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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Coco had done what she could to create an air of festivity. The night before, she had styled everybody’s hair—her four girls and the two white girls downstairs. She treated them all to fake fingernails from the River Street Store. She painted Mercedes’s real toenails, too. That morning, Coco tried to make Mercedes laugh by dramatically karate-kicking a roach. Mercedes ignored her. Coco quickly combed her own hair out, smoothed it with hand lotion, and squinted at her reflection in the mirror over the clogged fireplace, displeased. She was wearing a short-sleeved red cotton top and black slacks. She stuck her door-knockers in and opted for a ponytail. She squirted herself with perfume and headed toward Mercedes, who craned her neck back.

  “Honesty—” Coco appeased.

  “I don’t want it,” said Mercedes.

  “Mercedes, you didn’t put any on—”

  “I want my Tommy Girl.”

  “You are going to have to find it, then,” said Coco, wounded. Mercedes didn’t bother looking.

  “I hate these shoes,” Mercedes said.

  “I wanted to go shopping, Mercedes,” Coco chided.

  “You needed the money,” Mercedes said, stinging her.

  “It’s not your business what I need, Mercy,” Coco said, biting her lip.

  “Students,” began Miss Scutari. She stood at a podium in the old gymnasium, looking spiffy in a white suit. “This day is for you.”

  “They say it’s for the kids, but it isn’t,” whispered Coco forty-five minutes later, after a string of boring speeches by local politicos. Parents and guests were asked to hold their applause while the children retrieved their awards and certificates. Coco’s eyes welled with tears as Mercedes stood. Then Miss Scutari played a scratchy recording of the class theme song she had chosen for the graduates—Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance.” After the chorus sang, guests were invited outside for the final balloon ceremony.

  Coco could see Mercedes in the crowd of students moving toward the exit; with the heels, she was a head taller than most everyone. Coco caught up with her daughter in the front of the building, where she was huddled forward in conversation with Kaitlin, her new friend, who was in seventh grade. Mercedes like to hang around with older children. Coco nudged her daughter closer to the graduates, who were forming a loose group on the sidewalk beneath Miss Scutari’s bunch of balloons.

  Coco grabbed one for Mercedes, who reluctantly received it. Mercedes held her arm rigid, as though the balloon were a misbehaving child, while the other kids bonked the balloons and plucked at the strings. Miss Scutari addressed the graduates energetically, as if all the undone work of equipping these kids for adolescence could be pumped into them in these final minutes. On the count of three, they were to shout out the refrain from their class theme song—“I hope you dance”—after which they’d release the balloons into the sky. Mercedes rolled her eyes. She seemed reluctant to extract herself from the admittedly goofy ritual, yet equally unable to enjoy its simple pleasure. The children counted, “One, two, three!” Mercedes turned away from her balloon as she released it, disowning the gesture of hope.

  For all the talk in the family about Mercedes, it was perhaps Frankie who was most immediately at risk for joining a gang: he’d several times mentioned to Coco that he was considering it. His son, his mother’s cancer diagnosis, and the flurry around Mercedes’s suspension seemed to have caused him to reflect on the precariousness of his life. (“I went to high school and look at me, Mercy,” he’d said, the day she’d been suspended.) His dependency on Coco shamed him. “Coco works hard, you know,” Frankie said. “Sometimes I feel I’m taking advantage, but she’s good to me.” He seemed to be searching for a sense of purpose and at the same time to be giving up on some part of himself. Frankie still mourned his dream of playing minor league baseball. He no longer wanted to be a drug dealer; he never had. He didn’t want to be dealing when his son was old enough to understand; Mercedes already did, and he’d long since stopped working out of the house. During their fights, she would say, “You a drug dealer!” How could he respond to that?

  Frankie no longer said aloud that he still wanted to find a job and no longer defended himself against Coco’s indictments of his uselessness, and Coco, sensing his despair, didn’t insult him as often anymore. Coco doubted that any employer would hire Frankie: he was thirty years old, and the few jobs he’d held—at the packaging plant and in construction—were brief and off-the-books. Even as a drug dealer, his success wasn’t notable. Weedo and Coco’s cousin were dealing, and their business had “blown up,” even though they hadn’t been in Troy as long as Frankie had. Weedo arrogantly fanned his wads of ten- and twenty-dollar bills in Frankie’s face.

  Coco tried to assure Frankie that his slow way was better. While Weedo and Coco’s cousin sold cocaine from a car, they blasted music with the cousin’s infant daughter strapped in the backseat. Coco said to Frankie, “They have the baby in the car. Doing their shit in the street. Frankie, you do your stuff indoors. They use their money stupidly—you take care of your family.” Hungry bellies didn’t feed on gold. Coco knew that her cousin’s girlfriend saw little of the drug money; she’d recently shoplifted the baby’s medicine. Frankie paid attention to his son, even if he couldn’t dress him in brand-name; La-Monté cried for Frankie and ran to him when he stepped through the door. But Frankie remained despondent. All year long, Frankie looked forward to his summer softball league, but his team had lost every game so far. And he’d had to pawn his jewelry to pay for the uniform. Still, Frankie liked his family to watch him play.

  One June evening, the girls rode their bikes to Frankie’s softball game. They were running late. Mercedes raced her sisters down the stairs, bouncing her bicycle, and hit the sidewalk moving. “Stay on the sidewalks!” Coco shouted after them. Nautica zipped ahead. She kept her head low, like a racer, her elbows jutting up like the wings of a bat. Mercedes let her pass. Nikki looped around Coco. “Move along, Nikki,” Coco cajoled. Lately, Nikki had become clingy. She made La-Monté’s bottles and massaged her mother’s aching wrists after work. At night, when Coco sat on the stairs outside waiting for La-Monté to exhaust himself with play, Nikki sometimes watched her from the windowsill.

  Coco could tell from Frankie’s posture beneath the field lights that the game wasn’t going well. The final inning was almost over. Mercedes played softball with some other kids on an adjoining field. La-Monté demanded to walk and Nikki chased him. The Emeralds lost—again. The teams snaked their way through the handshake line; Frankie kicked dirt in the dugout. He’d only got up to bat twice. He said nothing to Coco as they headed home.

  Coco pushed the stroller toward the parking lot. Cars were backing out. Nautica zoomed off on her bicycle. “Mercedes, watch Nautica!” Coco yelled. Nikki had her head turned toward Coco and Frankie and almost collided with a car. She recovered herself and pedaled to join her sisters. The parking lot emptied. The car sounds faded. Conversation wafted from a porch.

  Coco dreaded going home. Roaches ruled the kitchen and the bathroom. They sapped her will to clean. Pearl grew sluggish. Coco stopped and Pearl climbed on her mother’s back. “Where would you want to go if we was to move, Frankie?” Coco asked.

  “I ain’t going back to the Bronx,” he said.

  They walked quietly past For Sale signs, breathing in the smell of summer grass. La-Monté was wide awake, craning his neck forward from the stroller, looking up at the stars.

  Back at home, the girls went inside to get ready for bed. Frankie sat on the stoop and ate a plate of food that Coco had left for him in the microwave. La-Monté pushed a toy stroller belonging to Nautica. Coco followed as he zigzagged, occasionally ushering him away from the curb. La-Monté loved the street: some days, he never set foot outside the house. The stroller tipped sideways and La-Monté fell. He grunted as Coco propped him back up—he wanted to stand up on his own. Some boys weren’t allowed to play with strollers—at least not in public—but Coco didn’t care if her son played with girls�
� toys; he was still young. Frankie shaved La-Monté’s head and Coco dressed him rugged, like a hoodlum, but she didn’t want him acting like one.

  She smooched and hugged him with abandon. She nuzzled her nose into his chubby underarms. “You smell so good!” she sang. “My son.” Friends chided Coco for the softness, and she retorted, “That’s right. He is a mama’s boy.”

  Frankie, to Coco’s relief, didn’t try to toughen him up. Frankie kissed La-Monté hello and good-bye. Whenever Frankie came home and ate, he’d balance his plate on one leg and La-Monté on the other, and they’d watch baseball or pro wrestling. Frankie never minded when La-Monté dove onto his shoulders from the back of the couch or nestled in his lap.

  One of Frankie’s teammates stopped by. Mercedes popped her head outside. She hopped onto the stoop and did a quick dance move as though she were swinging a golf club.

  “Mercedes,” Coco said. “Upstairs, now.”

  “All right!” Mercedes said good-naturedly. She added, “If someone asked Mrs. Cormier to baby-sit me, I bet she would baby-sit me.”

  “All right, Mercedes,” Coco said. “Good night.”

  Sometimes Mercedes made her feel as if she had another full-time job. Coco said, “By the morning I feel like it’s been a whole shift at Garden Way.”

  Mercedes squeezed past an old mattress in the hallway and, climbing the stairs three at a time, disappeared inside.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  By the summer of 2001, Jessica was working at a security desk in the vast marble lobby of an international bank. When she received a raise to $16 an hour, she moved to a bigger apartment in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx. She split the $750 rent with Máximo and her older brother, Robert, who had recently divorced.

  Jessica wanted Serena to have her own bedroom, and Serena’s white-wire frame bed was the first new piece of furniture Jessica bought. Serena’s room was too small for the canopy Jessica dreamed of, but Jessica did what she could with the space. Lavender sheets and a matching comforter covered the brand-new mattress. Pink Disney curtains hung from the single window. In her own room, Jessica made do with old sheets, which she tacked up over her windows to reduce the draft. She covered her lumpy mattress with Lourdes’s cast-off brown-and-olive sateen floral spread. There were framed pictures of her children on every conceivable surface.

  The larger implications of Jessica’s move, however, were ambiguous. Hunts Point, in Serena’s words, “was straight-up ghetto.” She preferred the easy freedom of her previous block. In Hunts Point, people broke night on the sidewalk, blasted music, and slept late. Serena couldn’t walk unescorted to the train. She couldn’t sit outside in the evening. Her Tío Robert’s presence in the narrow hallways of the apartment was oppressive; even when he wasn’t home, there seemed to be an awareness of his impending arrival.

  After dinner, Jessica retreated into her bedroom and lost herself in one of Máximo’s true-crime novels. Máximo, who worked as a security guard at a school, lived at the gym. Robert played his oldies music until his anti-depressants kicked in, then fell into an uninterruptible sleep. Serena invited Jessica to join her in the sala, but Jessica didn’t like the types of movies Serena liked. Serena missed the closeness of Jessica’s old studio. “When we all in the same room, we spent time with each other,” Serena said. “Now we in separate rooms.”

  Serena preferred to spend her summer days at her best friend Priscilla’s rather than in the empty apartment at Hunts Point. Priscilla lived with her sister, two brothers, her mother, and stepfather on the top floor of a three-decker near White Plains Road. Priscilla’s neighborhood was working poor and working class—full of Albanians, Indians, Irish, Puerto Ricans, Italians, and Dominicans. Instead of the bullet-proof check cashiers, the bodegas and liquor stores shared the blocks with businesses that spoke of future-oriented days—tile and sprinkler shops, travel agencies, bakeries. The parents’ workaday routines limited the teenagers’ range of motion: no adults were home after Priscilla’s mother went to work at two, but she kept watch on the girls by telephone. Supplemental surveillance was provided by surprise visits by Priscilla’s gruff stepdad, Al, who worked for a towing company. When his red shiny truck rolled up, unannounced, the girls assumed that he was spying, but Al also liked to play video games between the dispatcher’s calls.

  The teenagers usually hung out with their friends on “the bench”—actually two benches—overlooking Priscilla’s driveway, in the shade of some fruit trees. Priscilla’s front yard set the summer stage for the drama, which was largely psychological. If the gang weren’t draped over the bench, which was warped from wear, they lined the four short stairs that led up to the front door. In constant fear of missing her mother’s calls, Priscilla never traveled beyond the radius of the portable phone.

  The charge of “acting ghetto” delineated acceptable and unacceptable behaviors among the kids and deflated tough posturing and hypocrisies. “Acting ghetto” included bragging about violence; claiming you saw a new movie in the theater when you really saw it on a bootleg video; cursing; wearing slippers or curlers to the store. The girls labeled each other as well. “I’m the good girl, Serena’s the bad one,” Priscilla said. The best friends drew the line pop-culturally: Serena liked Black Entertainment Television; Priscilla preferred MTV. Serena liked rap and R&B; Priscilla, Britney Spears. Bad implied loud, assertive; good meant quieter. Serena barreled through her shyness with impulsiveness; Priscilla withdrew and fretted. Priscilla liked boys with jobs who wanted commitment; Serena liked guys who dressed like hoodlums and knew how to kiss. Priscilla had a mad crush on the landlord’s son but had turned her cheek to his kiss because he wanted to date other people. She was sixteen, he was twenty-three.

  Serena said, “How do you know where the first kiss will lead?”

  “I’m not gonna kiss someone I’m not with,” Priscilla said defensively.

  “Kiss him first, and see what happens,” Serena said, and rolled her eyes.

  Serena had been kissing a boy named Derek, who lived in the neighborhood. He was fifteen years old, with an ex-girlfriend who was pregnant by him. Priscilla’s sister, Monique, dated Derek’s friend. The boys passed by nearly every hour. Once in a while, Serena and Monique ventured to the store to buy lollipops or up the block to the fire hydrant, which Derek would try to open until an old lady threatened to call the cops.

  Jessica didn’t approve of Derek since learning about his pregnant ex-girl. Jessica believed that his having sex with Serena was just a matter of time. “Either he’ll expect it from her—cuz you know if he’s sexually active, he’s gonna have to have it—or he’ll go to another girl,” she said. Serena didn’t agree, but she perceived the challenge much the same way as her mother did—as a competition between girls—and she worried about her rival’s long-term advantage: “I think when the baby comes, there’s gonna be a lot of problems. Cuz he’s gonna go to see the baby, and I’ll think he’s gonna see the mother,” she said.

  Serena had other, pressing problems. She was teetering on the edge of academic disaster; if she failed summer school, which seemed increasingly likely, she faced the embarrassing prospect of a third year of ninth grade. Jessica assumed that Serena’s educational failure was part of her daughter’s personality—“That’s just Serena,” said Jessica. Virginity was another thing entirely. But if Jessica complained that Serena spent too much time on her social life, Serena retorted, “You jealous I’m the one having fun?” If Jessica mentioned pregnancy, Serena said, “You the one never should have had kids.” Jessica complained bitterly that Serena put friends before family. Serena coldly reminded Jessica about a lifetime of being pushed to the side for Jessica’s men. When they were younger, Serena had always remained behind, longing for Jessica, waiting; now that Jessica had finally created a home for her, it seemed to Jessica that all Serena wanted to do was leave.

  Lourdes expressed more confidence in Serena, whose success she viewed in opposition to both her own and Jessica’s experi
ence: “I haven’t gotten nowhere because, from being a mother, I became a mother again for my grandchildrens.” Lourdes spoke her mind to Serena, who laughed nervously at her grandmother’s directness: “Honey, the boys that are growing up now, it’s only for your pussy. A girl has to be smart now. Study. Be somebody. So when you become somebody, you don’t have to have this straggly shit on your lips, sitting on your ass, to see if they could support you. You could support yourself. They respect you, because they know they could lose you right there and then. You don’t need them, you understand?”

  Serena wasn’t the only one who seemed to be passing Jessica by. Shortly after Jessica met Máximo, she’d introduced Elaine to John, one of Máximo’s friends; Elaine and her former boyfriend had split, but remained on good terms. Elaine and John became a couple; now they led such a busy social life, Elaine had to carve out time for Jessica. John treated Elaine to dinner. He took her dancing. John had already introduced Elaine to his mother and his six-year-old son.

  Jessica had yet to meet any of Máximo’s children. They’d become engaged—but only because she surprised him with a ring at a seafood restaurant on City Island. Now she suspected he was cheating on her, although he denied it. She said she’d traced his cell phone calls and spoken with two girls who said they were involved with him. Neither sounded surprised to hear from Jessica; they’d been suspicious of his living arrangement; humiliatingly, Máximo had told them he was living with an aunt.