Lourdes talked on, flapping her sling for emphasis. The flames from the candles flickered. She bragged about her long hair and her fine ass and her Puerto Rican power, how when she danced she didn’t even need to flirt to get a man. Domingo raised his eyebrows mischievously at Lourdes, jingling the handcuffs hanging from the refrigerator handle like a prison guard. Lourdes scrambled off the bed and grabbed a wedding picture of her son Robert and his wife. She shook it like an angry fist. “You get married now, Mami,” she said, nudging Coco with her bad arm. She claimed she’d filed a lawsuit. “When I get the money from this, I’m going to give you a fucking church wedding.”
Coco burst into tears. “Why are you crying, Mami?” Lourdes asked, alarmed. She shot an accusing look at Domingo along with a blast of Spanish and demanded, “Why is she crying?” In what seemed like a single, fluid gesture, Lourdes then shooed Domingo away, ordered the old man off the only chair, sat Coco down, and knelt before her in the impossibly small space between the table and the wall of shelves.
“I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m gonna cry, then I’m gonna laugh, then I’m gonna cry. I’m happy and upset. I don’t know why I’m crying at the same time,” Coco blurted out.
Lourdes understood the difficulty of birthdays. Milestones were unhappy times. Her forty-third birthday was only weeks away. She raised Coco’s chin and placed her good hand firmly on Coco’s wet cheek. In a throaty voice, she launched into a bluesy rendition of “Happy Birthday,” putting her whole soul into the song. Then she broke into “Sixteen Candles,” refusing to let Coco’s brown eyes wander, until she ended abruptly with her own applause. “Oh, I love that song!” Lourdes said. “I love that song! Don’t you love that song, Mami?” Coco smiled shyly. “Happy birthday, Mami! Happy birthday!” Lourdes nearly shouted, pumping up her deflated hopefully-future-daughter-in-law. The decibel of the promises made up for what they lacked in conviction. Lourdes then announced in a normal tone of voice that Domingo would get Coco a winter coat. A guy he knew sold them from the back of a truck.
“I don’t want to get my hopes up, because when my hopes get up, they always come down,” Coco said, streaming down the stairs. She had not had a winter coat in years. Two little boys played soccer on a square of landing.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” one said to her.
“Happy Thanksgiving!” she said back. She wrapped the windbreaker she’d borrowed from her mother around her and pushed out the heavy door. She scurried down Mount Hope Place, as she had so many times before, and into the light of Tremont Avenue.
Back at Foxy’s, Coco checked in on the girls, then went back down to meet up with her friend Terry. It was so cold that only the drug dealers were out. Coco yelled to her little brother’s bedroom window, “Hector! Throw down Mommy’s scarf!” The scarf sailed down. Coco inhaled it as she wrapped it around her. “I smell just like my mother when she’s smoking cigarettes and booter—ugghh!” she said. “I think I dressed too baggy tonight. I feel fat. I real skinny but I feel fat.”
“You buggin’, Coco,” Terry said.
“Coco!” Hector yelled. He tossed down another missive from his room. To a matchbook he’d taped a free pass to a local club called The Fever. It stood on the corner of Webster and Tremont: Coco passed by the place whenever she took the 36 bus. Lourdes used to go dancing there when it was called the Devil’s Nest. Now black streaks of lightning flashed across the sign: “The Fever—Catch It!” Coco hoped that she would run into Roxanne. Fights made things vivid. It was her birthday. Something had to happen. Something had to change.
The Fever occupied the basement of a decrepit building close to where Mighty had been shot. Bouncers haphazardly pat-frisked the customers. It cost an extra $5 to keep your coat, and a dollar to wear your hat. To parade in one’s name brand must have been worth it, because most of the teenagers kept on their winter gear, even though the temperature climbed toward the tropical. Only the go-go girls were dressed to sweat, in leather hot pants and sequined bras.
Coco, in her topknot, looked vulnerable leading her friend Terry through the crowd. The girls danced without much enthusiasm. They whispered and danced some more. They stepped to the side of the floor and watched. Boys who could afford the $5 drinks clustered around the bar that surrounded the runway the go-go girls danced on. Bored, the girls flung their legs over the boys’ hat-covered heads. Coco bought a drink that she still hadn’t finished by the time they left, three hours later.
Back at Thorpe House, Coco realized that she’d forgotten to retrieve her keys from Vanessa’s little niece. She was locked out, but she wanted to take advantage of her daughters’ absence and clean. Although Coco would not admit it, she wanted to make a comeback on apartment check. She and Terry banged and body-slammed the front door of Thorpe for fifteen minutes and finally woke the security guard. He shuffled off in search of the master key. Coco slid down to the floor, while Terry perused a Thanksgiving bulletin board in the hall.
Terry scrutinized it closely. She needed glasses: her nose practically touched the paper turkeys stuck there. The nuns had prepared a photocopy that began, I’m Thankful For . . .
“She says plane instead of place, and she cannot even spell God!” Terry marveled at the errors of one essayist. She read Coco’s aloud:
I’m Thankful For . . . My three pride and joy’s Mercedes Nikki & Nautica. I thank god to have three beautiful girls. I’m thankful for having a great family that care for us a great deal. I’m glad to have a Mom thats there for me & understands me. I’m also greatful for the husband I have. He gives me headaches at times But we all go through that.
Most of all I’m glad for finally being (living) on my own & being my self & finally I thank god for my girls to be one step ahead at a early age (school)
Coco had drawn a smiley face with arrows pointed to the word school.
“I should go to jail,” Coco said self-consciously. “Oh, they come outta prison smart. Cesar learned so much in there. You should see how much he knows.” The Thorpe House guard must have fallen asleep downstairs, but Coco and Terry seemed neither to notice nor to care. They reminisced about their childhoods.
“I took my problems to the street,” said Coco. “That’s one thing, I never kepted them to myself. I guess it was because I wanted someone to talk to.” She paused. Her mood seemed melancholy. Her habit of annotating her own life was another way to tuck in the wild strands. “I can’t wait till my girls are old enough and I can talk to them about everything.”
Finally, the security guard returned; he could not find the key. Back at Foxy’s, the block was eerily still. Beside Foxy’s building, on what had for years been abandoned lots, stood brand-new single-family homes: the city’s latest attempt to improve the beleaguered neighborhood. The pastel units had outside light fixtures and driveways. The families parked their cars and checked the locks on their driveway gates, after which they slipped through barred doors and disappeared. In the middle of the neighborhood, the houses presented a surreal facade of cheer. They might have been intended to inspire, but the impossibility of acquiring something so close somehow had the opposite effect. The proximity made the failure pointed and personal.
It was five o’clock in the morning. Coco scanned her mother’s windows. The apartment was dark. “My brother’s asleep,” she said. Terry wandered off toward her own mother’s building. Coco collected the courage to go in. Her head pounded—she’d tied her ponytail knot too tight. “I feel so old,” she said, hugging herself against whatever awaited her, on the cusp of her twentieth year.
Cesar didn’t call Coco on her birthday. He’d been transferred upstate and was still waiting for phone privileges. But he’d written her a long letter that Coco read aloud to everyone who’d listen. The day she got it, she read it three times to herself. He wanted the relationship she wanted: “I told everybody up here that you had a girl and they were like, Damn, kid, you can’t make a boy for shit. I told them me and you already planned on trying again. You already said
Yes, don’t change your mind.”
He accepted Nikki: “I hate to admit it but it’s also my fault that you got pregnant from Nikki. . . . I made you weak by always arguing with you and accusing you of things.” He expanded her privileges: “Mamita, I’m giving you your freedom.” He proclaimed her a woman. Prison had changed his ways: “The happier I make you, the more loyal you’ll be. . . . Our relationship has no trust or understanding, it’s only based on love and our children. I don’t want it like that anymore. . . . I ain’t never going to find another woman that will do 9 years with me or love me the way you do. I thought I had two women who cared, but they both with other men now. And that’s Lizette and Roxanne. You are the only one who is still by my side.”
He had only one request:
All I’m asking you is to leave your face ALONE. And don’t cut your hair by yourself, and dress the way I like you to dress. Coco go to the beauty parlor every one or two months to get your hair cut. Dress like you care about yourself. Don’t be wearing no dirty sneakers and stained clothes. Wash your sneakers and shoes. Do your hair, look pretty at all times. That’s all I ask of you. I always dress nice, it ain’t to impress no one else it’s to impress myself and that’s what you have to do impress yourself Coco.
He called her “sweetheart.” “I miss being with you. Talking kissing laughing joking arguing and making love.”
The letter made her sad birthday the best yet.
“Ilovehimmysweetheart,” Coco whispered back.
Foxy rarely told Coco what to do with her children. But ever since Nautica had been born, Foxy had made a point of urging her daughter to get Nautica’s ears pierced; she wanted people to stop mistaking her granddaughter for a boy. Coco wanted to please her mother and stopped by Foxy’s with the girls, hoping to borrow the $10 she needed to do it, but only her brother Manuel, and his girl, Yasmin, and Manuel’s two children were home. Yasmin shuffled out of the bedroom in an oversize T-shirt and slippers, her long hair down.
“Can I have money for Nautica’s earrings?” Coco asked Manuel.
“I’m not a bank,” he said. Manuel was even harder than Iris. He was only twenty-three, but when it came to money, he acted like an old man. Yasmin modeled one of Coco’s large door-knocker earrings. Manuel made a sour face. “You look too womanish with them. Stay like you are,” he said.
Coco wanted much about her life to change. She wanted to marry and get her own apartment and go back to school. Sister Christine had told her about a high school program for young mothers, with on-site day care. Coco wanted to go. “You ain’t going back to school?” she asked Yasmin encouragingly. Yasmin was fourteen.
“I want to,” Yasmin said. “Everybody in school, they make me feel like they smart and I’m stupid.”
“There’s a school for girls like us. You’re supposed to sign up now.” Coco told Yasmin that her Thorpe friend Jezel was taking training as a day-care aide. Day care didn’t interest Jezel—she was impatient with children, especially her son—but it appealed to Coco because she loved kids.
“I want to go to school, but I need clothes. I won’t go to school until I have clothes,” Yasmin said. She also needed glasses.
“And when you get the clothes, what’ll be the excuse after that?” asked Manuel, heading past her into the kitchen.
“There won’t be no excuse because I want to go,” Yasmin called after him, and rolled her eyes. She scooted close to Coco and whispered, “Coco, I think I’m pregnant!”
“Why don’t you get it checked?” Coco asked.
“Because she’s a derelict,” Manuel said, returning to the couch.
“My brother’s smoking crack,” Coco teased.
Manuel crossed himself. “Thank God that I don’t. Don’t even joke about that.” Nikki climbed onto her uncle’s skinny lap. “You ain’t supposed to go between a man’s legs, Nikki!” Manuel said sharply. Nikki began to cry.
“Explain it to her better, look at her tears,” Coco said.
“You ain’t supposed to go between nobody’s legs,” Yasmin tried.
“Girl or boy,” Manuel added.
“Especially a man,” said Coco. She counted out four of her nine WIC tickets and tucked them in Foxy’s sanitary napkin pack, where the boys wouldn’t dare to look. Manuel surprised Coco by handing her $10 for Nautica’s ears, and by giving Nikki a dollar for her shame.
At the jewelry store on Burnside Avenue, the ear-piercing lady straddled a tattered stool in her bullet-proof safety stall. She wore a gold suede jacket, and her black jeans had silver-fringed holes, strategically placed. Her clothes seemed like an attempt to keep her spirits up. The stereo blared. Gold chains and earrings stuffed the counter. She also had a card table piled high with toys—Barney knapsacks, knock-off Barbie dolls.
“I want this,” Mercedes pleaded, pointing to everything.
“I don’t got the money, Mercedes,” Coco shouted. The music was so loud it was hard to hear.
“Take the baby’s,” Mercedes suggested practically.
“You don’t want your sister to have earrings?” asked Coco.
“She look ugly in earrings,” Mercedes said.
“So you and Nikki have earrings and your sister don’t?”
“Yeah,” Mercedes said. Nikki stood quietly.
Coco held Nautica’s small head while the lady dotted each earlobe with a Magic Marker. Without warning, she punched the first pink rhinestone through. Nautica sucked in and screamed on the exhale. Tears streamed down Coco’s face. The lady quickly stapled an earring into Nautica’s other lobe.
Coco pushed the earring in. The post dug into Nautica’s head. “They too big,” she said, sniffling.
“I do lots of children,” the lady said flatly.
“Oh,” said Coco, working up her courage. The lady’s tone ordinarily would have intimidated her, but Coco was speaking for a baby. “She’s five weeks old, but—”
“I do lots of children just two weeks old,” the lady said. End of chat.
Coco immediately returned to Foxy’s to show her mother Nautica’s earrings. In the elevator headed up, a neighbor glanced at the now unquestionably female Nautica. Her eyes then grazed over Mercedes, then Nikki, then she shook her head pityingly. “Coco, can’t you do anything right? Three girls?” Coco smiled her crumpled smile and shrugged. The woman shuffled from the elevator and, without bothering to turn her head back, added wearily, “That’s the only thing I done right. Had a son.”
The pressure to buy things was always intense in the ghetto, but Christmas created a level of expectation that was unbearable, and the tension was further compounded by the blues that came with every holiday. Foxy didn’t have any money to buy things for her grandkids, so she avoided her own children more than usual. Lourdes lost her sense of drama. Domingo said her battery was “down low.” He urged Coco to bring by the children to recharge her spirits.
Christmas was even worse in prison. Jessica had crocheted hats and scarves for her girls and her nephews and nieces, but didn’t have enough money for stamps to mail them out in time; she knocked herself out with prescription pills. Right before Christmas, Cesar got in a fight in the yard with a Muslim. Guards expected such outbursts around the holidays. Cesar spent Christmas Eve on keep-lock—room confinement—waiting to get shipped farther upstate to an isolation unit. He wrote to Coco, “I fucked up real bad this time.”
Still, Coco always looked forward to Christmas. Unlike her vague plans for marriage and school and getting a job, Christmas was a piece of her future that she could actually envision, and she knew exactly how to make it a reality. She trimmed her door with blinking lights that played a Christmas medley. At the center, she placed a red wreath and pictures of her daughters. (Foxy trimmed her apartment door with tinsel and added a handwritten note among the miniature gift boxes: “If anyone steals anything from this door, Manuel and Hector live here and will fuck you up bad. Foxy.”) While her bigger dreams prompted doubt and belittling remarks from others, nobody criticize
d a mother for doing right by her children at Christmas. That year, Thorpe House made the challenge easier: the children received lots of donated gifts, and the nuns provided the mothers with Christmas trees. Coco snapped pictures of Mercedes and Nikki sitting beside the tree, with Nautica sitting in Mercedes’s lap.
But instead of taking advantage of the reprieve Thorpe House had given her, Coco bought gifts for everyone in her extended family—even though she hadn’t paid off her debt to Dayland from the previous Christmas. It was another example of Coco’s self-defeating generosity. But unlike so many of her efforts, which ended in disappointment, watching her family open their presents was truly gratifying.
Not long afterward, in a letter to Cesar, Coco confessed that her old puppy love, Wishman, had been writing her from prison. Cesar demanded that the correspondence stop. He suspected Wishman’s intentions; Cesar, too, was writing other girls, and he was experiencing firsthand what could blossom from a prison correspondence.
For months, unknown to Coco, Cesar had been trading letters with Giselle, the girl he’d been with the morning of his arrest. At first, his notes had been a distraction to pass the time, another line tossed out to the outside world. A letter, even a boring one, improved a day. An excellent letter improved his spirit for weeks. To have your name shouted out at mail call proved you mattered. In the most depersonalized of institutions, an envelope conferred distinction: it was addressed, by name, only and directly to you. If you were a boy with a long term, letters reminded you of what was out there, what else was possible—which was why some lifers preferred no letters at all. Maintaining a correspondence also required imaginative leaps and concentration, skills that slowed the process of becoming institutionalized.
Correspondence could create a future within prison: letters might lead to visits, and visits were gifts. The vast majority of inmates receive no visits. Face-to-face contact gave a boy a better chance at kindling love. The next best thing might be someone on the other end of the phone line, a girl willing to accept your collect call; if she wasn’t interested, maybe she’d introduce you to a sister or a cousin or an aunt. You had to read between the lines, which was a game—valuable for its fun and distraction even if the objective failed. Lots of boys asked girls for pictures, which were called flicks. Flicks were censored, but like so many of the rules in prison, inconsistency and luck played their parts, and plenty of the pictures got in. The girls dressed in lingerie and posed provocatively. Some girls sent flicks that were fiendish (one inventive woman put lipstick on her vagina for an exclusive print). Giselle was conservative. But during months of exchanging letters, something precious happened—Cesar and Giselle became friends.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro Page 23