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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Finally, Cesar turned to Coco. “I saw my dad, I saw him today,” he said. Cesar glanced around, as though the announcement were insignificant, but his eyes showed that he was pleased. Cesar had not seen his father for years; now he was also at Rikers, serving time on a drug charge. Cesar was waiting in the chow line and recognized his father, who was pushing a mess hall cart.

  Cesar snatched the bottle cap the girls were tossing—the claim ticket for the clothes Coco had left for him in the property room—and tried to get Mercedes to play with him. He threw fake punches. She jerked her chin back and looked at her mother. He brushed her pouting lips with a slow jab. She retreated. “Oops! Here’s Nikki! I don’t love you no more!” he said, and he scooped Nikki onto his lap. Mercedes burrowed into Coco’s armpit. Coco later said she sympathized with her daughter’s hurt reaction; Cesar leveraged his affection for other girls against her all the time.

  “Do you love me?” Nikki asked Cesar.

  “I love you,” he said flatly.

  “You my daddy?” she persisted.

  “Yep,” he said, looking away. Coco and Cesar sat awkwardly. She struggled to engage him in conversation. She complimented the cleanliness of the unit, which was relatively new. “You get my letter about the baby’s—” she tried softly. She had written him her idea for a name for a girl. Originally, Cesar had wanted Giselle. Now he preferred Whitney, the same name he’d wanted for Mercedes. Coco suspected—as it turned out, rightly—that Whitney was one of Cesar’s girls.

  “Nautica,” Cesar said, interrupting Coco. His voice turned hard. “Nautica—what the fuck kinda name is that?” Coco bit her lip. A couple kissed one row over. The man’s hands moved inside the girl’s untucked shirt. She straddled the small table intended to keep a distance between them, his knees pressed in prayer between her legs. The airplanes from La Guardia sounded as if they were about to land on the roof.

  The girls were also exploring the acceptable limits of visitation. They trekked over to Rocco and Rocco’s mother. “Next time you come, pull my father down so Mercy can meet her grandfather,” Cesar mumbled to Coco. There were just minutes left. “What’s this about you and Roxanne?” he asked.

  “She won’t let me see the baby,” said Coco. “Mercedes wants to see her sister.”

  “I don’t want you fighting,” he said. He kissed only the girls good-bye. The visitors collected beside the gate at the first of several exits. Nikki watched her mother watching Cesar.

  “Bye, Daddy,” Nikki said softly. Cesar and Rocco talked animatedly as they waited to be searched. Coco peered at Cesar.

  “Bye, Daddy,” Nikki tried again, louder.

  “That’s not your daddy,” Coco reminded her.

  “No!” Nikki chastised herself. “Cesar!”

  The severity of Nikki’s voice caught Coco’s attention, and she tried to reassure her daughter. “Your daddy look like you,” Coco said to Nikki tenderly.

  Not too long after her visit to Rikers, Coco, still in her coat after collecting Mercedes from preschool, sat in her apartment, Cesar’s latest letter balanced on her belly. Tears dampened the paper. Mercedes clutched the chair. Nikki, sitting cross-legged in the corner of the kitchen, rocked herself to a private song near the overflowing garbage can. The letter, which had been addressed to Coco Santos, began promisingly:

  Ever since I was little I always wanted to have kids and be a father to them because I never really had a father. But I fucked up and I still have another chance, and I promise myself that I am going to do the right thing this time, if not for me for my children. I’m going to tell you something that nobody knows about except Mighty may he rest in peace.

  Coco, if it’s not a boy and I want to have another one from you would you let me? Because I ain’t going to stop having kids until I have a son. I don’t care if I end up with 15 daughters, I’m still going to keep on. I think you’re carrying a girl, I don’t know why but that’s just how I feel. I want a son so bad that I think I ain’t never going to have a little boy. . . . If you don’t give me my kids I’ll have them from someone else. See Roxanne she said she’ll never have another child from me that stupid bitch. I don’t need her. She’s not the only girl who can have kids.

  The mugging charge was dismissed and Cesar had been returned to Coxsackie. The bad part of the letter involved Cesar’s discovery that another girl had a daughter of his. Cesar wanted Coco to track down his baby’s mother. The only clues were her name, Whitney, and an approximate address, a building near Burnside on Davidson. The child was said to look just like Mercedes.

  The actual Mercedes was clamoring for Coco’s attention. She had learned a new song in preschool. “Put the letter down, Mommy, and hear me sing,” she urged. Cesar instructed Coco to pretend that she was his sister, searching for a long-lost niece. “Tell the bitch I want the baby to have my name,” Cesar wrote. The theme song from Cops wafted out of the bedroom—“Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?”

  Coco said, “Oh! Mercedes! Go watch it, Cops in the bedroom!” and pointed Mercedes toward the siren sound. Mercedes drifted toward it, humming the song in an eerie monotone. Nikki padded after her big sister. Coco wept.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Lourdes was dressed like a schoolgirl the cold September morning in 1993 when she went to see her youngest son. She wore a green-and-cranberry-striped hoodie and matching green leggings. She sported canvas shoes. A gold scrunchie cinched her waist-length hair into a bun. Slender gold hoops dangled from her ears. She’d painted her lips summer pink. But by the time Lourdes laid eyes on the tree-lined drive of Coxsackie Correctional Facility, she looked as though she’d imploded. She hated prisons. “Because I feel the pain of the whole room, of the whole people in jail, and I can’t take it,” she said. She dragged behind Mercedes, who hopped toward the front gate, which was topped by tall loops of razor wire. Cows grazed in a nearby pasture. Lourdes kept her head down during the lengthy processing. When the guard asked her, “What’s your relationship to the inmate?” Lourdes whispered, “Mother”—a word she usually proclaimed.

  Across her belly, one arm rested in a sling. The stories of how she came to have a cast were lively and various: she preferred the tale about a trip she took with her man, Domingo, to buy chickens, his admirable intervention in someone else’s domestic trouble, and her diving in front of him to block the bullet that the enraged husband had sent his way. For the prison visit, Lourdes had done her best to look buoyant, perhaps to minimize the wrath she anticipated from her son.

  The guard assigned to the visiting room at Coxsackie was immersed in a book of word games. Lourdes, Coco, and Mercedes waited beside him to be acknowledged. Finally, pushing his chin in the general direction of their seat assignments, he said, “Sit second table, by the window,” without lifting his head. Coco and Lourdes hesitated. They searched the room, perplexed. “Over there,” he said impatiently, without offering further direction. They tiptoed uncertainly down several steps and to the center of the room. “See that black girl sitting with that white guy? NEAR HER!” the guard screamed.

  Lourdes slid into a seat covered in greasy dirt so thick that other visitors had marked their presence in it with initials and hearts. The chair wobbled. “Can I switch chairs? Where do he come from?” she asked.

  Mercedes pointed to a door. “Abuela, Daddy come out from there,” she said. Lourdes tapped her left leg compulsively. When Cesar finally stepped through the inmate entrance, Mercedes bolted across the room; a guard removed his handcuffs just in time for him to catch her as she leaped into his arms. Cesar carried her to the desk guard, who took his ID number down, and he bounced Mercedes joyfully as he approached Lourdes and Coco. Lourdes stood. Cesar placed Mercedes down gently and hugged his mother, who sobbed. He kissed Coco’s cheek softly. She was crying, too. “What are you crying for?” he asked. He smiled worriedly and regarded the women in his life, glancing back and forth—Coco with her belly and self-inflicted red spots; Lourde
s, puffy-faced and sniffling; Mercedes peeking out happily beneath a head of perfect curls.

  He dove straight into the heart of the trouble, staring directly into his mother’s eyes: “So what’s up with you? What’s going on?” He knew most of it from Elaine, who believed that Domingo had beaten Lourdes for stealing his drugs. Elaine told Cesar about the resulting shoot-out between Domingo and her husband, Angel, how Domingo had threatened even Robert when he went to retrieve Lourdes’s things. Elaine had called the police, and Domingo ended up in jail for carrying an unlicensed gun. Despite his family’s posturing, Cesar knew the trouble—whatever it was—was his to fix. From prison, the business of fixing it was just that much harder. He’d already sent word to Rocco, who was back on the streets.

  What Cesar didn’t know was that, while Robert was making arrangements to get his mother to Florida, Lourdes had bailed Domingo out and returned to him. As Lourdes launched into her version of the story, Cesar’s expression flattened. His body became taut as Lourdes went on about how Elaine just cared for herself, how Elaine’s husband was a liar, how although Robert had invited Lourdes to stay with him and his wife, she couldn’t stay as far away as Brooklyn, let alone survive their Jehovah’s Witness rules.

  Cesar turned to Coco, who sat quietly. He placed his large hand on her big belly. In one month, their baby was due. Cesar seemed steadied by his physical contact with the unborn baby. He asked his mother, “Where are you living?” She did not respond. He glanced at Coco. “Is she back with him?” he asked. Coco bit her lip and cast her eyes down. Lourdes relaunched an explanation that she’d gotten beaten up because of Angel, but Cesar’s stare-down made her try another route. “Yes, I am back with my husband,” she said. “We are back in the apartment—”

  Cesar interrupted her. “He may give you food and he may give you clothes and he may give you shelter, but he did all that before without beating you and you gonna go back. And one day he’s gonna beat you and you end up dead. What am I gonna do? Sit here?” Cesar crossed his legs and placed his chin in his hand like The Thinker. “What kind of man is he? I’m a violent person and I don’t hit my girlfriend. Look at all I done to Coco, but I ain’t never hit her.” He fixed his eyes on the distance to control his rising anger, then noticed Lourdes’s quivering cheeks. His voice softened. “I couldn’t do nothing when I was a kid, but I can do something now. It’s no death. But I’m gonna get every bone broke. I know you love him and that’s your business, but this is out of your hands. Let it be.” He placed his arms around Coco and pressed his face into her breasts.

  Conversation meandered; Coco listened while Cesar and Lourdes discussed Cesar’s discovery of his other daughter. Mercedes padded over from across the room and presented Cesar with a car without a wheel. Hours passed. Cesar and Coco kissed; when Lourdes went to the bathroom, they necked. The food wrappers piled up. They caught up on family and friends. During a companionable lull, Cesar told Lourdes that he had recently tried heroin. He’d sniffed some with Tito, who was still at Coxsackie with him. Cesar didn’t think he would use it again, although he admitted that the boredom of prison was killing him. “When somebody brings stuff in, and you get in prison and you be sitting here all day doing nothing, the programs—I hate that shit—and somebody says, ‘You want to get high?’ you get high,” he said. Cesar instructed Coco to call Tito down the next time she came for a visit, so he could have visitors, too. She nodded, then excused herself, went into the bathroom, gripped the edge of the sink clogged with toilet paper and hair and cigarette butts, and cried. She never thought Cesar would try heroin. When he was out on the street, he had condemned every drug short of weed.

  Meanwhile, Lourdes tucked stray strands of hair into her bun. “You’ll fall in love again, it ain’t the last man,” Cesar assured his mother. Lourdes lifted her chin regally. A slat of afternoon sun pushed through the windows, which were so cloudy they looked as if they had been scrubbed with a giant Brillo pad.

  “Time’s up!” the droopy guard shouted. “Get out of here! Move it! Time to go!” Mercedes wanted more candy. There was no money, and only a Starburst left. “Can I have that?” she asked her father, who then popped it in his mouth. He exaggerated its deliciousness. “Bite it,” he said, inviting her to sample the sticky gob on the tip of his tongue.

  “Gim-me!” Mercedes cried. Cesar pulled out the gooey taffy and offered it to her, but just as she reached for it, he pulled it back. He teased her with the offer again, and just as she reached for it, he swallowed it and smacked his lips. He smothered her hurt feelings with hugs, making it into a game, drowning out her crying with laughter and kisses and silly smooching sounds. In the subtle tyranny of that moment beat the pulse of Cesar’s neighborhood—the bid for attention, the undercurrent of hostility for so many small needs ignored and unmet, the pleasure of holding power, camouflaged in teasing, the rush of love. Then the moment passed, and Cesar’s three-year-old daughter walked back out into the world and left him behind.

  To Coco’s relief, this time Mercedes didn’t ask why Cesar wasn’t coming home. Some parents lied to their children: they said the prison was a job or a hospital. Elaine used her brother as a lesson: she told her sons that Tío Cesar was paying the price for having done bad things. Coco thought it best to stay close to the truth while veering away from the harshness, so, whenever Mercedes asked, she assured her that Daddy would be home when he was done with being far away. When the guard ushered the visitors from the stuffy room, Coco did not turn back to Cesar. She said, “I get so much upset that I can’t look back, then I miss him all the way home.”

  Coco and Mercedes searched for deer on the Thruway. Lourdes brooded, stoking her discontent: “George beat up Jessica with a two-by-four. Angel—am I right or am I wrong, Coco?—broke Elaine’s jaw?” she exclaimed. In fact, it was George who broke Jessica’s jaw. But there were so many fights and slights and brawls and arguments that it was hard to keep track of them. “Robert, now, he’s a Jehovah’s Witness and he is willing to let his younger brother get brought downstate and take care of this and get more time? He is a religious person, and that don’t seem right to me. Did I tell them what to do when they get beaten up? Did I tell Jessica? Did I tell Elaine she had to leave Angel? Why do they get the right to tell me?” Coco and Mercedes fell asleep. Lourdes continued, “I told Cesar, ‘Get out of that macho. Get out of that hoodlum! And get inside you the urge to freedom!’ ”

  The anger gave way to sadness. Lourdes glanced over at a hill tapering up to a white colonial house. “One night in my life I want to sleep in a house like that, with a front porch, and all peace and quiet,” she said. She rummaged through her purse for her cigarettes and searched for a Spanish station on the radio, which she finally found, over an hour later, after crossing the miraculous span of the Tappan Zee Bridge. She turned the volume up louder, then louder, the closer she got to the Bronx.

  Cesar’s friends and girlfriends appreciated his loyalty. If he considered you family, he stood by you, regardless. He was brutally honest and what he said could be hurtful, but it also made him trustworthy in a world with a high tolerance for obfuscation and ducking and lies. He was calculating about playing girls, but his flattery always had a foundation. With women, Cesar did not confuse staying true with fidelity. “I loved Coco with all of my heart and soul, yet I was never faithful to her,” he said. Lizette gave him condoms whenever he went out. If Roxanne suspected him of cheating, he’d soothe her by saying, “Alright, but what girl could compete with you?” In prison, where business tended to be conducted through indirection, Cesar still presented his desires clearly and forcefully: he wanted a wife to help him through his sentence, a pretty enough stand-up girl who did her job—brought his children regularly to visits, offered companionship in trailers, put money in his commissary account. He hoped for a girl who would understand him and also check up on his mother, but he wasn’t expecting that.

  Coco wanted him to want her, though she was unsure of the terms of being chosen. To her m
other, she hesitantly confided her conflicts about the marriage: “We rushing things. We trying to do things so fast, it’s just coming out messed up.” If they were married, she would have to support him, and there were so many other things she needed to do: get her own apartment, finish high school, get a good job, be an excellent mother and example to her girls. She wanted to earn her driver’s license and save up for a convertible. She’d tool up to the front gates of the prison—with the girls in back—and swing open the passenger door the day Cesar was set free. Her boldest dream was to become a photographer. At the very least, she wanted to gain some weight in her butt and breasts and to stop picking her face.

  Coco mostly kept her deepest doubts from Cesar, but not from herself. “My thoughts keep changing every day,” she said. She had good reason for her confusion; Cesar sounded confused himself. He’d written that he loved her, but she remembered that he’d bragged about his ability to write letters just to gas her head. He had made that comment a long time ago, but now every time he wrote “I love you,” she wondered, Is he gassing my head now? She felt almost certain that his promise to get a tattoo that read Cesar loves Coco was a lie. Boy George had promised the same to Jessica, but then he’d gotten only the outline of the heart and had never added Jessica’s name.

  Coco was glad that Cesar was honest about his other girls—most boys lied—but if she married Cesar, she didn’t want other girls around. In fact, she didn’t want other girls around right now. “I can’t play you while I’m in here,” he had protested, as though her worry was foolish, but Coco knew that people got busy during visits. Once, Mercedes surprised a couple in a bathroom stall. Other couples managed to have sex in the open visiting room. Why else would otherwise stylish girls wear those ugly prairie skirts?