Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (23 page)

Edwin, Jessica’s here!

Hey, Jessica, I thought you was gone.

Jessica, you got fat!

Jessica saw Edwin’s head pop out of Sunny’s kitchen window, then disappear. The next thing she knew, she was in his arms. She stayed at Sunny’s until curfew, then borrowed money for a cab back to Lourdes’s. By the end of the week, she’d moved in with Sunny. Coco stopped by; she and Wishman flirted, then disappeared in Wishman’s room. Sunny liked that Jessica and Coco were friends. The girls kept her sons indoors. July in Morris Heights meant the streets were at their wildest.

That summer was a precious time. Some nights, Jessica and Edwin sat on the fire escape for hours, suspended over Andrews, considering everything. “He even told me about his dreams and fears,” she said. He was the only boy she had loved besides Tito who didn’t believe in hitting girls no matter what they did. When Jessica smacked Edwin with a belt while he was sleeping—some girl had called to say she was pregnant—Edwin didn’t get heated. He simply said, “Jessica, you crazy. Calm down.”

In September 1991, the night before Jessica reported back to the MCC, Sunny threw a party, and Coco met Milagros for the first time. Mercedes and Nikki had fallen asleep, and Milagros, who was on her way to score some coke, helped Coco carry them home. After leaving the girls at Foxy’s, they returned to the party. They tried not to laugh at Elaine, who’d started crying while she toasted Jessica. Defiance was one thing in the face of sadness, but people got uncomfortable with the softer side of unbearable things.

Jessica, Elaine, and Daisy decided to walk back to Lourdes’s. On Burnside Avenue, Jessica stopped and rapped on the window of a basement apartment where Tito was staying. He was still out on bail, and they’d made plans to meet earlier that evening at a club on East
Tremont and Webster called the Devil’s Nest. Neither went, but Tito was glad to catch a last glimpse of Jessica. “Click click click and she was gone,” he said.

The girls broke night. The next morning, Lourdes refused to come out of her bedroom to say good-bye. Edwin, Elaine, and Daisy accompanied Jessica to the courthouse. She surprised them by suggesting the subway, even though they had enough money between them for a cab. “I was trying to drag it out, it was the hardest thing I ever had to do,” she said. The guards made Jessica leave all her jewelry with her sister.

Later that evening, alone in the MCC, Jessica began to cry. She remembered thinking, “I can’t believe I turned myself in. Why didn’t I run away?”

C
esar arrived home unannounced weeks later, in October 1991. He stripped on the threshold of his mother’s apartment; when she opened the door, his prison-issued clothes were puddled around his feet. Prison clothes brought a house bad luck. Lourdes ushered Cesar inside and peered down the hall conspiratorially. She thought he’d escaped. When Coco, who was visiting, heard Lourdes’s happy shouting, she guessed that it was Cesar. She grabbed Nikki and hid.

Cesar had completed the minimum two years of his sentence. His release had been approved by the Division for Youth Board of Parole. The apartment to which he returned on Mount Hope Place was not much different from the one he’d left on Vyse, but the wear showed on his family. At forty, Lourdes had lost some of her resilience. Little Star, who was six, looked like a miniature mother, with dark circles under her eyes. Brittany and Stephanie were with Milagros, who had moved down the street from Coco’s mother’s, on Andrews Avenue. Robert had returned from Florida and now lived a regimented life in Brooklyn. He worked as a teller at a bank. Elaine lived with Angel and their two young sons in a tiny one-bedroom on Morrison. She was fighting to keep her house in order—her husband away from drugs and prison, and her two young sons away from their father’s influence. Coco, with whom Cesar was still in love, had a baby that did not belong to him, and Jessica was stuck at the MCC.

Things had changed in Cesar’s FMP family, too. His old compatriot Rocco was still with the ambitious schoolgirl, who seemed determined to change Rocco into a family man. Rocco was getting his GED and only robbing drug dealers part time. He encouraged Tito to stay in school and rob after class—Tito stood a chance to win a baseball scholarship—but Tito dropped out. Now he was dealing drugs and—unknown to Cesar—heavily using cocaine. Since Tito’s affair with Jessica, the friendship with Cesar had cooled. Cesar later said that he had never entirely trusted Tito anyway. Tito had always struck Cesar as tentative, and a reluctance to act could be dangerous. Tito seemed even more paranoid than before. Only Mighty, who had gotten out of prison the day before Cesar, seemed familiar, like home.

But on Cesar’s first day back, Lourdes nodded toward her bedroom,
where Coco was hiding. Coco was so nervous that she couldn’t hold her hands still enough to fix her hair, which she’d dyed blond.

“Hey, how you doing?” he asked, opening the bedroom door. His voice! She’d forgotten what it sounded like close in person, away from the echoing noise of a prison visiting room. Cesar looked more beautiful than ever to Coco, and he’d always been beautiful. His formerly thin arms had muscles. His stomach, which she saw because he rubbed it slowly as he spoke, had ripples. His presence made her head hurt—although the pain might have been caused by her habit of pulling the topknot of her ponytail too tight. “Let me see your daughter?” he asked. Coco stared at his lips as he smiled at Nikki. It was impossible not to smile when you saw her—a grinning mocha baby with a splotch of birthmark on her chubby cheek. Her eyes had Kodak’s long lashes, and like Coco’s, they were bright. “She’s beautiful, God bless her,” Cesar said. That was all. He turned and left.

That same afternoon, Lourdes’s husband, Que-Que, was arrested. “I’m glad you are taking him or I would have killed him myself!” Lourdes told the police. Their marriage had deteriorated since the move from Vyse to Mount Hope. Lourdes and Que-Que had been cocaine companions, but she said that he’d since pursued a private relationship with heroin, and that the challenge of getting the dope made him more sneaky and remote: he stole food stamps; pawned her jewelry, including her Irish friendship wedding ring; she couldn’t trust him with the rent. “A pothead? Fine. Sniff a little coke? I understand. But oh no, not heroin,” Lourdes said.

A condition of Cesar’s parole was that he either get a job or return to school. He chose school, thinking it would be easier to skip. He enrolled in Bronx Community College. The BCC campus was on the west side, close to Foxy’s. Cesar and Coco saw each other every day, and they immediately started sleeping together again. Coco stayed over at Lourdes’s with Mercedes. Cesar walked Serena the half block to her school, then went to school himself. It wasn’t always easy to rouse Little Star; she’d grown accustomed to Lourdes’s schedule, breaking night and sleeping until early afternoon. But sometimes Coco woke to Serena’s attempts to wake Cesar. “Tío,” Little Star would say. “Tío, I gotta go to school. Wake up, Tío, wake up.” She would already have fed and dressed herself.

“Take her, Coco,” Cesar would mumble from beneath his pillow. Coco didn’t mind. She’d grown fond of Serena, but she wondered how such an optimistic nickname had landed on a girl with such sad eyes. Little Star hardly seemed destined for brightness; she was more like an old lady. Her gravity spooked Coco; once, while she and Cesar were making
love, Coco spotted Little Star peeking through the wide gap underneath Cesar’s door. She frequently asked Coco when Jessica was coming home. “I don’t know, Mami,” Coco would say; then she would try to distract her with the offer of a game or a song. Coco preferred the sunny take on things. Children should be rambunctious. Coco said, “Serena was too grown for a six-year-old.”

Sometimes Coco brought Serena back to Foxy’s, where Coco lived with Mercedes and Nikki in her bedroom. Serena was an easy child; she never asked for anything or made a fuss. Nikki, on the other hand, had colic, and Coco couldn’t handle her. At night, Coco would pound on the wall between her bedroom and her mother’s room until Foxy or Richie came and took Nikki away. Some afternoons, Coco left Nikki with Foxy—or with Sheila, Nikki’s godmother and Foxy’s neighbor—and took Serena and Mercedes to wait for Cesar to get out of class.

Bronx Community College sat on a hill above University Avenue, which overlooked Aqueduct Park. Watching the students, Coco wished she had never dropped out of school. Cesar shared whatever he was learning—math, new words. She liked math best. He once teased her at Lourdes’s, in the shower, when she mispronounced
superb
“super-B.” Within a month, though, Cesar stopped attending college. The household needed money. He took a job overseeing crack sales just below the college, in Aqueduct, and Coco and Mercedes waited for him there.

Privately, Cesar was loving; publicly, he referred to Coco only as his daughter’s mother. He brought other girls home, but they didn’t stay the night. Coco learned to wait out his company; she pretended that she didn’t mind the steady stream through his room. If he broke night, she and Mercedes slept with Lourdes, or she retreated to Foxy’s, or she and Mercedes relocated to Lourdes’s couch.

But if Coco was resigned, Mercedes wasn’t having it. Sometimes Cesar would drive her around in Rocco’s car. If he offered a girl a ride, Mercedes refused to relinquish the passenger seat. She acted as though the gray Ford Taurus were her private limousine. “My chair!” she’d say, or, “Mommy’s chair!” and the girl would have to sit in back.

Coco was hoping that her patience would restore Cesar’s faith in her loyalty. She briefly took a job at Youngland, a children’s clothing store on Fordham, but Lourdes, who had agreed to watch Mercedes, complained about money, and Coco didn’t earn enough to pay her more. Regardless, Mercedes gave Coco a legitimate excuse for her constant visits to Mount Hope:

Mercedes wants to see her father.

Mercy’s crying for her father.

I swear, this girl, she is so attached!

Coco minded Cesar’s other girls less as long as they kept changing, but then he started up with Lizette, and there were fewer other girls. Cesar knew Lizette from Vyse. By November, as far as Coco could tell, there was only herself, Lizette, and Lizette’s best friend, Vicky. Cesar brought Vicky into his bedroom after Lizette went to school. Once, he called to Coco while Lizette showered. “Bring the baby,” he said. But the thought of having sex with him right after he’d been with another girl made Coco uncomfortable.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“You just had sex with her but—”

“You don’t like it, leave.”

“I don’t want to leave,” Coco said.

“Then let’s go.”

Cesar still loved Coco, but he wanted to punish her for Nikki. He’d warned her when he was in Harlem Valley, “Coco, I am going to do everything in my power to make you suffer when I come out.” Besides the other girls, he intentionally criticized Coco’s appearance, twisting what made her happy and confident into a source of embarrassment. Instead of nudging her to stop her bad habit of picking her face, he acted disgusted. Instead of soothing Coco’s self-consciousness about Nikki, he harped on her betrayal: “Every time I see his daughter I’m reminded of that.”