Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (37 page)

Coco still lounged on Manuel’s bed, letting the wound dry. “I can’t wait till summer,” she said roguishly. She’d pass by Lourdes’s way and make it her business to get seen. She relished the thought of strutting by all the Mount Hope girls Cesar had slept with, the jealousy she would arouse when she flashed her tattoo. Tattoos were almost as good as gold
nameplate necklaces. Coco’s daydream ended abruptly when a cockroach scurried across the bloody heart on her thigh.

Soon after he was transferred to Southport, Cesar broke up with Coco again. “The part that hurts is how he said he don’t want to have no more kids with me. I want a boy. He knows that,” she said. She blamed the breakup on her spotty face. In one of her countless letters of apology, Coco added a postscript: “I’m sorry for not being the girl you want me to be. I wish Pa, just for you, that I could be that perfect girl. But Im not.” She still promised to send him money when she received her welfare check.

The next day, Cesar’s homeboy Tito called in from Rikers to say hello. Tito called frequently because he manned one of the Rikers phone banks. For protection, he had joined the Latin Kings gang, and he extorted money for them from inmates who wanted to use the phone. “Your man broke up with me; it’s because I pick my face and he won’t let me have my baby boy,” Coco informed him.

“Coco, leave your face alone and work shit out,” Tito said. He tried to break it down for her: Cesar had been shipped to Southport for punishment for the fight he’d had with the Muslim. Southport was the facility where prison inmates went if the isolation units of their own prisons weren’t punishment enough. Inmates at Southport endured twenty-four-hour lockdown in a single-man cell and severe restrictions on all outside contact and activity. Segregation made a guy go crazy, Tito explained. The box made a boy want to say “Fuck it” to everyone. Coco’s duty as a wife was to make his time easier. Coco tested out Tito’s theory on her sister, who was unconvinced. “Coco, it’s like you in a box, because all you think of Cesar, Cesar, Cesar,” Iris replied. Coco proffered her idea about her marked skin. “Your face is just an excuse,” Iris said.

If reason played a part, its role kept changing. Coco and Cesar did soon get back together, then broke up again and reunited, for reasons Coco eventually lost track of. Coco’s new GED tutor helped her with nouns, pronouns, adjectives. She showed him her tattoo. Coco was good at strong beginnings and lousy on follow-through. She missed several sessions. School-wise, she said, she started to “mess up.” She wrote to Wishman and then to Cesar, to confess that she’d written Wishman. It was only February, and the snow seemed as though it would never stop. On the envelope of Cesar’s last conciliatory letter was a reminder that suggested he knew, even if Coco didn’t, the direction she was headed in: “Use your mind to control all your body parts.” The next time her tutor came, they worked on social issues and verbs.

O
ne night, Coco, Mercedes, and Nautica waited at Columbus Circle in Manhattan for the Prison Gap, a bus to Southport. Coco had left Nikki with Foxy; when things were rocky between him and Coco, Coco knew it was best to bring only his girls. A stable of old buses idled. Transportation companies like Operation Prison Gap, some managed by ex-convicts, hauled families and friends of prisoners upstate to visit loved ones. Without them, the visits would have been impossible; few people had cars. Prisons dotted the huge state, and inmates moved among them, seemingly arbitrarily. The bus riders were almost always women and children. Except for special charters on Mother’s Day or Family Day, the buses serviced primarily men’s facilities. Women inmates, like Jessica, had a much harder time seeing family. Passengers often recognized one another—from other routes, the long hours spent together waiting in processing, or the neighborhood; the majority of state prisoners came from the same parts of New York City. Some of the women became friends.

At Southport, Cesar was allowed only three hours of exercise a week. For this, he would be led, shackled, to a cage in a cube of walled-in yard, where he could do sit-ups, push-ups, squat thrusts, and jumping jacks. Showers were timed and also limited to three a week. Like Jessica, Cesar was obsessive about cleanliness and he found this especially difficult. He had no books. He had no photographs to look at. Radios were forbidden. He reflected upon his life. It surprised him that he didn’t miss the girls and parties as much as being able to open the door of a refrigerator, or play peekaboo with Mercedes on the floor. He said, “The street is like a scapegoat. You get in a fight with your mother and you go out and you get blasted and you have a beef with someone on the street—but two minutes later you don’t even remember what’s the beef about.” He did, however, remember a time he and Rocco broke into an apartment to steal drugs and discovered the dealer, and his baby son, at home. The dealer cried, “Hold up, not my kid!” and Cesar took the boy and moved him. Even though they only beat the guy and tied him up, Cesar started thinking about how horrible it must have been for the boy to see his father so scared.

The isolation of the box made him feel, at turns, morose and hyperactive.
He’d started suffering anxiety attacks. In his letter to Coco, he’d sounded desperate. “I’m in a real state of depression,” he’d written. Coco fretted because Cesar—for all he’d been through—had never expressed himself in this way in letters before.

The bus dispatcher greeted the passengers warmly. “Welcome, everybody,” he said. “There are some rules for you to follow. We don’t allow drugs on the bus. Please don’t be getting drunk. Be considerate to others, have a good visit tomorrow. Take the same seat when you come out of the facility, and come back next week and bring a friend.”

Coco gave Mercedes some candy and spread out Mercedes’s old black shearling along the backseat to make a bed. She held Nautica until she dozed off, then gently placed her beside Mercedes, who had quickly fallen asleep. Veteran visitors had equipped themselves with rolls of quarters and crisp dollars for the vending machines, clear plastic bags for locker keys and change. Some brought along pretty outfits whose perfection they preserved in dry-cleaning bags. The cost of the trip used up most of Coco’s money. Lourdes’s boyfriend, Domingo, had given Coco $20 to deposit in Cesar’s commissary, and Coco had budgeted an additional $20 for the vending machines, so Cesar and the girls could eat. She opened a sandwich she’d made for the ride and offered half to the woman seated next to her.

The woman declined, but offered Coco some of her springwater. As Coco sipped, the woman said, “This is such a good bus, quiet, the people nice, you just don’t know.” She recounted less savory trips—loud music, dueling girlfriends, wailing children, drunks. She showed Coco a picture of her son. The boy had just received a scholarship to private school from a local youth group.

“God bless him, he’s beautiful,” Coco murmured. She appreciated anybody’s good news. Mercedes curled close to her baby sister, and Coco covered them both with the coat she’d borrowed from Foxy. The bright city disappeared and the bus drove on in the companionable dark. Some of the riders spaced out, their Walkmans singing in their ears. The women chattered; two girls played clapping games. An old woman made her way slowly down the aisle, balancing on her cane. Her lopsided belly dragged beneath drooping breasts, but her spirits were high. “I had me a stroke right there at Rikers, right there in the visiting room,” she said. The man she’d been visiting had become her husband. Tomorrow, she bragged, he’d sign their first joint tax forms.

The night stretched on. Conversation quieted. Legs and arms dusted the aisle floor, children coughed, braids came undone. Coco looked
out the window. She couldn’t imagine moving upstate, as Milagros planned to do, living out in the country, away from her family. The old bus creaked and rolled.

Nautica woke first; she spit up and cried at dawn. Coco covered her hairy head with a cotton cap. “You going to see your daddy. I’m getting butterflies just thinking about seeing your daddy,” Coco said. She raised Nautica up each time the bus bounced from a bump and smiled.

About a half hour from the prison, the bus pulled into a truck stop. The women gathered themselves and their dry cleaning and crowded into the cramped bathroom of the restaurant. There they tucked and scrutinized and tightened, sharing compliments and lipstick and complaints in the toasty bathroom air. They didn’t want to dress in the bathroom at the prison, where they would lose precious minutes of their visits.

“I ain’t never been to see my husband in nothing but a dress,” said a young woman in a lime green sheath that showed her figure. An older woman gruffly forked her permed hair.

“Albany gave you the date?” one woman asked another. She was referring to the official approval to marry an inmate; the headquarters of the Department of Corrections was in Albany.

“My friend is going to make my wedding dress. I already have it all designed,” answered the bride-to-be.

Coco leaned against the wall and listened and waited for the one bathroom stall to clear; she felt too self-conscious to undress in front of the others. She snuck a look in the mirror: to save money, she’d trimmed her own bangs. She’d slicked them down with Vaseline, which emphasized the jaggedness. A fresh spray of red spots flecked her cheeks.

“Here, I’ll hold her,” a lady offered, reaching for Nautica. Coco slipped into the stall and stepped into a conservative outfit Elaine had loaned her—a beige turtleneck and matching skirt, topped by an embroidered vest. She wore sheer stockings beneath the slitted skirt, so she could show Cesar her tattoo. Her own style was more sporty, but she wanted Cesar to see that she had matured.

In the prison processing area, Mercedes sat beside Coco, legs swinging, humming to herself. “You been here before?” a woman asked, sounding concerned. Her eye makeup was a rainbow. The woman positioned herself over Mercedes’s head and mouthed, so Mercedes couldn’t hear, “Expect bars—you can only touch his hands.” Coco’s eyes filled with tears.

All the visitors were allowed to the next stage of processing except Coco. Coco waited. Nautica dozed. Mercedes doodled. Coco showed her how to draw
♥ U. “Your Títi Jessica taught me that,” Coco said.

After fifteen minutes, Coco hesitantly approached the guard at the desk. She hadn’t filled out the forms correctly, and he hadn’t bothered to tell her. Already, she’d lost an hour. Mercedes rested her nose on the counter. “What’s in your lunch box?” she asked the guard as Coco struggled to hold Nautica and to write at the same time.

The guard pointed to a kitchenette. “That’s where I heat up my food,” he said. A woman emerged from the ladies’ room, transformed. The guard bent forward and whispered, “Who is the painted lady?”

“What’s in your lunch box? Tell me!” Mercedes said.

“You sure talk a lot. I bet you are a little flirt.”

The guard stamped Coco’s hand with invisible ink, then stamped Mercedes’s, and finally directed them to a door.

The doors led out to a short walkway that led into another building, where Coco and her daughters waited twelve minutes for two guards to finish a conversation, after which one yelled at Coco for setting off the metal detector because she’d forgotten to remove her watch. When she cleared the detector, they were allowed into the visiting room. Carrying Nautica, Coco slowly wound her way to her seat assignment at the end of the S-shaped rows. Mercedes paraded through, initially oblivious to the shackled men behind the wire mesh.