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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Back at Sing Sing, after Coco’s visit, Cesar trashed his cell. “It was mad dark. It was deep,” a friend said. “I ain’t never seen Cesar like that.” Cesar tore up his letters and ripped apart his books. He shredded his clothes and his bedsheets. He destroyed everything he owned but the photographs. The guards let him be.

  Coco told everybody she spoke to in the Bronx that day about what she believed had happened to Mercedes—neighbors, cousins, Rocco’s wife—as though the craziness she felt could find relief by raising the general level of alarm. She also told them so she could anticipate their judgment, receive their comfort, and assuage her guilt. Mercedes pulled Coco aside: “Why you telling everybody for?” Mercedes seemed humiliated, but her mood improved as soon as she got back to Corliss Park. The following day, she told Stephanie and Brittany that she had been abused and bragged that she’d gotten to miss a day of school and spent the whole day playing with her dad—an unexpected treat.

  That evening, the girls trooped upstairs to the bathroom; since her trip to the dentist, Mercedes had anointed herself the family dental czar. She lorded over the bathroom sink, above her smaller sisters, dispensing toothpaste generously. Nikki closed the lid of the toilet, climbed up, and placed one foot on the rim of the sink. Like an accomplished general, she turned the water on—blasting—with her toes.

  “I brush my teeth at night,” Mercedes boasted. More softly, she whispered, “Naughty don’t.” Nautica, who had several rotten teeth herself, preferred to play with the dolls beside the bathtub. Mercedes, still full of her day with Cesar, dedicated a song in his honor.

  “This is the song I sing at night, when I cry for my dad,” she said solemnly, launching into R. Kelly’s “I Believe.”

  “Me, too! I cry for my dad at night,” Nikki added.

  But Mercedes was the chosen one. She saw her father more often, and he always sent letters and pictures and birthday cards. All Nikki had from Kodak were some outfits he’d surprised her with for her last birthday. Lately, whenever Mercedes received yet another letter from Cesar, Nikki asked, “Mommy, why my daddy don’t write?”

  As Mercedes belted out the blues, Nikki tried to join in, but when Mercedes hushed her, Nikki retreated to her room. She took the crimson velvet skirt her father had sent her out of the closet gently and smoothed an imperceptible wrinkle. With her free hand, she reached for a dog-eared photograph curled on top of her broken TV. It was a picture of her with her mother. Every day, Nikki carried the picture with her to school. In it, Nikki was a baby, sleeping blissfully in Coco’s arms. Coco, whose eyes were also closed, rested her chin on Nikki’s head.

  Nikki pressed the picture to her chest. She pulled out Mercedes’s pink satin first-birthday dress and twirled around the room, watched by her bedraggled dolls. “I’m always a prin-cess, I’m always a prin-cess,” Nikki sang softly to herself.

  Unlike other people’s children, whose sicknesses seemed low-grade and intermittent, Coco’s girls’ conditions now seemed to alternate between serious and extremely serious. Mercedes was uncomfortable and disconcertingly quiet; Pearl vomited constantly—sometimes ten times in a day. Coco tried letting Pearl scoot around in just a T-shirt and diaper, but Pearl kept catching cold; the apartment was drafty, and Mercedes and Nikki and Brittany and Stephanie were always running in and out of the house. Pearl still needed three asthma treatments a day, and there were plenty of times that Coco didn’t have a chance to change her clothes until the other children were going to bed. Even when Pearl wasn’t attached to her oxygen, she required more supervision than Coco was accustomed to in a toddler—more than Nautica, who, at two, was still tripping and banging into things.

  One morning in mid-January, while Coco was taking a quick shower, Mercedes broke into the bathroom, screaming, “Something’s wrong with the baby!” Pearl had turned blue. Coco ran Pearl over to Milagros. As Milagros administered CPR, Coco froze. Milagros coaxed Coco, who was shaking uncontrollably, to phone the ambulance. Milagros watched Coco’s other children until Coco and Pearl returned home from the hospital. Then, in February, Mercedes suffered from a recurrence of the warts; Coco would wake up in the middle of the night to pee, or to take Nautica to the bathroom, and she’d discover her daughter asleep in the now-cold tub.

  Even after Mercedes had the warts removed, Coco couldn’t stop crying. She cried over the segment of Sally Jessy Raphael in which a teenage girl acted snotty to her mother. She wept when another guest left her baby with the child’s father and claimed her back after six hard years. She cried over the happy stories, the sad ones, for the girls who were angry, or stupid with love. She wondered if she was having a nervous breakdown. She said, “Everything, God, I’m sure I cry.” She picked the skin on her face until it bled. Nikki started to mimic her. Coco begged her not to and looked in the mirror and interrogated herself: “Why I pick my face? Why do I have this bad habit? I wonder, did my father have this bad habit? How come I’m the one that got it?”

  One afternoon, when Frankie passed through, Coco read to him from a brochure from a sleepover camp. Camp Ramapo was a country camp for at-risk children, and Coco was considering sending Mercedes and Nikki. She thought they were too young to be away for three weeks, but she also wanted to get them out of the house, away from all the arguing. She had fond memories of her own experiences as a camper with the Fresh Air Fund.

  Coco felt self-conscious reading aloud to Frankie. When he chuckled at her halting pronunciation, she broke down in tears.

  “Damn, Coco,” he asked, “you crying again?”

  Coco’s despondency unsettled even Milagros. Milagros gave little thought to her kids’ appearance—she just aimed to keep them clothed and fed—but Coco had always been vain about the girls’ looks, and now she seemed not to notice their mismatched outfits and sloppy hair. Mercedes and Nikki were also missing school; in the mornings, Milagros would send Serena over to Coco’s to make sure they were awake. One morning, Pearl’s health aide could not rouse Coco despite hearty pounding on the door. She scolded her later for sleeping through Pearl’s treatment and threatened to call BCW.

  Foxy made an emergency visit. Ordinarily, Coco cleaned her house top to bottom for company, but now she trailed her mother through the mess. Coco said, “You don’t know what it’s like, I cry for you every day up here, Mommy. I miss you so much.” When Foxy left, she took Nautica back to the Bronx for a week, to relieve some of the pressure.

  Coco’s sister, Iris, suggested Coco see a therapist. “With all Pearl’s appointments, you think I got time for another appointment?” Coco asked derisively. Increasingly, Coco’s hopes for relief hinged on Frankie. His absence had enhanced his appeal; without his companionship, his willingness to baby-sit, and the little extras his cash made possible, life was lonely and grim. “Every cab pulls up flashes in my window and I get excited, and then it’s not him, and I get so upset,” she said. Coco’s playfulness had disappeared, and her children hovered close. Nikki repeatedly assured her she was pretty. Mercedes kept a sober vigil by her side.

  Then Coco received the $1,734 back payment for Pearl’s disability income and decorated the apartment. She bought furniture and a large-screen TV from the white lady next door, who was leaving Corliss Park. The burnt-orange-and-brown velveteen couch was just like the one Lourdes used to have back when Coco had met Cesar, but the rest of Coco’s inherited decor was green and pink, with a cow theme. She was glad to have a coordinated style to her apartment, even if it wasn’t her own: the cow mobile, cow cookie jar, and cow utensil holder matched the cow wallpaper trim. The trim bubbled slightly because the lady had ripped it from her wall, but Coco hammered it in to make it stick.

  She tacked up green polyester curtains, a green straw fan beside her print of the Last Supper, and another beside a print of an elegant black panther in midleap. She placed a picture in a frame Iris had made from Popsicle sticks and papered the wall of the dining room with photographs. There were several of Jessica and her friends.

  Frankie came
back to the newly hooked-up apartment shortly afterward. Coco wanted to think his homecoming came from one of her many ultimatums—that he stop dealing—but he was having trouble covering his rent. His mother had also had a dream that he was going to get locked up or hurt. It seemed like a good time to take a break.

  Frankie’s hiatus from selling drugs wasn’t unusual. The low-level jobs of the drug trade resembled other low-level jobs: employees got laid off with fluctuations in the shipments or the business; or they got bored and restless; or hopeless, just as they did in Troy’s few remaining factories. Technically, Frankie was still forbidden from living with Coco but, luckily, trouble elsewhere granted Coco a reprieve. Rick Mason had turned his attention from Corliss Park to Fallon Apartments, the housing project where Iris and her family now lived.

  Without work or much weed to distract him, Frankie grew possessive. He noticed Coco checking out Large, a neighbor, another dealer, who parked his car in a space outside her front door.

  “What you putting lipstick on for?” Frankie asked.

  “Cuz I don’t want to be pale,” she said smugly.

  “Pull the shade,” he snapped. The interrogations multiplied. Why did she wear tight clothes to appointments and baggy clothes around the house with him? Why did she have kids with other guys and not him? Coco agreed that the situation wasn’t ideal: “I finally got a relationship and I don’t wanna have a baby. And then when I was dealing with them, I wasn’t in a relationship and I had them. So it’s weird.” But she also understood that she could not manage another child, not just yet, even though she still wanted a boy.

  Fortunately, Pearl bolstered Frankie’s sense of belonging. He was always lifting her up and cuddling her. He would administer her asthma treatments and let Coco rest. Some nights, Pearl slept on his chest so he would wake up if she couldn’t breathe. But he was reluctant to baby-sit all the girls, even when he had nothing else to do. At least now that the weather was warmer, Coco could bundle Pearl in a towel and escape to Milagros’s. Serena wheeled the oxygen tank. Milagros placed Pearl near Matthew and Michael, whom she’d set up on a sheet laid out on the floor. Coco and Milagros would watch TV and play cards and gossip. At some point, Frankie would poke his sullen face inside Milagros’s door. “Coco, come home,” he’d say.

  “I’m here,” she’d say.

  “Coco, cook, I’m hungry already.”

  “You had your fun, now I’m having mine,” she answered, but her resolve would already be weakening.

  After Frankie left, Milagros would say, “I got to give you credit. For a young mother, you do good. You don’t just leave.”

  Coco sighed. “Where I’m supposed to go?”

  One afternoon, Frankie surprised Coco and invited her to play a game of football. She barreled upstairs to change. She had not been outdoors for four days. But by the time she came back downstairs, he’d already gone. She pushed open the door to the porch: he was halfway down the block, headed toward the basketball courts, surrounded by his friends.

  Mercedes ran up to her mother. “Can I go with Frankie? Ma?” Mercedes asked breathlessly. Her hair looked fantastically wild; strings of curls had sprung free from her ponytail. Her face was flushed with excitement. Coco turned from her and stared after Frankie in the distance.

  “Ma?” Mercedes repeated. “Ma!”

  “I don’t know what you want to go for, he ain’t going to let your ass play,” Coco said. Mercedes sprinted toward the boys, wove her way to Frankie, and reached for his hand.

  “Don’t think I need you! With Pearl’s check at the beginning of the month, I got enough to pay my bills by myself!” Coco shouted, watching her man and her daughter walking into the first hole of spring.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  As Coco’s situation continued to unravel, Jessica was attempting to piece her life together. “My little girl’s getting breasts, I gotta get out soon,” Jessica said. That January 1996, she had transferred to the residential unit of the prison’s Drug Abuse Program, DAP. Graduates earned a full year off their prison term. Access to social service programs, inside or outside of prison, wasn’t always based on need, nor was the access logical: the inconsistencies and red tape tried everyone’s stamina, clients and staff alike. The arbitrary nature of bureaucratic processing led many poor people to approach government assistance as another state-sponsored lottery.

  Jessica had never had a drug addiction, but she qualified as an “inmate in need of recovery,” which turned out to be a stroke of luck. Before she was sentenced, she’d been interviewed by a probation officer for her biographical profile for her pre-sentence report. During the interview, Jessica had admitted that she’d used weed and cocaine socially. She had also used coke to lose weight when George thought she was getting fat. The mere mention of the drug use, which the probation officer had jotted down, gave Jessica a chance to acquire practical skills that would substantially improve her prospects.

  Compared to her lolling prison routine, DAP resembled boot camp. Guards strictly enforced dress codes. They barred the geometric designs that women ironed onto their khakis to individualize their uniforms. Morning meditation launched weekdays. Meetings and themes and acronyms—NA, AA, SMART—organized the week. Each resident acquired a designated buddy, with whom she had to write a report on their required conversation about the week’s chosen recovery theme. DAP convened community meetings, group meetings, and individual counseling sessions.

  DAP required five hundred hours of therapy and education in five areas—Thinking Skills, Communication Skills, Criminal Thinking, Relapse Prevention, and Wellness. Just as she had in Florida, Jessica responded enthusiastically. She said her favorite class, Feelings, helped the most. She seemed interested in examining the connections between the present and her memories of the past. She became animated about subjects other than love, and even somewhat curious. She said, “So much chunks of my childhood has been erased, I guess cuz of the trauma and everything.” It was hard to tell if her new confidence stemmed from having absorbed anything useful or simply from having become part of a new culture of recovery, with its terminology and sense of legitimacy; either way, she seemed better than she’d been in years. “The way I see it,” she said, “in co-dependency you re-create your parents’ problems.”

  Jessica came to believe that her exposure to Lourdes’s abusive boyfriends had caused her to confuse love with violence. She remained loyal to George, with whom she was still in touch, but she grew publicly less protective of him. And she blamed herself less. She began to discuss scary memories, such as the times George played Russian roulette with a gun to Jessica’s forehead. After she realized that the gun was loaded, she figured that “the bullet wouldn’t hurt me because I was so numb from fear.”

  Yet she resisted categorizing herself as a victim of domestic violence; she felt that the dynamic between them was much more complicated than the analysis allowed. She preferred to remember what George had given her, rather than what he’d taken; and she’d also been rotten to him. To deny George’s goodness or to downplay his generosity and guidance—to the authorities, no less—ran counter to her personal code. “Take it like a woman,” Lourdes had told her after she was arrested. “You can walk clearly in the streets.”

  Jessica was also reevaluating her behavior as a parent. She wrote Serena that there was nothing Serena could say that Jessica hadn’t felt herself: anger that Jessica was incarcerated, anger that she had put herself in a position to get arrested in the first place, longing for her own mother, crying in bed at night. She assured Serena that it was okay to hate her and not write back.

  But while Jessica attempted to address the problems of the past, new problems intruded. Coco wrote Jessica about what was going on with Mercedes, and Jessica was flooded by memories of her own and Serena’s abuse. Suddenly, her newfound faith in the value of self-examination felt far more tenuous, and old habits began to reassert themselves. Six weeks into the program, on Valentine’s Day, she allowed an amorous coup
le to use her top bunk for a moment of privacy. Inmate couples violated DAP’s guidelines, and someone in the unit snitched.

  Characteristically, Jessica protected the guilty couple, but the director interrogated the women individually, and one of the lovers caved in; Jessica could tell by the shamed look on the girl’s face as she left the director’s office following the interview. Jessica glared at her.

  The confessor said, “You know, Jessica, I don’t like to fight.”

  Instead of backing off, Jessica blew up. “I’m not asking you if you like to fight,” she said heatedly. “You just better be ready to protect yourself from the blows when they come.” Jessica had already received a strike for her role in the rendezvous, and another for keeping the secret to herself. “STRIKE,” the memo read. “Ms. Martinez received a strike today for enabling a physical relationship on the unit. It was her responsibility to come forward and she did not.” Now she had earned a third: threatening to assault. She was thrown out of the program. She had also forfeited the year off her prison term.

  Jessica changed from the standard khakis into a bright orange jumpsuit. Her loyalty had earned her a three-week stint in SHU. The segregated housing unit denied inmates all privileges, including personal property. An officer locked Jessica in a bare cell. Jessica had snuck in two favorite photographs, glued back to back, which she kept in the plastic frame that held her prison ID. On one side were the twins in pink satin dresses. On the other was Serena, grinning broadly in Jessica’s lap. The photograph had been taken during the prison visit in Florida. Serena wore a red, white, and blue outfit, with her hair in a French braid. It was one of the few pictures of Serena in which her happiness outshone the worry. Between the two pictures, Jessica had tucked a four-leaf clover. The clover had been given to her by Tamika, her old girlfriend from Florida, who had plucked it from the prison yard at the beginning of her bid; Tamika had then passed it along to Jessica the night before she got out.