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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Coco reread the official-looking letter. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing Mercedes. It was this kind of moment, during Coco’s own adolescence, that had made the drugs so hard for Foxy to resist. Coco said, “So much is in my head, I feel I’m gonna crack.” Then the phone rang; it was Milagros. Did Coco want to go dancing to celebrate Mother’s Day?

  Milagros seemed to have lost interest in nursing school and had lately been going clubbing every weekend. Coco disapproved of Milagros’s partying, and her women friends, but Coco needed music, and she was in no position to turn her nose up at the company. She wanted to shake off the stress. She put La-Monté to sleep, threw on some clothes, and left Mercedes in charge of the children. She met Milagros at Broadway, a new club in Albany.

  Usually, Coco strode straight to the dance floor. That night, she sat at one of the tiny cocktail tables and watched other people dance—Milagros laughing with her girlfriends, older couples dancing Spanish. She slumped down, like Mercedes at her classroom desk. But instead of sleeping, like her daughter, Coco placed her heavy head in her small hands and wept.

  Foxy’s call woke her the next morning; she wished Coco a happy Mother’s Day, a ritual Foxy never forgot. After they finished talking, Coco shuffled into the kitchen to warm La-Monté’s bottle and discovered Frankie, tears streaming down his face, his barrel chest heaving, his hands gripping the edge of the dish-filled sink. He’d recently discovered that his mother had cancer, and the prognosis wasn’t good. Coco had been trying to get him to talk about it, but they’d get interrupted by one of the children, or he wasn’t in the mood, or Coco was too tired from work. Frankie left.

  Jessica called next. She and Coco had not been in touch often, but they kept up with each other’s news through Milagros and still felt close. “It could be years, she never forgets me,” said Coco. Throughout Jessica’s incarceration, Coco had always sent Jessica Mother’s Day cards. The recognition meant a lot to Jessica, who still acutely felt her own failure as a mother.

  Jessica had had a difficult year with Serena. Serena was failing ninth grade yet again, and Jessica had recently come home from work to discover her daughter in the apartment with a boy. When Serena took the phone, she sounded as unhappy as her mother. “Happy Mother’s Day, Títi,” said Serena.

  “Thank you, Mami,” Coco said.

  At the hearing, the associate superintendent suspended Mercedes indefinitely and ordered the principal to file for a PINS petition on behalf of the school. Before Mercedes would be considered for reentry, she was required to attend at least two sessions of counseling. In the meantime, a tutor would visit her at home and she would report to a probation officer. Coco was relieved; she had expected worse.

  Outside, Coco hurried after Mercedes, who broke into a run. “You all right, Mercedes?” Coco called after her.

  “It don’t matter. It don’t matter,” Mercedes said, her voice cracking. By the time her mother caught up with her, she’d succeeded in beating back the urge to cry.

  At home, Mercedes retreated into her dark bedroom, which sat off the kitchen at the back of the apartment, climbed beneath her comforter, and turned on her TV. On the paneling hung a drawing Cesar had commissioned from a prison artist shortly after Nautica was born—three inscribed hearts chained together—Daddy, Mercy, Naughty. Coco hovered in her doorway. “I feel sick. I can’t talk,” Mercedes said, and Coco let her be.

  There was no need for words. “I know exactly what’s wrong with my child,” Coco said. “I know, that’s why I don’t need counseling. I am tired of saying the same thing. They ask me, ‘Do you know what’s running through Mercedes’s mind?’ I know exactly what’s wrong with my child.” She paused. “I know what the answer is—Cesar. . . . Everything is just missing him.”

  Mercedes had turned eleven in April. For the first time ever, Cesar had forgotten her birthday. It was then that her good behavior at school suddenly ceased.

  Cesar had been overwhelmed by the responsibilities of his busy new prison life. The previous August, shortly after Rocco had moved into a wheelchair-accessible apartment, Cesar had been transferred to Woodbourne, a medium-security facility. Woodbourne was the calmest of the ten prisons he’d been in. Most of the inmates were in their late thirties and older. Almost all of them programmed, which meant that fights were kept to a minimum. Cesar was used to prisons where stabbings happened daily; at Woodbourne, months passed between incidents. At first, medium-security status unnerved him. He’d wait by his cell for a guard to escort him to the package room until the guard said, “What are you waiting for?”

  “It’s wild,” he excitedly told Rocco. “You can get up and go!” For fifteen minutes of every hour, medium-security inmates were “clear to move.” Cesar’s enthusiasm for the tiny, substantial pleasures was contagious; he was one of the few people capable of temporarily distracting Rocco from his despair. Cesar was assigned to a dorm that housed the state’s deaf inmates. He began to learn how to sign.

  Cesar also enrolled in college; the drug war had sapped the budget for New York State inmate education, but Woodbourne had one of the few degree programs available. Cesar’s program was inmate-run. Twenty-five men started, and Cesar was one of only six who survived the first term. Students had one year to complete a three-year workload. The inmates were tough professors, but if Cesar graduated, he’d receive a Certificate of Ministry in Human Services. He loved school.

  Cesar took five classes, which covered subjects like homiletics and world religions. Three typed essays were required every week. Cesar didn’t have enough money for a typewriter, so he borrowed them from his classmates. He had to wait until they’d finished their homework, which meant he usually broke night typing. Under the pressure of these unaccustomed deadlines, he’d forgotten to send Mercedes her birthday card.

  Back in the Bronx, Rocco broke night playing chess on his computer. The stainless-steel bathroom features of his new wheelchairaccessible apartment reminded him of a cell: “I feel like I’m in jail sometimes. Toilet flushes like a jail toilet. Bars on the window. Nothing to do.” Cesar immersed himself in papal history and politics; Rocco devoured gangster magazines. Rocco came across a profile of Boy George in Don Diva (“For the Ghetto Fabulous Lifestyle”) in its special issue on kid kingpins. Pictured in a film reel on the cover, under “The Eighties,” was Boy George’s head. While Rocco pined for his outlaw days, Cesar had been thinking about the ways in which idle time on the street had eased his way toward criminality. He said, “For me, crime was attention. Responsibility got strapped on my chest when they said, ‘There’s no food in the house.’ You get praise for doing wrong. I didn’t see it as wrong, because helping my family is right. How I tended to my family was different. Why is because we didn’t have. The sequence led to the boy that created me.”

  Rocco and Marlene had divorced, but Cesar and Giselle’s relationship was stronger than ever. Giselle regularly visited Cesar with their baby girl. Giselle’s father had left when she was young, and Giselle was determined that Cesar be a presence in their daughter’s life. Cesar hated the long gaps between his other daughters’ visits: “I don’t think it’s fair, you know. But I’m not saying it’s Coco’s fault. I gotta understand that she got all them kids, and she going through her own problems and sometimes I say, you know, I ain’t got it that bad.” But Cesar hungered for news about Mercedes that was positive. Coco tended to write for advice when Mercedes was having trouble. Lourdes’s dispatches tended to seize on evidence of other people’s flawed mothering. Cesar knew little about Mercedes’s accomplishments. He longed to know what made his daughter happy, what thoughts absorbed her, what activities composed her daily routine. Pictures no longer satisfied his curiosity. In his letters, he made a point to acknowledge her strengths instead of reprimanding her for her weaknesses. In one recent letter, she had described her softball team. She disliked the team name—No-Smoking Kids—which she found silly, and she wished that instead of donated T-shirts, they could have real uniforms. She men
tioned an outfielder who’d missed a ball—“That girl was looking stupid,” Mercedes wrote.

  Cesar had conducted a “positive asset search” on Mercedes’s letter. He’d learned the technique in psychology. “She doesn’t like the name of the team,” he said. “She has a critique.” He suggested Mercedes help the outfielder; perhaps they could practice together? He told her not to worry if the outfielder rejected her offer; she wouldn’t be a sucker for being kind. Offering would make Mercedes feel better about herself either way. “Use that muscle,” Cesar wrote. He wanted to try to make it safe for Mercedes to take risks. In thinking about his adolescence, he’d realized the punishments for his behavior never gave him clues about how to go about making improvements: “They made me pay the consequences when I did wrong, but not one ever tried to show me a solution or identify the cause.”

  After the superintendent’s hearing, Coco had mailed Cesar a copy of Mercedes’s records. Cesar pored over the notations. He said sadly, “It’s like reading a book about myself.” All her teachers believed she was capable. Mercedes’s problem was “her attitude.” But her assertiveness served her badly in only one of the two worlds she had to negotiate. Bossiness at school might have rendered her a bit of a bully, but at home, lording over little kids was a necessary skill. At school, outbursts caused chaos; at home, they somehow focused things; in either place they generated the attention she needed and craved. But unlike her sister Nikki’s behavior, whose sweetness disguised anger, Mercedes’s only served to underscore it. As a result, she couldn’t, or didn’t, move between the two worlds easily.

  Cesar still blamed Coco for burdening herself and Mercedes with too many children—Coco had been “too ignorant, or too selfish,” he wasn’t sure which. Rather than attack Coco, however, he placed Mercedes’s struggle in a wider context. Mercedes’s predicament extended beyond personal history or family or attitude or teenage parenting. “Poverty is a subculture that exists within the ghetto,” he said. “It goes beyond black or Hispanic, at least in my mind. Overworked teachers. Run-down schools. It looks like they designed this system to make our children fail. Socioeconomic conditions. Why are we so passive? We accept conditions that don’t benefit us—economic oppression we’ve been suffering for years. That’s the primary condition.”

  But Cesar mainly blamed himself. He’d been in prison for most of Mercedes’s life. At first, he was going to send her copies of his syllabi to show her how busy he had been and to explain why he missed her birthday, but he decided to apologize instead. He’d still failed her—even if the reason was worthy. He wrote, “School was no excuse not to keep in touch.” It wasn’t often that anyone admitted their mistakes to Mercedes; the default posture of poverty was defense. Cesar told her that he hoped his degree would make Mercedes proud of him when he came home.

  In Troy, children shared the same probationary space as wayward adults. The two-story office building sat opposite the local newspaper, not far from the storefront that used to house the shelter where Mercedes had stayed six years before. The city’s homeless population had continued growing, and Joseph’s House had since moved to larger digs. A plump receptionist buzzed Mercedes and her mother in.

  Coco looked tiny next to Mercedes, who towered over her by a full head. Mercedes’s long mane of brown-blond hair spilled from a bandanna of the Puerto Rican flag, which she’d positioned with the star facing front. Like Wonder Woman, she assessed the scene—a skinny white guy nervously sitting, a black woman reading a magazine. She sat down and nibbled her nails. Her door-knocker earrings swung, a cursive Mercedes inscribed in their cradle. Coco moved almost primly, each gesture snug with anxiety.

  Miss O’Connell, Mercedes’s probation officer, beckoned them through a metal detector and led them to a chilly interview room. On the wall was a tattered Xerox, LOVE, THE ANTI-DRUG. It read in part, “Drug Free is achieved in a series of small, personal ways.”

  “Do you understand why you’re here?” Miss O’Connell asked without introducing herself.

  “No,” Mercedes said.

  “Why did you leave detention without permission?” she asked.

  “Cuz I didn’t think I was supposed to be punished,” said Mercedes.

  “What else could you have done?”

  Mercedes knew the drill: “Listen to Mrs. Hutchins.”

  “What else?”

  “Asked?” Mercedes tried.

  “What could you have changed to make a better situation?” Miss O’Connell asked, but it wasn’t a question. “Attitude,” she added. Probation tackled that.

  Mercedes would be routed to Diversion, a program that aimed to keep her at home. Miss O’Connell outlined Mercedes’s options: If Mercedes “didn’t cooperate,” she’d “choose to go to family court.” There, a “judge would weigh the truth, like judges did.” Then Miss O’Connell asked Mercedes to sign a voluntary form that acknowledged that she understood she had a choice. Mercedes looked perplexed, so Miss O’Connell elaborated: the voluntary form involved “rights in America.”

  “You have a right to accept this part of probation, so which do you pick?”

  Mercedes’s eyes widened and she looked at her mother. Coco uncertainly reached for the pen.

  Because she was a minor, the terms of Mercedes’s probation required that she follow the rules both at school and at home. “What does it mean to follow the rules?” Miss O’Connell asked.

  “Listen to my mom,” Mercedes said.

  “That’s right, listen to your mom. You’re old enough to help a little bit. Set the table. Do the laundry.” Mercedes’s house had no table; she ate on her lap on the floor; Coco thought her daughter helped too much. Miss O’Connell quickly ticked off a checklist of questions she was supposed to ask Mercedes. “Drugs,” Miss O’Connell said. “Drugs, hopefully, that’s not a problem at eleven. Curfew?”

  “She’s barely outside,” Coco said.

  Ordinarily, Miss O’Connell saw her charges weekly, but since it was summer, she suggested every other week: It didn’t make sense to Coco. Summer streets were the worst, and without school, the children had less to do than ever. Miss O’Connell was ready to conclude the interview: “So what are you leaving with? What’s the message you are getting from me, from school, from home?”

  “Try to control my temper,” Mercedes said.

  “You need to control your temper.”

  Then a remarkable thing happened—Mercedes asked for help: “I can’t—I don’t know how,” she said. It was an extremely rare admission of weakness, but Miss O’Connell didn’t respond. Coco, however, understood the significance of what had just happened, and she tried to keep Mercedes’s request for help afloat: “How come Mercedes try to calm me down when I get upset, but she can’t realize it for herself?” Coco asked anxiously. Without glancing up from her paperwork, Miss O’Connell assured Coco that Mercedes would learn all she needed to know in anger management.

  That spring, Rocco’s luck changed again. He’d fallen in love with Maya, a short religious missionary from the Philippines. She conducted Bible studies with several people in Rocco’s assisted-living apartment building and had tried to invite Rocco, but he’d been so depressed the day she knocked on his door that he hadn’t bothered to open it. But when Rocco made the connection that the pretty girl he’d spotted leaving the building was Maya, he was ready for religion.

  Rocco was a dutiful student during their sessions—no wisecracking, no cursing. He offered her Pepsi and avoided his past. He finally worked up the courage to leave a love note in the pages of her Bible. After she’d discovered it, she told him, “Brother, I’m not the girl.” But once Rocco had given up his romantic hope, he started speaking more freely with Maya. He unburdened himself; his humorous personality came out. One night, he showed her the X-ray film from his spinal injuries.

  Around this time, Maya said, “God interfered.” Maya had seen a dream interpreter on television who said some dreams were prophetic in nature, and she’d had several that stayed in her
memory. In the first, she and a girlfriend went to buy shoes. They hurried; it was late, and the store was about to close. Maya quickly grabbed a pair of purple shoes, which are wedding shoes in Filipino culture. On the way home, she was pushing her friend in a wheelchair, and when they came to a hill, they switched places, so Maya could enjoy the ride down: Maya waved a shoe in each hand, she said, “rejoicingly.”

  In the second dream, Maya was looking in the mirror and a Latina face was reflected back. She was wearing a wedding gown, zipped halfway, and she went to find her mother to ask her to zip it. “Who am I marrying?” Maya asked.

  “Basta magiging masaya ka,” her mother said. Just go ahead, you will be happy.

  In the third dream, Maya lay on a gurney in the hospital awaiting spinal surgery to make her taller. The night that Rocco showed her his X rays, Maya realized that she had had a premonition, and she cried the whole subway ride home. “I was thinking, ‘Is he my destiny? I hope not.’ ”

  They held hands a long time before they kissed. When Rocco proposed and Maya said yes, Rocco’s friends warned him against it; she might be marrying him for a green card. But Rocco decided it was worth the risk.

  Mercedes returned to school in time to graduate with her fifth-grade classmates. Money was tight, but Coco still surprised her with a new bicycle. Coco did her best to keep her financial problems away from her children, but Mercedes watched her mother carefully. For weeks, Mercedes had refused to let Coco take her to the mall to buy shoes for graduation. However, graduation morning, Mercedes faced the problem of walking in the sandals Coco had borrowed, having anticipated that her daughter’s only other option—sneakers—wouldn’t match her dress. Mercedes tottered over to the couch and threw herself down, leaned her head on one hand, and plucked at the black lace sheath that covered the crimson dress. Her white bra straps stuck out from beneath the spaghetti straps. She said she didn’t want to go. “Mercy,” Coco said, her concern sounding through. She wanted Mercedes to enjoy the day.