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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Kids leaped after the balloons, some of which had been tied to a fan. Lourdes sweated in the kitchen. Jessica passed out the corsages; Serena cut the cake. Meanwhile, Priscilla fielded increasingly distressed phone calls from Derek, who was trying to figure out whether or not he should come; Serena couldn’t decide herself. Lourdes, after learning that Derek’s ex-girlfriend was pregnant, had warned Serena that she was going to have a talk with him. “Now is not the place,” Serena argued. “It’s hard enough to come and not know nobody.” Before long, everyone was putting in their two cents. Serena burst into tears, then locked herself in Lourdes’s bedroom; Emilio was already hiding out there, with all the furniture that had been dragged away to make room to dance; Roxanne’s new baby lay asleep on a towel on the floor.

  Serena sobbed into her hands. She imitated her grandmother, her mothers, her aunt: “What makes you think if he got one girl pregnant, he’s not going to get you pregnant?” She answered herself, “Who says I’m going to spread my legs?” Priscilla knocked and reported in: Derek was on his way! Serena worked herself up into a frenzy: “They are so worried about me having sex. She has fourteen grandchildren. Why me? They don’t care if their sons do it, only their daughters. If I was a grandson, do you think they would all be pressuring me?” she cried. “If I want to have sex, I’m going to have sex. Everybody has sex. They all want me to change. I don’t care what my family, friends, or nobody says about me, I am the way I am and I don’t care!”

  She would be pregnant within six months.

  That evening, when the limousine arrived, Jessica and Elaine escorted Serena outside, covering her eyes. Monique and Derek showed up in a livery cab just as Serena’s sisters and cousins and friends excitedly filled the seats.

  “Sorry, too late, go home!” said Priscilla, dismissing her sister. Serena did the same to Derek. Derek stormed away. Monique followed him. Serena climbed into the limo in a huff. Jessica watched Monique and whispered to Elaine, “What’s her problem?” The adults crowded around the limo window to send the children off. The coolers had beer and soda.

  “No drinking!” Jessica said. “I forgot to ask them to take it out!”

  “Have fun!” Elaine said. Her sons, Angel and Edriam, and their friend Josh were going along. Serena had known Josh from childhood.

  Jessica warned, “Remember to be back by twelve or else they’ll charge it to the credit card! Don’t break anything!”

  Someone passed Brittany the clutch of pink balloons. The divider between the driver and the kids dropped down. “Where do you want to go?” the chauffeur asked.

  “Times Square!” Serena replied. They snapped pictures.

  “Smile!”

  “Say welfare!”

  “Welfare!” they shouted.

  “Say food stamps!”

  “Food stamps!”

  “Say WIC!”

  “WIC!”

  They tested the buttons. They clicked the divider up, then down, then up, then down. Turned on the heater, then the air conditioner, then flashed a neon strip of light. Ice cubes sailed back and forth. Serena handed around cans of Coke, with the Blimpie’s napkins provided by the limo company.

  “Lower the music!” she yelled as she dialed Derek on her new Minnie Mouse cell phone. “Hello,” she said. “What you doing? . . . Yo, son, don’t catch an attitude. Bye!” She hung up.

  The limousine turned off the West Side Highway and moved toward Forty-second Street and inched through the tourists. “Times Square,” the chauffeur announced. Josh stuck his head out the window.

  “We’re going to get in trouble,” Stephanie said.

  “Ya’ll get your head in the window!” Serena said.

  “Ya’ll get a limo to cover up?” said Josh, astonished. He called out to a stretch limousine as it glided by.

  “That’s a Navigator,” said Angel.

  “Why don’t I have one of those? I could have fit everybody in there,” Serena said morosely. Brittany and Stephanie each had a window. “Let me sit by the window,” asked Serena. They refused. “My greedy sisters being greedy with the windows,” muttered Serena. Stephanie finally gave in.

  The driver needed to move along or park the car. Did they want to take a walk?

  “Why we gonna get out and walk?” asked Tabitha.

  “Nobody gots money,” Serena said.

  “Let’s go rob a bum,” Josh joked.

  “Stoopit,” said Serena.

  “Where would you like to go?” asked the chauffeur.

  “Somewhere far!” Tabitha said.

  “New Jersey?” Priscilla asked.

  “Can we get out of Manhattan?” Josh asked. “Let’s go to a bridge.”

  “There’s mad bridges,” said Serena. The kids paused uncertainly.

  “The Brooklyn Bridge?”

  “The George Washington Bridge?”

  They wanted to leave the familiar world behind, but no one knew the direction out. “Mister,” Josh asked the chauffeur. “You must know everything. You been everywhere. Where should we go? The waterfront?”

  The chauffeur didn’t respond. Someone suggested the bench, and so they cruised back up to Priscilla’s. Nothing was happening at the bench. “Where do you want to go?” the chauffeur asked again.

  “Tremont,” Tabitha said. She still lived there, in Rocco’s old building. She wanted to see her boyfriend. She borrowed Serena’s cell phone to alert him and instructed the chauffeur, “Tremont near the Grand Concourse and Anthony.”

  The old neighborhood had changed in small ways, imperceptible to outsiders. Some of Tremont’s hungry spiritedness had been subdued. Instead of its edgy hustle, Jessica’s old block had the dusky veneer of a dying industrial town. Under the policies of New York City’s prosecutorial mayor, police had frog-marched the dealers off the streets; some of them were now working indoors. Others had moved north, upstate, to small cities like Troy. But the quiet wasn’t calm: it was as though the whole neighborhood were fronting.

  The super of Jessica’s old building had passed his job down to his son. The old apartment wasn’t quite an apartment anymore: the son had broken up the units and rented out single rooms to a collection of unattached men—motherless men; husbands whose women had given up on them, or men who had given up on themselves; immigrants. The limousine pulled up in front of the old steps, right where Boy George had collected Jessica, and where Cesar and Rocco and Mighty and Tito used to watch girls and hang out; now only a few boys were there, leaning against a car.

  Serena and Tabitha climbed out of the limo into the balmy summer night. The streets seemed strangely empty. Tabitha’s boyfriend spotted her from the opposite side of Tremont. He tried to keep his cool pose as he approached, slipping between the passing cars, but the agility of his movements belied his eagerness. Tabitha flew toward him as though she were running for her life. He lifted her and twirled her around and placed her safely on the sidewalk. They lingered in the shadows.

  “C’mon,” Serena said, ushering out the stragglers. “Let’s go for a walk.” Her stomach hurt; she needed air. She wondered if the nausea came from the ride or from the “hoochie drink” her Tío Robert had prepared for her the night before. Her sisters and cousins and friends stepped onto the sidewalk. For a moment, they looked lost. The limo driver stepped out, too. “Don’t go far,” he said.

  Serena peered east, down Tremont, toward Anthony. Tabitha and her boyfriend were just turning the corner, headed toward Mount Hope. Serena led the way, following the lovers. She passed her old elementary school. Elaine’s oldest son suggested a visit to his grandmother, who lived nearby. She wasn’t home. Aside from Tabitha’s mother, they didn’t know anyone else in the neighborhood, although most of them had been born there. Their time was running out: soon it would be midnight. Serena herded the procession of sisters and cousins and friends back to the car.

  Jessica fumed when she learned about the stop on Tremont: “I wouldn’t have paid for a limo if they wanted to go for a walk.” Even if they wa
nted to walk, why pick Tremont? And if they had to choose Tremont, why walk east? “Anthony? Mount Hope? That’s a drug-infested block, there’s shootings there,” Jessica said. “They could have at least walked in the opposite direction, by the Concourse.” In the Bronx, you always had to watch where you were going. The smallest moves in the wrong direction could have enormous consequences.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Coco’s family wasn’t at Serena’s birthday party, but they heard about it, and it made Coco feel bad for all she couldn’t do. She had wanted to rent a limousine for Mercedes’s fifth-grade graduation, but there had been the suspension, followed by probation and counseling, and then the roof had caved in—literally. A whole chunk of Coco’s kitchen ceiling came down, after a weekend’s rainstorm. And then roaches—wave upon wave of roaches—made use of the sudden hole. Coco left increasingly desperate messages for her landlord, but the landlord never called back. “That lady have a habit of not returning calls,” Coco observed dryly. Then Coco and Frankie broke up again, but this time they’d even parted on kind terms, exhausted from the recriminations and arguing. Next, Coco lost her job: Garden Way closed. Not long after, the authorities discontinued Pearl’s SSI benefits; “She does too good in school,” Coco said. Within weeks, Rent-A-Center retrieved the velveteen green sectional couch that had effectively furnished the living room, and cable cut off access. Frankie brought milk and Pampers for La-Monté and called every night to calm him because he had trouble falling asleep without his father; then the phone company shut off the phone. In the barrage of trouble, Coco’s worries about Mercedes had once again been eclipsed.

  By the end of July, the infestation was so bad that roaches were crawling out of the ketchup bottle and inside the TV screen. Everyone slept on the raft of the double-sized bunk bed in the center of the living room; Coco had dragged it away from the walls so that the roaches couldn’t crawl directly onto the children. But even with the moat, nobody was sleeping much; every time someone had to pee, Coco had to stomp the way to the bathroom, flicking on lights—where there were bulbs—disrupting the roaches with her own maternal parade. The damp bathroom was so bug-ridden that the children didn’t want to use it: Pearl shunned her beloved tub; Nikki, who was ten, began to wet her pants again, which she hadn’t for years; then Naughty, who’d never had the problem, caught it.

  Mercedes bravely slept on an old couch. In the morning, unasked, she approached the hallway closet, where Coco had stockpiled the children’s clean clothes. Nikki, Nautica, and Pearl—afraid to stand on the floor—stood and watched from the couch: opening the door inevitably unleashed a shower of roaches. But Mercedes just hopped back, let them fall, stomped to make them scramble, and then began shaking out the clothes so her sisters could dress.

  Mercedes hadn’t expected a limousine ride for her graduation. But what she’d wished for on her last two birthdays was equally impossible—she wanted her parents to be together, and she wanted her father home, in the house.

  Last year, before the arrival of Cesar’s new baby daughter, Mercedes’s birthday had been just right. Coco took her and Nautica to visit their father, and their parents got along. Cesar had matured notably in the fifteen months since he’d last seen his daughters, and his change of heart was evident.

  Ordinarily, when Coco did manage to bring them, Cesar made his displeasure at the rarity of her visits known, and Mercedes had to anxiously defend her mother against her father’s silent treatment and his quips. That day, however, Mercedes had been relieved of the duty of diplomacy. After Cesar had kissed and hugged his daughters, he’d welcomed Coco. “Wow, man,” he’d said warmly, “you got fat.”

  The visit took place in the honor room, where inmates had more freedom of movement. Inmates were allowed to use the honor room if they’d gone sixty days without a disciplinary infraction, and Cesar easily qualified. He’d been programming consistently—he’d already taken Alternatives to Violence, Frontline Anti-Aggression, Latinos en Progreso, General Business, Printing, and Parenting. He volunteered for a diversion program that brought teenagers into the prison, in the hope of keeping them outside.

  Coco relaxed as soon as she realized that Cesar wasn’t going to lecture her. Then Mercedes relaxed, and Nautica, who was six, amused them all by running around, dancing crazy, singing silly. “She was like a little Energizer Bunny,” Cesar said. Nautica’s abandon teased out Mercedes’s levity. Mercedes had become buried in self-consciousness—at ten, she already thought she was too tall, that her eyebrows connected unappealingly, that her stomach was fat. Her head now reached up to Cesar’s chin. Cesar was stunned by Mercedes’s height. He thought she was perfect. But he hadn’t remembered Coco as quite so short. One of his friends mistook Coco for his daughter. “No, man,” Cesar told him, “that’s the mother of my kids.”

  The girls admired their father’s biceps and made fun of his Afro. He’d explained that he was growing it out until Giselle gave birth, just as he’d done before Nautica was born.

  “I’m always going to be the oldest one,” Mercedes said.

  Cesar smiled. Mercedes and Nautica picked his Afro with their fingers and twisted small clumps into ponytails. Coco couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You find this real entertaining, right? Hilarious?” he said companionably.

  The old Cesar wouldn’t have stood for it—not in public, in front of other men—his head sprouting a garden of dizzy antennae pointing every which way. When the girls performed songs and cheers, he clapped and sang freely. He danced, which sent his daughters into gut-clutching giggles, and played round after round of patty-cake.

  He later said, “I don’t want to be on a visit with them and they want to play and I go, ‘No, sit down. No, be quiet. No.’ ” Everything was Yes. Yes to countless games of cards and checkers and tic-tac-toe. Yes to all the candy Nautica retrieved from the vending machine; at home, Nautica and her sisters only got a quarter, and she had to decide between the miniature bags of Skittles and the jellies she loved. Mercedes and her father shared four packs of his favorite barbecue chicken wings, which she heated for him in the microwave. They took pictures when the click-click came—all four of them, together. They acted like a family. Coco later said how strange it was—how if they’d been on the outside, even on a birthday, they would never have spent the day like this.

  Toward the end of the visit, Nautica begged Cesar to give her a pony ride, as he had when she was little, where he bounced her like a piece of popcorn on his knees. He did—for a good ten minutes. Then he held her lengthwise like a barbell and pushed her into the air. Mercedes watched, her awe and longing clear. When Cesar began to spin Nautica around, Mercedes couldn’t contain her desire. “Can you do that to me?” she asked breathlessly.

  She caught herself as quickly, and her expression turned stony. The hope became a dare. Since she was a baby, no one had been able, or willing, to carry her. She weighed 130 pounds now.

  Cesar placed Nautica down and squatted before Mercedes. Drawing out the moment, he rubbed his chin. Then, very seriously, he examined his big hands. He measured the width of his grip below Mercedes’s knees. Mercedes had braced herself for rejection; then, the next thing she knew, she was up in the air. She went rigid with excitement and terror. “No, Daddy!” she shrieked giddily.

  He adjusted her on his shoulders. She clutched his hair and dug her legs into his armpits. Then he paraded his daughter around the honor room and into the regular visiting area, where they took another lap past the inmates, who smiled and nodded as Cesar introduced his oldest girl. He pushed out the door to the enclosed cement courtyard. An April wind had whipped up, and everything was flying, so he quickly ducked back inside, exaggerating the drop as they went over the threshold.

  “Daddyyy!” Mercedes squealed, nearly losing her balance. She regained it as he steadied. He headed back to their table, where Nautica grinned and Coco gazed up at them, like a little girl in awe of a Christmas tree. Mercedes was trying not to smile but she couldn’t help i
t. “I’m going to fall! Daddy! I’m too heavy!” she said urgently.

  “Relax, I ain’t going to drop you, don’t worry,” Cesar assured her. He’d been lifting weights almost daily for the last five years. To himself, he said, “Listen, you light as a feather to me.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a book of nonfiction. I was present for much of what is depicted here; some scenes were recounted to me. Hundreds of hours of written and tape-recorded interviews were supplemented with other research, including court transcripts; medical, academic, financial, legal, police, and prison records; and personal letters and diaries. I have generally referred to the Administration for Children’s Services by its former name, BCW (Bureau of Child Welfare), as that was the term commonly used by the subjects of this book. Most of the spoken words quoted here were uttered in my presence; the remaining direct quotes come from government wiretaps transcribed by me, and from recollected experiences and exchanges that were assembled and confirmed through overlapping primary and secondary-source interviews. In those cases where someone is said to have “thought” or “believed” something, those thoughts and beliefs were described and recounted to me by that person. Physical descriptions come from visits to locations. There are no conflated events or composite characters in this book. Only the names of some individuals have been changed, principally to afford the children a measure of privacy.