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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  At Coney Island, the wind made it too cold to swim, but the children ran in the sand and splashed their feet in the waves. The group trooped up to the boardwalk for lunch. On a picnic table outside the boarded-up Freak Show, everyone except Elaine’s sons munched on Elaine’s chicken and rice and beans. Her boys weren’t hungry because Elaine had earlier spirited them away and treated them to McDonald’s, on the sly.

  Damp clothes made the children shiver. Their lips were blue. With the gusts of wind, it was impossible to light the candles on Serena’s birthday cake, which was soon dusted with sand and ripped apart for a cake fight; Milagros tossed the remains in a garbage can. Serena spent the rest of her birthday lifting her sisters and cousins in and out of the seats of baby rides. For the long trip back to the Bronx, Serena, exhausted, sank into the subway seat next to Coco. Brooklyn passed in a rush. Serena watched the rooftops of the houses. “I want to live in a house,” she said.

  “Me, too, Mami,” said Coco. “When I get my apartment, I want to get it big enough for Mommy Jessica to come and live.”

  Serena pointed out a fence. “A pregnant lady couldn’t get over that fence,” she observed. She distractedly brushed the sand from the soles of her sneakers. “My best birthday was my sixth birthday.”

  That was the summer before her mother went away. Jessica had rented a community center in the projects and threw Serena a big party. All of Serena’s friends and family came for the celebration, said Serena, “even people from Florida.” Streamers and balloons draped the tables and bags were stuffed with candy. Jessica had hired a DJ, and a clown who painted the children’s faces. Even Lourdes showed. Serena still had the pictures of herself and her grandmother, cheeks pressed together, beside her layered Minnie Mouse birthday cake.

  Two years later, Serena sat on the subway, contemplative and sticky with sand. Nikki sucked her thumb and leaned cautiously against Coco’s big belly. Mercedes confidently plopped her head in what remained of Coco’s lap.

  “Old people should think like children,” Serena whispered cryptically. Coco nodded. It was advice that, at nineteen, she easily took to heart. Coco covered Mercedes’s shoulders with a towel and tightened her grip. The F train turned northward and jerked underground toward the Bronx.

  Coco was having a difficult year. First, Cesar had gone away for Mighty’s death. A few months later, Coco’s mother, Foxy, had a nervous breakdown and spent three weeks as an inpatient at a public psychiatric hospital. When Foxy was given a day-release pass, she came home, but after less than an hour, she called a cab to take her back. Home completely overwhelmed her. On the psychiatric ward, she rested. A new beau named Hernan had been visiting; they’d talk for hours and make out on her bed until the nurse would interrupt them and tell him he’d have to leave.

  After Foxy was discharged, she’d spend the days with Hernan and his friends in a nearby park, or in front of the Oval Pharmacy, where she had her new antianxiety and antidepressant prescriptions filled. She would tell her family that she’d been at an appointment at the hospital. Foxy said, “I did not want to go back home.” But Coco didn’t like living there without her mother; the ordinarily chaotic house felt sad and bleak. Iris and Manuel had moved out, and her stepfather, Richie, seemed desperate. Coco’s little brother, Hector, had been expelled from junior high for shooting a gun into the air near his school. When Foxy returned at night, Richie and Foxy would start fighting, and Hector would inevitably get involved. Sometimes Coco took the girls down the block and went to Milagros’s. But more often than not, Coco found Milagros’s boring—or, if Milagros was high, uncomfortable. Then Foxy and Milagros started hanging out and partying: Coco complained, but they paid her no mind. Coco couldn’t escape to Lourdes’s. Lourdes had been evicted again and was living with a Dominican drug dealer, who scared Coco, and worse yet, sometimes provided Foxy and Milagros with their drugs.

  That June 1993, when Coco was five months pregnant, she decided to “go homeless.” Going homeless meant entering the city shelter system to begin the long process of acquiring an apartment you could call your own. By entering a shelter, Coco could qualify for New York City public housing and get her name on the lengthy waiting list. Twice Foxy had personally escorted Coco to the shelter, and twice Coco had followed her mother right back home. The shelters scared Coco, especially the coed one. After her last attempt, Coco had said, “I’ma live here with my mother till I grow gray hair.” But Foxy encouraged her youngest daughter’s faltering steps toward independence. Coco’s older brother and sister and their families had gone homeless successfully. This time, as a pregnant mother of two, Coco qualified for emergency placement. She finally made up her mind to try again with a friend, whose uncle offered the girls a ride. Foxy was out, so Coco avoided the good-bye. She had no money, which turned out to be lucky, because Coco later said that if she had, she would have returned home by cab.

  Her girlfriend helped her through the processing—waiting and soothing the children, who became hungry, then cranky. They complained and cried until they fell asleep on the floor as the night cracked open into day. Coco got sent to Thorpe House, a transitional residence for women and children on Crotona Avenue. The refurbished building was just a block from the hooky house where Serena had been conceived.

  Thorpe House had been renovated by the Dominican Congregation of Our Lady of the Rosary. The four-story tawny brick building sheltered sixteen families. A wrought-iron fence topped with barbed wire separated the back of the house from the courtyard of a fourteen-story project that towered over Thorpe from behind. On sunny days, the smashed glass on the sidewalk sparkled; gnarls of cassette tape, looped along the barbed wire, glistened. There was a brightness to the place.

  Across the street, trees shaded a tiny park with benches, their branches decorated with empty plastic bags. On one trunk hung a wooden cross with plastic flowers and fraying ribbons, in memory of the victims of a triple murder that had taken place just before Coco moved in.

  The nuns assigned Coco an apartment on the first floor. Her door stood just past the security guard’s cubbyhole, at the end of a short hall. The door opened directly into her living room; a kitchen, situated in the far right corner, sat opposite two bedrooms. Coco smothered the living room walls with photographs, re-creating the bedroom she’d left behind. One of the first things she did was to take her girls to get their portraits taken at Sears on Fordham. She placed eight-by-eleven-inch pictures in the window, facing outward. She’d spotted one of Cesar’s old girlfriends on a nearby corner—the one she’d seen him hugging on Tremont. The portraits showed off Coco’s beautiful daughters just in case the girl passed by her street.

  Coco and the girls used only one of the bedrooms; in the other, Coco piled up the donated furniture she didn’t like. She and Mercedes shared a twin bed; Nikki used the mattress below, which pulled out like a trundle bed. The room’s window overlooked an abandoned lot and a barricaded single-family home. Coco blocked the window with a bureau to protect her girls from the gunfire she sometimes heard at night. On top of the bureau stood a statue of the Virgin Mary and a ceramic bassinet. Beside them she placed a porcelain unicorn she was safekeeping for Lourdes until Lourdes found a more reliable home. Squeezed next to the bureau was a small desk where Coco wrote to Cesar after the girls fell asleep. She hated to be alone—even steps away from her daughters in the living room. Sometimes she woke Mercedes up to keep her company at night.

  Whenever Coco had change for the pay phone, she called her mother’s. Foxy wasn’t often home; she was usually with Hernan. Coco bristled at the very idea of her mother having a new boyfriend and harangued Foxy about Hernan every chance she could. Hernan was a short Vietnam veteran with thick black hair and dark skin. Coco thought he looked like a rapist, and that Foxy, whose complexion was light and flawless, was too good for him. Foxy was still seeing Coco’s stepfather, Richie, expecting her eighth grandchild, and yet here she was, acting like a kid. Coco urged whoever was at her mother’s to come visit. People pro
mised to come by but rarely did.

  The Thorpe House staff aimed to equip the mothers with independent living skills, to reroute their formidable streetwise savvy toward the less tumultuous routines of the conventional world. But the two sets of skills didn’t add up: one was geared for hilly terrain, like four-wheel drive; the other assumed the roads were level and paved. Like some of the other residents, Coco intuited the limitations of the optimism, yet she was more willing than many of her Thorpe House peers to hear out the nuns. Coco had survived extreme hardship without becoming hard. She was eager to devise a plan for her future and was open to the help Thorpe offered, even though it was often unclear how it applied to her life. Her caseworker, a gray-haired Irish nun named Sister Christine, quickly developed a fondness for her.

  Coco responded most enthusiastically to the workshops on money and budgeting. Every two weeks, she received $125 from welfare, by which time she was often $110 in debt. Thorpe covered utilities and rent. Coco hoped the budgeting workshops would teach her how to stop having to struggle—a problem for which she blamed herself. The day checks arrived was pickup day. After she picked up, Coco immediately counted for one top priority: People I Owe Money To. She always owed someone something—$8 to Thorpe for change for washing, $6 to a neighbor for food, $15 to Dayland, a drug dealer from around her mother’s way, who had lent her $200 the previous Christmas when she had had no money for gifts. Coco earmarked the cash by writing the names—“Dayland’s,”

  “Sheila’s”—on the actual bills. She also deducted for tokens for appointments and put money aside for a cab in case of emergency. It wasn’t unusual for her to have $5 left, which she had to stretch for the next two weeks.

  She usually owed someone food stamps. Luckily, Coco’s girls were under five and still qualified for WIC—Women, Infants, and Children, a supplemental food program. Through WIC, she received dated vouchers and exchanged them for specified items—eggs, cereal, and most preciously, milk. What remained of the money went to clothes for the girls and necessary toiletries. Children’s looks reflected the quality of mothering; sloppiness and dirt were physical evidence of failure, of poverty winning its battle against you. Coco would keep the girls indoors rather than let them look busted-up outside. She spent hours on their hair, twisting and tugging, braiding and curling, liberally applying Vaseline. When she was done, she’d briskly rub her palms together and wipe a hand down each daughter’s face; Vaseline also kept their skin from getting patchy. “I want them to be perfect. They are so beautiful,” Coco said. It irritated her that she’d send Mercedes off to preschool looking brand-new, and they’d return her with a top splotched with finger paint. Weeks ahead of time, Coco estimated the price of the clothes she wanted, including tax. As soon as she possibly could, she made a deposit and put them on layaway.

  But budgeting didn’t mitigate one of Coco’s greatest problems—everyone around her also needed, and Coco didn’t know how to refuse. Sometimes Coco spent down her money just so she could be the one to use it, which allowed her to maintain her integrity. “This way if the girls in my house come to ask me for money, I tell them no, and I ain’t lying,” Coco said. Drinking men were employing a similar logic when they bought beer, bottle by bottle, at the corner store: better that way than a six-pack, even though the single bottles cost more. Otherwise, you either shared your beer or got the reputation of being greedy for refusing your friends; the trips to the store also broke up the boredom and gave folks something to do.

  Coco’s sister, Iris, however, knew how to take care of business. Her method was a stern personality. Hardness kept at bay all kinds of problems, and Iris could ward off potential borrowers with one stony look. Coco was too open; even if she avoided being a bank for near strangers, she ended up as the neighborhood grocery store: “They be knocking at all hours of the day and night, ‘Coco, you got this? Coco, you got that?’ ” Cash had to stretch further with Cesar jailed. He needed winter boots, a coat, socks, towels and sheets, and commissary money for his hygienes and stamps. Then he asked for extra things—such as a door-size reproduction of his favorite photograph of Mercedes with her hair in Shirley Temple curls. Coco didn’t know how to tell him no. “The welfare money, that’s the girls’. It belongs to the girls, not him,” she would say, but only to herself. The one time she explained to him she had no money, he told her to borrow it. Delilah, the loan shark from her mother’s block, charged a 100 percent markup for whatever amount she lent and doubled the bill every week. Coco’s $20 loans routinely cost her $60, so she did with him what she’d done with the nuns—sweetly demurred until avoiding became impossible, then made promises she couldn’t deliver, then apologized and blamed herself.

  One day, Coco and Iris went shopping. Although Coco had figured out her budget, she deferred to Iris, whom she considered a financial whiz. Iris was the only person Coco knew who actually survived on her welfare benefits. “I’m gonna give you my list of people I owe and you have to divide it up,” Coco said to Iris. Iris brought her to Big R Food Warehouse and suggested Coco buy the enormous packets of chicken and pork chops. Iris divided them into smaller portions and froze them separately; Coco often forgot to defrost meat in enough time for dinner. Iris had her children’s school clothes pressed and laid on a chair the night before; Coco was constantly rummaging around for the hairbrush or a matching sock. Coco knew she couldn’t replicate Iris’s strict adherence to order, but she longed for her girls to sleep in rooms like Iris’s rooms. “They for beautiful people,” said Coco. In her niece’s bedroom, everything matched—curtains and bedspreads and sheets.

  But Coco’s pride in her sister’s way was mixed with concern. The rigidity of Iris’s approach to her predicament generated its own problems. Iris lived in a housing project, and it was dangerous to take the elevators early in the morning, or late at night, alone. She rarely ventured anywhere without her husband, Armando—even to visit family. The toll of this vigilance was apparent in Armando’s anxious eyes and the grim set of Iris’s jaw. Mainly, though, it was Iris’s unhappiness that upset Coco. The family anxiety projected an unspoken, unappealing truth: that even living right—which is what Coco called it—was just another precarious hold. Poverty pulled everybody down. Coco loosened her body to minimize the impact of the fall; Iris and Armando froze, and the chill stiffened their kids, as well. Even indoors, when Armando planted himself in his favorite chair he gripped the arms.

  Babyland, Kiddieworld, Youngland—these were Coco’s favorite stores. Strollers hung from the ceilings. High chairs and rockers and swings lined row after row; the circular racks were choked with brightly colored clothes. Whole departments were devoted to each passing phase of a baby’s life. At Youngland, Iris exchanged the $12.99 jeans Coco had put on layaway for a similar style Iris had found for half the price; Coco would never have had the defiance to ignore the clerk’s snooty look. She and Iris waited in line. The counter loomed above them like a police precinct desk. Coco counted twenty-three kinds of hair bands. “My girls have all the hair bands except for the whistles,” she said. This omission bothered her. “It’s better to have girls, because you can let them wear things as long as they look pretty,” Coco said. Boys required name brands. Coco and Iris chuckled over the realization that they rarely shopped for themselves. “My panties have holes,” Coco said to Iris elatedly. Outside, she gave $3 to a homeless man.

  Coco’s Thorpe House caseworker, Sister Christine, worried about Coco’s generosity. When you were poor, you had to have luck and do nearly everything absolutely right. In a life as vulnerable to outside forces as Coco’s and her two little girls’, the consequences of even the most mundane act of kindness could be severe. The $10 loan to a neighbor might mean no bus fare, which might mean a missed appointment, which might lead to a two-week loss of WIC. Hungry children increased the tension of a stressed household. If the resolution was going to a loan shark, the $10 cost $40 or $50, effectively pushing Coco back a month. But to Coco, nothing was more important than family, and
family included Cesar and Lourdes and friends, both new and old. Coco gave Foxy some of her food stamps, in addition to WIC tickets, because Foxy was feeding seven people on her youngest son’s SSI and paying all the bills.

  Sister Christine wanted to tell Coco, Get away from your family. But she couldn’t. Not everyone could clamber onto a lifeboat from a sinking raft. You either made your way by hardening up, like Iris, or you stayed stuck. Coco didn’t see a choice. She admired Iris’s accomplishments, but she couldn’t live like that. Nor could she be like her older brother, Manuel, who dressed himself better than his children. Coco couldn’t ignore the people she cared for, which is why Foxy and her little brother Hector turned to her first for help. The word that came to Sister Christine’s mind whenever she thought of Coco was enmeshed. Coco would have said that she had heart.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Months after Coco had moved to Thorpe House, she was still visiting Foxy’s five or six times a week. The returning gave her a sense of purpose. However, sustaining the connection cost her—she missed appointments, her housing-application case lost momentum, not to mention the money she spent on bus fare. Still, she clung to her mother’s block and treated Thorpe as a satellite. There were dollar stores near Thorpe, but Coco bought her shampoo and soap at Bank of Bargains on University. There was a C-Town in her new neighborhood, but Coco preferred the one nearest home, where she could sometimes convince Foxy to shop with her. This devotion required Coco to pay a cab to take her, the girls, and the month’s twenty-three bags of groceries back along Tremont to Thorpe. At Foxy’s, Hector had taken over Coco’s old bedroom, but he let Coco keep her closet as an archive of cherished things: the black leather shearling coat Cesar had bought for Mercedes; two white fake-fur coats the girls had worn the previous Easter; Mercedes’s handmade pink satin birthday-party dress.