Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (22 page)

Coco tossed a big party for Mercedes’s first birthday. First birthdays, like sweet sixteens, were a significant milestone; Mercedes had made a whole year, and Coco wanted to mark the accomplishment. Foxy knew a thing or two about throwing parties. For one Halloween celebration when Coco was younger, she and the kids had gathered leaves outside, then spread them around on the floor. Richie had made a scarecrow and Foxy had stuck a Philly blunt in its mouth. For Mercedes’s birthday, Foxy charged $2 at the door. Jessica didn’t have to pay—she was family. She wore the striped Gap polo shirt that Boy George had given her after their first date. She had a beeper in the left pocket of her jeans and another in her right. The bun on her head was covered with a green bandanna. Coco’s ex-boyfriend Wishman’s little brother Edwin watched Jessica dance.

Wishman and Edwin didn’t get along. Wishman was the street type; Edwin was more of a mama’s boy. That day, Edwin was baby-sitting his infant sister. He brought her into Coco’s bedroom to change her diaper, and the next thing you know, there was Jessica, leaning against the bedroom door. He recognized her as the same girl in the collage on Coco’s wall. Jessica was even prettier in person. “God, you’re so gentle, that’s so sweet, you’re so gentle,” Jessica said. “Someday you’re gonna make a good father.”

Later that night, the police raided the party, then unsuccessfully tried to convince Foxy to let them use her apartment for surveillance: they were still watching the Cuban drug dealers who were working out of the building across the street. Edwin and his friend Freddy gave Jessica and Daisy a ride to the apartment in Manhattan. Jessica invited the boys upstairs. “So what’s the sleeping arrangements?” Jessica asked. Nobody said anything. Jessica had an idea. She called Daisy into the bedroom. The girls reemerged in only teddies. Freddy looked Daisy over and agreed to stay. He and Daisy took the living room.

Jessica realized that Edwin was nervous. She put on a bathrobe to help him relax. “I just need to do some stretches to unwind,” she said. She touched her toes. She reached her arms up to the sky. She showed him her tattoos, and how she could almost do a split.

“Please,” Edwin said. “Please stop doing that. Will you please stop doing that?”

“Yo, why?” she asked, mock innocently. She had the bathrobe on. He was fully clothed. “You’re a good-looking boy.”

“I’m not a boy.”

“Well, you’re a good-looking young man, you know.”

“I’m not so young.”

“Yeah, well, then, let’s go to it.”

“For real?” he asked.

Jessica laughed.

He said, “You sure?”

“He was sixteen at the time,” Jessica said much later, still tender at the memory. She thought she would have to lead the way. “But,” she added, “he proved me wrong.”

Jessica started spending a lot of time at Sunny’s with Edwin. Sunny liked having her around. Edwin later said that she was the only girlfriend of his that his mother ever liked, even though she was the type of girl that mothers warned boys about. Sunny still lived down the block from Coco, on Andrews Avenue. Jessica and Edwin shared a bottom bunk. Another of Edwin’s brothers slept on top. Wishman had his own room because his fights with his brothers got too physical; Sunny, who also had a toddler and a baby, couldn’t take the arguing. One time the boys got so rough with one another that she’d had to call the cops.

Sunny never had to wake Edwin twice for school. She and Jessica spent afternoons talking, sprawled across Sunny’s big bed. Sunny remembered how hurt Jessica was about Lourdes, whom she described as self-absorbed and always into her men.

Sometimes Milagros brought the twins and Jessica kept them. Sunny didn’t mind the additions to the crowded apartment: children played together, and the more there were, the easier it was to baby-sit. Serena sometimes stayed with Coco at Foxy’s, or at Milagros’s, but mostly she remained at Lourdes’s.

George eventually tracked down Jessica at Sunny’s. He wondered aloud what type of man dated freaks—like the freak Jessica would become if someone happened to toss acid in her pretty face. Was it true that she had AIDS? That her daughters were skinny and starving? “That’s sad,” he said scornfully. Sunny grabbed the receiver away from Jessica. George suggested that Sunny keep a close eye on her schoolboy son. Sunny called the phone company and requested a block on the phone to prevent incoming calls from jail. Soon after, her line went dead. Sunny went down to the pay phone and the phone company informed her that someone had called and requested that the service be shut off. Then a delivery boy appeared at Sunny’s door, armed with a dozen white roses. The creepy bouquet included a card from George. He hoped she liked the roses; her son’s funeral would be filled with flowers just like them.

Jessica still kept in touch with George. She said numbly, “If George wanted me dead, I’d have been dead by now.” George’s mother arranged conference calls: Jessica used a pay phone on the corner of 176th and Andrews, George called in from prison, and his mother hooked them up. The pay phone was the same one where Cesar used to hang out, with Coco watching from above.

From Sunny’s living room, Jessica heard a cop-call. She was baby-sitting Sunny’s daughters and her twins. The cop-call—
Po-Po
—was a neighborly warning sounded by whoever spotted the police, for anyone who might like to know; it was not a rare sound on Andrews. Jessica walked to the kitchen window to see if anything interesting was going on.

The street had been blocked. Cruisers had parked and others were pulling up. Then she heard, “Police! Open up!
Policía!
”

“I was like, ‘How can all this be for me? Damn, I’m gonna have to pay for somebody else’s mistakes and my tears are just coming out,’ ” Jessica later said. A police officer told her to find someone to collect the children. She called Coco, who ran the three blocks from Foxy’s. Coco comforted the girls, who were hysterical, as an officer handcuffed Jessica and escorted her downstairs.

Since George’s conviction, narcotics detectives had been driving his confiscated cars, and they were just as flashy as they’d been when
George cruised around in them. In the ongoing game between the police and the dealers, George’s cars signaled that the government had won the latest round.

That day, waiting outside on Andrews Avenue, the cherubic Obsession case agent sat plumply in the driver’s seat of one of the Mercedes. Jessica recognized him from her long days in court during George’s trial. Another detective climbed in the back. Jessica recalled him leaning forward, his breath hot in her ear. “We hear you’re a freak,” he said.

“Your mother’s a freak,” Jessica said sweetly.

George’s miniature TV sat silent in the dashboard. Jessica asked the case agent if she could make a call. She couldn’t call Lourdes; Lourdes didn’t have phone service; she wasn’t even making her rent. Jessica unsuccessfully tried to reach Sunny to let her know that Coco had all the kids. The Bronx disappeared behind Jessica. In the passenger seat, she headed toward DEA headquarters in Manhattan, in the same Mercedes-Benz in which George had collected her on the night of their first date, three years earlier.

From the MCC, like George before her, Jessica called his mother collect. Rita told Jessica a time to call back the following day. At the prearranged time, George called in on a separate line and his mother hooked them up:

“Well, tell that bitch now she knows what it is to be in jail,” Jessica could hear him shouting.

“Fuck him,” she said.

“Fuck her,” he said. Then they talked.

An NYPD case agent later said that there was no plan to arrest Jessica that spring. They had, in fact, been keeping tabs on her in the hope that she might lead them to Obsession money, or to workers still at large and further up the pyramid. But, for reasons that were never entirely clear, the strategy suddenly changed. George’s lawyer believed that Jessica had been arrested in the hope that she would testify against the Obsession hit man, Taz, who had been arrested months earlier. According to the case agent, however, George put out a contract on Jessica. The plan for the hit was overheard on a prison wiretap: George would try to get Isabel to invite Jessica dancing, then have her pretend that she needed to make a phone call once they got to the club. She’d ask Jessica to accompany her outside, where Jessica would get shot. Her murder would be made to look like a botched robbery.

It took Jessica two months of working the telephone and writing letters
on her own behalf to scrape together the $5,000 bail. Some of the money came from Elaine’s father’s sister-in-law, whom Jessica considered an aunt. Boy George reminded Jessica of what he used to say whenever she asked for money for Lourdes, or for one of the problems her family always had: “What the fuck do they do for you?”

“They my family.”

“That’s your
family,
” he would say, mocking her. “That’s your family, huh? My family do more for you than your family.”

“It’s true,” conceded Jessica.

Jessica mailed Coco and Edwin visiting forms. Since they were both under eighteen, they had to get their mothers’ signatures. That Mother’s Day, Coco was the only one who remembered to mail Jessica a card.

During the time between Jessica’s arrest and her sentencing, she and Coco became closer than they’d ever been before. Jessica wrote her niece from jail:

To: My Baby Mercedes . . .

Hi Mercedes how are you feeling? Well as for your titi jessica I’m chillin. I miss you so-so much. I can’t wait to see you. I wonder if you forgot about me, or when you would go to sleep on my chest. I should be home for a little while then I’ll have to go away for a long time. But I want you to remember one thing that your titi jessica loves you a whole Big Bunch. I know you can’t read this now but when you get older you’ll read it and see how much I love my little niece. Be a Good Girl and take care of your sister and Mommy. Love always your titi JESSICA.

Jessica told Coco in her letters that she was soon going to make bail. Her brother Robert and his girl, Shirley, had agreed to sign for her bail bond. Jessica had decided to plead guilty. “I was brought up that if you do something, you do it, and you don’t stick the blame on somebody else,” she said. Jessica’s lawyer had made arrangements for her to turn herself in at the beginning of September, to give her time with her family. She already had her summer planned; Coco was flattered that her sister-in-law trusted her:

Yo, if I’m not pregnant now, which I doubt, I’m sure gonna get pregnant for the two months I’m in Edwin’s house, we’re gonna have sex, for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, dessert, non stop until
I drop, or he drops. . . . Coco I’m gonna finish this letter tomorrow because I took my sleeping pills and their starting to take effect.

When Jessica finally got out, it was Coco whom she called to bring her clothes—no way was she going to return to the Bronx in a prison uniform in July, with everyone outside. Coco assembled what she could find: black leggings, black sandals, and a lime green blouse. Jessica scooted into a bathroom at the courthouse to change and put on her makeup. She and Coco took the subway straight to Andrews, to Sunny’s. Jessica’s return was like the first day out with a new baby: