Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (31 page)

Coco felt anxious because Cesar was always after her to visit and the visits were costly, and hard to manage with two kids. She had been trying to save the $60 to take the bus upstate. One afternoon, she got lucky—Cesar was transferred down to New York City, so she didn’t have to travel. Then she got luckier still—he called.

“Good news!” Coco shouted as she hung up the receiver of the pay phone in the Thorpe House hallway. “Cesar is in Rikers!” She popped her head into her neighbor’s door. Jezel sat at her small kitchen table, breathing out a long, strong stream of Newport smoke.

“I can go, girl, I can go,” Jezel said. Jezel had been dating Tito by telephone. Tito had asked Coco to hook him up. Coco, remembering how much Tito loved Jessica, deduced that Tito liked women with big butts and breasts, but the qualifying credential was Jezel’s toughness; Coco had also pieced together that Tito was locked up for killing his wife.

Jezel distracted Tito from the boredom of prison, and Tito distracted Jezel from the boredom of the shelter. Jezel returned Coco’s favor by introducing Coco to a nephew who was serving time as well. Jezel’s nephew mailed Coco intricate cartoon drawings, shaded neatly in colored pencil. Cesar didn’t send drawings. The nephew also complimented Coco and asked her questions about her life. Coco was curious what crime the nephew had committed, but, she said, “Unless they tell you, don’t ask.”

Coco hopped down the stairs and into her apartment and turned up the radio. “Daddy is in Rikers, Mercy,” she sang.

“Daddy is in Rikers!” Mercedes repeated. She bobbed her chin in time to the music, trying to imitate her mother, who was now doing a Jamaican dance she’d learned from a neighbor the night before. Mercedes thrust her hips as if she were Hula-Hooping and reached her chubby arms up through the air. “I want to go see Daddy!” she chirped. “Daddy is in Rikers!” Coco touched her girls less now that they’d grown older, but she was so elated that she held Mercedes’s hands.

Coco’s physicality with her children tended to have a purpose—adornment or punishment. She roughly dried them after their baths, stilled them to pull on their clothes, and tugged their heads back as she brushed and braided and twisted and tightened their hair. Even her tenderness was often gruff. The night before they were to visit Rikers, Coco settled in to work on Cesar’s favorite hairstyle on Mercedes—Shirley Temple curls. Mercedes bristled. “Hold still, Mami,” Coco said. “Don’t you
want to look pretty for Daddy?” Getting pretty took well over an hour. Coco decided on the outfits ahead of time: theirs (striped-purple zip sweatshirts with black baggy jeans), and hers (a light blue-green sweat suit with a hair clip to match). The girls splashed in the tub while Coco ironed. She cleaned their already-cleaned ears again, because sometimes Cesar inspected them. Before they went to bed, she painted their toes and the little moons of their fingernails.

She felt excited about seeing Cesar, but she felt some reluctance, too. The trouble was the red spots; she had been picking her face. It was a habit her great-grandmother had had. Tiny circles flecked her skin and spilled off her button nose. Coco tried hard not to pick, but at night when her girls fell asleep, if she couldn’t sleep herself, she picked. She stood before the bathroom mirror and leaned over the sink. She started by inspecting. Even then, she told herself, “Don’t pick, don’t pick, don’t pick!” She was not dissatisfied with her reflection; in fact, Coco usually liked her looks. The culprits were the quiet and the darkness. The next thing she knew she was pressing into her cheeks with her fingernails—which, in an attempt to curb this urge, she’d clipped. She dug deeply enough to make her face bleed.

The marks worried her less when Cesar was upstate. Upstate visits required advance planning and gave her splotches time to fade. Cocoa butter helped to erase them, but now her face was covered. She could already hear him yelling tomorrow at Rikers—
You keep fucking with your face like that ain’t nobody gonna love you. Stop messing with your face!
His letters always had a line or two about the marks. The spots mapped her self-inflicted failures. At the same time, Coco interpreted Cesar’s haranguing as a sign of love. Cesar wanted his girls and children to look good in the visiting room. A good-looking girl enhanced his stature, much as she would on the street.

The following day, on Rikers Island, handwritten signs greeted Coco. Visitors were invited to drop contraband in a forgiveness box:
Women’s jail on the Island with lots of rooms for a short/long stay too/So don’t be the one.
Another sign said,
Check your self be for i do.
That day, a heavyset woman was caught trying to smuggle in heroin. Afterward, a guard hollered over the long line of women and grandmothers and little boys and girls waiting to be searched: “You better not be bringing drugs in here. I may not be no gynecologist, but I know how to do the job!” No one came forward. Another line snaked toward the final metal detector. Everyone had to remove their socks and shoes.

“Things are getting outrageous in here,” whispered a woman behind
Coco. Another said, “Are you shitting me?” “I got my man,” joked another, “ain’t no woman but a gynecologist going to look up my part.” A tall woman hiked up her skirt. “They can kiss my ass,” she said, a defiant cowgirl striding away in her muscular bare feet.

Mercedes stared at the woman who’d been caught: she was crying softly as her youngest child dug into her belly, sobbing. The woman’s older boy sipped nonchalantly from a can of 7UP a guard had given him, but he hadn’t yet mastered coolness; when another officer handcuffed his mother, the boy’s petrified eyes locked on her, giving him away.

It took another hour for Coco and the girls to reach the visiting area. The girls spotted Cesar across the vast dim space and darted over to him. He kissed Coco distractedly and took his assigned seat. His bright orange jumpsuit puffed out like a parachute. As the girls clambered on his lap, he craned his neck and scanned the room. Visits gave inmates a chance to see friends in other units and gather intelligence. Three tables away, he spotted Rocco talking to his mother. Rocco’s baby brother had curled into the plastic seat like a prawn. Cesar wanted Rocco to visit his unit. Coco wanted Cesar’s attention, although her face betrayed no sign of impatience or need.

Cesar mouthed to Rocco, “Come over to my side. You gotta come over to my side, man.” Rocco had been brought down from his upstate prison as a codefendant in Cesar’s pending case. Cesar’s transfer to Rikers resulted from a new warrant. He and Rocco, who was finishing his time for a drug conviction, were being charged with a Manhattan robbery. Cesar couldn’t remember every mugging, but he was certain that he wasn’t guilty of this one; they’d only robbed people in the Bronx.

Finally, Cesar turned to Coco. “I saw my dad, I saw him today,” he said. Cesar glanced around, as though the announcement were insignificant, but his eyes showed that he was pleased. Cesar had not seen his father for years; now he was also at Rikers, serving time on a drug charge. Cesar was waiting in the chow line and recognized his father, who was pushing a mess hall cart.

Cesar snatched the bottle cap the girls were tossing—the claim ticket for the clothes Coco had left for him in the property room—and tried to get Mercedes to play with him. He threw fake punches. She jerked her chin back and looked at her mother. He brushed her pouting lips with a slow jab. She retreated. “Oops! Here’s Nikki! I don’t love you no more!” he said, and he scooped Nikki onto his lap. Mercedes burrowed into Coco’s armpit. Coco later said she sympathized with her daughter’s
hurt reaction; Cesar leveraged his affection for other girls against her all the time.

“Do you love me?” Nikki asked Cesar.

“I love you,” he said flatly.

“You my daddy?” she persisted.

“Yep,” he said, looking away. Coco and Cesar sat awkwardly. She struggled to engage him in conversation. She complimented the cleanliness of the unit, which was relatively new. “You get my letter about the baby’s—” she tried softly. She had written him her idea for a name for a girl. Originally, Cesar had wanted Giselle. Now he preferred Whitney, the same name he’d wanted for Mercedes. Coco suspected—as it turned out, rightly—that Whitney was one of Cesar’s girls.

“Nautica,” Cesar said, interrupting Coco. His voice turned hard. “
Nautica
—what the fuck kinda name is
that
?” Coco bit her lip. A couple kissed one row over. The man’s hands moved inside the girl’s untucked shirt. She straddled the small table intended to keep a distance between them, his knees pressed in prayer between her legs. The airplanes from La Guardia sounded as if they were about to land on the roof.

The girls were also exploring the acceptable limits of visitation. They trekked over to Rocco and Rocco’s mother. “Next time you come, pull my father down so Mercy can meet her grandfather,” Cesar mumbled to Coco. There were just minutes left. “What’s this about you and Roxanne?” he asked.

“She won’t let me see the baby,” said Coco. “Mercedes wants to see her sister.”

“I don’t want you fighting,” he said. He kissed only the girls good-bye. The visitors collected beside the gate at the first of several exits. Nikki watched her mother watching Cesar.

“Bye, Daddy,” Nikki said softly. Cesar and Rocco talked animatedly as they waited to be searched. Coco peered at Cesar.

“Bye, Daddy,” Nikki tried again, louder.

“That’s not your daddy,” Coco reminded her.

“No!” Nikki chastised herself. “Cesar!”

The severity of Nikki’s voice caught Coco’s attention, and she tried to reassure her daughter. “Your daddy look like
you,
” Coco said to Nikki tenderly.

Not too long after her visit to Rikers, Coco, still in her coat after collecting Mercedes from preschool, sat in her apartment, Cesar’s latest letter balanced on her belly. Tears dampened the paper. Mercedes clutched the
chair. Nikki, sitting cross-legged in the corner of the kitchen, rocked herself to a private song near the overflowing garbage can. The letter, which had been addressed to Coco Santos, began promisingly:

Ever since I was little I always wanted to have kids and be a father to them because I never really had a father. But I fucked up and I still have another chance, and I promise myself that I am going to do the right thing this time, if not for me for my children. I’m going to tell you something that nobody knows about except Mighty may he rest in peace.

Coco, if it’s not a boy and I want to have another one from you would you let me? Because I ain’t going to stop having kids until I have a son. I don’t care if I end up with 15 daughters, I’m still going to keep on. I think you’re carrying a girl, I don’t know why but that’s just how I feel. I want a son so bad that I think I ain’t never going to have a little boy. . . . If you don’t give me my kids I’ll have them from someone else. See Roxanne she said she’ll never have another child from me that stupid bitch. I don’t need her. She’s not the only girl who can have kids.

The mugging charge was dismissed and Cesar had been returned to Coxsackie. The bad part of the letter involved Cesar’s discovery that another girl had a daughter of his. Cesar wanted Coco to track down his baby’s mother. The only clues were her name, Whitney, and an approximate address, a building near Burnside on Davidson. The child was said to look just like Mercedes.

The actual Mercedes was clamoring for Coco’s attention. She had learned a new song in preschool. “Put the letter down, Mommy, and hear me sing,” she urged. Cesar instructed Coco to pretend that she was his sister, searching for a long-lost niece. “Tell the bitch I want the baby to have my name,” Cesar wrote. The theme song from
Cops
wafted out of the bedroom—“Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?”

Coco said, “Oh! Mercedes! Go watch it,
Cops
in the bedroom!” and pointed Mercedes toward the siren sound. Mercedes drifted toward it, humming the song in an eerie monotone. Nikki padded after her big sister. Coco wept.

L
ourdes was dressed like a schoolgirl the cold September morning in 1993 when she went to see her youngest son. She wore a green-and-cranberry-striped hoodie and matching green leggings. She sported canvas shoes. A gold scrunchie cinched her waist-length hair into a bun. Slender gold hoops dangled from her ears. She’d painted her lips summer pink. But by the time Lourdes laid eyes on the tree-lined drive of Coxsackie Correctional Facility, she looked as though she’d imploded. She hated prisons. “Because I feel the pain of the whole room, of the whole people in jail, and I can’t take it,” she said. She dragged behind Mercedes, who hopped toward the front gate, which was topped by tall loops of razor wire. Cows grazed in a nearby pasture. Lourdes kept her head down during the lengthy processing. When the guard asked her, “What’s your relationship to the inmate?” Lourdes whispered, “Mother”—a word she usually proclaimed.

Across her belly, one arm rested in a sling. The stories of how she came to have a cast were lively and various: she preferred the tale about a trip she took with her man, Domingo, to buy chickens, his admirable intervention in someone else’s domestic trouble, and her diving in front of him to block the bullet that the enraged husband had sent his way. For the prison visit, Lourdes had done her best to look buoyant, perhaps to minimize the wrath she anticipated from her son.