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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  In the midst of the crisis, Coco decided to make the move upstate. She felt that no good would come of staying in the Bronx. She rarely saw her sister, she couldn’t pin down her own mother, and perhaps the distance would renew Foxy’s interest in Coco and her kids. Coco also wanted to escape the neighborhood, which she felt was full of hypocrites—people pretending good while saying nasty things about her, and now, about her baby. Wishman had only visited the hospital once, and he’d brought along his new girl. Foxy condemned Wishman for abandoning a sickly infant, but Coco believed that he would eventually come around. “If it was hard for me and I gave birth, think how he must be feeling worse,” she said. In the meantime, Coco reminded her mother that she’d raised her girls without two fathers, and she could do just as well without three.

  Foxy agreed to oversee Pearl’s care in the hospital while Coco went through the shelter in Troy and settled down. Richie agreed to keep an eye on the apartment at Prospect. Richie’s brother had lent him enough money to get out of the shelter and rent an apartment, and Richie would use Coco’s furniture until he could afford his own. In the meantime, Coco packed the important things she could carry with her—the girls’ best clothes and her photographs. Richie promised to safeguard the toy chest Cesar had made for Mercedes until she came back for it. A friend offered to give her a lift to Troy.

  Coco had three goals at the time of her brave upstate move. On her way to her new home, stuck in traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge, she scribbled them down on a scrap of paper. The first, she circled: “my child out the hospital.” The second: “Cesar in my life,” beside which she drew a frowning face and added, “A dream now.” The third: “My four girls to finish school and get married and do not come out like me!!!”

  On another scrap, she drew a fat heart and placed her family inside: “This is my life Right here: Mercedes, 4 years old; Nikki 3 years old; Nautica, 11 months old (mother) Coco, 20 years old, Pearl 1 month old.” She added comments in the remaining corners, as though hope, too, could be rearranged, like the figurines on the shelves of the apartment she’d fled:

  Life is Bitch BUT I’m a strong woman!

  I’ll give these girls the world!

  I’ll never put anyone Before my Kids.

  Then she graced the bottom with the sentence that would become the next tattoo of the seven she would eventually acquire—Mercedes, Nikki, Nautica, Pearl. My four Pride & Joys.

  PART III

  Upstate

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  To qualify for permanent housing in Troy, Coco had to prove that she was homeless. Shortly after arriving, she installed Nikki and Nautica at Milagros’s and took Mercedes with her to a local shelter, Joseph’s House, a renovated storefront downtown. The homeless guests had to clear out each morning; Coco and Mercedes would take the bus back to Milagros’s apartment. The bus traveled along River Street, parallel to Troy’s Hudson River industrial waterfront. The neighborhood had been a thriving working-class district. Traces of better days remained, but the area had grown shabby. Victorians that weren’t boarded up had signs: No Trespassing and Apartment for Rent.

  Out the bus window, Coco observed white girls pushing strollers with darker-skinned babies down the desolate blocks. She spotted a dealer in a rotting doorway. She passed a Burger King. Just before the entrance to Corliss Park, where Milagros lived, a strip mall offered a few stores. Gray patches of tar, like flattened mud pies, decorated the parking lot. Rent-A-Center stood beside the Town Village Laundromat and Dry Cleaners, where every thirteenth wash was free. Past the gas station, where the bus swung left, was a twelve-step gift shop called Living Recovery.

  Corliss Park was nothing like the Bronx projects. Two-story garden apartments were plotted along a single looping street. Trees stood between units with front and back yards. Barbecue grills, protected from the elements by green garbage bags, loomed like giant mushrooms. Children left their bicycles, unlocked, outside.

  Milagros had received her housing assignment quickly; she’d dealt with the paperwork before leaving the Bronx. Coco waited over three months; she’d arrived in Troy without any of the necessary documentation. Pearl’s illness made her even more discombobulated than usual. She’d misplaced the girls’ birth certificates, which she needed to register them at a clinic, which was required to update their immunizations so they could register at school—she’d forgotten their immunization forms along with other necessary documents. There were appointments and paperwork required for housing, and Coco didn’t even have money for local bus fares because she had no benefits: the city was still paying rent on the apartment she’d abandoned in the Bronx and refused to transfer her welfare case upstate. Foxy would borrow $20 or $30 from Delilah, the loan shark, and wire it to Coco via Western Union, thus incurring an additional $15 cost. But whenever Coco had real money—$40 or $50 or $60—she interrupted her homelessness and took the three-hour bus ride back to the city to check on Pearl. Coco was so exhausted from the disruption and the traveling that she often fell asleep to the hum of the heart monitor as soon as she reached Pearl’s bedside in the Bronx.

  Foxy’s maternal impulses were spent before her new granddaughter’s birth, but the crisis brought out the capable woman Coco remembered and still yearned for. Foxy couldn’t rouse herself to face Hector’s probation appointments—for the time he’d brought a gun to junior high—but she visited the hospital every day. Hector’s problems implicated Foxy, but no one blamed her for Pearl. The baby’s condition remained extremely serious: she’d lost two ounces since the operation for a heart murmur, and infections still plagued her. She relied upon a respirator, which damaged her underdeveloped lungs. Foxy prayed in the hospital chapel before she headed home.

  When Coco couldn’t get to the city, she kept abreast of Pearl’s condition through Foxy’s neighbor Sheila, who had a phone. The child’s condition improved as reports were passed along. The doctors’ dire prognosis became Foxy’s cautious prognosis, which Sheila spruced up. “This little baby’s very sick” turned into “She’s hanging in there” to “She’s growing every day.” One doctor had told Foxy that if Pearl survived, she wouldn’t develop normally. Foxy hoped that by the time Coco finally settled in Troy, there’d be better news to share. In Foxy’s experience, predictions rarely held.

  Late in the fall of 1994, Foxy had a windfall. Richie’s ancient lawsuit—concerning his fall from the fire escape—finally came through. Coco thought that it was no coincidence that her mother had reunited with Richie shortly before he received his check for $70,000, but Coco was still happy that they were seeing each other again. They burned through the money, some of which Richie kept hidden in the broiler of his stove: everyone ate takeout; Foxy cabbed everywhere; Richie gave his brother the $12,000 he owed him, paid for Foxy’s sister Aida’s funeral, bought himself a gun for protection, and got leather coats for everyone in the house. Coco told him, “‘You’re all getting outrageous.’ He’s like, ‘You never know if you die tomorrow.’ ” Every time Coco saw him in the Bronx, he would slip her some cash. Within a week, the family had also gotten good news about Pearl: she’d survived another operation and some of her tubes were taken out. Coco got to hold her for the first time. “It felt so good,” she said, gratified.

  Coco secretly liked the arrangement: in Troy, Milagros was watching Nikki and Nautica; in the Bronx, her mother was acting like a mother, and her stepfather was back in the picture. Coco felt like a teenager again. A girl could travel with just one, and Mercedes, who was four, accompanied Coco everywhere. The duo strolled down Troy’s empty main streets, honoring the unspoken boundaries within which poor people could comfortably walk and congregate. They stopped by Barker Park, across from the abandoned Stanley’s department store. They bought snacks at the Night Owl and hung around the Kentucky Fried Chicken. At night, back at the shelter, Coco and Mercedes stayed up talking with the other transplanted women. They had come to Troy from Brooklyn and New Jersey and the Bronx. Coco passed around a favorite photograph o
f Cesar—stepping out of the shower, grinning, his arms open wide. The women marveled at him.

  Coco found her days at Milagros’s boring. Milagros never played music or danced with the kids; she only wanted to watch TV. Coco wrote letters to everyone in the Bronx. The pace picked up when Jessica’s children returned from school. Coco would do anything to make the children laugh. Sometimes they played school. Serena appointed herself teacher; if Coco wasn’t an unruly student, she acted like a snotty parent who dismissed the teacher’s criticisms of her problem child. Once, Serena, puzzled about what to do, ordered Coco to the principal. Coco drew out Serena’s consternation but surrendered just in time; Coco was sensitive to the difference between teasing and mockery. Serena basked in the attention. Coco felt guilty about favoring one niece, but she believed that Milagros favored Brittany and Stephanie—she’d had them from birth—and Kevin, Milagros’s oldest, was special just for being male.

  Coco helped keep the girls in touch with Jessica. They dictated letters and drew pictures that she tucked into the envelopes. Coco wrote Jessica a long confessional: she couldn’t explain what had happened with Wishman, but she knew she still loved Cesar. She enclosed a photograph of Pearl. The baby looked scrawny; Jessica wrote back that she was beautiful. Jessica assured Coco that no matter what, she would always be her sister-in-law. She told her to ignore what people said and to give her love to the girls and stay strong.

  By January 1995, Richie’s fortune was nearly gone. To make ends meet, Foxy rented a bedroom to Octavio, one of the Cuban brothers who oversaw several drug spots on her block. Octavio sometimes stored the day’s drugs there. Grumpy and pockmarked, Octavio was probably young, but the street had ground him into middle age. He paid Foxy $40 a week and he occasionally sprung for cigarettes or milk. Pitchers and runners came and went, morning, noon, and night. They were supposed to load up and go, but they lingered unless Octavio badgered them to move along. They preferred to watch pro wrestling, survey the food prospects in the kitchen, or flirt with Hector’s girlfriend’s pretty friends. Foxy couldn’t take the chaos and spent most nights at either Richie’s or Hernan’s.

  The two men in her life lived near one another; she shuttled between them. Sometimes, to avoid detection, Foxy changed her outfits as a disguise. Once, Hernan suspected that she’d slipped over to Richie’s, and he waited outside the building door for hours. Finally he gave up, but left behind a note:

  Foxy. Why do you lie so much?

  I waited here long and left my name to carry on.

  Hernan.

  That winter, when Coco came to the Bronx, her mother’s apartment no longer felt like home. Foxy couldn’t be badgered into staying the night there, even with her grandchildren, and the apartment she had forsaken had become a combination hotel, stash house, and teen fort. In the dim light, teenagers smoked blunts, watched bootleg videos of current movies, had sex, laughed and argued, playfought, and played cards. Babies crawled underfoot. On the living room wall was a swath of so many children’s hand-prints that it looked like a stencil. The children were family—the block’s sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, neighbors, friends’ boyfriends’ other kids.

  Coco would once have loved all the action, but now it made her uncomfortable. Milagros usually kept Nautica upstate, but Coco worried about Mercedes’s and Nikki’s safety with what she called “all the in and out.” She also worried about her uncle Benny’s pitbull, Sugar, who—although she was kept in the bathroom—sometimes managed to escape. Coco corralled the girls in Foxy’s room; they got restless and cranky; Coco lost her patience and hit them; then she would feel guilty and indulge them with candy or toys she couldn’t afford from the dollar store. The company ate the cupboards clean. The fridge only held her uncle Benny’s HIV medication. Once, while Nikki was posing in the bathroom mirror, she cut her hand on one of his razor blades. There had been no Band-Aids, clean towels, or toilet paper.

  Whenever she could, Coco escaped to the hospital. Nikki and Mercedes weren’t allowed inside the neonatal unit, and Hector’s Iris offered to watch them at the house. But Coco worried—Iris smoked weed, and when she didn’t she sometimes lost her patience with her one son. Coco preferred to switch buses at Tremont, request a transfer, and leave them at Lourdes’s.

  During one of Coco’s trips to the Bronx, a pudgy brown-eyed boy, one of her brother’s friends, kept coming around to the house. His name was Aaron, but everyone called him Frankie. Frankie recognized Coco from the neighborhood, but Coco didn’t remember him. He was easy to overlook: his pale features were pleasing, but bland; he spoke little. He stuttered when he was nervous, except when he was stoned. Coco noticed that her mother perked up whenever Frankie came around. “He used to be bringing my mother weed, or my mother was always giving him weed, and he was just, like, constantly there,” said Coco. Coco didn’t generally favor guys with bellies, but Foxy’s responsiveness to Frankie had caught Coco’s attention. Then a bulletin from Cesar’s gossipy sister, Elaine, accelerated things. Coco hadn’t heard from Elaine for a while, but she tracked Coco down at Foxy’s and informed her that Cesar had gotten married—legally. Cesar had made Elaine promise not to reveal the bride’s name to anyone but family—current family. Coco was floored.

  Around the same time, Pearl, who had spent six months in the hospital, was released to Foxy’s care. Foxy agreed to keep the baby until Coco got her own place. Meanwhile, Foxy moved back to her own apartment, where Pearl’s homecoming inspired a storm of cleaning. All guests were booted, including Octavio. Foxy had wanted to get rid of him earlier but had been afraid to kick him out; sometimes dealers refused to go. But even Octavio didn’t doubt a sick baby’s right to a good start.

  Pearl’s arrival stirred the somnolent building. The baby had so much gear that she required a small parade—her special crib, a brand-new asthma machine, tubing to hook her to the oxygen tank, reserve tanks, bottles of medication, ointments, and jars. Foxy bustled Pearl into the apartment, past the note she had taped to the door: “Absolutely no smoking! The baby’s home already. Foxy.” Neighbors came by to look at her; the curiosity was not always kind. Pearl had Wishman’s eyes, but watery instead of angry. Her thin face bulged at the cheeks as if she were eating gravel.

  Hector, who, like Cesar, had long ago assumed the role of bodyguard of his family, emerged as the primary protector of his infant niece. He moonlighted as a human smoke detector, ushering violators into the hall. He didn’t keep his music down, though—Hector loved his hiphop—and Pearl got little sleep. Nobody was sleeping much but Foxy, whose doctor had given her a prescription for her migraines called Toradol. The injections knocked her out completely. Pearl shivered constantly, as though she were being electrocuted, but the precise cause of this—music, slamming doors, shouting and laughter in the hall, or her illness—was hard to identify.

  Still, the smokeless baby room was a haven. Wishman’s fourteen-year-old brother, Shorty, visited his niece every day. Shorty had an ongoing beef with a gang, the Ñetas, and traveled in what he considered a disguise—he walked the few blocks from his mother’s with a T-shirt pulled over his head. Perhaps he felt connected to the fragile baby, a soul whose life was as threatened as his.

  Wishman, however, ignored his daughter. If he visited the apartment, he avoided Pearl’s room. Once, he stepped in to check out a crew of girls there, but he didn’t even glance in the direction of the crib. Foxy dismissed him as a bona fide hoodlum. Frankie, on the other hand, had warmed to the child immediately.

  Frankie had grown up in the projects down the block from Foxy’s building. He lived there with his mother, younger brother, and stepfather; Frankie’s own father, who was Italian, left home when Frankie was two. Frankie had a talent for sports. After high school, he moved to Florida, where he played minor league baseball and tried out with the Detroit Tigers but didn’t make the cut. “It broke my heart, so I didn’t try no more,” he said. He returned to the Bronx.

  Frankie had just split up with his son’s mother whe
n he met Coco. He was nice to Coco’s daughters, and Coco liked that. One afternoon, Coco bought her daughters boxing gloves. It was too cold to go outside, and the girls needed something besides TV to keep them occupied. Hector’s friends snatched the gloves—they were sick of TV also—but Frankie retrieved them for the girls and taught them how to spar. Mercedes and Nautica threw diligent punches. Nikki’s were weak; her lack of toughness worried Coco. If other children grabbed Nikki’s toys, or her cousins became too aggressive, Coco had to force Nikki to defend herself. Luckily, Mercedes, who was stocky, looked out for her.

  Lots of boys lost their patience after a few minutes of play with children, but Frankie didn’t. Coco observed him closely when her children were in his orbit, and his affection toward her daughters seemed real. They wrestled. Nautica dove on top of the thrashing heap and Frankie laughed easily: he didn’t yell if someone’s foot kicked his face. Coco offered Frankie eye-to-eye contact, registering her interest.

  Frankie showed his respect and introduced his two children to Coco. He didn’t get along with the mothers, but his own mother did, and he got to spend time with his kids when the mothers brought them to visit their grandmother. Mercedes and Nikki got along with Frankie’s daughter, and Nautica played with his son. A few nights later, Coco put on thin pajamas that caught the outline of her legs. She plunked herself on the couch. Frankie sat on the floor before her. He asked her to please braid his hair and she said yes and he leaned back between her thighs. She did not move. “Can I put my head on your lap?” he asked politely. He hugged her belly and shifted upward, to her breasts. He soon formalized his intentions. He said, “You know, Coco, you know, I want to be with you.”