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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  The proximity of his new prison to the city also made it much easier for family and friends to reach him, and his clarity about his old life and his resolve about the future improved as he had more contact with the outside world. Elaine visited with her sons and her new boyfriend. Giselle took the shuttle, which was less expensive than the longer bus rides, and the frequency of their visits made them less charged. Since their reconciliation, she’d been talking about having a baby, although Cesar wanted her to wait until he was released. He wanted to help the children he already had. Rocco would ride up on his motorcycle and play a game of chess before he reported in for the night shift at his software company.

  Rocco, who continued to vacillate between the criminal and the straight worlds, was feeling guilty about his good luck. He’d been thinking about his old crew. Mighty was dead. Tito was still serving time in Sing Sing, and he wasn’t doing too well. Rocco had visited Tito a few times and found him paranoid. Tito believed the authorities beamed voices to taunt him from his transistor radio and obsessed over a farfetched theory for another appeal he couldn’t afford to wage. Cesar was locked up, too, but at least he was surviving. “In a way, I started them all,” Rocco said. “Why am I still here? Why am I with my family? Why did I manage to get married? Why are things so cool for me, when I am the main dude?” He wanted to make it up to Cesar. “I’ll show him Windows 95, Windows 98, I’ll show him DOS—so that he won’t get lost again,” Rocco said. “I’m on this new route.” Giselle’s vision of the future also included Cesar as a family man. That’s who he was during their visits. “I don’t care if he works at McDonald’s as long as we have enough to pay the bills and have a roof over our heads,” she said.

  Cesar didn’t let on, but he sometimes believed Giselle’s love for him was close to miraculous. During visits, he’d watch her cross the room and wonder why such a beautiful woman stuck by him. She did not need Cesar in the ways to which he’d been accustomed to being needed. His ability to physically protect her was limited. Trailers were the only time Cesar could satisfy her sexually. She earned her own money. Said Giselle, “I can do for myself. I don’t need to be with someone because of what they can do for me.” She performed her wifely duties but did not become intimately involved with his family. She called to wish Lourdes her happy birthdays and Mother’s Days; she passed through at Christmas and Thanksgiving; she called Coco on his behalf and checked up on the girls; but she left Lourdes to handle Cesar’s tenuous relationship with Roxanne. Giselle visited Cesar, but when she didn’t, she did not apologize.

  Shortly after Cesar got off keep-lock, he stopped the drugs cold turkey and used the remainder of Rocco’s money to pay off fines he’d incurred from the recent charge. He stepped out of the mix and kept to himself. Cesar said, “I was either gonna end up killed or murdering someone, and I thought about how that would make my daughter feel, to come to my funeral for that.” He confessed to Giselle that he’d been using and devoted himself to her in earnest. He stopped writing other girls. He signed up for a parenting class.

  Meanwhile, Jessica was slowly establishing herself on the outside, struggling to balance the needs of her current life with the habits of the old one. She showed photographs of her Boy George days to her current George. He couldn’t relate to the bejeweled girl in leathers and fur coats. “I see her as simple. The pictures didn’t seem right. She’s just Jessica,” he said. They didn’t go to expensive hotels; they snuck over to his mother’s empty apartment. Jessica no longer lounged in Benzes and BMWs, smug on the ostrich-skin passenger seats; now she amicably ducked beneath the dashboard to avoid being recognized by fellow probationers when she accompanied him on his rounds.

  The couple had more privacy when Jessica moved into her own place in May 1999 and George quit his job. The owner of the company where Elaine and Jessica worked had helped Jessica find the newly renovated studio apartment, which occupied the basement of a privately owned home on a pretty block in Pelham Parkway in a middle-class neighborhood. Elaine had shared her worries after Jessica showed her the apartment she’d originally planned to take. “No sister of mine is living in a dump like this,” Elaine said of the moldy cave in a dismal building in a dangerous neighborhood. “You served your time,” she told Jessica. “You don’t have to live like this anymore.”

  Still, Jessica spent some harrowing nights alone in her new digs. The couple who lived upstairs had brutal fights, which she could hear through the ceiling. She’d curl up in bed and try to drown out the sound of the children’s screaming, covering her head with a pillow that Serena had embroidered with Welcome Home. Other nights, Jessica distracted herself from the stillness by calling whomever she could think to call—Serena, although she had to watch the long-distance; George; her prison pals Ida or Miranda; or Talent, Boy George’s old friend, whom she’d bumped into at the halfway house.

  Since Jessica’s release, Boy George had been trying in vain to reach her. He’d written letters in care of Lourdes, but the last address he had was Mount Hope, and Lourdes had moved five times since then. He had also written Jessica in care of his mother, but they hadn’t kept up after Jessica’s initial visit. Jessica wasn’t interested in her old lifestyle, but she did miss the anchor Boy George had provided. She was doing what she was supposed to—working, trying to reconnect with her children, trying to make a lasting relationship with a man—but a lot of the time she felt unmoored. She was still dating George, who had become a security guard. His wife was pregnant, but Jessica still hoped for more than he was giving. She worried constantly about money. She’d promised to help Cesar and to send her ex-girlfriend, Nilda, her box—Nilda was about to be released—but Jessica was barely getting by. The children always needed something; Jessica wanted lots of things herself.

  A few times, George drove Jessica upstate to see the children; Jessica had lent George $3,000 of her $5,000 settlement to repair his car. On one trip, they ran into Coco and Frankie and Coco’s girls in the park. From a distance, Coco mistook George for Serena’s boyfriend because they were holding hands. Coco and Jessica exchanged hugs, but neither had much to say. The encounter disappointed Coco, who attributed its awkwardness to Jessica’s allegiance to Giselle. Coco later said, “Jessica falls in love too fast.”

  The warehouse where Jessica worked shut down for a month in the summer. She invited her daughters to come to the city and share the vacation with her. The twins weren’t as eager to spend time with her as they had been when they were younger, but Serena seemed excited, and Jessica wanted to act like a mother, even though she wasn’t entirely sure how. In anticipation of the visit, she hung three new toothbrushes on her bathroom wall.

  That July, the girls bused down to Jessica’s. Brittany and Stephanie quickly grew homesick and returned to Troy, but Serena stayed on. Jessica dyed Serena’s dark brown hair blond. They spent afternoons at the swimming pool at Roosevelt Park. They went to the clinic, where Jessica had a pregnancy test (it came out negative). She and George doubledated with Serena and Frederico, George’s younger friend. They went to Coney Island, Serena said, “about a million times.”

  Serena sometimes placed calls to George on Jessica’s behalf—as a lure, or as a front to bypass George’s wife. Jessica’s openness in the company of her daughter surprised George: “Jessica treats her like she’s thirty. Certain things you shouldn’t say—in a way it’s good, but in another way it’s taking away childhood.” At the same time, George counseled Serena about the dogging ways of men. “Mostly I would tell her what I would think if I saw a girl,” he said. He invited her along with his friends and their dates: after they’d dropped off the girls, George would let Serena overhear the deprecating comments the boys made about the girls they’d just been sweet to in the car. Serena celebrated her fourteenth birthday in the city; George treated her and her cousin Tabitha to the movie American Pie. Afterward, they all went to a diner, and Serena received a cupcake with a candle. The waitresses sang.

  The tentative changes that Cesar began
in the box accelerated with the crises that hit him back to back in the spring of 1999, within weeks of turning twenty-five years old. First, Rocco had a devastating accident: he was riding his motorcycle on the Grand Concourse when a woman made a U-turn in front of him, and he smashed into the side of her car. The crash left him permanently paralyzed. One week later, Lourdes suffered the first of two major heart attacks. She was admitted to the same hospital as Rocco. Cesar had long feared that Lourdes would die while he was locked up, and he didn’t want his mother to leave the world disappointed in him. He became even more determined to figure out a way to help the people in his life, even from prison. “My mother’s health had a lot to do with it,” Cesar said. “My wife. My children. I had to make a list of my priorities.” Cesar couldn’t reach Rocco on the phone during the months of his hospitalization, so Cesar befriended an inmate who was wheelchair-bound and started educating himself.

  Giselle took Mercedes and Nautica along with her son, Gabriel, to visit Cesar that summer, but Mercedes returned home morose. She’d overheard Gabriel call Cesar Daddy.

  “Why you calling him Daddy? He ain’t your father,” she’d said, and Cesar had reprimanded her. She’d been taught that she wasn’t supposed to call Frankie Daddy; she was supposed to teach Nautica that Cesar was their father, and she had always taken the responsibility seriously.

  Cesar didn’t even know where to start; if Mercedes was confused, what about his other children? Mercedes had visited him since birth, and they’d had those precious seven months together between Harlem Valley and his current bid. What about Nautica, whom he’d rarely seen? Or Justine, whom he was just beginning to know? Or Whitney, the daughter he’d yet to meet? How would he explain yet another sibling to his daughter? For, unknown to Mercedes, Giselle and Cesar were trying for a child. Cesar held serious doubts about the wisdom of Giselle’s timing, but he felt he was in no position to refuse. He wanted to reassure Mercedes, but he was also disturbed by her attitude. Giselle advised Cesar to be gentle with Mercedes. She told him, “Mercedes only does what she sees.” His job, as her father, would be to counteract it, to show her another way.

  As Cesar groped for new ways to help his troubled daughter, Rocco was in a state of shock. He only began to sense the gravity of what had occurred through the reactions of his friends. “Stone-cold murderers, killers, crying, ‘Yo, man, I can’t see you like that,’ ” Rocco remembered. He still couldn’t take it in: “‘Is it bad? Get out of here! Is it that bad?’ ” In a panic, he checked himself out of the rehabilitation hospital months ahead of schedule.

  Rocco’s wife, Marlene, was immediately overwhelmed: she was working full-time, going to college, raising their daughter, and now nursing Rocco, who was home and at a loss as to how to manage the most basic tasks. Within months, their credit cards were maxed out by all the charges for the medical supplies. Marlene started drinking and chainsmoking cigarettes, and despairing that her life would never be hers again. She said, “He is his own person. He will survive this and I’ll lose my mind.” Rocco had finally given himself over to his family, but his surrender had come too late: “He straightened out. Because he’s got no choice. He can’t go anywhere. He can’t do anything illegal. He’s in a fuckin’ wheelchair,” Marlene said.

  That fall, she put Rocco’s name on a waiting list for a wheelchair-accessible apartment, signed him up for SSI, found him a good doctor and a bearable home health-care aide, installed him back in his old bedroom in his parents’ apartment on Tremont, and left. Cesar criticized Marlene’s disloyalty: “Your boys are still there, but Marlene left.” Rocco defended her: “But my boys haven’t been through what Marlene’s been through.”

  Rocco didn’t listen to music because it made him want to go outside, and he couldn’t go outside unless his brother carried him down three flights of stairs. He couldn’t roughhouse with his daughter. For a time, he couldn’t even manage the bathroom alone. Rocco began wondering if this was his punishment for all the bad things he’d done. He wanted to die. During their phone conversations, Cesar didn’t offer consolations; he respected the immensity of Rocco’s loss. But his letters and phone calls helped bring his friend back from the edge.

  Mercedes was also having a hard time, but she didn’t have Cesar’s counsel; Coco couldn’t afford collect calls to her phone. As it turned out, Coco was having a boy, and her baby shower was to be the summer’s big event. Coco’s cousin Leo, whom she’d asked to be the baby’s godfather, had gone all out and reserved a picnic area in a park: there were games and a sound system and a pile of gifts and balloons and tin trays toppling with food and a huge cake and a barbecue. An enormous pacifier dangled down over Coco’s wicker chair, which was decorated in baby blue. Then Frankie got arrested and ruined everything. During the festivities, he slipped away to buy weed for some white kids, anticipating a small cut for himself. On the ride back from the pickup, a police officer pulled them over and Frankie got so nervous that the officer became suspicious and conducted a search of the car. Instead of opening the gifts alongside her baby’s father, as Coco longed to, she sat miserably beside Iris, who gleefully ripped open the packages before passing them on to Coco, undone.

  Coco encouraged Mercedes to return to Ramapo Camp, which she did, for two weeks that July. She learned to swim underwater and jump off a diving board. But as soon as she met up with her mother in the Bronx afterward, Mercedes’s family responsibilities returned. When Octavio, the drug dealer who managed Foxy’s block, made a nasty comment about Coco, Mercedes bravely told him, “Shut up.” Octavio then swatted her—only half-jokingly—and she hit him back with all of her might. Then she spent the rest of that night baby-sitting her sisters in the waiting room at Bronx Lebanon because Pearl had fallen in the bathroom and seriously cut herself.

  Mercedes was baby-sitting even more than usual because Coco was supposed to be on bed rest. Coco’s doctor had expressed concern about this delivery, and he’d scheduled a cesarean for the early fall. “How you be on bed rest with four children?” Coco asked. Frankie, who had been released after the drug charges were dropped, was nowhere to be found. Or he’d appear when it was too late to do Coco much practical good. “Ma, you want something to eat?” he asked sheepishly at two o’clock one morning, trying to pat down Coco’s anger as she lay beached on the floor at Foxy’s among her daughters and the rumpled sheets.

  “What do you think? The girls had oatmeal for dinner, with a package of hot dogs! I have a belly to feed!” Coco yelled. He stood dumbly, still waiting for the order. She screamed, “Chicken and cheese!” Mercedes was relieved when they returned to Troy.

  At home, Mercedes escaped to the street and rode her bicycle to visit her Títi Iris. Like Mercedes, Iris loved upstate life. She could walk to the store and not worry, “Is someone gonna take my money?” Kids didn’t ride bikes around the kitchen, but on sidewalks and lawns. But even Iris’s didn’t remain the refuge Mercedes needed. In August, the Troy Housing Authority police raided Iris’s apartment, which they’d mistakenly targeted instead of the drug dealer’s across the way. During the bust, the police grabbed Mercedes’s uncle, Armando, who was watching TV in the bedroom, shoved him to the floor, and handcuffed him. They told Iris, who was screaming, to shut up as they rifled through closets and upended bureau drawers. Their oldest son ran all the way to Coco’s: Coco knew it was an emergency because Iris’s kids were never allowed on the streets alone. Only when one of the police officers saw the award from the tenants’ association on the wall did he recognize Iris from the community center and call the raid to a halt.

  After the raid, Armando became more rattled than ever; Iris’s kids started having difficulty sleeping, afraid that the police would break in and take away their father. Iris quit college and fell into a depression; her determination didn’t return, even after the family moved. Her doctor put her on an antipsychotic medication called Risperdal. Mercedes’s formerly ambitious aunt now stayed locked up in her apartment and started putting on weight. Iris couldn’t t
ell how much of her anxiety came from the trauma of what had happened, or from the fear she felt about her new neighborhood, which was around the corner from Mercedes’s school; every fourth or fifth house was condemned or abandoned. Drugs always managed to wreck her life no matter where she went.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Serena returned to Troy in time to start high school. After the summer with Jessica, Serena and Milagros argued more than usual. To Milagros’s consternation, Serena now called Jessica’s boyfriend “Daddy George,” and she had a photograph of herself and George in a frame inscribed Daddy’s Little Girl. Milagros said, “Don’t you tell me that every man your mother gets involved with, you’re going to be calling them Daddy.” Serena got angry; she told Milagros Jessica and George were getting married, that he called Serena his daughter, that he called her on the phone. Milagros told her the relationship wouldn’t last. She warned Serena, “Believe me, your mom is gonna be with a lotta guys before she even settles down.”