Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (25 page)

Just before Christmas, Cesar dropped in on Rocco. Rocco was shaving his head in the shower when one of his cohorts called in: there was a drug dealer to rob. “It’s all in timing. ‘Yo, it’s on.’ You gotta be there, or you’ll miss it,” Rocco said. But this time, Rocco wasn’t moving fast enough. He said he still needed to dress, and his crime buddies wouldn’t wait. He offered up Cesar as his replacement: “Let my boy go, he just got out, you can trust him.”

Cesar came home with $25,000, intoxicated with the ease of the job. “Like snatching an old lady’s purse,” he said. He gave some to Rocco and tore through the rest. He bought himself a winter coat and clothes and sneakers and jewelry; he stocked the shelves with food and paid Lourdes’s back rent and overdue electric bill; he bought gifts for Serena and a Christmas tree. He gave Lizette a nameplate necklace and some outfits. He didn’t buy anything for Coco, but he did get Mercedes a black leather shearling. She was almost two. At first, the coat spooked her; she called it
kuko
—monster—and she cried, but Cesar coaxed her to put it on. Then she refused to take it off.

Early in January, Lizette lost the baby. Cesar was regaining interest in Coco and losing interest in Lizette, but even after the miscarriage, he still didn’t have the heart to send Lizette back home; she had told him that her mother’s boyfriend had made a pass at her. Lizette’s miscarriage brought out Coco’s boldness, though. One afternoon, she kicked open Cesar’s bedroom door. “If you so much a woman, come out in this hall,” she yelled to Lizette. “What is it, Cesar, you got another ho in there? Ho after ho after ho after ho! When you’re done, why don’t you come to your wife?”

Lourdes scurried to the kitchen and returned with a can opener. “Here,” she said. “Hit her with this.” It wasn’t personal—Lourdes liked Lizette well enough—but a fight was a fight. Fights gave people some relief, some room to breathe, and added some entertainment to an otherwise gloomy day. The next time Coco got heated, Lourdes handed her a garlic press.

But even without the promise of a baby, Coco still envied Lizette. Lizette was closer to the center of things. “Cesar never went out with me, like holding hand in hand, or taking trains together, never. He went with her,” Coco said.

Jessica had spent Christmas at the MCC, awaiting transfer to a permanent facility. She bided her time writing letters and waiting for her turn on the unit telephone. She wrote Trinket in care of Milagros and offered her condolences; she called Rocco, and they joked and had phone sex; she called Edwin. If Edwin wasn’t home, she grilled his baby sisters about his whereabouts. She instructed the children to warn any rivals that Edwin already had a wife, who was dangerous and about to get out of jail. Jessica couldn’t call Lourdes because her mother still didn’t have a phone.

John Gotti was back at the MCC, and he sent food to the women on Jessica’s unit, which the guards brought in for him from Little Italy. Jessica once ran into him on the inmate elevator, and Gotti recognized her from her paralegal days. “Mr. Dapper Don,” she said, “it can happen to the best of us.” They both laughed. Jessica later said, “He was so cute, with the hairstyle and everything. Now I was thinking, ‘He’s not so old.’ ”

Guards remembered Jessica, too. George and the Obsession case were already jailhouse legend: Jessica’s six tattoos, her sex life, George’s death threats, the exotic James Bond cars, the Christmas Eve party on the yacht. No one seemed surprised when Jessica got reprimanded for having sex with a male inmate named Jamal in an unmonitored room. Someone had snitched. Jamal was being represented by George’s old attorney. “You’ll always be Miss Rivera,” a guard warned her. “If I was you, I wouldn’t get involved with any man. The word’s out.”

But Jessica wasn’t sure she wanted to be George’s girl anymore; she liked Jamal. She told the captain, “I’m going to jail for ten years. I’m chasing this opportunity.” Jamal arranged for his mother to deposit money in Jessica’s meager commissary account and send Jessica sneakers before she got shipped away. The next stop was a holding facility in Georgia.

Meanwhile, Boy George, who was stationed in Lewisburg, made his own contributions to the prison rumor mill: Jessica heard that a beating was waiting for her in Georgia. But the women there who were allegedly so loyal to George’s friends only fired insults. The authorities next shipped Jessica to Oklahoma, where she stayed for a month, and no one bothered to bother her. Finally, a prison bus delivered her, shackled and handcuffed, to her final destination—Florida. George had allegedly arranged for someone to greet Jessica with a beat-down. But that spring, just before her twenty-fourth birthday, she arrived at the maximum-security women’s facility in Marianna and was processed in the same dreary, depressing way as everyone else.

A guard removed her leg irons and unlocked her handcuffs. She stripped and squatted and spread apart her buttocks. She coughed and coughed again—to dislodge potential contraband from body cavities. Then she stood. She ran her hands beneath her breasts, as she was ordered. She opened her mouth and raised her tongue. She lifted her arms and ran her fingers through her hair. She received a brown paper bag of hygienes—soap, toothpaste, deodorant—several changes of prison-issue clothes, an assignment to kitchen duty, and a cubicle.

T
hat March 1992, Lizette returned to her mother’s. Coco still lived with her two daughters at Foxy’s, and Cesar continued to visit her there. He enjoyed the freedom of having no live-in girlfriend, but the fun soon ended. In May, the police picked him up on a parole violation: he’d been driving Rocco’s car without a license. When he returned to his mother’s, after a summer at Rikers, Serena had gone to Robert’s, and her welfare benefits had gone with her. Lourdes hadn’t paid the rent in months. She was using more than ever and had been spotted hanging out in the abandoned building on Mount Hope. Mighty gave Lourdes cocaine—to keep her business indoors, away from the gossip—but Cesar tried to calm her down by getting her interested in weed.

Cesar immediately reconnected with Coco, but he also met another girl named Roxanne. Roxanne had a swan’s neck, almond-shaped eyes, and the posture of a dancer. She also had a welcome confidence with boys. She hung out with her friends on Tremont, in front of Kennedy Fried Chicken. All of Cesar’s friends had tried to kick it to her—Rocco, Mighty, Tito—but Cesar, with his baby face, was the one she picked.

One afternoon, Coco passed by Mount Hope to show Cesar some photographs. Lourdes was hanging with her friends in front of the building.

“Cesar’s not home” is how Lourdes greeted Coco. “Cesar’s not home.” Why did she say the same thing twice?

“Where’s your son?” Coco asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, Coco, he haven’t came in from last night, he was hanging out with the guys.”

“Okay, Ma, bye,” Coco said. Lourdes underestimated her; she seemed to have forgotten that Coco was also a Sagittarius. Coco ducked inside the building, and when she heard the pounding music from the fifth floor, she knew immediately Cesar was upstairs.

He answered the door in just a towel. He refused to let her in. His hair was wet.

Roxanne, who lived a few blocks from Mount Hope, threw a party in the basement of her mother’s building one night that fall. It was after 3
A.M.
when Roxanne’s cousin and Mighty decided to go get burgers. Mighty
had been drinking. As they walked across the White Castle parking lot, Mighty exchanged words with a group of boys who were leaning against a car. The boys flashed their guns, but Mighty kept acting tough. He was also armed.

Roxanne’s cousin knew Mighty well enough to worry, and she ran back to the party for Cesar. Cesar was about to get into a fight himself, but he broke away and ran to his friend’s aid. By the time Cesar arrived, the boys were in the restaurant and Mighty was stewing in the parking lot. When Cesar failed to calm him, he accompanied him inside. The trouble exploded instantly. Guns blasting, Cesar and Mighty backed out the glass front doors.

Mighty had a habit of stepping in front of Cesar whenever they got into shoot-outs; he was shorter, and Cesar fired over his head. Cesar had repeatedly warned Mighty about this habit, but it was also a testament to the trust between them; Mighty would tease Cesar, saying that Cesar always had his back. But this time, Cesar slipped. He doesn’t remember pulling the trigger, but he remembers his best friend going down, his chin lifting toward the sky as the bullet tore through the back of his head.

Rocco got word and ran down Tremont. By the time he reached White Castle, Cesar was gone, and Mighty had been rushed to Lincoln Hospital, where he died immediately. The police had already taped off the crime scene. Mighty’s blood was everywhere.

Cesar ran to Roxanne’s mother’s, where Rocco later caught up with him. Rocco found Cesar muttering incoherently on Roxanne’s twin bed and threatening to kill himself. Rocco managed to convince him to hand over his gun. The next day, Cesar and Roxanne went on the run. For several weeks the couple skulked from apartment to apartment, hotel to hotel, living on the McDonald’s, sandwiches, and KFC that Roxanne retrieved for them.

Roxanne’s mother had a boyfriend who supplied the fugitive couple with a steady stream of cash. As the weeks went on, Roxanne’s mother and the boyfriend argued about the money. Roxanne’s mother did not want her daughter doing time and gave Roxanne an earful whenever she came home and showered. Roxanne carted the frustration back to Cesar, who had started smoking cigarettes. He hated cigarettes. He battled with Roxanne, but anything was better than being alone with his thoughts. Their days consisted of sex and arguing—“Argue, fight, bed. Argue, fight, bed,” Cesar said. Later he admitted, “I was stressing. I didn’t handle it too good.”

Coco was also overwhelmed by the gravity of what had happened, but she didn’t know what to say, so she obsessed about Cesar being on the lam with another woman. She felt that Roxanne was not even pretty; she had to be at least part Dominican whether or not she admitted it, and she was slim, practically skinny. Coco wondered how Cesar could have sex with someone who had hair like a black girl’s.

To raise some cash, Cesar made a few drug deliveries, riding the train to Bridgeport and New Haven. He kept in touch with Coco at Foxy’s. He paged her. She called him back. “Coco, I gotta get out. Yo, Coco, I don’t want to be here,” he told her. Coco didn’t know what “here” meant, because Cesar was everywhere. He’d been in a hotel by Van Cortlandt, in one in Yonkers near Rosedale, in his friend Luis’s girl’s apartment, just around the block from Lourdes’s old apartment, on Anthony Avenue. Cesar stopped at Elaine’s, and Milagros’s, but both of them became so nervous that he had to move on. He crashed with a full-grown lady, the older sister of a friend, but he’d left when she pressured him for sex. He stayed in the basement of his old building on Tremont, where he and Coco made love on a weight-lifting bench. He even went to the Empire State Building with the super’s son. Cesar had been to plenty of other places Coco never heard about, with people she didn’t know, but Cesar told her things. He trusted Coco with his life even though he didn’t trust her with other men. He told her he was scared, that he’d spent Christmas Eve in a cellar scribbling words on scraps of paper that didn’t make sense. He said he realized that he hadn’t done anything with his life. He still wanted to kill himself. They never spoke directly of Mighty; the subject was too painful. They did, however, speak about Roxanne.