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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Coco’s new life was deeply entrenched with bureaucracies. The wide net of her institutional contacts with city, state, and federal agencies didn’t make her small world any bigger, however: the same girls and women traveled to the same offices with similar needs and waited for verdicts that seemed to be issued arbitrarily. The meetings themselves were usually pointless and brief—often just minutes—but the waits were sometimes whole mornings or afternoons. Coco’s days were a string of appointments—planned and unplanned visits to the clinic, recertification at welfare, screenings for public housing, the twice-monthly sign-in to collect her WIC. She reported weekly to the nuns who ran the shelter—for apartment checks (for cleanliness), refrigerator checks (for cleanliness and food), and for lectures about parenting and health. If Coco wasn’t getting the girls ready for an appointment, on the way to an appointment, or on the bus ride home from one, she was in a room crowded with women and children in the long yawn of waiting to be seen.

  Even so, Coco was always glad to escape the shelter, where she felt constrained by its rules. “It’s so boring,” she said of Thorpe. Anything was better than being stuck indoors with her two restless girls, no money, no telephone, her looming belly, and a nun at the door reminding her of some failed responsibility. Coco liked the nuns themselves, but didn’t like how “they all into my business.” There was a curfew, and you had to request a pass for an overnight guest. When, in recreation, Coco carved a clutch of balloons on a wooden plaque and inscribed Cesar’s name inside one balloon, in glitter, a staff person asked, “Why you always putting that guy’s name?” No one commented on the balloons inscribed with “Mercedes,” “Nikki,” and “Unborn Baby”; Cesar was part of Coco, too!

  Coco signed out of Thorpe to conduct her business. Under “Destination,” if she didn’t write “welfare” or “the clinic,” she scribbled “mother’s” or “mother-in-law’s.” She caught the 36 bus on the corner of Crotona Avenue and disembarked on Tremont, near the Concourse. Lourdes brought her up-to-date on gossip, especially about Roxanne. Roxanne and her baby also passed by Lourdes’s frequently, and the possibility of a chance encounter gave the otherwise repetitive days a charge. Roxanne had said that if she saw Coco, she’d kick her in the stomach—at least, that’s what Roxanne’s sister had told Lourdes and Lourdes had told Elaine and Elaine had told Coco.

  Otherwise, Coco went to Foxy’s, but she didn’t get much attention there. Sometimes she stopped by Sheila’s, Foxy’s neighbor, or she passed by Milagros’s. Milagros still lived on Andrews, a few blocks from Foxy’s, with Kevin, and Jessica’s three girls. Sometimes Milagros would baby-sit so that Coco could go clubbing, but the frequent fights and shoot-outs at the clubs dampened her enjoyment, now that she had children: “I would be there dancing, and all I be doing is thinking of them. What if something happened to me and they waiting for their mother and I never come home?” Sometimes Coco would baby-sit, and Milagros would go get high, what Coco called “do her thing.” Lots of afternoons, they talked, and Coco would amicably reject Milagros’s advice about Cesar. Sometimes they let other people’s problems talk: One day, on a talk show called Shirley, the topic was marriage without sex. On the Shirley set, dumpy women with bad posture sat in an uneven row, jiggling their feet in too-short skirts. Subtitles ran beneath their double chins: Didn’t have sex in her ten-year marriage or Hasn’t had sex in six years.

  “I could never go more than two months. You going to go nine years. You gonna be able to do it?” Milagros asked.

  “I know this, I ain’t never going to look like that, all fat and ugly looking,” said Coco, scoffing. “That’s why I want to get married. I can only do it if I can be married.” If Cesar chose Roxanne to be his legal wife, Coco planned to remain alone. Cesar vacillated about his marriage plans. He said Coco needed to prove her loyalty. Milagros told Coco she was only setting herself up to be hurt. Coco suspected that Cesar was waiting to see if she gave him a son.

  While Coco and Milagros watched television, the children played in one bedroom. Serena organized a game called Moving. The play baby stroller had already been packed with baby powder, the dolls strapped with knapsacks, ready to go. Brittany was scrunched up on the windowsill, painting her toenails, knees to her ears, leaning against the window guard. Stephanie applied fake makeup to Mercedes’s upturned face. Serena balanced a tray toppling with the fake food bought years earlier by Jessica.

  “We’re moving,” she announced. They had no destination. She added, “We gotta bring this food. We just need to take our things.”

  Milagros, in fact, had been talking a lot about moving. In the last year, she’d lost her closest friends to prison and death: Jessica was locked up; Puma had been gunned down. Milagros wanted to get away from the partying; she’d been using too much coke. She also wanted to put some distance between herself and Kevin’s mother, who was due out of jail and making noises about taking Kevin back. And the Bronx had nothing for the children. The only play area was a concrete space between two buildings. Kevin was eleven and regularly getting into trouble at his school. “When he asks me if he can carry a knife, I think it’s time to do something,” Milagros said. He had already been mugged, and recently, there’d been another stabbing at his junior high, the same one Coco had attended. Twice a day, Milagros had to walk to the school to escort Kevin to the bathroom because he was too afraid to go alone.

  Milagros’s older brother, who was married to one of Puma’s sisters, had recently joined a growing number of Bronx friends and neighbors who had moved upstate, and the news that drifted back to Milagros was all good. Apartments were spacious. Children could play outdoors safely. Schools were strict about classwork and attendance. Mothers didn’t have to break night waiting in the emergency room. There were jobs. Willy, the twins’ father, already lived there, as did his mother and several sisters. Milagros thought it would be good for the twins to be near him, and the family could help take care of the children so that she could return to work.

  Milagros suggested to Coco that she join her; they could go through the shelter together and help one another with the kids.

  “I can’t be that far from my mother,”

  Coco said. “Coco, you is a mama’s girl,” Milagros said affectionately. But she’d started Coco thinking.

  Coco appeared content during those spells she stayed put at Thorpe, almost in spite of herself. She loved the games during parent-child recreation. She excelled at apartment inspection. She was exuberant after meeting with Sister Christine and filling out the housing-application forms. She threw herself into the role-plays in drama, playing a pregnant girl jealous of an unpregnant friend working toward her GED. She had meat thawing under a stream of hot water in the kitchen sink by the time she fetched Mercedes from preschool and Nikki from day care. Day care, in Nikki’s case, meant mornings spent with an anxious lady in a dark apartment in front of the TV; the lady’s husband walked around the house in his undershirt and dress slacks. Coco didn’t like the situation, but she thought it was unfair to send Mercedes to school and keep Nikki home, and it was hard to complete anything with both of them underfoot.

  In sunny weather, Coco brought the girls across the street. Mercedes rode her tricycle in the little park. Coco would borrow Sister Christine’s camera if she had money for film. Taking pictures was one of Coco’s greatest pleasures; Nikki loved posing almost as much. She’d jut out her hip, tuck her chin in, and beam. Mercedes preferred the gangsta style she saw in the Polaroids of her father and his friends—hands on bent knees, with a menacing look of having been interrupted, or standing, arms folded across her chest, her expression intently grim. Nikki loved girlish clothes, but if Coco dressed Mercedes sexy—cropped tops that showed off her belly—Mercedes got anxious. A few times, when she was younger, she’d wet herself. Like Serena, Mercedes was shy about showing off her body. So Coco gave Mercedes a sporty style instead.

  At dusk, Coco would settle the girls in the tub while she started dinner, which the girls ate from pla
stic bowls on their laps in front of the TV. Cops was Mercedes’s favorite show. Coco prepared rice and beans and fried chicken, or rice and beans and fried pork chops, or rice and beans and Spam, or—if it was the end of the month—rice and beans. It was always a battle to get Nikki to eat and to get Mercedes in bed. Coco easily won with Nikki, but often surrendered to Mercedes, then—in an attempt to be fair—let Nikki stay up, too. After Coco carried the sleeping girls into the bedroom, she always turned on the radio. Like her, Mercedes and Nikki couldn’t rest in silence. Then Coco cleaned, or visited with Jezel and Maritza, the other Puerto Rican girls at Thorpe.

  A group of the mothers stayed up late one night talking in Jezel’s apartment. Coco told them about Cesar—their first meeting, his other girls, how they planned to marry if he decided on her.

  “I’d have binned him if he did all that to me,” one girl said.

  “You won’t know until you stand in my shoes what my love is,” Coco said, her eyes filling with tears. “I am in love.”

  “I bet you in love. But all he ever done for you is got you pregnant,” the girl said.

  Coco socialized less after that. She rearranged her living room furniture a lot, as many as three times a week; Mercedes and Nikki came home to a new house every day. She longed for visitors. Foxy was “always making excuses.” Lourdes was “all into her business.” Iris needed her husband’s permission to visit, although she did manage to pass by, said Coco, “once in a blue.” At least Cesar kept her company.

  Whenever Coco returned to Thorpe, she beelined for the mailbox. No load of groceries, no weight of a sleeping child, kept her from the silver boxes first. She got letters from her old boyfriend Wishman, who was in prison on attempted murder charges in Baltimore, but Cesar’s letters were the ones Coco craved. “When he don’t write, I get depressed,” Coco said. Envelopes addressed with his surname, to Coco Santos, promised good news; Coco Rodriguez letters, addressed to her own name, were ominous. If Santos had been crossed out and replaced with Rodriguez, she tried to open the letters in private, to avoid crying in front of the girls—then they’d cry, too—but she rarely had the patience to wait.

  Coco composed long letters in reply. She also copied by hand letters Cesar sent her to forward to his incarcerated friends. They wrote in a secret code, which Coco tried to decipher. His friends may have been in prison, but through their letters she learned some of the juiciest gossip on the street. A few times she took the liberty of introducing herself: “By the way, this is Cesar’s wife, Coco, the one that had his first child and now his last,” she once added. These communications suited her indirect style.

  Cesar complained about prison, but it sometimes seemed easier and more fun than Coco’s life. Cesar had no children to feed and bathe and dress; he had no worries about basic necessities; he lived in a dorm with his friends. Hype, the boy who had introduced Cesar to West Tremont, was also at Harlem Valley. They had towel fights after showers and played basketball for whole afternoons. Cesar was studying for his GED; he already had better penmanship and a larger vocabulary. Coco’s limitations were her failures; but Cesar’s immobility was the prison’s fault. And Cesar still dictated the terms of the relationship—to choose her or to cast her aside. She wrote him and asked if it was okay if she gave birth to a girl. “Coco,” he wrote back. “I hope if it’s a girl you don’t start that bullshit about (I hope you love her) because you know that no matter what it is I’ll love her or him. As long as it’s mine I don’t give a fuck if it’s gay I’ll still love it the same so don’t sweat it alright!”

  Coco felt anxious because Cesar was always after her to visit and the visits were costly, and hard to manage with two kids. She had been trying to save the $60 to take the bus upstate. One afternoon, she got lucky—Cesar was transferred down to New York City, so she didn’t have to travel. Then she got luckier still—he called.

  “Good news!” Coco shouted as she hung up the receiver of the pay phone in the Thorpe House hallway. “Cesar is in Rikers!” She popped her head into her neighbor’s door. Jezel sat at her small kitchen table, breathing out a long, strong stream of Newport smoke.

  “I can go, girl, I can go,” Jezel said. Jezel had been dating Tito by telephone. Tito had asked Coco to hook him up. Coco, remembering how much Tito loved Jessica, deduced that Tito liked women with big butts and breasts, but the qualifying credential was Jezel’s toughness; Coco had also pieced together that Tito was locked up for killing his wife.

  Jezel distracted Tito from the boredom of prison, and Tito distracted Jezel from the boredom of the shelter. Jezel returned Coco’s favor by introducing Coco to a nephew who was serving time as well. Jezel’s nephew mailed Coco intricate cartoon drawings, shaded neatly in colored pencil. Cesar didn’t send drawings. The nephew also complimented Coco and asked her questions about her life. Coco was curious what crime the nephew had committed, but, she said, “Unless they tell you, don’t ask.”

  Coco hopped down the stairs and into her apartment and turned up the radio. “Daddy is in Rikers, Mercy,” she sang.

  “Daddy is in Rikers!” Mercedes repeated. She bobbed her chin in time to the music, trying to imitate her mother, who was now doing a Jamaican dance she’d learned from a neighbor the night before. Mercedes thrust her hips as if she were Hula-Hooping and reached her chubby arms up through the air. “I want to go see Daddy!” she chirped. “Daddy is in Rikers!” Coco touched her girls less now that they’d grown older, but she was so elated that she held Mercedes’s hands.

  Coco’s physicality with her children tended to have a purpose—adornment or punishment. She roughly dried them after their baths, stilled them to pull on their clothes, and tugged their heads back as she brushed and braided and twisted and tightened their hair. Even her tenderness was often gruff. The night before they were to visit Rikers, Coco settled in to work on Cesar’s favorite hairstyle on Mercedes—Shirley Temple curls. Mercedes bristled. “Hold still, Mami,” Coco said. “Don’t you want to look pretty for Daddy?” Getting pretty took well over an hour. Coco decided on the outfits ahead of time: theirs (striped-purple zip sweatshirts with black baggy jeans), and hers (a light blue-green sweat suit with a hair clip to match). The girls splashed in the tub while Coco ironed. She cleaned their already-cleaned ears again, because sometimes Cesar inspected them. Before they went to bed, she painted their toes and the little moons of their fingernails.

  She felt excited about seeing Cesar, but she felt some reluctance, too. The trouble was the red spots; she had been picking her face. It was a habit her great-grandmother had had. Tiny circles flecked her skin and spilled off her button nose. Coco tried hard not to pick, but at night when her girls fell asleep, if she couldn’t sleep herself, she picked. She stood before the bathroom mirror and leaned over the sink. She started by inspecting. Even then, she told herself, “Don’t pick, don’t pick, don’t pick!” She was not dissatisfied with her reflection; in fact, Coco usually liked her looks. The culprits were the quiet and the darkness. The next thing she knew she was pressing into her cheeks with her fingernails—which, in an attempt to curb this urge, she’d clipped. She dug deeply enough to make her face bleed.

  The marks worried her less when Cesar was upstate. Upstate visits required advance planning and gave her splotches time to fade. Cocoa butter helped to erase them, but now her face was covered. She could already hear him yelling tomorrow at Rikers—You keep fucking with your face like that ain’t nobody gonna love you. Stop messing with your face! His letters always had a line or two about the marks. The spots mapped her self-inflicted failures. At the same time, Coco interpreted Cesar’s haranguing as a sign of love. Cesar wanted his girls and children to look good in the visiting room. A good-looking girl enhanced his stature, much as she would on the street.

  The following day, on Rikers Island, handwritten signs greeted Coco. Visitors were invited to drop contraband in a forgiveness box: Women’s jail on the Island with lots of rooms for a short/long stay too/So don’t be the one. Another
sign said, Check your self be for i do. That day, a heavyset woman was caught trying to smuggle in heroin. Afterward, a guard hollered over the long line of women and grandmothers and little boys and girls waiting to be searched: “You better not be bringing drugs in here. I may not be no gynecologist, but I know how to do the job!” No one came forward. Another line snaked toward the final metal detector. Everyone had to remove their socks and shoes.

  “Things are getting outrageous in here,” whispered a woman behind Coco. Another said, “Are you shitting me?” “I got my man,” joked another, “ain’t no woman but a gynecologist going to look up my part.” A tall woman hiked up her skirt. “They can kiss my ass,” she said, a defiant cowgirl striding away in her muscular bare feet.

  Mercedes stared at the woman who’d been caught: she was crying softly as her youngest child dug into her belly, sobbing. The woman’s older boy sipped nonchalantly from a can of 7UP a guard had given him, but he hadn’t yet mastered coolness; when another officer handcuffed his mother, the boy’s petrified eyes locked on her, giving him away.

  It took another hour for Coco and the girls to reach the visiting area. The girls spotted Cesar across the vast dim space and darted over to him. He kissed Coco distractedly and took his assigned seat. His bright orange jumpsuit puffed out like a parachute. As the girls clambered on his lap, he craned his neck and scanned the room. Visits gave inmates a chance to see friends in other units and gather intelligence. Three tables away, he spotted Rocco talking to his mother. Rocco’s baby brother had curled into the plastic seat like a prawn. Cesar wanted Rocco to visit his unit. Coco wanted Cesar’s attention, although her face betrayed no sign of impatience or need.

  Cesar mouthed to Rocco, “Come over to my side. You gotta come over to my side, man.” Rocco had been brought down from his upstate prison as a codefendant in Cesar’s pending case. Cesar’s transfer to Rikers resulted from a new warrant. He and Rocco, who was finishing his time for a drug conviction, were being charged with a Manhattan robbery. Cesar couldn’t remember every mugging, but he was certain that he wasn’t guilty of this one; they’d only robbed people in the Bronx.