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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  He looked directly at Coco and spoke; he was neither rude nor friendly. “There are people constantly in and out. I’ve gone over there and knocked on the door. You were not there and your children were not there. There is your boyfriend, and all his little friends, in and out of the house. Tell me, what’s going on? I go to the door and an old man in an undershirt opens the door. There are little kids all over the place. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “He doesn’t stay in the house,” Coco lied. “He stayed outside, on the porch.”

  “Don’t tell me what I did see and didn’t see. I was there, and you weren’t.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, an old man in his underwear. Frankie don’t even be in his underwear,” she said nervously. The fight for the lease was momentarily forgotten. Mason had waged the most hurtful allegation anyone could—that she wasn’t protecting her children.

  Mason’s voice rose. “There were all kinds of people in and out, in and out, and your boyfriend, sitting on that lawn chair like he was the big king of the castle. We may not be from the Bronx, but we ain’t stupid,” he said. “Your kids shouldn’t be exposed to that, and neither should other people’s kids.”

  The administrator interrupted, eager to conclude: “Do you understand now, is it agreed, that should he come on the premises, he will be arrested? Will you sign a statement agreeing to that effect?”

  Mason continued, “Because if I see him around there, he’s going to be arrested.”

  Coco agreed to sign an interim contract, which would be effective for eight months. She promised that she had no other tenants besides her and the girls. If all went well, she would return to a regular lease.

  The administrator arranged his papers and packed up, saying, “Now, we don’t want to have any more trouble. Life is hard enough without getting evicted.” His eyes darted over Mercedes and Nikki and Nautica, their backs pressed against big kelly-green chairs lining the wall, their legs sticking straight out; they looked scared. He added, “And you have your hands full.”

  “Mommy?” Nikki croaked.

  Mason rose and offered Coco his hand. “There are enough good men in Troy to keep you outta trouble. He’s gotta stay out.”

  The first thing Coco did when she got back to Corliss Park was drag the lawn chair to the sidewalk and dump it in the garbage. Then she marched straight to Family Dollar. Mercedes wheeled Pearl’s oxygen. Coco bought several packages of decorative white picket-fence pieces, trooped back to Corliss Park, in no mood for nonsense, and shoved them in her lawn. She clamped a bouquet of plastic red and yellow flowers to one of the ankle-high picket-fence posts and waited for Frankie to come home, so she could tell him that he had to go.

  Frankie didn’t last in the Bronx. He later confided to Coco that he had felt displaced at his mother’s house. His younger brother had claimed his old bedroom. His mother, who worked part-time for a bookie, did not approve of sons whose nights extended through to afternoons on her couch. Outdoors, he risked encountering people he owed money to: Octavio, the drug spot manager; Delilah, the loan shark; the mothers of his two kids. He returned to Troy. After several furtive nights at Coco’s, he started spending most of his time with some friends who stayed in a rickety second-floor tenement on Second Avenue, near River Street.

  The apartment served as a hangout and a stash house for crack arriving from the Bronx. They dealt out of the Phoenix Hotel, using a room that had been rented by a crackhead. Business was great. The gram that brought $30 in the city brought in $100 in Troy, and they could unload fake product because upstate customers were easier to intimidate and dupe. “There are a lot of dummies up here,” said Frankie. “In the city, they ain’t playing that.”

  But the pace of dealing crack was too much for Frankie—“Too fast,” he said, “too fast, it like gets you scared.” He was constantly coming up short, and he was also lousy at collecting debts; overdue addict accounts, even in Troy, required threats and the occasional beat-down. His languid personality was better suited to dealing weed.

  So he started dealing weed out of the Second Avenue apartment, where he split the bills with another recent Bronx transplant and two white boys, who opened the flimsy door to a shifting collection of bored friends, acquaintances, and customers. Frankie had been smoking weed so long that he could estimate the weight of a bag by sight. He wasn’t ambitious; he mainly wanted to earn enough to keep himself in smoke. He went weeks without going to the city, then might go every day for a week. He sometimes took the bus, but the police occasionally patrolled the buses and the stations; he preferred his local teenage customers to drive. The teenagers relished the opportunity to go to the inner city on a mission evocative of—albeit more unsettling and less exciting than—those adventures depicted in rap videos on TV. The white boys provided Frankie with a cover—their cars were less likely to be stopped on the Thruway. The ride was also more comfortable than the bus, and they didn’t ask for contributions for tolls or gas.

  What Frankie loved most about his new arrangement, however, was the freedom. He’d lived under women’s rules most of his life. Now, at twenty-four, he blasted music at any hour—not Coco’s slow jams, but rap, much of it hard-core, which Coco forbade. On Second Avenue, there were lots of abandoned houses, and the people who lived there rarely called the cops for small disturbances. He could watch his pornography whenever he felt like it. Baseball games weren’t interrupted by Mercedes’s whining for cartoons. There were fewer reminders of all the people he was letting down. The best things about his relationship with Coco continued much as before. Only their intimate life quieted.

  He still showered at her apartment, because his roommates left the bathroom a mess. He ate at Coco’s when his ulcer flared up from all the greasy pizza and microwave cheeseburgers. But Coco was usually asleep whenever he surprised her at night, and stealing privacy during daylight with four children was impossible. In the morning, if he managed to pull her into the shower, Mercedes would be pounding on the bathroom door before they’d even kissed. Even without interruptions, the situation was fraught; when Frankie told Coco that she was beautiful, she’d start crying. She had been picking her face and arms and the reachable parts of her back.

  Pearl’s illness flattened Coco. Frankie no longer accompanied her on the merry-go-round of doctor appointments, and she couldn’t manage the long waits alone with a baby, a toddler, and two kids. Just taking the bus was risky because Nautica was prone to tantrums and Coco’s hands were full with Pearl and her portable oxygen tank. Sometimes Mercedes would fall asleep so deeply that she couldn’t be politely roused.

  Frankie had to be badgered to stay home with more than two. Nor could Coco burden Milagros too frequently because Milagros now had Jessica’s baby boys, and Matthew and Michael were fearful and clingy. When Milagros did watch the girls, Mercedes and Brittany and Stephanie got into fights, so Mercedes always ended up accompanying Coco.

  Coco never had enough money for a taxi. Money was tight. Frankie generally kept his earnings to himself. Coco had to make $10 last the three weeks from the day she did her grocery shopping until the end of the month; Pearl had been approved for Social Security income for her disabilities, but the checks hadn’t yet been transferred. The girls still needed coats and beds. Coco would say, “I know these ain’t your kids, Frankie, but you ain’t helping out in any way.” For a spell, Frankie would pass along food stamps given to him by one of his customers. But Coco always needed—comfort, Pampers, milk.

  Mercedes started combing through Frankie’s pockets for spare change when he was in the shower or sleeping. One night, a glassine of crack fell out, and she brought it to her mother; Frankie claimed he’d picked it up when another dealer had tossed it, midchase, while running from cops. Coco secretly wondered if Frankie was using. Something was also up with Mercedes; she complained constantly that her teeth were hurting her, and by the end of November 1995, she was taking up to five baths a day.

  Coco shared her frustrations about Frankie with
anyone who would listen. She urged Serena to recognize what was going on beneath appearances. “He look like he haven’t changed, he be all nice and sweet, but he has changed,” Coco said. But Frankie did look changed. In fact, he looked terrific. His posture had improved. His shirts no longer sagged. Somehow his eyelids had quit drooping. His face shone from fresh shaving; his sneakers were brand-new. Coco noted wryly, “You more fly.”

  “For real?” Frankie responded, mistaking the hard nut of assessment for a compliment.

  In December, just as Coco was reaching her breaking point, Frankie brought his son up from the city for an extended visit and left the child with Coco. She began to suspect that Frankie wanted her stuck in the house, saddled with the kids. Coco had never considered him a player, but neither had she known him to be popular, and now he was. She dispatched Mercedes, with Frankie’s son, to investigate. They spent a day at the stash house. Aside from some gossip, Mercedes had little to report. Coco visited the apartment unannounced, bearing food. “I don’t want you starving. Whatever goes on between us, you have to eat,” she said disarmingly.

  Half-dressed white girls, the wives and friends of Frankie’s friends, lounged on the old couch, knobby legs holding up their chins. They struck Coco as shameless—parading around in nothing but oversize T-shirts not only in front of Mercedes, but in front of their husbands’ friends. White boys did not seem to mind their girls’ obvious disrespect. Coco heard they gave up sex easily. Boys didn’t have to buy Troy girls Pampers or milk or let the girls keep the change for cigarettes. Coco didn’t barter, either, but she allied herself with the demeanor of the Bronx.

  Even though Coco had been the one to tell Frankie to leave, she felt that he’d abandoned her. She blamed Rick Mason and castigated the Troy Housing Authority. She fantasized about returning to the Bronx. In the meantime, Frankie prospered and hung framed prints of his favorite pro wrestlers in the stash-house living room. He assured her that the arrangement was only temporary, but when he signed up for cable, Coco believed he’d never come home.

  In the meantime, Mercedes had continued to complain about her toothaches, and she was still taking lots of baths; Coco brought her to the clinic. The dentist said that five of her teeth were rotten and needed to be removed; the doctor diagnosed Mercedes with genital warts. He explained that he had to notify BCW. Coco was devastated. Mercedes had always had warts, ever since she was a little girl, but the pediatrician in the Bronx had never treated it as a problem. Suddenly, this doctor was saying that her daughter might have been molested. Although there were other possible explanations, now that the suspicion had been voiced, Coco assumed the worst.

  The sexual threat men posed to little girls was so pervasive that even the warnings meant to avert it were saturated with fatalism. For the mothers of girls, this threat hung over the whole of life, like a low cover of dread; it was one of the more commonly given reasons why expectant parents wanted boys. Good mothers didn’t go from man to man not only because promiscuity was frowned upon, but also because protecting children meant limiting the number of men that passed through a house. The rules sounded clear if you listened to what people said: never leave your girls alone with a man who wasn’t blood. In practice, however, that expectation was unrealistic, and women frequently failed to meet it: a neighbor would mind a baby while the mother made an emergency visit to the hospital; a sister would need to run to the store and her brother’s friend would watch her niece; a friend would offer to keep an eye on the kids to give an exhausted woman a break; children often stayed awake long after their mothers fell asleep. And all of this was further complicated if adults were drinking and using drugs.

  Coco believed she was vigilant. From their infancy, she’d admonished her girls to keep their legs closed and to stay off men’s laps. She never let them go away with strangers but, given her profound insecurities and the fluid kinship relationships on which she depended, it was impossible—and sometimes rude—to draw a hard line between who was like family and who was not. A lifetime assault of contradictory messages—to be sexy, to respect, that all men were dogs but that without them women were nothing—reinforced her sense of powerlessness and futility. In a sense, Coco had been both fighting this eventuality and waiting for it all her life, so that now her guilt and failure trumped the very real question of whether the abuse had actually happened or not. Mercedes’s own confusion showed during her examination with the doctor: her mother had always told her not to let a man touch her. The doctor had to bribe her with a lollipop.

  Cesar had been transferred to Sing Sing. Coco felt that she had to tell him immediately, and in person. Foxy agreed to watch Nikki and Pearl. Coco, Mercedes, and Nautica took the train to Ossining.

  Coco was frightened. She hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. In the visiting room, she approached a guard who stood at a podium. She explained to him about Mercedes’s warts and said, “I don’t know how my husband will take it.” He moved her to a table nearer him. Coco pulled Nautica onto her lap. “Don’t tell Daddy, Mercy,” Coco said.

  “Why?” Mercedes asked.

  “If Daddy gets mad, they will keep him in jail longer,” Coco said. Mercedes moved into the empty chair facing the officer. “Move here, Mercy, that chair’s for the inmate,” she added.

  “What’s an inmate?” Mercedes asked.

  “The person that’s in jail. Naughty, take the gum out your mouth.” Nautica refused. “Naughty, take the gum out and Daddy will take you to play in the playroom,” Coco tried. She spotted Cesar. “Mercy, Naughty—Daddy,” she whispered. Nautica clambered off her and ran after her sister. One on each arm, Cesar carried his daughters back to the table. Mercedes settled on his lap. Nautica tugged him toward the playroom. “You want to sit on Daddy’s lap?” Cesar asked Nautica. Nautica smiled bashfully. “Naughty, you wanna sit on Daddy’s lap?” he asked again. She declined. “Aw, all right then,” he said, hurt. He faked a punch to her belly.

  “Mercedes,” Coco said, and sucked in her breath. She didn’t pause after that: “You know the warts on her that she had from the time I wrote you in Harlem Valley when Mercy was a baby? Well, down here, they never paid them no mind. But up there? They real strict, right, Mercy? They look hard into everything. I went to the doctor and they said somebody was messing with her, and on Monday she’s going to have a physical because she has to have one before they get removed, but they got BCW and everyone involved, and I have to find out from the hospital down here to get the records from how old she was. The only two people she was left with was my mother and your mother, and your mother says it might be Richie, but if he was going to do something, he would have done it to me and my sister. . . .”

  Cesar stared at Coco; Mercedes looked at her mother, then turned up to her father, then turned back to her mother again. Coco finished and smiled dumbly.

  “You find something funny?” Cesar said icily.

  “No.”

  “What so funny then?”

  “Nothing.” Coco didn’t know why she smiled.

  “You finished?” he said impatiently. She nodded. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said, then reached for his daughters’ hands. They spent the rest of the visit in the children’s room. They built houses with bright blocks and ate the plastic food Nautica served them on dishes she washed in a plastic sink. They played dominoes. He gave them pony rides so fast that between the bumps and the laughter they couldn’t catch their breath.

  Back in the Bronx, Coco stopped by Lourdes’s to report what had happened, but Lourdes was “all into her business.” Coco next tried Elaine, who was down the block, visiting her mother-in-law. Coco hollered up to the window and Elaine and her family met her in the lobby. Mercedes was hungry, so Elaine’s husband, Angel, went off to get french fries. Since the last time Coco had seen her, Elaine had put on a lot of weight. She’d returned to school. She and Angel were having problems. The children started a game of tag. Elaine asked Coco how she was. Whole minutes passed before Coco could sto
p crying enough to be able to speak. “Don’t you think if Richie woulda done it, that he would have done it to me and my sister?” she asked.

  “It never happened in your family,” Elaine said quietly. “It never happened in your family,” she repeated, her voice getting firm. “It happened in my family. I said to my mother, ‘Mom, if it happened in our family, and the only place the baby was, was with our family and her family, don’t you think that it means it probably happened in our family?’ She said she never left the baby with her boyfriend except for when she went to the store. And you know my mother, Coco. She wasn’t at the store for no five, ten minutes. Forty-five minutes every time. ‘And who gave the girls a bath while you were cooking? And who went to hit the girls to go to bed? And who stayed with the girls when you went to the store?’ My mother just cried.”

  Coco cried during the ride back to Foxy’s. Mercedes and Nautica watched her silently. Coco’s thoughts returned to something Elaine had said about Jessica—how Jessica didn’t do anything when the doctor discovered Serena’s abuse. Elaine had emphasized the point. “She chose to not hear. She chose it. But you are doing something about it, Coco. You are trying to find out,” Elaine had said. It also touched Coco that in the eight years she’d known Elaine, it was the first time Elaine had ever given her a hug.