“I was like, ‘How can all this be for me? Damn, I’m gonna have to pay for somebody else’s mistakes and my tears are just coming out,’ ” Jessica later said. A police officer told her to find someone to collect the children. She called Coco, who ran the three blocks from Foxy’s. Coco comforted the girls, who were hysterical, as an officer handcuffed Jessica and escorted her downstairs.
Since George’s conviction, narcotics detectives had been driving his confiscated cars, and they were just as flashy as they’d been when George cruised around in them. In the ongoing game between the police and the dealers, George’s cars signaled that the government had won the latest round.
That day, waiting outside on Andrews Avenue, the cherubic Obsession case agent sat plumply in the driver’s seat of one of the Mercedes. Jessica recognized him from her long days in court during George’s trial. Another detective climbed in the back. Jessica recalled him leaning forward, his breath hot in her ear. “We hear you’re a freak,” he said.
“Your mother’s a freak,” Jessica said sweetly.
George’s miniature TV sat silent in the dashboard. Jessica asked the case agent if she could make a call. She couldn’t call Lourdes; Lourdes didn’t have phone service; she wasn’t even making her rent. Jessica unsuccessfully tried to reach Sunny to let her know that Coco had all the kids. The Bronx disappeared behind Jessica. In the passenger seat, she headed toward DEA headquarters in Manhattan, in the same Mercedes-Benz in which George had collected her on the night of their first date, three years earlier.
From the MCC, like George before her, Jessica called his mother collect. Rita told Jessica a time to call back the following day. At the prearranged time, George called in on a separate line and his mother hooked them up:
“Well, tell that bitch now she knows what it is to be in jail,” Jessica could hear him shouting.
“Fuck him,” she said.
“Fuck her,” he said. Then they talked.
An NYPD case agent later said that there was no plan to arrest Jessica that spring. They had, in fact, been keeping tabs on her in the hope that she might lead them to Obsession money, or to workers still at large and further up the pyramid. But, for reasons that were never entirely clear, the strategy suddenly changed. George’s lawyer believed that Jessica had been arrested in the hope that she would testify against the Obsession hit man, Taz, who had been arrested months earlier. According to the case agent, however, George put out a contract on Jessica. The plan for the hit was overheard on a prison wiretap: George would try to get Isabel to invite Jessica dancing, then have her pretend that she needed to make a phone call once they got to the club. She’d ask Jessica to accompany her outside, where Jessica would get shot. Her murder would be made to look like a botched robbery.
It took Jessica two months of working the telephone and writing letters on her own behalf to scrape together the $5,000 bail. Some of the money came from Elaine’s father’s sister-in-law, whom Jessica considered an aunt. Boy George reminded Jessica of what he used to say whenever she asked for money for Lourdes, or for one of the problems her family always had: “What the fuck do they do for you?”
“They my family.”
“That’s your family,” he would say, mocking her. “That’s your family, huh? My family do more for you than your family.”
“It’s true,” conceded Jessica.
Jessica mailed Coco and Edwin visiting forms. Since they were both under eighteen, they had to get their mothers’ signatures. That Mother’s Day, Coco was the only one who remembered to mail Jessica a card.
During the time between Jessica’s arrest and her sentencing, she and Coco became closer than they’d ever been before. Jessica wrote her niece from jail:
To: My Baby Mercedes . . .
Hi Mercedes how are you feeling? Well as for your titi jessica I’m chillin. I miss you so-so much. I can’t wait to see you. I wonder if you forgot about me, or when you would go to sleep on my chest. I should be home for a little while then I’ll have to go away for a long time. But I want you to remember one thing that your titi jessica loves you a whole Big Bunch. I know you can’t read this now but when you get older you’ll read it and see how much I love my little niece. Be a Good Girl and take care of your sister and Mommy. Love always your titi JESSICA.
Jessica told Coco in her letters that she was soon going to make bail. Her brother Robert and his girl, Shirley, had agreed to sign for her bail bond. Jessica had decided to plead guilty. “I was brought up that if you do something, you do it, and you don’t stick the blame on somebody else,” she said. Jessica’s lawyer had made arrangements for her to turn herself in at the beginning of September, to give her time with her family. She already had her summer planned; Coco was flattered that her sister-in-law trusted her:
Yo, if I’m not pregnant now, which I doubt, I’m sure gonna get pregnant for the two months I’m in Edwin’s house, we’re gonna have sex, for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, dessert, non stop until I drop, or he drops. . . . Coco I’m gonna finish this letter tomorrow because I took my sleeping pills and their starting to take effect.
When Jessica finally got out, it was Coco whom she called to bring her clothes—no way was she going to return to the Bronx in a prison uniform in July, with everyone outside. Coco assembled what she could find: black leggings, black sandals, and a lime green blouse. Jessica scooted into a bathroom at the courthouse to change and put on her makeup. She and Coco took the subway straight to Andrews, to Sunny’s. Jessica’s return was like the first day out with a new baby:
Edwin, Jessica’s here!
Hey, Jessica, I thought you was gone.
Jessica, you got fat!
Jessica saw Edwin’s head pop out of Sunny’s kitchen window, then disappear. The next thing she knew, she was in his arms. She stayed at Sunny’s until curfew, then borrowed money for a cab back to Lourdes’s. By the end of the week, she’d moved in with Sunny. Coco stopped by; she and Wishman flirted, then disappeared in Wishman’s room. Sunny liked that Jessica and Coco were friends. The girls kept her sons indoors. July in Morris Heights meant the streets were at their wildest.
That summer was a precious time. Some nights, Jessica and Edwin sat on the fire escape for hours, suspended over Andrews, considering everything. “He even told me about his dreams and fears,” she said. He was the only boy she had loved besides Tito who didn’t believe in hitting girls no matter what they did. When Jessica smacked Edwin with a belt while he was sleeping—some girl had called to say she was pregnant—Edwin didn’t get heated. He simply said, “Jessica, you crazy. Calm down.”
In September 1991, the night before Jessica reported back to the MCC, Sunny threw a party, and Coco met Milagros for the first time. Mercedes and Nikki had fallen asleep, and Milagros, who was on her way to score some coke, helped Coco carry them home. After leaving the girls at Foxy’s, they returned to the party. They tried not to laugh at Elaine, who’d started crying while she toasted Jessica. Defiance was one thing in the face of sadness, but people got uncomfortable with the softer side of unbearable things.
Jessica, Elaine, and Daisy decided to walk back to Lourdes’s. On Burnside Avenue, Jessica stopped and rapped on the window of a basement apartment where Tito was staying. He was still out on bail, and they’d made plans to meet earlier that evening at a club on East Tremont and Webster called the Devil’s Nest. Neither went, but Tito was glad to catch a last glimpse of Jessica. “Click click click and she was gone,” he said.
The girls broke night. The next morning, Lourdes refused to come out of her bedroom to say good-bye. Edwin, Elaine, and Daisy accompanied Jessica to the courthouse. She surprised them by suggesting the subway, even though they had enough money between them for a cab. “I was trying to drag it out, it was the hardest thing I ever had to do,” she said. The guards made Jessica leave all her jewelry with her sister.
Later that evening, alone in the MCC, Jessica began to cry. She remembered thinking, “I can’t believe I turned myself
in. Why didn’t I run away?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Cesar arrived home unannounced weeks later, in October 1991. He stripped on the threshold of his mother’s apartment; when she opened the door, his prison-issued clothes were puddled around his feet. Prison clothes brought a house bad luck. Lourdes ushered Cesar inside and peered down the hall conspiratorially. She thought he’d escaped. When Coco, who was visiting, heard Lourdes’s happy shouting, she guessed that it was Cesar. She grabbed Nikki and hid.
Cesar had completed the minimum two years of his sentence. His release had been approved by the Division for Youth Board of Parole. The apartment to which he returned on Mount Hope Place was not much different from the one he’d left on Vyse, but the wear showed on his family. At forty, Lourdes had lost some of her resilience. Little Star, who was six, looked like a miniature mother, with dark circles under her eyes. Brittany and Stephanie were with Milagros, who had moved down the street from Coco’s mother’s, on Andrews Avenue. Robert had returned from Florida and now lived a regimented life in Brooklyn. He worked as a teller at a bank. Elaine lived with Angel and their two young sons in a tiny one-bedroom on Morrison. She was fighting to keep her house in order—her husband away from drugs and prison, and her two young sons away from their father’s influence. Coco, with whom Cesar was still in love, had a baby that did not belong to him, and Jessica was stuck at the MCC.
Things had changed in Cesar’s FMP family, too. His old compatriot Rocco was still with the ambitious schoolgirl, who seemed determined to change Rocco into a family man. Rocco was getting his GED and only robbing drug dealers part time. He encouraged Tito to stay in school and rob after class—Tito stood a chance to win a baseball scholarship—but Tito dropped out. Now he was dealing drugs and—unknown to Cesar—heavily using cocaine. Since Tito’s affair with Jessica, the friendship with Cesar had cooled. Cesar later said that he had never entirely trusted Tito anyway. Tito had always struck Cesar as tentative, and a reluctance to act could be dangerous. Tito seemed even more paranoid than before. Only Mighty, who had gotten out of prison the day before Cesar, seemed familiar, like home.
But on Cesar’s first day back, Lourdes nodded toward her bedroom, where Coco was hiding. Coco was so nervous that she couldn’t hold her hands still enough to fix her hair, which she’d dyed blond.
“Hey, how you doing?” he asked, opening the bedroom door. His voice! She’d forgotten what it sounded like close in person, away from the echoing noise of a prison visiting room. Cesar looked more beautiful than ever to Coco, and he’d always been beautiful. His formerly thin arms had muscles. His stomach, which she saw because he rubbed it slowly as he spoke, had ripples. His presence made her head hurt—although the pain might have been caused by her habit of pulling the topknot of her ponytail too tight. “Let me see your daughter?” he asked. Coco stared at his lips as he smiled at Nikki. It was impossible not to smile when you saw her—a grinning mocha baby with a splotch of birthmark on her chubby cheek. Her eyes had Kodak’s long lashes, and like Coco’s, they were bright. “She’s beautiful, God bless her,” Cesar said. That was all. He turned and left.
That same afternoon, Lourdes’s husband, Que-Que, was arrested. “I’m glad you are taking him or I would have killed him myself!” Lourdes told the police. Their marriage had deteriorated since the move from Vyse to Mount Hope. Lourdes and Que-Que had been cocaine companions, but she said that he’d since pursued a private relationship with heroin, and that the challenge of getting the dope made him more sneaky and remote: he stole food stamps; pawned her jewelry, including her Irish friendship wedding ring; she couldn’t trust him with the rent. “A pothead? Fine. Sniff a little coke? I understand. But oh no, not heroin,” Lourdes said.
A condition of Cesar’s parole was that he either get a job or return to school. He chose school, thinking it would be easier to skip. He enrolled in Bronx Community College. The BCC campus was on the west side, close to Foxy’s. Cesar and Coco saw each other every day, and they immediately started sleeping together again. Coco stayed over at Lourdes’s with Mercedes. Cesar walked Serena the half block to her school, then went to school himself. It wasn’t always easy to rouse Little Star; she’d grown accustomed to Lourdes’s schedule, breaking night and sleeping until early afternoon. But sometimes Coco woke to Serena’s attempts to wake Cesar. “Tío,” Little Star would say. “Tío, I gotta go to school. Wake up, Tío, wake up.” She would already have fed and dressed herself.
“Take her, Coco,” Cesar would mumble from beneath his pillow. Coco didn’t mind. She’d grown fond of Serena, but she wondered how such an optimistic nickname had landed on a girl with such sad eyes. Little Star hardly seemed destined for brightness; she was more like an old lady. Her gravity spooked Coco; once, while she and Cesar were making love, Coco spotted Little Star peeking through the wide gap underneath Cesar’s door. She frequently asked Coco when Jessica was coming home. “I don’t know, Mami,” Coco would say; then she would try to distract her with the offer of a game or a song. Coco preferred the sunny take on things. Children should be rambunctious. Coco said, “Serena was too grown for a six-year-old.”
Sometimes Coco brought Serena back to Foxy’s, where Coco lived with Mercedes and Nikki in her bedroom. Serena was an easy child; she never asked for anything or made a fuss. Nikki, on the other hand, had colic, and Coco couldn’t handle her. At night, Coco would pound on the wall between her bedroom and her mother’s room until Foxy or Richie came and took Nikki away. Some afternoons, Coco left Nikki with Foxy—or with Sheila, Nikki’s godmother and Foxy’s neighbor—and took Serena and Mercedes to wait for Cesar to get out of class.
Bronx Community College sat on a hill above University Avenue, which overlooked Aqueduct Park. Watching the students, Coco wished she had never dropped out of school. Cesar shared whatever he was learning—math, new words. She liked math best. He once teased her at Lourdes’s, in the shower, when she mispronounced superb “super-B.” Within a month, though, Cesar stopped attending college. The household needed money. He took a job overseeing crack sales just below the college, in Aqueduct, and Coco and Mercedes waited for him there.
Privately, Cesar was loving; publicly, he referred to Coco only as his daughter’s mother. He brought other girls home, but they didn’t stay the night. Coco learned to wait out his company; she pretended that she didn’t mind the steady stream through his room. If he broke night, she and Mercedes slept with Lourdes, or she retreated to Foxy’s, or she and Mercedes relocated to Lourdes’s couch.
But if Coco was resigned, Mercedes wasn’t having it. Sometimes Cesar would drive her around in Rocco’s car. If he offered a girl a ride, Mercedes refused to relinquish the passenger seat. She acted as though the gray Ford Taurus were her private limousine. “My chair!” she’d say, or, “Mommy’s chair!” and the girl would have to sit in back.
Coco was hoping that her patience would restore Cesar’s faith in her loyalty. She briefly took a job at Youngland, a children’s clothing store on Fordham, but Lourdes, who had agreed to watch Mercedes, complained about money, and Coco didn’t earn enough to pay her more. Regardless, Mercedes gave Coco a legitimate excuse for her constant visits to Mount Hope:
Mercedes wants to see her father.
Mercy’s crying for her father.
I swear, this girl, she is so attached!
Coco minded Cesar’s other girls less as long as they kept changing, but then he started up with Lizette, and there were fewer other girls. Cesar knew Lizette from Vyse. By November, as far as Coco could tell, there was only herself, Lizette, and Lizette’s best friend, Vicky. Cesar brought Vicky into his bedroom after Lizette went to school. Once, he called to Coco while Lizette showered. “Bring the baby,” he said. But the thought of having sex with him right after he’d been with another girl made Coco uncomfortable.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“You just had sex with her but—”
“You don’t like it, leave.”
“I don’t want t
o leave,” Coco said.
“Then let’s go.”
Cesar still loved Coco, but he wanted to punish her for Nikki. He’d warned her when he was in Harlem Valley, “Coco, I am going to do everything in my power to make you suffer when I come out.” Besides the other girls, he intentionally criticized Coco’s appearance, twisting what made her happy and confident into a source of embarrassment. Instead of nudging her to stop her bad habit of picking her face, he acted disgusted. Instead of soothing Coco’s self-consciousness about Nikki, he harped on her betrayal: “Every time I see his daughter I’m reminded of that.”
Within weeks, Lizette was pregnant, and her mother dumped her at Lourdes’s. Lizette remembered her saying to Lourdes, “I’m very ashamed of my daughter and what she did. You can keep her.” At first, Lourdes was welcoming. While Cesar was out working the streets, she taught Lizette how to cook rice that didn’t come out like a snowball, and how to season steak with pepper and vinegar. Lourdes also spent time with her friends in the bedroom, sniffing cocaine. She asked Lizette not to mention this to her son, and Lizette answered, “I don’t know nothing,” honoring a fundamental ghetto rule. Lizette later noted that at least Lourdes cared enough to hide her business; people in her house used to break night doing drugs right in front of her.
Lizette kept quiet about Lourdes’s drugs, but Cesar would find out anyway, and Lourdes would think Lizette had snitched. The friendship between the older and younger woman soured; the arguments about cooking and housework began. Lourdes complained to Cesar that Lizette was lazy; Lizette said Lourdes wanted her to do everything. Lizette told Cesar that Lourdes was a hypocrite. Cesar agreed, but Lourdes was his mother. Lizette thought Cesar acted less like Lourdes’s son and more like her man: he’d curse Lourdes out for her bad behavior and she would run crying into the bedroom; he’d order her friends out of the apartment; he’d decide whether she could go dancing and inspect the way she dressed. One time, he frog-marched Lourdes back upstairs for wearing something too revealing. In the meantime, Lizette and Little Star kept one another company. “We grew a little bond,” Lizette said. They watched TV and colored. Little Star cried a lot. She told Lizette that she missed her mother. Lizette missed her own mother, too.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro Page 15