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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Rocco got word and ran down Tremont. By the time he reached White Castle, Cesar was gone, and Mighty had been rushed to Lincoln Hospital, where he died immediately. The police had already taped off the crime scene. Mighty’s blood was everywhere.

  Cesar ran to Roxanne’s mother’s, where Rocco later caught up with him. Rocco found Cesar muttering incoherently on Roxanne’s twin bed and threatening to kill himself. Rocco managed to convince him to hand over his gun. The next day, Cesar and Roxanne went on the run. For several weeks the couple skulked from apartment to apartment, hotel to hotel, living on the McDonald’s, sandwiches, and KFC that Roxanne retrieved for them.

  Roxanne’s mother had a boyfriend who supplied the fugitive couple with a steady stream of cash. As the weeks went on, Roxanne’s mother and the boyfriend argued about the money. Roxanne’s mother did not want her daughter doing time and gave Roxanne an earful whenever she came home and showered. Roxanne carted the frustration back to Cesar, who had started smoking cigarettes. He hated cigarettes. He battled with Roxanne, but anything was better than being alone with his thoughts. Their days consisted of sex and arguing—“Argue, fight, bed. Argue, fight, bed,” Cesar said. Later he admitted, “I was stressing. I didn’t handle it too good.”

  Coco was also overwhelmed by the gravity of what had happened, but she didn’t know what to say, so she obsessed about Cesar being on the lam with another woman. She felt that Roxanne was not even pretty; she had to be at least part Dominican whether or not she admitted it, and she was slim, practically skinny. Coco wondered how Cesar could have sex with someone who had hair like a black girl’s.

  To raise some cash, Cesar made a few drug deliveries, riding the train to Bridgeport and New Haven. He kept in touch with Coco at Foxy’s. He paged her. She called him back. “Coco, I gotta get out. Yo, Coco, I don’t want to be here,” he told her. Coco didn’t know what “here” meant, because Cesar was everywhere. He’d been in a hotel by Van Cortlandt, in one in Yonkers near Rosedale, in his friend Luis’s girl’s apartment, just around the block from Lourdes’s old apartment, on Anthony Avenue. Cesar stopped at Elaine’s, and Milagros’s, but both of them became so nervous that he had to move on. He crashed with a full-grown lady, the older sister of a friend, but he’d left when she pressured him for sex. He stayed in the basement of his old building on Tremont, where he and Coco made love on a weight-lifting bench. He even went to the Empire State Building with the super’s son. Cesar had been to plenty of other places Coco never heard about, with people she didn’t know, but Cesar told her things. He trusted Coco with his life even though he didn’t trust her with other men. He told her he was scared, that he’d spent Christmas Eve in a cellar scribbling words on scraps of paper that didn’t make sense. He said he realized that he hadn’t done anything with his life. He still wanted to kill himself. They never spoke directly of Mighty; the subject was too painful. They did, however, speak about Roxanne.

  Cesar knew Roxanne wasn’t the cause of the anguish and tension, but he somehow still blamed her. She was pregnant. She couldn’t decide what to do: One minute, she’d threaten to take out the baby. Then, if he agreed, she’d quip, “I’m keeping the baby. Think your ass gonna tell me what to do.” Eventually, Roxanne did decide to keep the baby, stay with Cesar, but return to her mother’s apartment. Cesar agreed to stay with Roxanne, sleep wherever he could, and see Coco on the side.

  Unknown to both Coco and Roxanne, Cesar was also seeing another girl named Giselle, whom he paged whenever Roxanne or Coco couldn’t be with him. Cesar could not sleep alone. Giselle was a neighborhood girl he knew from way back—even before he met Coco. One of Cesar’s friends hid his stash at Giselle’s mother’s, and Cesar tagged along whenever he went to re-up. He hadn’t seen Giselle for years. During that time, she had married, moved to Yonkers, had a son, and divorced. She’d recently returned to the neighborhood and was living with her mother. Her sister was dating Cesar’s friend Luis.

  Giselle and Cesar would meet up at her sister’s place on Anthony. Giselle cooked for him. Cesar stayed up late with Luis and his friends, but Giselle wasn’t a hang-out person; she usually left him to his company and climbed into her sister’s bed with her baby son. After his guests left, Cesar would hide his 9mm Taurus with its two clips in a cigar box on top of a wall unit in the living room that blocked the window to the street. He would have preferred to keep his gun closer by, but Giselle’s son was underfoot. Then he’d push the love seat into the couch, wake Giselle, and carry the baby back to bed.

  It’s unlikely that another girl would have changed Coco’s devotion to Cesar. “To me,” Coco said, “I was always with him. I knew we wasn’t together, but to me, the way I looked at it, I was always with him. He didn’t worry because I never was going toward anybody else. He knew that if he was with another girl, Coco would take me back. I would.” Giselle, however, didn’t accommodate the other girls so quickly. She made Cesar sleep alone the night after she spotted him on Mount Hope with Roxanne sitting on his lap.

  In January 1993, Rambo, a Bronx homicide detective, changed out of his sweat suit and into a Con Ed employee uniform. Hulk’s choice of a disguise was appropriate: gas leaks, like fires, were common in the neighborhood. That morning, a tip had come in, confirming where Cesar had spent the previous night. Hulk and the other undercovers drove to Anthony Avenue. They’d heard that Cesar didn’t plan to surrender quietly.

  Rambo, nicknamed for his pumped-up body, was known for solving cases. He’d transferred to the 46th in 1988, when the crack trade was exploding. Tremont, in its heyday, reliably gave him five shootings every week. Rambo was considered a fair cop by the neighborhood’s tough guys because he didn’t harass people unnecessarily. “He didn’t set you up,” said Cesar. “If you didn’t have nothing on you, he wouldn’t plant nothing on you. He’d say, ‘I’m gonna get you, but I’m gonna get you fair and square.’ ” Rambo tracked down runaway daughters and retrieved stereos from ex-girlfriends; he brought Pampers on house calls and handed off twenties for milk. People confided in him; he never made someone who had too much time feel that he was in a rush. He respected the men, and if the women whistled, he was glad to remove his shirt and show off his chest.

  During the four months he’d been trailing Cesar, Rambo and Lourdes had become cautious friends. He stopped by her apartment regularly and searched the place every time, but she didn’t insult him, which he appreciated. “She was afraid,” Rambo said. “She didn’t want to rat on her own kid, but she knew if another cop or a rookie saw him, and he was armed, they were going to kill him, and she knew I wouldn’t do that to the kid unless I had to.” Rambo assured her that if Cesar surrendered, he’d take him in safely. Lourdes passed the word along to Cesar, as Rambo expected, but Cesar said again he wouldn’t go without a fight. Rocco planted misleading rumors—that Cesar had fled to Puerto Rico, to Springfield, to Florida.

  One afternoon, Cesar went to Big Joe’s, in Mount Vernon, a tattoo shop. Cesar had never been tattooed before. He liked clean, untouched skin. He already had a burn mark on his shoulder from when Lourdes had dropped a pot of boiling water on him. But killing his best friend was a deeper cut, and this tattoo was to be his penance; it was a wound Cesar wanted the world to see.

  Cesar boasted to the tattoo artist that the detective Rambo was chasing him.

  “He’s a friend of mine,” the tattoo artist said. In fact, unbeknownst to Cesar, Rambo moonlighted for Big Joe as a body piercer.

  Cesar added, “When you see him again, mention to him that Cesar was here.” At first, Rambo thought the message was just another false lead. But then he learned that the tattoo, which was just above the boy’s heart, read Forgive me Mighty, R.I.P.

  Rambo rang the doorbell at Giselle’s sister’s. Police manned the fire escape, the alleyways, and the roof. When Giselle’s sister opened the door, several police pushed in. Cesar was lying beside Giselle and her son in the living room, in their makeshift bed. Rambo handcuffed Cesar, then instructed Giselle to
dress him. She passed her screaming son to her sister and guided Cesar’s feet into a pair of sweats. Cesar told her to double up on his boxers and socks, so that he’d have a clean pair to wear in jail while he washed the others in the sink. She tied the laces of his Nikes and tucked twenty dollars in his pocket for deodorant and shampoo.

  Rambo escorted Cesar to the 46th quietly. He let Lourdes bring in sandwiches and juice. Afterward, Cesar asked him, “So who called the cops on me?”

  “You know what was your problem?” Rambo replied. “Too many girls.”

  Upon hearing the news, Coco cried, but after she heard that Cesar had been in bed with Giselle, she laughed. “That’s just like him,” she said. The police would have seen him naked. Roxanne had been dissed.

  Coco was pregnant. She’d suspected the pregnancy but the first test had been negative. The second test was positive. Once again, she was carrying Cesar’s baby, and once again he was locked up. “I bugged out for a minute. Then I got happy. I was like, ‘All right, you know, finally!’ I even thought I could write Cesar and give him good news.” The good news was even better because it would upset Roxanne.

  Cesar told Roxanne during a visit at Rikers Island, where he was being held. “That was the beginning of the end right there,” he said. That May, in 1993, Roxanne gave birth to their daughter, whom she named Justine. Justine had Roxanne’s eyes and Cesar’s light complexion and wide grin. A friend of Cesar’s named Ace hired a private attorney to represent Cesar, but then Ace was murdered. When the private attorney delivered the news, he suggested Cesar call Legal Aid or plead out. Cesar didn’t trust Legal Aid: his last Legal Aid attorney had advised him to plead guilty to a robbery he hadn’t even committed. The following month, Cesar pled guilty to one count of manslaughter. He was sentenced to an indeterminate term of nine years to life. He would serve at least the nine-year minimum. This time, however, the New York State Department of Corrections classified Cesar as an adult. He was nineteen.

  Coxsackie Correctional Facility was the first of many maximum-security prisons among which Cesar would be shuttled over the coming years. Most of Coxsackie’s inmates were young, so there was lots of fighting. Some inmates called it Gladiator Camp. Tito, his old friend from FMP, was there awaiting trial for the murder of his wife. Since he’d last seen Cesar, things had spun out of control: he’d continued robbing drug dealers and doing too much coke. Tito claimed that he had exchanged shots with an intruder, who’d shot his wife, then fired at him; the prosecutors would argue that Tito had killed his wife, then shot himself to cover it up.

  Wherever the truth lay, Tito refused to plead guilty. Cesar tried to shake him out of it. Back when Tito only had a gun charge, he’d spent the night before his sentencing curled up at the foot of Rocco’s bed. Cesar wasn’t sure that Tito was hard enough to handle prison, but he knew that the fifteen years the district attorney had offered Tito was better than what he was bound to get if he went to court. Tito was determined to prove his innocence.

  Cesar and Tito weren’t on the same unit, but they hung out in the yard. They ragged on the other teams during handball games. They hollered, “East Tremont! East Tremont!” when they played basketball. They sat on the bleachers and talked. They never discussed Tito’s relationship with Jessica, or what had happened to Mighty. They reminisced about better times. They spoke of all the other girls they’d known, or wished they’d known, and wondered who would answer the letters they floated into the world—Tito called them kites.

  “The whole thing is about getting bitches to write to pass the time,” Cesar said. Cesar cast a wide net. For starters, his correspondents included Coco, Roxanne, and Lizette. He wrote other girls in care of friends, because he only remembered the girls by nicknames or by their buildings or by their blocks. He told Tito, “We shoulda kept their addresses if this was the kind of life we was gonna lead.”

  Cesar’s adult designation made him potentially eligible for conjugal visits called trailers. Trailers were named after actual trailers on the compound, where inmates could spend overnights with their families. To qualify for trailers, wives had to be legal wives. But trailers required a girl with resources—money for the food and traveling, persistence to assemble all the necessary documentation and fill out the required paperwork, and stamina to withstand the duration of her husband’s bid.

  Prison was the fulfillment of the empty promise of the ghetto: it positioned you even farther out on the margin of things. Cesar’s ability to sustain vital relationships in the outside world could wither with each passing year. He didn’t have the resources he had on the outside—spotless sneakers, brand-new clothes, his sexual prowess, different girls to impress and experience. Roxanne wasn’t suited for the long haul; he’d yet to see their baby, and her explanations felt like excuses. All prison visitors needed ID, and Roxanne still hadn’t gotten around to getting their daughter’s birth certificate. Coco wanted to make the effort, but she was disorganized and easily distracted. Cesar wondered how long any girl would last without sex. “You try to fill your little black book,” Cesar said. “You’re gonna need a lot of spare tires throughout this ride.”

  Eight months later, a friend sent him Giselle’s address.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The maximum-security prison in Marianna, Florida, where Jessica would spend the first two years of her incarceration, was the only high-security federal facility for women in the nation at that time. Although Jessica was a nonviolent offender with no previous record, she had to start her sentence in maximum detention because of the length of her term. The women who filled Marianna’s antiseptic units were by and large minority and poor, with lives that in many ways were similar to Jessica’s. The skyrocketing number of women in prison was the unintended consequence of a drug policy that snagged legions of small-timers in the attempt to bring the kingpins down. The perfunctory institutional attitude toward the women reflected their relative insignificance in the war on drugs: a high-tech fortress, Marianna operated more like a public hospital with extra rules than a prison containing violent criminals. The atmosphere was more depressing than punitive.

  Jessica was popular at Marianna. She had lots of friends and suitors. She spoke up for the women whenever a guard gave them the runaround. She defended people who weren’t even her friends. One time, when an unpopular guard confiscated photographs that revealed her cleavage, Jessica said, “I got implants and that’s that.”

  “These are pictures for your family and friends. This isn’t Playboy,” said the guard.

  “How do you know what Playboy looks like?” asked Jessica. The women got a kick out of that.

  Prison was certainly less frightening and more boring than Jessica had imagined. She earned her GED. She landed a job with federal prison industries, UNICOR, where her inventive excuses earned her the name “The Idle Queen.” During work, she’d claim she had diarrhea so she could go to her cell bathroom rather than the open one. “I turn on the soap opera, put on the sign ‘Bathroom in Use,’ and I just sit down, and when people walk by I make sounds,” Jessica said. “I can drop sixteen minutes that way.” She fantasized about getting a letter to Mike Tyson, who was also in prison: Hey Mike, do you remember me? I’m George’s girl.

  Jessica kept busy. She wrote to Coco and Edwin and Daisy and George. She wrote to Tito via Coco, and to Cesar, once their inmate-to-inmate correspondence was approved. She sent all the children in her family birthday and holiday cards. She conjured up aches and pains for the cute prison doctor in the hope that she’d get felt up. She fell for a volatile girl named Tamika and their arguments fought off whole afternoons and nights of the tedium. She signed up for every workshop the prison offered—about religion and parenting and HIV. “I tried to go in that battered women’s group,” she said, “but it was just too much for me. I’m in the sexual abuse group. I couldn’t feel like I’m a battered wife.”

  Jessica was eager to share all that she was learning. She sent AIDS pamphlets to her daughters. Jessica’s friends
teased her, saying little girls weren’t at risk for HIV. “No,” Jessica said, “but I don’t want them to be ignorant like me on the street.” She wrote her little cousin Daisy, noting, “You should really get this,” on a Xerox she’d included of her GED (not long afterward, Daisy did). Jessica mailed Mercedes a book to help her with her ABCs and tried to dissuade Coco from her eternal wish to gain weight. Jessica had started exercising in the yard. “Don’t get fat,” she wrote, “I have fat on top of fat on top of fat.”

  At first, Jessica welcomed her assignment to Florida because her maternal grandmother and several uncles lived there; before Jessica left, Lourdes had promised to move the girls down, so that she could keep in closer touch. The Florida contingent of Lourdes’s family were working people, and whenever Lourdes visited, she straightened out: she’d return to the Bronx fatter, without circles beneath her eyes. Lourdes’s feelings about Florida were nevertheless complicated. She was beholden to her siblings for flying her down there, and she sometimes felt used. She’d end up taking care of her mother, and doing the cooking and cleaning while everyone else went to work. That year, however, Lourdes never even left the city for a visit; things were so bad she rarely left the block.

  Lourdes and Milagros had been hanging out and partying in the abandoned house on the corner; during the day, while they slept, Serena tried to keep her baby sisters quiet, in front of the TV. “She was good,” Lourdes said. “She didn’t touch anything.” Elaine stopped by to check up on her nieces; she taught Serena how to heat up a can of SpaghettiOs. She warned her never to open the door, but Serena couldn’t help it. Lourdes’s friends came, and sometimes a neighbor offered to take Serena to the park. Hundreds of miles away, Jessica worried. She said, “The hanging out, the people coming in and out, my daughter didn’t have no privacy.”