For the most part, Coco had retreated to Foxy’s. You could hate a rival all you wanted to, but pregnancy merited respect. There were girls so hard that they paid no mind to a belly, but Coco wasn’t one of them. After all, the unborn baby was innocent. If you cursed a pregnant girl and something bad happened to the baby, you could be cursed the rest of your natural life. Perhaps Lizette’s baby might reestablish the balance that Nikki’s arrival had wrecked: Coco had Kodak’s child, now Cesar would have Lizette’s; Coco and Cesar would be even. And Coco still continued to see Cesar—every day—on the sly. Coco had convinced her little brother, Hector, to trade bedrooms with her so that she would be near the fire escape. That way, Coco could scramble down whenever Cesar pulled up in Rocco’s car and honked. “I forgave him,” she said. “I forgave him because I loved him and I didn’t want to see the bad.”
The badness, however, impressed and intimidated the men in Coco’s family. Cesar gave Richie money and once lent him his gun. Cesar let Coco’s older brother Manuel strut the gun around the block. But Cesar had no tolerance for guys who were all talk. When it was discovered that a cousin of Coco’s was being regularly raped by her father, everyone threatened to kill him, but it was Cesar who beat the guy up and ordered him to leave the girl alone. Cesar bought Coco food if she hadn’t eaten, and whatever Mercedes needed. Coco’s room was stocked. He also bought things for Nikki, a gesture Coco interpreted hopefully. Even if he saw Coco twice in an afternoon, he’d return to Foxy’s every evening—ostensibly to tuck in Mercedes. Coco would sneak out and leave the girls in her room, asleep.
But at Lourdes’s, Cesar ignored Coco completely. He passed her on his way to the bathroom. Lizette followed. Coco could hear their laughter in the shower. She and Cesar used to laugh like that. Cesar and Lizette padded by again in towels, then reappeared, dressed, ready for the street. On his way out, Cesar lifted Mercedes and nuzzled her neck with his nose. “Bye, Mercy, Daddy’ll be back,” he said. To Coco, he said, “Clean my sneakers. Do all them.” She found a rag and the white shoe polish and opened the door to Cesar’s bedroom. Photographs of Lizette and Cesar decorated the headboard of her old bed. Lizette had everything she thought Cesar wanted: an unmarked face, no height, no kids from other boys. Coco decided to be the best wife. Lizette cooked for him and did his laundry, but Coco wiped the scuff marks off pair after pair of his sneakers. She arranged them in his closet in neat lines. She ironed his T-shirts and his jeans. She said, “He never had to put a thing in the cleaners cuz I do the pleats.”
Following his release from prison, Mighty spent a lot of time at Lourdes’s; his mother and brother had moved away from Tremont, and he was dealing drugs in an abandoned house on Mount Hope. Mighty was family. When Lourdes cooked, she sent him down a plate; sometimes she traded the food for drugs. Mighty used Lourdes’s bathroom. He wore Cesar’s clothes. Lourdes felt that the boys’ friendship fulfilled a lack of brother love. “Mighty had a brother the mother doted on. Robert never gave brother love to Cesar. What they were having, they were missing it—they put it together, the both of them,” Lourdes said. The only thing Lourdes didn’t like about Mighty was his drinking. Sober, he was beautiful—even shy—but alcohol made him mean.
Cesar trusted Mighty absolutely: “Mighty was an ultimate soldier. ‘Whatever it is, I’m with it. Whatever it is, I’m there.’ He was a field man. He felt comfortable in the action. He wasn’t comfortable making decisions.” That’s what Cesar did. Mighty wasn’t much of a talker, which gave his words more weight.
Mighty liked Lizette. He disliked Coco because she’d hurt Cesar. He eyed her coldly. “How you doing, slave girl? Slaving today?” he’d say. Alone with Coco, Mighty prodded her; why did she stay? Coco didn’t know how to respond. His close attention made her feel awkward. She blamed herself for Cesar’s mistreatment, and what business was it of Mighty’s, anyway? “I used to tell him it don’t bother me, which it did bother,” she said.
Coco waged her counterattacks against Lizette—surreptitiously, while Lizette was in school. She tossed the stuffed animals Lizette gave Cesar in the incinerator. She carved Coco and Cesar inside his bedroom closet. She mauled their photographs, stabbing Lizette’s image with a pen. She destroyed the picture of Cesar with his legs and arms wrapped from behind around Lizette, his hands cupping her bigger breasts. “I fucked them up so bad there was no way of making those pictures right,” Coco said. She inscribed her name in the headboard, and a warning: This bed belongs to Coco. Whoever sleeps in here is just a ho.
Coco aimed the insults nearer Cesar, although she didn’t challenge him directly: How could he stay in his room when Mercedes, his only child, longed to play with him? One day, Cesar walked past the living room without giving his baby girl a glance. Coco was watching TV with Mercedes and Lourdes and Little Star. “Don’t disrespect my daughter like that,” she finally snapped. He slammed the bedroom door.
That December 1991, Lizette was the one that Cesar brought to Jessica’s sentencing. Coco accompanied Lourdes. The night before, Lizette slept in Cesar’s room, and Coco spent the night with Mercedes on the couch.
Coco started crying as soon as she laid eyes on Jessica in the courtroom. Cesar hated crying and he hated courts. “Ma, I’m gonna go to my parole office now,” he mumbled to Lourdes. Without saying good-bye to Jessica, he and Lizette left the sentencing. Cesar later admitted he could not bear to watch what was about to happen to his sister.
Had Jessica gone to trial, she would have faced a twenty-year mandatory minimum term. Instead, she pled guilty to one count of participating in a narcotics conspiracy. The judge asked Jessica if she had anything she wanted to say before he imposed his sentence. Jessica stood. She spoke softly. “Yes, Your Honor. I would just like to say that I’m sorry for the crime that I’ve committed, and all I hope for is to return to my family and to my mother.”
Despite appearances, Jessica’s sentence was not determined by the judge; federal mandatory minimums pretty much rendered judicial discretion moot. Drug quantity served as the main determinant of prison time. Freedom decreased by jumps of five, ten, and twenty years for each gram over a congressionally determined number. The judge said, “I do not, as a general proposition, make the type of statement that I am going to make now, but . . . I feel that this case is a case that really does not call for the mandatory minimum that exists here. I think you have to be punished and you should be punished, but I think a ten-year sentence in this case is unusually harsh, and I do not like imposing it, but I have an oath of office that I have to follow.”
The proof of Jessica’s actual involvement in the Obsession organization was limited: two entries in 10-4’s ledger from her few days of working at the mill, and the brief message she’d passed on to George’s supplier, recorded on the wiretap. However, to reduce the mandatory minimum term, Jessica would have had to cooperate, and she had refused. The only way to be granted immunity would be to confess every secret, but she was as loyal to George as Cesar had been to Rocco. She also had a family to protect, and Milagros, who was now going to have legal custody of the twins. Jessica wasn’t sure that her children weren’t better off without her. The judge continued, “And what I can make out of all this, you got yourself involved with this guy Rivera, and he certainly helped lead you astray. And you went there in the first place of your own free will. But what I would hope is that in prison you learn some kind of trade so that when you get out, you can stay out of trouble.”
He granted Jessica a few extra minutes to say good-bye to her daughters. In the grandeur of the hushed courtroom, the children seemed especially small. Brittany and Stephanie, dressed in identical aqua sweat suits, hugged Jessica’s legs. Serena clasped her waist desperately. Elaine had to peel them off. The marshal said it was time. Coco was too upset to touch Jessica; she clutched Mercedes instead. Lourdes slumped against the bench. Mercedes cried. Coco bounced her awkwardly. Mercedes cried louder.
“Did you bring her bottle? She’s hungry, Mami, can’t you tell, s
he’s hungry,” Lourdes said. “Where’s Little Star?”
Serena had crept out into the hallway to try to catch one more look at her mother being taken away.
As it happened, two weeks earlier, Serena had lost the father she had never known. Puma had never made the comeback he’d hoped for in the entertainment world; instead, he’d continued dealing. His success didn’t reach the scale of George’s, but he’d done okay. He and his wife, Trinket, had moved to a residential neighborhood in Mount Vernon; Trinket wanted some distance from the Bronx and the inevitable fallout of Puma’s work.
That same December, they’d attended a holiday party with their two sons. After the party, Puma had driven his family home and parked on the street in front of his house. He retrieved his baby son from the car seat and stepped onto the walk that led to his door. Trinket was trying to wake their older boy, who’d fallen asleep in the backseat, when two young men appeared from behind the shrubbery. Both were drug dealers who—until that moment—Puma had considered friends. Trinket covered her child’s mouth with one hand and dragged him beneath the car. She heard Puma begging for the baby’s life. She heard shots. Puma tossed the baby as the bullets hit him. The baby survived.
Just before Christmas, Cesar dropped in on Rocco. Rocco was shaving his head in the shower when one of his cohorts called in: there was a drug dealer to rob. “It’s all in timing. ‘Yo, it’s on.’ You gotta be there, or you’ll miss it,” Rocco said. But this time, Rocco wasn’t moving fast enough. He said he still needed to dress, and his crime buddies wouldn’t wait. He offered up Cesar as his replacement: “Let my boy go, he just got out, you can trust him.”
Cesar came home with $25,000, intoxicated with the ease of the job. “Like snatching an old lady’s purse,” he said. He gave some to Rocco and tore through the rest. He bought himself a winter coat and clothes and sneakers and jewelry; he stocked the shelves with food and paid Lourdes’s back rent and overdue electric bill; he bought gifts for Serena and a Christmas tree. He gave Lizette a nameplate necklace and some outfits. He didn’t buy anything for Coco, but he did get Mercedes a black leather shearling. She was almost two. At first, the coat spooked her; she called it kuko—monster—and she cried, but Cesar coaxed her to put it on. Then she refused to take it off.
Early in January, Lizette lost the baby. Cesar was regaining interest in Coco and losing interest in Lizette, but even after the miscarriage, he still didn’t have the heart to send Lizette back home; she had told him that her mother’s boyfriend had made a pass at her. Lizette’s miscarriage brought out Coco’s boldness, though. One afternoon, she kicked open Cesar’s bedroom door. “If you so much a woman, come out in this hall,” she yelled to Lizette. “What is it, Cesar, you got another ho in there? Ho after ho after ho after ho! When you’re done, why don’t you come to your wife?”
Lourdes scurried to the kitchen and returned with a can opener. “Here,” she said. “Hit her with this.” It wasn’t personal—Lourdes liked Lizette well enough—but a fight was a fight. Fights gave people some relief, some room to breathe, and added some entertainment to an otherwise gloomy day. The next time Coco got heated, Lourdes handed her a garlic press.
But even without the promise of a baby, Coco still envied Lizette. Lizette was closer to the center of things. “Cesar never went out with me, like holding hand in hand, or taking trains together, never. He went with her,” Coco said.
Jessica had spent Christmas at the MCC, awaiting transfer to a permanent facility. She bided her time writing letters and waiting for her turn on the unit telephone. She wrote Trinket in care of Milagros and offered her condolences; she called Rocco, and they joked and had phone sex; she called Edwin. If Edwin wasn’t home, she grilled his baby sisters about his whereabouts. She instructed the children to warn any rivals that Edwin already had a wife, who was dangerous and about to get out of jail. Jessica couldn’t call Lourdes because her mother still didn’t have a phone.
John Gotti was back at the MCC, and he sent food to the women on Jessica’s unit, which the guards brought in for him from Little Italy. Jessica once ran into him on the inmate elevator, and Gotti recognized her from her paralegal days. “Mr. Dapper Don,” she said, “it can happen to the best of us.” They both laughed. Jessica later said, “He was so cute, with the hairstyle and everything. Now I was thinking, ‘He’s not so old.’ ”
Guards remembered Jessica, too. George and the Obsession case were already jailhouse legend: Jessica’s six tattoos, her sex life, George’s death threats, the exotic James Bond cars, the Christmas Eve party on the yacht. No one seemed surprised when Jessica got reprimanded for having sex with a male inmate named Jamal in an unmonitored room. Someone had snitched. Jamal was being represented by George’s old attorney. “You’ll always be Miss Rivera,” a guard warned her. “If I was you, I wouldn’t get involved with any man. The word’s out.”
But Jessica wasn’t sure she wanted to be George’s girl anymore; she liked Jamal. She told the captain, “I’m going to jail for ten years. I’m chasing this opportunity.” Jamal arranged for his mother to deposit money in Jessica’s meager commissary account and send Jessica sneakers before she got shipped away. The next stop was a holding facility in Georgia.
Meanwhile, Boy George, who was stationed in Lewisburg, made his own contributions to the prison rumor mill: Jessica heard that a beating was waiting for her in Georgia. But the women there who were allegedly so loyal to George’s friends only fired insults. The authorities next shipped Jessica to Oklahoma, where she stayed for a month, and no one bothered to bother her. Finally, a prison bus delivered her, shackled and handcuffed, to her final destination—Florida. George had allegedly arranged for someone to greet Jessica with a beat-down. But that spring, just before her twenty-fourth birthday, she arrived at the maximum-security women’s facility in Marianna and was processed in the same dreary, depressing way as everyone else.
A guard removed her leg irons and unlocked her handcuffs. She stripped and squatted and spread apart her buttocks. She coughed and coughed again—to dislodge potential contraband from body cavities. Then she stood. She ran her hands beneath her breasts, as she was ordered. She opened her mouth and raised her tongue. She lifted her arms and ran her fingers through her hair. She received a brown paper bag of hygienes—soap, toothpaste, deodorant—several changes of prison-issue clothes, an assignment to kitchen duty, and a cubicle.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
That March 1992, Lizette returned to her mother’s. Coco still lived with her two daughters at Foxy’s, and Cesar continued to visit her there. He enjoyed the freedom of having no live-in girlfriend, but the fun soon ended. In May, the police picked him up on a parole violation: he’d been driving Rocco’s car without a license. When he returned to his mother’s, after a summer at Rikers, Serena had gone to Robert’s, and her welfare benefits had gone with her. Lourdes hadn’t paid the rent in months. She was using more than ever and had been spotted hanging out in the abandoned building on Mount Hope. Mighty gave Lourdes cocaine—to keep her business indoors, away from the gossip—but Cesar tried to calm her down by getting her interested in weed.
Cesar immediately reconnected with Coco, but he also met another girl named Roxanne. Roxanne had a swan’s neck, almond-shaped eyes, and the posture of a dancer. She also had a welcome confidence with boys. She hung out with her friends on Tremont, in front of Kennedy Fried Chicken. All of Cesar’s friends had tried to kick it to her—Rocco, Mighty, Tito—but Cesar, with his baby face, was the one she picked.
One afternoon, Coco passed by Mount Hope to show Cesar some photographs. Lourdes was hanging with her friends in front of the building.
“Cesar’s not home” is how Lourdes greeted Coco. “Cesar’s not home.” Why did she say the same thing twice?
“Where’s your son?” Coco asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, Coco, he haven’t came in from last night, he was hanging out with the guys.”
“Okay, Ma, bye,” Coco said. Lourdes underestimated h
er; she seemed to have forgotten that Coco was also a Sagittarius. Coco ducked inside the building, and when she heard the pounding music from the fifth floor, she knew immediately Cesar was upstairs.
He answered the door in just a towel. He refused to let her in. His hair was wet.
Roxanne, who lived a few blocks from Mount Hope, threw a party in the basement of her mother’s building one night that fall. It was after 3 A.M. when Roxanne’s cousin and Mighty decided to go get burgers. Mighty had been drinking. As they walked across the White Castle parking lot, Mighty exchanged words with a group of boys who were leaning against a car. The boys flashed their guns, but Mighty kept acting tough. He was also armed.
Roxanne’s cousin knew Mighty well enough to worry, and she ran back to the party for Cesar. Cesar was about to get into a fight himself, but he broke away and ran to his friend’s aid. By the time Cesar arrived, the boys were in the restaurant and Mighty was stewing in the parking lot. When Cesar failed to calm him, he accompanied him inside. The trouble exploded instantly. Guns blasting, Cesar and Mighty backed out the glass front doors.
Mighty had a habit of stepping in front of Cesar whenever they got into shoot-outs; he was shorter, and Cesar fired over his head. Cesar had repeatedly warned Mighty about this habit, but it was also a testament to the trust between them; Mighty would tease Cesar, saying that Cesar always had his back. But this time, Cesar slipped. He doesn’t remember pulling the trigger, but he remembers his best friend going down, his chin lifting toward the sky as the bullet tore through the back of his head.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro Page 16