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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  “I’ll baby-sit,” Lourdes offered. She held out her T-shirt for Tyson to autograph.

  Jessica stared meaningfully at her mother. “Don’t you have something to do tonight?”

  “Then I’ll baby-sit,” Elaine piped up. Could he sign her napkin, too?

  “Don’t you have your own kids to baby-sit?” Jessica said curtly.

  “You can bring your kids,” Tyson suggested helpfully.

  “My kids ain’t supposed to be out late,” Jessica said, confusing everyone.

  This wasn’t newfound independence. She was in love.

  Tito let himself care about Jessica. She was six years older, and he knew she was a player, but he couldn’t help himself. The sex was fantastic. They used to have competitions to see who could have the most orgasms. Tito was astonished at how much fun Jessica had in bed. After she came, she would laugh and laugh and he would say, “Jessica, what’s wrong?” and she would say, “Nothing, stupid.” Sometimes they snorted coke. She also mentored him about business. He said, “Jessica’s a girl you could make money with.”

  Tito and Jessica managed to set up a part-time house at Jessica’s apartment in Manhattan. FMP had effectively disbanded, but it provided the perfect cover for their affair. “Cesar’s sister needs a ride,” he’d say to his wife, or, if Jessica paged him, “It’s Cesar’s moms” or “Cesar’s daughter’s mother needs Pampers.” Weekdays, Jessica attended George’s trial and Tito went to school. At night, Jessica cooked while Tito did his homework. He still dabbled in robberies whenever Rocco popped up, but Rocco’s schoolgirl was slowly pulling Rocco into the straight world. Jessica deftly managed both worlds: she nursed Tito back to health when a bullet grazed him in a shoot-out and surprised him with a cake when he made the tenth-grade honor roll.

  One night, though, Tito made the mistake of answering the telephone.

  “Hello,” Tito said.

  “Hello!” Boy George echoed. “Who the fuck is this?” Tito passed the receiver to Jessica.

  “Hello,” Jessica said.

  “Who the fuck was that?”

  “Please! My little brother’s friend.” She laughed richly and cooed to Tito, “He think you my man!”

  Tito sometimes went to the Obsession trial to be close to Jessica. During one break in the testimony, Tito left the courtroom. He paged Jessica from the courthouse pay phone, an old-fashioned booth with brass fixtures and accordion doors. The code for I LOVE YOU flashed onto Jessica’s beeper screen.

  George saw Jessica stand. He gestured from the defense table. “Where are you going?” She pointed to her beeper.

  “Sorry,” Tito said, wrapping his arms around Jessica and pulling her into the booth. “I had to have a kiss.”

  “You crazy,” Jessica said sleepily, and she gave him one.

  George never found out about Jessica and Tito, but Cesar did, and he was furious. Tito was unstable—openly emotional. Cesar made it clear: “You can end it now, or when I get out, I’ll end it.” Tito ended the relationship. Jessica called Cesar crying, “You trying to ruin my life.”

  But Jessica continued to see Tito anyway. She would surprise him at his door in nothing but a leather trench coat and heels. Tito had to work to keep himself away from temptation. Like ex-cons who watched prison movies to keep straight, Tito watched home videos of himself having sex with Jessica. The tapes reminded him of what she was capable of doing with other men. Then Tito was arrested on a gun charge—for possession of a semiautomatic Tech 9. Jail terrified him. He posted bail and dutifully returned to his wife.

  In mid-November 1990, the jury returned a partial verdict; they found George guilty of two of fourteen counts—tax evasion and conspiracy to run a continuing criminal enterprise. Four of George’s codefendants, including Miranda, were also convicted; one lucky spot manager walked. George got sent back to Otisville and awaited sentencing.

  Prisons, like hospitals, reduced relationships to essentials. George had Jessica, his mother, his brother, and Isabel, the mother of his second son. His friends had dropped away. George suggested that Jessica move in with Isabel. Jessica refused. George was running out of money. The trial had cost him over $200,000, and now he had to pay for an appeal. George’s street contacts shrank with each new round of arrests. He believed his best chance at survival was to maintain an image of power, even as his power was diminishing. Maintaining leverage from the inside without money would be impossible. The holidays were approaching. Ostensibly, Jessica and George were still a couple, but by this time, she visited erratically, and the visits were often unpleasant.

  Even after his conviction, George acted as though a successful appeal were guaranteed. He referred to the future with such vehemence that to suggest otherwise would have been almost embarrassing. George told his mother and brother not to come to the courtroom for his sentencing if they were going to show any emotion: “I don’t want to see a teardrop fall. Because if you start with this teardrop shit and screaming, then you gonna mess me up. I wanna walk outta there with my head high, smilin’, smiles, everyone! Smiles! This is just another card game we’re playing here!” His father showed.

  On March 13, 1991, paralegals and case agents packed the benches of the courtroom. There were so many spectators that people lined the walls. Extra federal marshals had been assigned to guard the doors and block the windows, should Boy George try to make a run for it, or try to hurt himself. Judge Kram told him that he was one of the most violent people ever to set foot in her courtroom. She said that in the long months of the proceedings, she had not seen any sign of remorse.

  Boy George, in fact, had not been charged with any acts of violence. However, Judge Kram took the many violent accusations into account. Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, conduct that did not reach the evidentiary standards of a trial could affect sentencing. The contested evidence fell under the category of “relevant conduct,” behavior that could be included if it related to the convictions or shed light on the circumstances of the crimes. Relevant conduct had only to satisfy a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard rather than the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard at trial.

  In Boy George’s case, the consequences of the relevant conduct were devastating. Behind the tax evasion and conspiracy convictions were charges of several Obsession organization murders. There were further death threats, including the one George had allegedly made against the prosecutors and the judge.

  Boy George was twenty-three years old when he was sentenced. The judge committed him to federal prison for the term of his natural life. He had no option for parole. George laughed upon hearing the sentence—just as he’d planned—but the effect was more horrifying than defiant.

  Jessica did not attend the proceeding. She tried unsuccessfully to comfort him on the telephone. George told her that he’d rather she were dead than free. Shortly afterward, the phone company shut off Lourdes’s service.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Foxy was the first to be furious about Coco’s second pregnancy. The belly was Coco’s, but Cesar’s reaction was everyone’s primary concern. “Why I gotta tell him you staying in, you make me look like a liar! I say you in, and you end up pregnant,” Foxy yelled. Lourdes also showed little compassion for Coco, even though she’d been in the same unhappy place more than once herself—pregnant by a different boy from the father of her previous child.

  Coco dialed Cesar’s dormitory at Harlem Valley. She knew that if she didn’t hurry, Lourdes or busybody Elaine would beat her to the news. “I got something to tell you,” she remembered saying.

  “What, you been doing on the street?”

  “No, it’s worse.”

  “Somebody came in you?”

  “No, it’s worse.”

  “What?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Coco recalls hearing ho and slut, but not much after that: Cesar’s fury made her stomach hurt. It didn’t matter to Cesar that Kodak wasn’t a stranger but the boy to whom she’d lost her virginity. It didn’t even mat
ter that Kodak was the only other boy besides Cesar with whom she’d ever had sex. “I went out with my girlfriends and ended up in his house” is how Coco could have explained it, but Cesar did not give her a chance.

  His outrage assaulted her through the mail:

  Coco I can’t sleep at night because every time I close my eyes the picture of you having sex with him come clear in my mind. . . . If you would have never got pregnant it would’ve been much easier to handle. We could of still been friends. . . . I really really, really do hate you. And there is nothing that could change that feeling for you the way I hate you now is stronger than the way I use to love you. . . . I hate you more than I hate the people who I shot to get in here in the first place. I hate you more than I love my mother.

  . . . Coco this letter is only going to be seven pages long because we don’t have anymore paper on the unit. But I don’t think that a million pieces of paper would be enough for me to really explain how much I really do hate you.

  Coco reasoned that since the baby made her lose Cesar, the loss of the baby might bring him back. She made an appointment for an abortion. She went to the clinic but forgot her Medicaid card. She rescheduled and missed the second appointment. She finally went for a third, but she’d lost heart. Coco’s sister, Iris, remembered Coco punching herself in the stomach and throwing herself against the wall. “She did everything to try and get rid of that baby,” Iris said. But the baby survived all of it, so Coco reckoned it was fate. All Cesar saw, however, was choice:

  Coco the first thing I want to say is thanks a lot for ripping my heart a part the way you did. . . . Coco there’s two girls out there that are virgins and are in love with me and I was dissing them just in order to try to make a family with you. But I fucked up because they might not be virgins anymore. So I lost both ways. I didn’t only lose them but I lost you. Right now I need a real pretty girl that’s a virgin and loves me so I don’t have to worry about her first getting to her again.

  The usual rumors spread. Kodak denied the baby was his. Neighbors gossiped. Jessica stood by Coco. She lobbied Cesar on Coco’s behalf: “Look at my life,” she told her brother. “I have kids by different guys. People make mistakes. Why you gonna care about other people talking shit?” Jessica knew Cesar was still in love with Coco.

  In her bedroom at Foxy’s, which she shared with Mercedes, Coco made a shrine to the world’s best ex-sister-in-law. Photographs of Jessica covered the doors of her closet and one wall. Jessica didn’t pose in front of brick buildings with graffiti or kneel in dingy stairwells like other girls. She sat in the front seat of a Batman-and-Robin car.

  Kodak’s mother was less supportive about the pregnancy. “That can’t be my son’s,” she told Coco, “because my son was locked up.” But when Nikki Victoria was born, in March of 1991, her birthmarks changed Kodak’s mother’s mind: all her children had them. Jessica welcomed the baby as her niece, and Lourdes welcomed Nikki as a granddaughter. Cesar continued to berate Coco. Jessica advised Coco to be firm. “Don’t take pity on my brother. Leave him and he’ll come back to you,” she said. Coco lacked the courage, but she appreciated Jessica’s faith that she was capable of taking a stand.

  Cesar called Foxy’s regularly to check on Mercedes—Coco would press the receiver to Mercedes’s mouth to capture sounds—but Cesar’s inquiries quickly turned into diatribes. If Foxy answered, the fighting started sooner. Cesar blamed Foxy for Coco’s infidelity.

  “See, I knew your daughter was with someone,” Cesar said. “Your daughter’s a fuckin’ ho.”

  “You a fucking ho!” Foxy retorted.

  “Ma, just hang up the phone,” Coco pleaded.

  “Fuck this motherfucker!” Foxy hollered. “Fuck this, this motherfucker gonna get me to shut up!”

  “Oh, man, please stop, please stop,” Coco begged, her words drowned by Foxy’s shouts. “I didn’t care what he was saying about me,” Coco recalled later, “but I didn’t want them arguing. I felt bad for my mother because she did know I was going dancing and everything, but she didn’t know I was gonna come out pregnant. So I made her look like the liar.” It was that eternal triangle that trapped so many of the girls and women Coco knew—the irresolvable conflict between blood and love and need, between you, your mother, and a man.

  Coco tossed a big party for Mercedes’s first birthday. First birthdays, like sweet sixteens, were a significant milestone; Mercedes had made a whole year, and Coco wanted to mark the accomplishment. Foxy knew a thing or two about throwing parties. For one Halloween celebration when Coco was younger, she and the kids had gathered leaves outside, then spread them around on the floor. Richie had made a scarecrow and Foxy had stuck a Philly blunt in its mouth. For Mercedes’s birthday, Foxy charged $2 at the door. Jessica didn’t have to pay—she was family. She wore the striped Gap polo shirt that Boy George had given her after their first date. She had a beeper in the left pocket of her jeans and another in her right. The bun on her head was covered with a green bandanna. Coco’s ex-boyfriend Wishman’s little brother Edwin watched Jessica dance.

  Wishman and Edwin didn’t get along. Wishman was the street type; Edwin was more of a mama’s boy. That day, Edwin was baby-sitting his infant sister. He brought her into Coco’s bedroom to change her diaper, and the next thing you know, there was Jessica, leaning against the bedroom door. He recognized her as the same girl in the collage on Coco’s wall. Jessica was even prettier in person. “God, you’re so gentle, that’s so sweet, you’re so gentle,” Jessica said. “Someday you’re gonna make a good father.”

  Later that night, the police raided the party, then unsuccessfully tried to convince Foxy to let them use her apartment for surveillance: they were still watching the Cuban drug dealers who were working out of the building across the street. Edwin and his friend Freddy gave Jessica and Daisy a ride to the apartment in Manhattan. Jessica invited the boys upstairs. “So what’s the sleeping arrangements?” Jessica asked. Nobody said anything. Jessica had an idea. She called Daisy into the bedroom. The girls reemerged in only teddies. Freddy looked Daisy over and agreed to stay. He and Daisy took the living room.

  Jessica realized that Edwin was nervous. She put on a bathrobe to help him relax. “I just need to do some stretches to unwind,” she said. She touched her toes. She reached her arms up to the sky. She showed him her tattoos, and how she could almost do a split.

  “Please,” Edwin said. “Please stop doing that. Will you please stop doing that?”

  “Yo, why?” she asked, mock innocently. She had the bathrobe on. He was fully clothed. “You’re a good-looking boy.”

  “I’m not a boy.”

  “Well, you’re a good-looking young man, you know.”

  “I’m not so young.”

  “Yeah, well, then, let’s go to it.”

  “For real?” he asked.

  Jessica laughed.

  He said, “You sure?”

  “He was sixteen at the time,” Jessica said much later, still tender at the memory. She thought she would have to lead the way. “But,” she added, “he proved me wrong.”

  Jessica started spending a lot of time at Sunny’s with Edwin. Sunny liked having her around. Edwin later said that she was the only girlfriend of his that his mother ever liked, even though she was the type of girl that mothers warned boys about. Sunny still lived down the block from Coco, on Andrews Avenue. Jessica and Edwin shared a bottom bunk. Another of Edwin’s brothers slept on top. Wishman had his own room because his fights with his brothers got too physical; Sunny, who also had a toddler and a baby, couldn’t take the arguing. One time the boys got so rough with one another that she’d had to call the cops.

  Sunny never had to wake Edwin twice for school. She and Jessica spent afternoons talking, sprawled across Sunny’s big bed. Sunny remembered how hurt Jessica was about Lourdes, whom she described as self-absorbed and always into her men.

  Sometimes Milagros brought the twins and Jessica kept them. Sunny didn’t mind the additions to the
crowded apartment: children played together, and the more there were, the easier it was to baby-sit. Serena sometimes stayed with Coco at Foxy’s, or at Milagros’s, but mostly she remained at Lourdes’s.

  George eventually tracked down Jessica at Sunny’s. He wondered aloud what type of man dated freaks—like the freak Jessica would become if someone happened to toss acid in her pretty face. Was it true that she had AIDS? That her daughters were skinny and starving? “That’s sad,” he said scornfully. Sunny grabbed the receiver away from Jessica. George suggested that Sunny keep a close eye on her schoolboy son. Sunny called the phone company and requested a block on the phone to prevent incoming calls from jail. Soon after, her line went dead. Sunny went down to the pay phone and the phone company informed her that someone had called and requested that the service be shut off. Then a delivery boy appeared at Sunny’s door, armed with a dozen white roses. The creepy bouquet included a card from George. He hoped she liked the roses; her son’s funeral would be filled with flowers just like them.

  Jessica still kept in touch with George. She said numbly, “If George wanted me dead, I’d have been dead by now.” George’s mother arranged conference calls: Jessica used a pay phone on the corner of 176th and Andrews, George called in from prison, and his mother hooked them up. The pay phone was the same one where Cesar used to hang out, with Coco watching from above.

  From Sunny’s living room, Jessica heard a cop-call. She was baby-sitting Sunny’s daughters and her twins. The cop-call—Po-Po—was a neighborly warning sounded by whoever spotted the police, for anyone who might like to know; it was not a rare sound on Andrews. Jessica walked to the kitchen window to see if anything interesting was going on.

  The street had been blocked. Cruisers had parked and others were pulling up. Then she heard, “Police! Open up! Policía!”