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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Around the time Cesar got moved to Shawangunk, Rocco’s situation had begun to unravel. His wife had won a graduate scholarship to New York University; she wanted to become a high school guidance counselor, but even with three jobs between them, they couldn’t cover their expenses. With school, Marlene was too tired to restrict Rocco to living life the harder way. She later said, “He was a pit bull, and I let go of the leash.” Rocco assembled a crew of younger boys and started robbing drug dealers again. “When the struggle’s put on me, this is the only way I knew how to deal with it,” he said. Just before Christmas in 1998, Rocco and two other boys made a successful hit. They came away from a stash house with $150,000—$50,000 each. Rocco bought himself a motorcycle, surprised his disgruntled wife with a Honda CRV, indulged his daughter in presents, and deposited $400 in Cesar’s commissary account.

  Cesar spent down the money on sneakers for his three daughters, which he ordered from a catalog; he sent Giselle’s son a $30 money order for his birthday; and he used the rest for Giselle’s third-year anniversary gift. He mailed a rose enclosed in a bell jar to Giselle’s office, with a card that read, “With all my love from your husband, Cesar.”

  PART V

  Breaking Out

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Inmates at Danbury called the restless discomfort common to women near release S&SS—short and shitty syndrome. Jessica had a case of it. She slept fitfully, had diarrhea and migraine headaches, and hadn’t been able to hold down food for weeks. She anxiously awaited her box: she was allowed a box of clothing in preparation for her return to the outside world. Jessica’s box arrived with eighteen days remaining on her sentence. “Now I really know I’m leaving, now that my clothes are here,” Jessica said. The friend who’d sent the box had herself just gotten out of prison; she’d planned on dressing Jessica sexy, but sent a sporty style instead—beige sweater, beige underwear and bra, with matching overalls. Jessica tried on the outfit and suffered an anxiety attack. “She couldn’t breathe,” said her roommate, who was happy for Jessica but not looking forward to being left behind.

  Release dates were onerous. Inmates with longer terms had been known to try to “steal a date,” which meant intentionally provoking a fight with a woman who was due to leave. Despairing lovers jumped girlfriends to keep them close. Nilda kept a distance, not because she would hurt Jessica, but because she didn’t want to dampen Jessica’s spirits by letting Jessica see her cry, and she’d been crying a lot.

  Other risks awaited Jessica on the outside—mainly, the utter precariousness of her life. Boy George, from his antiseptic cell in a supermax prison in Beaumont, Texas, wrote, “ . . . I’ve got a couple of brothers outside who if you find yourself in need they could be helpful. I have no malicious thoughts towards you Jessica, trust in me. . . .” The cement fortress where George lived was connected to a vast compound shining with state-of-the-art high-security technology, laid out in a wasteland of dried-up oil rigs. Some of the small-town guards affected the slang and mannerisms of their inner-city prisoners. George said the only difference between the street and prison, besides the absence of cars and real women, was that it was more dangerous inside. He wore a four-ounce eighteen-karat-gold chain around his neck.

  Boy George still knew how to make the most of the little he had to work with. He read more than he had in the free world—Machiavelli, Thomas Harris, the New York Times, and Maxim, his latest favorite magazine. His cellie passed along books about Puerto Rican heritage and George read them, mainly as a courtesy. “I don’t care if I got white in me, black in me, European, it don’t make a difference. I’m me.” He was more interested in the Internet.

  He’d never inscribed Jessica’s name onto the blank space of his heart tattoo, but on his shoulders, he’d inked the skyline of Manhattan, including the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Below the city, BOY arched above two shooting pistols, near 27, a reference to a gang that controlled a piece of the prison black market. On his stomach, he’d added an apple, with a New York Yankees insignia, pierced by two swords. It amused him that in all the years he’d lived in the Bronx, he’d never thought to go to a Yankees game.

  Prison had further refined Boy George’s philosophical leanings; he’d become a bit of an avuncular sage. He believed he still knew the best route for Jessica: to find an educated man who was also streetwise, “a person who could teach her and stand to be taught by an individual who has had a life like her,” he said. Jessica’s susceptibility to the influence of others worried him, just as it worried everyone who knew her—her blood family, her prison family, the friend who’d mailed her the clothing box. “She’s easy to convince,” said George. “She thought that sex was the right thing, to give it up to everybody. She’s got to say, ‘Am I gonna be a free-for-all? Or am I gonna be a person who has limits here?’ Is it all about sex, Calvin Klein, is she gonna parlay with that? Or is she gonna say, ‘I got five children. Now that’s a lot of children’?” He paused. “If she doesn’t find the right man, she did all that time for nothing. She did all that time for shit.”

  George was thirty-two years old. He’d served nearly a decade and still had a life sentence left. He claimed that he was optimistic about winning his latest appeal, but his confidence sounded strained; there wasn’t much money left for the legal battles. His mother still worked as a hospital aide. But when George spoke of Jessica, he exuded certainty.

  Nilda warned Jessica to stay away from anyone who had anything to do with George. Other close friends advised Jessica to keep some distance from her siblings; they didn’t like the childhood stories they’d heard about Jessica’s older brother, Robert, and they didn’t trust Elaine. Where had she been all these years? Nilda understood that Jessica had to reckon with her mother. “Open up your heart,” she told Jessica. “Tell her how she hurt you. Accept it, but what happened, happened. If she denies it, hey, go on.”

  With only days to go, Jessica took the last lap of the outposts that comprised her daily prison routine, what inmates called the merry-go-round: She signed herself out of security and gathered her files from education. She checked out of religion and released herself from medical. A few of the guards wished her well. Nilda prepared a chilikida for Jessica’s last supper, which she served with a can of Coke. Jessica’s closest friends gathered in her cubicle. They sang her favorite song (the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge”). She distributed her property; it was bad luck to carry anything from prison to the free world. She gave Nilda her most cherished objects: two sample-size bars of Dove soap, which she’d snuck home from the hospital, on which she’d carved Matthew and Michael; her red plastic Hamster cup (Hamster was Nilda’s pet name for Jessica); and a crocheted vest. Jessica also left Nilda a pile of pictures of herself. She broke night her final night in custody and finished a sweater she was crocheting for Nilda’s mother; she would mail it from a post office, so that the gift wouldn’t have a prison stamp.

  At 8:30 A.M. on December 17, 1998, Nilda walked Jessica to R&D—Release and Delivery. At 8:50 A.M., seven years from the day she was sentenced, Jessica walked out of Danbury Correctional Facility. She had one streak of gray hair below the crown of her head, a skunk’s tail, and she carried twenty extra pounds. She was thirty years old. Prison, she wrote to a friend, had transformed her from “a naive young girl that thought without a brain,” to a woman with a longer view.

  While Jessica rode the bus from Danbury to New York, Nilda opened the notes Jessica had hidden in their secret places for her to find. Jessica sat beside a fellow ex-inmate whom she recognized, but didn’t know well. They were both so nervous that they barely spoke, but they held hands. Jessica looked out the window at the farm stands, the highway. She gazed over the Bronx as the bus headed toward Manhattan, then watched the people on the city streets.

  Finally, the bus pulled into the cavernous garage of the Port Authority. At the gate, Jessica and the woman disembarked; they didn’t have luggage. The woman stepped into the glare of the termin
al to no one, clutching her crocheted knapsack, her hand clamped on a scrap of paper with her halfway house address, petrified. But Jessica was surprised by a small crowd of well-wishers who surrounded her with a happy burst of instructions and laughter and nervous anxiety: Inez, a Danbury friend, who was pregnant, had brought her a bag of clothes; Cathy, another Danbury friend, had brought along her new girlfriend and gave Jessica a Metro-Card (tokens had been the standard the last time Jessica was in New York). The group protectively led her to the express train, which rushed them all to the Bronx: Jessica had just under an hour to report to the halfway house to which she’d been assigned. On the ride, they caught up on the gossip—which guards had divorced or retired, which physician’s assistant was dating which ex-inmate, who’d gone back to being straight and who stayed gay. Arm in arm, the women escorted Jessica to the block where they had already been, pointed out the building, kissed her, hugged her again, and let her go. It was a violation of everyone’s probation to fraternize.

  Meanwhile, Lourdes, with the fragile hope of surprising Jessica, waited underground in a nearby subway. She stood on a platform with Emilio, who hunched over her, nervous and tentative. He’d been hearing about Jessica, it seemed, forever. Framed photographs of her dominated Lourdes’s sala walls. For the special day, Lourdes had worn her new eyeglasses with gold trim, and a brand-new pink-and-green sweat suit. She’d even gotten a neighbor to French-braid her hair. But Lourdes had mistakenly gone to the wrong station. After an hour, she gave up. Emilio tenderly held her elbow as he helped her slowly climb the stairs.

  Whatever expectations had accompanied Jessica’s homecoming quickly dissolved into the strange twilight haze of postprison existence. Jessica had physically returned to her old world to begin a supposedly brand-new life that hadn’t quite started yet. The dreary halfway house hunkered down on a gritty block just north of Fordham Road. Institutional renovations and a glossy blue coat of paint had added a fluorescent sheen to the dingy tenement, not unlike the probationary life Jessica faced: the governing rules imposed a superficial order on the old vulnerabilities, but there was a deeper sense that nothing much had changed. She attended her required Narcotics Anonymous meetings, walking past familiar drug spots that operated in a nearby park. She could have walked to the hooky house where she’d met Puma. Her children were elsewhere, her little brother was locked up, her mother was broke.

  Almost immediately, Jessica got romantically involved with a fellow resident. At night, she skulked beneath the security cameras and snuck into his room. She posed for photographs—straddling his bed, squatting on the floor, her hands up against the cinder-block wall, wearing his gift of black lace lingerie. Boy George soon received news of her adventures; a member of his prison gang was stationed at the halfway house.

  In her loneliness, Jessica also resorted to the pay phone, as she had so many times before. Her first call out went to Edwin, Wishman’s little brother. He was studying to become an X-ray technician and working at a Bronx hospital. He couldn’t see her—he was married and his wife was pregnant—but his mother, Sunny, met Jessica on Fordham to celebrate Jessica’s first two-hour pass. (“I’m still the same?” Jessica asked hopefully, to which Sunny replied warmly, “You still got that fat ass!”) Ghosts of Jessica’s former life, both kind and unkind, seemed to haunt her everywhere. She ran into one of the boys from the hooky house. Lourdes surprised Jessica by showing up at the halfway house with Big Daddy, who’d lived with them on Tremont. Jessica made a snide comment in front of him about Lourdes’s continued use of drugs. “That’s right, baby—the kind that a doctor prescribes,” Lourdes said archly. “Mami, want me to pee for you in a cup?” Jessica even passed by George’s mother’s apartment. Rita still had the reversible mink and leather coat George had had specially made for Jessica ten years earlier. “To get it back I have to kiss ass. It’s not worth it,” Jessica said. George’s little brother had become a man. He’d acquired more confidence, a wife and children, and reminded Jessica of George.

  But it was her children who were truly transformed: Serena was a young woman; Brittany and Stephanie had stretched into slender adolescent girls; her infant sons were now little boys. Milagros brought them all down for Christmas, which they celebrated at Lourdes’s. Lourdes set out a feast—her pasteles, arroz gandules, potato salad, a special ham. Jessica’s grandmother came in from Florida; Jessica’s favorite aunt—Lourdes’s younger sister Millie—came with her girlfriend, Linda; Elaine and Robert brought their children; Jessica’s cousin Daisy showed up with her little boy. Jessica surprised the children with winter coats from Old Navy. She said, “I was happy cuz I was with my kids. That was the best gift.” They took lots of pictures. In them, Jessica smiled broadly, back in the bosom of her family.

  Although the job market for ex-felons was severely limited, Jessica’s release from the halfway house depended upon her finding employment. Elaine got Jessica hired at the warehouse where she worked. Elaine managed the office; Jessica took orders and called clients, reminding them in her sultry voice of overdue bills. At an office party, she met a married schoolteacher, whom she briefly dated. She gave her daughters her toll-free number: Jessica couldn’t travel upstate to see them because of probation, and Milagros couldn’t usually afford the time or money to bring them down. Serena called frequently.

  In January 1999, Jessica was approved to move in with Elaine. (Her application to live with Lourdes was denied because Lourdes’s boyfriend had been convicted of a felony.) Jessica still had to pay $50 a week to the halfway house, which was part of a court fine imposed a decade before. The day she was leaving the halfway house, Jessica ran into Talent, an old colleague of Boy George’s from the early days. Talent was being admitted, having finished an eight-year term for drug dealing. He and Jessica exchanged numbers and promised to keep in touch.

  Although Jessica and Elaine were getting reacquainted, Jessica privately doubted the arrangement could last; historically, the sisters’ periods of peace had been short. Elaine now had the large life: she had a good job, a wardrobe, credit cards, a car. She was in the midst of an intoxicating romance. Jessica suffered anxiety attacks. She wasn’t accustomed to the lack of rules. She missed the daily support of her prison friends, and sometimes she felt so overwhelmed that she half-wished she could go back—at least there she knew what she was supposed to do. Her weight made her painfully self-conscious. She was in a perpetual panic about money, and she needed eyeglasses. Jessica could barely manage her court fine and her share of Elaine’s household bills.

  Elaine kept a tidy house, but Jessica cleaned obsessively. She lost her patience with her nephews, who slammed the door as they ran in and out of the house and plunked their dirty dishes in the sink. Each night before she crawled into Elaine’s bed, she swept and mopped the floors, as she used to in her prison cell. The bed frame was the same one Jessica had given Elaine years earlier, from one of the apartments Jessica had shared with George. On Sundays, Jessica’s boyfriend from the halfway house visited on his free pass, but the couple had no privacy unless Elaine went out. The only bureau Jessica had was the edge of Elaine’s computer desk. She crowded it with photographs and toiletries.

  Elaine relished her mentor’s role. She explained to her older sister how to budget. Jessica needed and resented her. Elaine was undergoing a sexual awakening, and it was as though she and Jessica had traded places. Elaine went clubbing, and to strip joints with her girlfriends, and away for weekends with her lover, to the Poconos; Jessica baby-sat. Serena would come to visit, and it sometimes seemed to Jessica that Serena loved Elaine more; they’d grown closer over the years of Jessica’s incarceration, and Elaine could buy things for Serena. Elaine had even kept in touch with Torres, the twin boys’ father, who was clamoring to meet his sons. Milagros reluctantly agreed to bring them down. “He just wants to get in Jessica’s pants,” she said, her voice clipped.

  The initial meeting went badly. Jessica had an anxiety attack and hid in the bathroom; Milagros blankly obse
rved Torres, who sat with his hands clasped on Elaine’s couch, while the boys ran in and out of the living room. Elaine kept pace with them, buzzing back and forth between Torres and Jessica like a harried diplomat. But Torres and Jessica reconnected on the phone. They began having long, flirtatious conversations. He called her from the boiler plant, where he now worked nights. Jessica switched between Torres and her boyfriend on call-waiting, and some nights fielded a torrent of other calls.

  She and Torres scheduled a meeting in New Haven the day of the settlement conference for the Yale lawsuit, which had yet to be resolved. By then, her lawyers had learned she was back in touch with Torres and urged her to settle, which she did—for $5,000. After the conference, she lunched with the law students and spoke to the prison clinic class. (Years later, one student summarized the lesson Jessica had taught him as “the importance of and the impossibility of nailing down the facts.”) Torres picked her up at the train station and drove her back to Elaine’s. By the end of the ride, it was clear to both of them that rekindling the relationship wasn’t likely—Torres had become a born-again Christian and wouldn’t even let Jessica listen to pop music in his car. But Jessica needed the attention and seemed glad to have men back in her life.

  It wasn’t long before she fell in true love again: with a twenty-three-year-old ex-marine who walked right up the stairs onto Elaine’s porch and knocked on her door. He’d been looking forward to meeting Jessica; the colleague who was training him as a home confinement officer had described her as “Wow.” He later said he knew he was in trouble when he first laid eyes on Jessica: she was stepping out of the shower, wearing only a towel. He introduced himself; Jessica believed it was destiny that his name was George. She joked about already having his tattoos. Jessica asked him in her prettiest voice to please wait while she dressed. George didn’t tell Jessica that he had a girlfriend, whom he considered a wife.