Knock-Out was their favorite. One boy would pick an unsuspecting male passerby and the other boy had to knock him down. Whichever boy succeeded, won—Mike Tyson, they would shout, crowned! They robbed a bicycle store and armed themselves. They bought an M1, a .45, and a shotgun and set about committing robberies. They added two .357s, a .38, a .45, an M1, and a Tech 9 to their arsenal. They stashed the guns under Cesar’s bed and above an awning near his old elementary school. Jessica worried about Cesar and asked Boy George to talk some sense to him. One night, Boy George invited Cesar up to Grande Billiards to play pool.

  The bouncers waved the boys through the first security check at the downstairs entrance, past the other customers waiting to be frisked. Clearance at the second security checkpoint went just as smoothly. The pool players saw Boy George approaching and surrendered the coveted center-floor table. Cesar felt that standing with Boy George was like being in the gangster movies he loved.

  George played the part. He counted out $1,000 and placed the bills on the table. He said, “Cesar Augustus. I’m going to tell you what. You win, it’s yours.” George was the only one who ever addressed Cesar formally. Cesar won the game. He won the $2,000 game after that. He won until the pot reached $49,000, after which George said, “One more game for everything.”

  “Everything but a thousand,” Cesar said knowingly. George was testing him. As expected, George won the final round. Cesar asked George to give him work.

  George discouraged Cesar: “If something happens to you, I don’t want your mother blaming me.”

  Now and then, when George would spot Cesar on the street and give him a lift, Cesar would still try to convince him: “Man, let me work for you!”

  Without glancing at the bouncing beanstalk in the leather passenger seat beside him, Boy George would answer, “You’re not a stupid kid, Augustus. Go to school, go to school, go to school!”

  Some days, Coco headed for Cesar instead of classes. If she couldn’t find Cesar around the bodega at Andrews Avenue, she boarded the 36 bus and headed east. She shied away from self-assertion, but when it came to hunting down Cesar, she was dogged in her pursuit. “I would just pop up,” she said. Usually, Cesar wasn’t home. He was courting trouble, or ducking out from the consequences of trouble he’d caused, or, unknown to Coco, flirting with other girls on nearby streets. Coco sometimes arrived in the afternoon and found Lourdes sleeping. If Lourdes woke in a dark mood, both Little Star and Coco knew not to ask for anything, not even a glass of water.

  If Lourdes was feeling energized after an argument with her husband, she would enlist Coco to help her clean. They’d turn the radio to Lourdes’s favorite Spanish station—93.7 WADO. She would lean on the broom and introduce Coco to the mop. Coco would fill a bucket with hot water in the bathtub, then pour in the King Pine cleaner that Lourdes kept beneath the sink. She’d lug the bucket to Lourdes, who would be singing and sweeping and cursing up a dusty storm.

  Coco would mop while Lourdes lifted furniture and ashtrays and children, placing them wherever they wouldn’t topple—on the kitchen table, on the beds, on the couch. After mopping came laundry. Lourdes did not like to go anywhere, even to the Laundromat, alone. Coco accompanied her. Back home, they’d string a clothesline along the hall to dry the leggings and baby T-shirts and baby socks, and the damp-clothes smell would blend with the King Pine, scenting the apartment. But even with dinner done and the laundry hanging, with Jessica’s three girls bathed and changed, their hair done, Lourdes’s anger was not necessarily used through.

  The best days were when Coco found Lourdes cooking. Lourdes’s beauty shone in the kitchen, and Coco loved to see her bustling among her steaming pots. With one hand stirring arroz con pollo and the other holding a Newport, Lourdes did dance moves in her slippers, belting out lyrics, clamoring for Coco to pass her the shrimps or to Stay out of the way, baby, this pot is hot! Ordinarily snooty neighbors would knock on the door, rendered shameless by the enticing smells. “The people from the building come to my house to eat my food,” Lourdes said. When there was money, Lourdes was proud that she could provide so well for so many hungry mouths. When she didn’t have money, neighbors pooled change for the ingredients, as if it were Sunday night and people were collecting for a bag of weed.

  N
ever would Lourdes stoop to cooking with the store-bought jars of Goya or packets of Sazón that her lazy daughters used. Sofrito had to be homemade. She valued her pilón—her mortar and pestle—even more than her statue of Saint Lazarus and her Irish friendship wedding ring. “When I move, it’s the first thing I pack,” she said. Food made any apartment feel like a home—even Vyse, which to everyone’s distress was infested with rats. Her mother had given Lourdes the pilón as a gift when she was fifteen years old; Lourdes had been cooking for nine years by then.

  Coco loved rainy days because bad weather temporarily released the grip of the streets: Cesar stayed indoors and his friends stayed home. Coco would show up and, without a word, start taking her clothes off. “Wait,” Cesar would say, “I’m not even awake.” They spent whole mornings and afternoons in bed, having sex and playing Nintendo. Cesar had a fancy bed with a mirrored headboard. Coco, at those times, felt as if all life were happening there. Sometimes, if Cesar wasn’t in the mood to make love, Coco could convince him.

  “She would just take the sex from me,” Cesar said. At first, it unnerved him, but he grew to like it. Coco was provocative without being nasty. They talked, too. Cesar asked her things:

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yeah,” Coco answered.

  “But why? What you love about me?”

  “Everything about you.”

  “You are not telling me what I want to hear.”

  Direct questions made Coco nervous. They reminded her of her stepfather, Richie, and that she never did well on tests. Mercifully, such moments were usually interrupted because something was always going on at Lourdes’s house, and Cesar’s friends never stayed away for long.

  In some ways, Four Man Posse was better than blood family. Family always brought with it inherited problems and allegiances, whereas FMP created beefs that they stood a chance of fixing and set their own rules. Loyalty was paramount. Nothing was to come between them—not other guys or crews, and never girls. Sisters were off-limits. All moms automatically got respect. The steps of Rocco’s building on Tremont served as the official meeting place. The boys pledged to take bullets for each other, never ask questions if asked for backup, and never rat each other out. Girls could be shared, but if you took another guy’s girl, you had to tell the boy face-to-face. If a member really liked a girl, the other FMP members could try to kick it to her, but if she remained true, the other boys had to leave her alone for good. If an FMP member ever fell in love, FMP still came first. “Your friend is going to last forever,” Cesar said. “Your girl ain’t. If you shoot somebody for your girl and you get twenty-five-to-life, she won’t last. You do it for a friend, he will.”

  Live by the gun, die by the gun was their motto, Scarface their favorite movie. Cesar’s favorite scene was of Al Pacino lecturing the patrons of a fine restaurant. The diners stared at Pacino and his entourage, frightened but mesmerized. By being scapegoats for all that was bad, Pacino told them, criminals fulfilled people’s need to believe they were purely good. Cesar liked talking about the bond between Pacino and his partners. He felt that way toward Rocco and Tito and Mighty—his homeboys, his crimeys, his family, his crew. Everyone swore by FMP’s rules, which weren’t so different from those of previous generations of Tremont kids. Only Cesar and Mighty, however, took the vows to heart.

  Since winter, George had been dating a shy, chubby girl named Gladys who had straight silky hair like Jessica’s. Gladys lived with her Catholic parents in a single-family home in a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx. “From a straight-up Little House on the Prairie neighborhood,” said George, both pleased and charmed. He was proud of Gladys. He needled Jessica by saying how much he preferred Gladys’s ladylike company. Gladys worked as a teller in a Manhattan bank. He drove her downtown some mornings, on his way to Gleason’s Gym. Gladys believed George’s money came from his father, who “worked in construction.” George had promised to take Jessica to Hawaii, but he took Gladys instead.

  George didn’t bother to hide the photographs of the vacation: Gladys leaning lazily on George’s shoulder; Gladys smiling beneath palm trees; Gladys’s thick fingers clutching fancy neon drinks. It was Gladys he jetted to San Francisco on a day trip to fetch a pair of Nikes that weren’t in stock in New York. It was Gladys he took to restaurants. But when he invited her to the black-tie company party he’d planned for Christmas Eve, Jessica had reached her limit: Vada could have him in Puerto Rico and Gladys could take the best of him, but on that special night, Jessica was determined to be the girl on George’s arm. He didn’t put up a fight.

  Jessica shopped along Fifth Avenue and found the perfect dress—an off-the-shoulder white satin gown. She treated herself to a manicure and a pedicure. The day of the gala, she spent the afternoon in a hair salon. She took so long getting ready that George threatened to leave without her. She teetered after him in her satin white high heels and finished putting on her makeup in the car. Then she slid her hands into the white satin gloves that matched her dress.

  Meanwhile, at the World Yacht dock in Manhattan, Obsession employees and their dates waited and waited for their host. The 121 guests had arrived by the modes of transportation proper to their caste: by BMW and Mercedes, by rented limousine, by livery cab. Gladys and a girlfriend milled about in the anxious crowd. Finally, the car pulled up, the valet opened the door, and Boy George stepped out in his Bally shoes. The crowd cheered and clapped. He strode up the ramp of the Riveranda yacht in his silk tuxedo and waved to his people. Jessica hung on his other arm. The DJ announced, “Mr. and Mrs. Boy George!”

  Jessica relished Gladys’s reaction. “You shoulda seen that girl’s neck snap,” she recalled. “She had pretty hair, I’ll give her that. But she wasn’t as pretty as me. I looked like Cinderella, with the prince right next to me.”

  Before dinner, George gave a short speech that one manager remembers as characteristically succinct: “Let’s go out there and make some money. Thank you for coming.” The menu included steak tartare, skewered lamb, prime rib, and $12,000 worth of Moët. Loose Touch and the Jungle Brothers performed. George paid Big Daddy Kane $12,000 for a fifteen-minute rap. Safire never sang a note, but she supposedly pocketed $3,000 (without a private dressing room, she claimed, she couldn’t be expected to perform).

  10-4 had ordered printed raffle tickets listing prizes for the Boy George Christmas Give Away (“winners to be announced by the host”). First prize was a loaded Mitsubishi Galant; second, $10,000; third, a Hawaiian trip for two; fourth place, Disney World. Door prizes included a home entertainment center, a Macy’s gift certificate, a “nite on the town,” and $100 bills that the captain of the ship noted none of the guests bothered to claim. 10-4 received a gold Rolex and $50,000; George gave Snuff a brand-new BMW 750. To four of his top men, George presented diamond-studded gold belt buckles, appraised at $7,500 each. Jessica didn’t win anything, but she wasn’t thinking about material things. “What I need a prize for? I had him,” she said.

  The seating was organized by drug spot; managers sat among the pitchers and dealers who worked for them. One had all his boys wearing fedoras, which they called Godfather hats; another table sported red cummerbunds. Plenty of guests mugged for the roaming photographer. He snapped lots of pictures—of guys leaning forward, toasting, their eyes bloodshot, grinning above abundant tables, of the girls beside them in slinky satin and taffeta swirls. It was like prom night, but with an open bar and no chaperons. Boy George paid for everything—in cash. The bill from World Yacht alone ran to more than $30,000.

  Fights erupted as the night wore on. One guest challenged a drunken dealer, who had perched on the tip of the ship’s bow, to swim ashore. Another guest was dragged to the deck, stripped to his underwear, and beaten brutally for trying to steal a diamond pendant from a female guest. Jessica fantasized about inviting Gladys to the deck and tossing her overboard. “I was around him so much that I started thinking like him,” Jessica later said. But she was having too much fun dancing to
start a fight.

  For George, of course, the party had a purpose: pleasure reinforced loyalty, and loyalty was essential to his business. He said, “It’s good to bring them together, so they know, ‘Listen, man, you have a family here. If anything ever goes wrong, this is the type of force that’s coming behind you.’ ” That force would soon be tested. The professional photographs of each table, so meticulously arranged by drug location, would prove invaluable in identifying the players in the Obsession hierarchy.

  After New Year’s, Boy George’s best heroin source once again dried up. George called Lourdes’s, looking for Jessica. She had been staying at Vyse, following another beating. Cesar answered the phone.

  “Whassup, homie?” George asked.

  Cesar answered, “I signed up for school.”

  “Meet me at Tremont,” George said.

  Cesar had just spent a week at Spofford Hall, a juvenile detention center in the South Bronx, for a robbery he hadn’t committed. (He’d instructed Coco to bring his Nintendo to her sister Iris for safekeeping, so it wouldn’t get hocked while he was gone.) One of the terms of Cesar’s probation was that he return to school. George pulled up to the corner of Tremont in a white BMW. Cesar was still hoping that George was going to offer him a job. Instead he said, “Want to go to the Poconos?”

  “I’m just a little kid. I can’t go to the Poconos,” Cesar replied. His exstepfather, Big Daddy, had taken his mother there.

  “We’re going to the Poconos,” George said. Signing up for school merited encouragement. George might also have felt the need to smooth things over with Jessica, who had been in exile at Lourdes’s for almost a month. George added, “There’s got to be some pussy involved in the trip. Get a girl.”

  Cesar called Coco. Coco had only been outside of the city twice—once, on a family trip to Disney World, when her father was alive, and to Binghamton, New York, where she’d once gone as a camper with the Fresh Air Fund. Coco told Foxy that she was going away with Cesar’s older sister. Foxy called Lourdes to double-check. Lourdes covered for Coco, but Foxy hesitated until Jessica called and warmly assured her that Coco would be fine—a girls-only trip.