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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Serena continued to do poorly academically, but she had learned how to circumnavigate the school dress code. When necessary, she’d zip up her jacket in the hallway to hide her midriff-exposing top. She earned attention from the boys who hung around Corliss Park, Kevin’s friends, older boys. They commented when she and her best friend made a point of passing by the basketball court.

  Jessica spoke to the children on the phone after she’d resettled into DAP. “Why haven’t you written me?” she asked Serena. “You chillin’? You love me?”

  “Yeah,” said Serena.

  “How much you love me?”

  Serena answered without much heart, “Two fingers put together so nobody can come between us.” Jessica reminded her that, if she earned a time cut, she could be home by the end of the year. Stephanie grabbed the phone. Jessica said, “You still see your daddy, then? Tell him to send me money.”

  “He still with his wife,” Stephanie said.

  “Your father’s full of ca-ca,” Jessica said, before remembering her newer approach to parenting. “Even though youse are big, I’m gonna take you to school.”

  Brittany reported an 85 average and recited the days of the week in Spanish. “Love you smushies,” she chirped.

  “Bunches and bunches,” said Jessica. Serena came back on the line. Jessica asked Serena to sing a song, remembering how, as a child, she’d loved to croon into a hairbrush. “Make believe the phone is a microphone,” Jessica urged.

  Serena said, “I don’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “Cuz my voice is all cracky.”

  “It’s a feeling, you’ll get over it,” Jessica said, hurt. Serena passed the phone to Kevin. Jessica marveled at his deep voice. “You are sounding like a whole man. Before you was a little cutie, now—you are using the condoms, right?” She reminded him to protect his sisters and to take care of himself. He’d been getting into trouble—placed on probation for stealing a bicycle with a group of his friends and suspended from school for fights. Jessica added, “This ain’t no life for nobody. It’s boring. Yo, you be good.” If he mailed her some pictures, she promised to hook him up with some pretty prison girls.

  Milagros finally had her turn. Jessica teased her, too. “You gotta keep him away from me. You know how I am with the young boys.”

  “I’ll beat you up if you show him things,” Milagros replied cheerfully.

  “How the boys?”

  “They bad.”

  “Serena?”

  “Bad. She got a body and a half.” Usually, Jessica deflected her dependence on Milagros with sarcasm, or by criticizing Milagros’s mothering, soaking her own wounds in blame. This time, she tried something different. “Thank you for everything, girl,” she said, venturing to speak aloud what Milagros understood. Then Jessica quickly changed the subject, as if embarrassed not only by the help Milagros had given her, but also by the expanse of the need that remained.

  Serena seemed to understand that despite her longing for a mother, her most vital connection to Jessica was as a friend. Boys, for example—her mother’s favorite subject—appeared in Serena’s letters far more often than they did in her day-to-day conversations:

  Oh Mommy guess what you know the boys I told you about they was at this dance I went to. When it was over we all went outside and I walked around by myself and one of them walked by me and was like “Beau-ty-ful” then he went on walking and then he was like “Serena don’t denie it you know you was the prettys girl up in that dance” and then all the boys was like Yap. I said, “thank you very much.” Well that is all I have to say. Peace and love Serena . . . P.S. The boys names are Anderson, Ernesto, Mike, Cris and Thorey. Ernesto was the one who called me Beautyful.

  In another letter, Serena described a trip to the store:

  . . . they’es boys was outside and kept on looking at me. So I didn’t want Mommy Milagros to leave me by myself in the store but the baby’s had to use the bathroom so she went around the corner to take them + ask me to pay for the stuff so I did, but when I came out the boys started kicking it to me you know trying to talk to me. One boy was like what’s up cutie and was like hi, he was like, don’t you live on 14th street, I was like no, he was like yeah you don’t remember me I was riding my bike I was like no, then he ask me for the 7 digits (my #) I told him no because I am already taken. This boy was so cute. I only said that I was taken because I am not allowed to have no boyfriends. . . . this other boy try to kick it to me in front of my mother and just ignored him cause he was butt ugly. Well mommy, I gotta go I love you so very mush and of course miss you more then Nething.

  By New Year’s 1998, Milagros had completed her GED and returned to work full-time; she’d found a job as a home health-care aide. She needed Serena to help watch the twin boys after Kevin picked them up from day care and brought them home. The Troy buses ran infrequently and Milagros’s workdays sometimes ended at nine or ten o’clock. Serena chafed at the responsibility. Kevin was supposed to help baby-sit, but he spent his time with friends or his girlfriend, and Milagros had a higher tolerance for his irresponsibility because he was a boy. He was also impatient with the children and sometimes hit them.

  Coco felt that Serena ended up with too much of the burden, but understood the situation from both sides—from the perspective of her niece, with whom she shared a sense of lockdown, and from the perspective of Milagros, with whom she shared the feeling of being overwhelmed. Milagros also regretted relying on Serena; it reminded her of her own childhood, having to watch little children indoors when she wanted to go outside with her friends. Sometimes she managed to get home early and relieve Serena, but instead of playing outside, Serena would make a beeline for Coco’s, which irritated Milagros: What was the difference between one house full of children and the next?

  That same January, Coco dyed her hair black and immediately decided it was a mistake. “I feel I look tough, mean. I don’t want to look like that,” she said. “I want to get over my past. I want to learn how to get over it. I just want to move on.” There was too much come-and-go at Corliss Park, and when she received another eviction notice, it seemed like a blessing rather than a curse: “I feel once I’m out of this stupid building I’ll be much, much better, and my life will be great,” she said. By February, she’d found an apartment in a drafty house on a hill near the girls’ school.

  “There’s drugs there,” said Frankie; he preferred to keep street and home life separate.

  “There’s drugs everywhere,” Coco replied.

  But if Coco was readying to make her break from the Bronx, the Bronx wasn’t done with her. Her new place immediately filled up with the latest wave of refugees. Some of her visitors had recently been living at Foxy’s, but Foxy got hauled in during a drug raid—“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said—and her apartment was temporarily off-limits. Like her mother, Coco had trouble saying no to anyone in need.

  Trouble broke open like a burst of billiard balls. Hector, his pregnant wife, Iris, and his son had gone homeless in Troy; Hector had been dealing drugs in the Bronx, and he wanted a fresh start before the new baby arrived. Hector’s Iris’s childhood friend Platinum had followed Iris up with her son and gotten kicked out of the shelter for mouthing off. Sheila, Foxy’s old neighbor, was hiding from her favorite son, who’d been released from prison and gone back to crack; Sheila dreaded having to involve the police. She had found an apartment in Troy, but she couldn’t afford to buy any furniture; when she stayed in her place overnight, she slept on a thin blanket on the linoleum floor. Hector’s family had also gotten a housing placement, only to learn from the pizza delivery boy that the previous tenant had been stabbed to death by her husband, which explained the stains on the stairs. They all preferred Coco’s house.

  In a sense, all folks going house to house were fugitives: sometimes it was a debt or a stepfather or a boyfriend who scattered a family; other times, a marshal’s padlock drove you from your door. That’s what had happened t
o Hector’s Iris before she’d moved into Foxy’s: following her mother’s arrest for dealing, the apartment was seized, and Iris had to crawl in through the window to retrieve some clothes.

  Day in, day out, life in the overcrowded house was hard for Coco to bear. Sheila and Platinum smoked cigarettes and Pearl’s asthma worsened; Coco tried doing her homework while administering extra treatments, but often fell asleep herself. Now Mercedes was arguing with Tío Hector, instead of with Frankie, but the arguments covered the same tired themes. Hector would reprimand Mercedes for not listening to Coco, and Mercedes would blink her eyes insultingly and suck her teeth. Or she’d shout, “I ain’t gotta listen to you. You ain’t my father!” Hector, who was only eighteen himself, would yell, “What, you threatening me?” He would order Mercedes and his son to stand in the corner, which Coco found humiliating. On the other hand, Mercedes was exasperating, and Coco would smack her; blank-faced, Mercedes took her licks. Her fortitude impressed Hector’s wife. She said, “Coco whips Mercedes’s ass and she pays no mind.” Mercedes’s apparent toughness reminded Coco of the stories she’d heard about Cesar as a boy. Mercedes listened carefully to the comparisons made between her and her dad.

  Soon, Head Start effectively expelled Pearl: she still had seizures and vomited whatever she ate, and they were understaffed. The situation devastated both mother and daughter. Every morning, as Pearl’s sisters put on their coats and grabbed their knapsacks, she said, “Mommy, give me my bookbag. I want to go to school.”

  “Mami, but you sick,” Coco would say, and Pearl would start to cry. Coco tried to distract her with a Barney video. Pearl adored Barney; she often walked around the apartment humming the theme song to the show and clutching her beloved Barney book. Coco left Pearl at home and went to class, but she knew that her daughter could be fine one minute and in jeopardy the next. Coco worried that her friends might overlook the signs that preceded her attacks—how the color of her fingernails changed, or her nostrils flared, or the constant swallowing.

  Pearl’s removal from Head Start also jeopardized her benefits; SSI needed proof that Coco wasn’t responsible for keeping her out of school. Luckily, Pearl’s teacher wrote a letter describing Pearl’s condition, and Coco brought a copy of the letter to Pearl’s doctor, who finally seemed to hear what Coco had been saying to various medical professionals for more than two years. He diagnosed Pearl with reflux—a condition greatly eased by a simple operation. Frankie nursed Pearl through her recovery because Coco couldn’t bear to see her baby with a feeding tube.

  In the midst of everything, upsetting rumors about Cesar’s wife, Giselle, had been reaching Coco upstate: Giselle owned a car; Giselle was studying law; Giselle was in Elaine’s wedding (Elaine and her husband, Angel, remarried in church, and Elaine’s father threw them a reception, from which Lourdes was barred). Giselle took her son, who looked distressingly like Cesar, to Disney World. Most hurtful to Coco was the news that Jessica was corresponding with Giselle, her new sister-in-law.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  In fact, Giselle had never responded to Jessica’s letter, and the rumors made Giselle’s situation sound better than it was. The car she used was borrowed from her godmother—in exchange for repairs and gas. Giselle’s son, Gabriel, had been the ring bearer at Elaine’s wedding, and it was true that Giselle had taken him to Disney World, but it was their first vacation in six years, and she was still paying for it on an installment plan. She was enrolled in Bronx Community College, but she’d had to borrow $400 from a loan shark for tuition because of the vacation debt. Since the Disney World trip, however, she was considering switching her major from business to criminal justice because she’d heard that Florida had a shortage of prison guards. In the meantime, as she had for the last three years, Giselle plugged away in the office of a factory that produced menus. She earned $8.75 an hour, without benefits. But she still felt lucky; her mother worked the factory floor, and compared to that, office work was a luxury.

  On her desk, Giselle kept a photograph of Cesar, taken during one of their trailers. You couldn’t tell from the picture that he was in prison—he stood near what passed for a small cabin, on grass. Giselle kept Cesar’s incarceration a secret from her colleagues. “People are ignorant, they start treating you stupid,” she said. Love wasn’t something anyone could understand. When they asked why her mysterious husband didn’t pick her up after work or take her dancing, Giselle said, “He works.” Four nights a week, she went to school—she had no time for playing. From school, if it wasn’t too late, she collected her son from her mother, and they went back to the orderly apartment where they rented a tiny room.

  The apartment was only blocks from East Tremont, where Giselle had been raised and her mother still lived; she yearned to leave the neighborhood but couldn’t afford to. In the meantime, the trailer visits with Cesar provided her with some escape. Once she cleared the prison gates and had her bags searched and got processed, there was Cesar, waiting for her. They would painstakingly put away the groceries or arrange the videos she’d brought to watch. She had finally weaned Cesar of the gangster movies he’d loved when he was on the lam; now she subjected him to her own favorites—romances. He had cried at the end of Romeo and Juliet. She was eager to show him Titanic, but she had to wait for the certified release, because the Department of Corrections banned bootleg tapes. The initial awkwardness between them on the trailers enchanted Cesar; it bemused him how nervous he could be with his legal wife. But once they kissed, things relaxed.

  Giselle had her own kitchen and her husband to cook for, and her son was free to jump about the way a growing boy was supposed to, without someone yelling at him, “Be quiet, Gabriel!” or, when he watched cartoons, “Turn down the TV!” Here Gabriel’s exuberance wasn’t inevitably met with an adult’s irritation, and his requests to play Go Fish and Spit got Cesar’s grateful Yes, instead of No. In the afternoon, he and Cesar played basketball.

  For the first few trailers, Cesar didn’t sleep at all—he didn’t want to miss a moment—so when Giselle fell asleep, he woke up Gabriel and they played chess, a game Cesar had taught him in the regular visiting room. The only reminders of prison, besides the consciousness of time passing, and the barbed wire, and the occasional crackling announcement from the loudspeaker, were the three times a day Cesar had to step outside for count.

  Although Giselle yearned to understand Cesar’s prison life, she didn’t like to pry. She watched the TV show Oz for insight, and weighed it against the small tidbits that he shared. She kept her worries about his safety to herself, although she shared her fears that he would go back to being a heartbreaker as soon as he returned to the free world. “I’m not saying I will be faithful, but I will never leave her,” he said. But the real threat to their marriage was much closer to home. Cesar had yet to tell Giselle that he had received an additional one to three years for possessing the shank; nor did she know he was using heroin.

  In the spring of 1998, Cesar asked Giselle to make arrangements to bring Mercedes and Nautica along on the next trailer, and Giselle agreed. She knew that Mercedes had been writing Cesar about her unhappiness at home, and that he was worried about her. When he got out, he wrote Mercedes, she could live with him and his wife.

  The trailer visit would coincide with Mercedes’s eighth birthday. For weeks, it was all Mercedes spoke about. Some of the staff at her school pitched in for the bus fare. Coco had bought the girls new outfits, sneakers, toothbrushes, socks, and underwear. No one would have any reason to discount her daughters, and she instructed them to speak up if anything made them uncomfortable, or if they wanted to sleep with their father or sit on his lap. Mercedes and Nautica were packed to go days before they were due to leave.

  Then, the night before the girls were going to meet Giselle in the city, Giselle called Coco: the trailer visit had been canceled—there had been a fight at the prison and Cesar had been slashed. He’d been thrown into protective custody, with thirty-two stitches across his back.


  Weeks earlier, Cesar’s friend had been attacked. According to Cesar, the men involved decided to jump Cesar rather than wait, because they feared Cesar would retaliate. Cesar had been standing in the chow line when they assaulted him.

  Cesar didn’t want the children to visit until the beef was resolved. The visiting room on a weekend would provide a prime opportunity for a revenge attack on his family. He didn’t want to put the children at risk, or put himself in a position where he would have to defend them, thereby further compromising his already shaky status with the authorities.

  When Giselle arrived that Thursday, Cesar nervously scanned the room before he would let her hug him. He hadn’t shaved, and he had dark circles beneath his bloodshot eyes. Ordinarily, he ate three packages of barbecue chicken wings and three packages of microwave french fries, but Giselle had to get after him to finish even one. He told her he could finish his own sentence because it was punishment for killing Mighty, and for all the bad things he’d done for which he hadn’t been caught. But he couldn’t live with being the cause of harm done to his family. Giselle found that she was unable to comfort Cesar this time: “All the serenity he had was gone.”

  Before Giselle could make it back to see Cesar, he got shipped to Southport again.

  When Lourdes and the girls visited Jessica, that same spring, they found her in a reflective mood. In therapy, she had been analyzing her relationship with her family and reconsidering her relationships with men. After greeting her with hugs, the three girls headed into the prison’s playroom, a glassed-in space with bright decorations and comfortable furniture and toys. Jessica eyed Lourdes narrowly. “I had to write a family history and I put that you was codependent on men.” Lourdes fidgeted in her seat. “I don’t even know the reason my father died.”