Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (24 page)

Within weeks, Lizette was pregnant, and her mother dumped her at Lourdes’s. Lizette remembered her saying to Lourdes, “I’m very ashamed of my daughter and what she did. You can keep her.” At first, Lourdes was welcoming. While Cesar was out working the streets, she taught Lizette how to cook rice that didn’t come out like a snowball, and how to season steak with pepper and vinegar. Lourdes also spent time with her friends in the bedroom, sniffing cocaine. She asked Lizette not to mention this to her son, and Lizette answered, “I don’t know nothing,” honoring a fundamental ghetto rule. Lizette later noted that at least Lourdes cared enough to hide her business; people in her house used to break night doing drugs right in front of her.

Lizette kept quiet about Lourdes’s drugs, but Cesar would find out anyway, and Lourdes would think Lizette had snitched. The friendship between the older and younger woman soured; the arguments about cooking and housework began. Lourdes complained to Cesar that Lizette
was lazy; Lizette said Lourdes wanted her to do everything. Lizette told Cesar that Lourdes was a hypocrite. Cesar agreed, but Lourdes was his mother. Lizette thought Cesar acted less like Lourdes’s son and more like her man: he’d curse Lourdes out for her bad behavior and she would run crying into the bedroom; he’d order her friends out of the apartment; he’d decide whether she could go dancing and inspect the way she dressed. One time, he frog-marched Lourdes back upstairs for wearing something too revealing. In the meantime, Lizette and Little Star kept one another company. “We grew a little bond,” Lizette said. They watched TV and colored. Little Star cried a lot. She told Lizette that she missed her mother. Lizette missed her own mother, too.

For the most part, Coco had retreated to Foxy’s. You could hate a rival all you wanted to, but pregnancy merited respect. There were girls so hard that they paid no mind to a belly, but Coco wasn’t one of them. After all, the unborn baby was innocent. If you cursed a pregnant girl and something bad happened to the baby, you could be cursed the rest of your natural life. Perhaps Lizette’s baby might reestablish the balance that Nikki’s arrival had wrecked: Coco had Kodak’s child, now Cesar would have Lizette’s; Coco and Cesar would be even. And Coco still continued to see Cesar—every day—on the sly. Coco had convinced her little brother, Hector, to trade bedrooms with her so that she would be near the fire escape. That way, Coco could scramble down whenever Cesar pulled up in Rocco’s car and honked. “I forgave him,” she said. “I forgave him because I loved him and I didn’t want to see the bad.”

The badness, however, impressed and intimidated the men in Coco’s family. Cesar gave Richie money and once lent him his gun. Cesar let Coco’s older brother Manuel strut the gun around the block. But Cesar had no tolerance for guys who were all talk. When it was discovered that a cousin of Coco’s was being regularly raped by her father, everyone threatened to kill him, but it was Cesar who beat the guy up and ordered him to leave the girl alone. Cesar bought Coco food if she hadn’t eaten, and whatever Mercedes needed. Coco’s room was stocked. He also bought things for Nikki, a gesture Coco interpreted hopefully. Even if he saw Coco twice in an afternoon, he’d return to Foxy’s every evening—ostensibly to tuck in Mercedes. Coco would sneak out and leave the girls in her room, asleep.

But at Lourdes’s, Cesar ignored Coco completely. He passed her on his way to the bathroom. Lizette followed. Coco could hear their laughter in the shower. She and Cesar used to laugh like that. Cesar and Lizette padded by again in towels, then reappeared, dressed, ready for the street.
On his way out, Cesar lifted Mercedes and nuzzled her neck with his nose. “Bye, Mercy, Daddy’ll be back,” he said. To Coco, he said, “Clean my sneakers. Do all them.” She found a rag and the white shoe polish and opened the door to Cesar’s bedroom. Photographs of Lizette and Cesar decorated the headboard of her old bed. Lizette had everything she thought Cesar wanted: an unmarked face, no height, no kids from other boys. Coco decided to be the best wife. Lizette cooked for him and did his laundry, but Coco wiped the scuff marks off pair after pair of his sneakers. She arranged them in his closet in neat lines. She ironed his T-shirts and his jeans. She said, “He never had to put a thing in the cleaners cuz I do the pleats.”

Following his release from prison, Mighty spent a lot of time at Lourdes’s; his mother and brother had moved away from Tremont, and he was dealing drugs in an abandoned house on Mount Hope. Mighty was family. When Lourdes cooked, she sent him down a plate; sometimes she traded the food for drugs. Mighty used Lourdes’s bathroom. He wore Cesar’s clothes. Lourdes felt that the boys’ friendship fulfilled a lack of brother love. “Mighty had a brother the mother doted on. Robert never gave brother love to Cesar. What they were having, they were missing it—they put it together, the both of them,” Lourdes said. The only thing Lourdes didn’t like about Mighty was his drinking. Sober, he was beautiful—even shy—but alcohol made him mean.

Cesar trusted Mighty absolutely: “Mighty was an ultimate soldier. ‘Whatever it is, I’m with it. Whatever it is, I’m there.’ He was a field man. He felt comfortable in the action. He wasn’t comfortable making decisions.” That’s what Cesar did. Mighty wasn’t much of a talker, which gave his words more weight.

Mighty liked Lizette. He disliked Coco because she’d hurt Cesar. He eyed her coldly. “How you doing, slave girl? Slaving today?” he’d say. Alone with Coco, Mighty prodded her; why did she stay? Coco didn’t know how to respond. His close attention made her feel awkward. She blamed herself for Cesar’s mistreatment, and what business was it of Mighty’s, anyway? “I used to tell him it don’t bother me, which it did bother,” she said.

Coco waged her counterattacks against Lizette—surreptitiously, while Lizette was in school. She tossed the stuffed animals Lizette gave Cesar in the incinerator. She carved
Coco and Cesar
inside his bedroom closet. She mauled their photographs, stabbing Lizette’s image with a pen. She destroyed the picture of Cesar with his legs and arms
wrapped from behind around Lizette, his hands cupping her bigger breasts. “I fucked them up so bad there was no way of making those pictures right,” Coco said. She inscribed her name in the headboard, and a warning:
This bed belongs to Coco. Whoever sleeps in here is just a ho.

Coco aimed the insults nearer Cesar, although she didn’t challenge him directly: How could he stay in his room when Mercedes, his only child, longed to play with him? One day, Cesar walked past the living room without giving his baby girl a glance. Coco was watching TV with Mercedes and Lourdes and Little Star. “Don’t disrespect my daughter like that,” she finally snapped. He slammed the bedroom door.

That December 1991, Lizette was the one that Cesar brought to Jessica’s sentencing. Coco accompanied Lourdes. The night before, Lizette slept in Cesar’s room, and Coco spent the night with Mercedes on the couch.

Coco started crying as soon as she laid eyes on Jessica in the courtroom. Cesar hated crying and he hated courts. “Ma, I’m gonna go to my parole office now,” he mumbled to Lourdes. Without saying good-bye to Jessica, he and Lizette left the sentencing. Cesar later admitted he could not bear to watch what was about to happen to his sister.

Had Jessica gone to trial, she would have faced a twenty-year mandatory minimum term. Instead, she pled guilty to one count of participating in a narcotics conspiracy. The judge asked Jessica if she had anything she wanted to say before he imposed his sentence. Jessica stood. She spoke softly. “Yes, Your Honor. I would just like to say that I’m sorry for the crime that I’ve committed, and all I hope for is to return to my family and to my mother.”

Despite appearances, Jessica’s sentence was not determined by the judge; federal mandatory minimums pretty much rendered judicial discretion moot. Drug quantity served as the main determinant of prison time. Freedom decreased by jumps of five, ten, and twenty years for each gram over a congressionally determined number. The judge said, “I do not, as a general proposition, make the type of statement that I am going to make now, but . . . I feel that this case is a case that really does not call for the mandatory minimum that exists here. I think you have to be punished and you should be punished, but I think a ten-year sentence in this case is unusually harsh, and I do not like imposing it, but I have an oath of office that I have to follow.”

The proof of Jessica’s actual involvement in the Obsession organization was limited: two entries in 10-4’s ledger from her few days of working at
the mill, and the brief message she’d passed on to George’s supplier, recorded on the wiretap. However, to reduce the mandatory minimum term, Jessica would have had to cooperate, and she had refused. The only way to be granted immunity would be to confess every secret, but she was as loyal to George as Cesar had been to Rocco. She also had a family to protect, and Milagros, who was now going to have legal custody of the twins. Jessica wasn’t sure that her children weren’t better off without her. The judge continued, “And what I can make out of all this, you got yourself involved with this guy Rivera, and he certainly helped lead you astray. And you went there in the first place of your own free will. But what I would hope is that in prison you learn some kind of trade so that when you get out, you can stay out of trouble.”

He granted Jessica a few extra minutes to say good-bye to her daughters. In the grandeur of the hushed courtroom, the children seemed especially small. Brittany and Stephanie, dressed in identical aqua sweat suits, hugged Jessica’s legs. Serena clasped her waist desperately. Elaine had to peel them off. The marshal said it was time. Coco was too upset to touch Jessica; she clutched Mercedes instead. Lourdes slumped against the bench. Mercedes cried. Coco bounced her awkwardly. Mercedes cried louder.

“Did you bring her bottle? She’s hungry, Mami, can’t you tell, she’s hungry,” Lourdes said. “Where’s Little Star?”

Serena had crept out into the hallway to try to catch one more look at her mother being taken away.

As it happened, two weeks earlier, Serena had lost the father she had never known. Puma had never made the comeback he’d hoped for in the entertainment world; instead, he’d continued dealing. His success didn’t reach the scale of George’s, but he’d done okay. He and his wife, Trinket, had moved to a residential neighborhood in Mount Vernon; Trinket wanted some distance from the Bronx and the inevitable fallout of Puma’s work.

That same December, they’d attended a holiday party with their two sons. After the party, Puma had driven his family home and parked on the street in front of his house. He retrieved his baby son from the car seat and stepped onto the walk that led to his door. Trinket was trying to wake their older boy, who’d fallen asleep in the backseat, when two young men appeared from behind the shrubbery. Both were drug dealers who—until that moment—Puma had considered friends. Trinket covered her child’s mouth with one hand and dragged him beneath the car. She heard Puma
begging for the baby’s life. She heard shots. Puma tossed the baby as the bullets hit him. The baby survived.