Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (40 page)

Family Day was a big event for the women prisoners. Of those lucky enough to have guests, the festival was often the only chance they had to
see their families. Family Day resembled a company picnic: there were performances and games, hamburgers, hot dogs, and Sno-Kones for the children. Jessica had looked forward to the celebration for five months. She hadn’t seen Serena in more than a year; she hadn’t seen the twins in the three years since her arrest. “It was all she talked about for several weeks,” Torres recalled. Well beforehand, Jessica had sent Lourdes all the requisite forms and the free voucher for a bus that left directly from the Bronx. Then Family Day arrived, and no one showed.

Jessica was devastated. Back on her unit, she mouthed off to one of the officers, and he sent her into disciplinary segregation and wrote her up for insolence and disobeying an order. When she finally returned to work, Torres gave her a rose and a sympathy card. He offered to mail her daughters the gifts she’d made—another infraction of the rules for guards. He also improved on Jessica’s homemade package by adding treats from the outside world: candy, a
Jurassic Park
videotape for the twins, and, for Serena, a bottle of perfume.

Until then, Jessica had considered Torres mainly a challenge, and winning him over a distraction to help pass the time. But his kindness toward her daughters touched her. She appealed to Amazon, an inmate who practiced Santeria, and one night, they performed a ritual to help the romance along. Jessica brought an apple to the boiler room. There, they removed the core. Jessica then wrote Torres’s name on a piece of paper, rolled it up, and stuck it inside, like a message in original sin. Amazon topped off the apple with honey. Jessica hid it in Torres’s locker. He discovered it and tossed it away. He thought “the voodoo” was a joke. Only many months later did he become convinced that Jessica was a temptress God had sent to test him, and that his failure to resist her had placed him under the devil’s spell.

Torres told Jessica that she deserved better than to have quick sex with a married man in a locker room. He snuck in a self-help book—Marianne Williamson’s
Women’s Worth
—and presented it to Jessica. She interpreted this as a sign that he accepted the girl she had been in the past and that he wanted to help her become the woman she could be. She underlined passages that reflected the way she felt and recited them back to him.

In the meantime, Jessica’s friend Player had developed a crush on an officer who supervised the recreation room. Eventually, Jessica and Player became roommates. Like schoolgirls, they daydreamed about their men. They hurried to the windows to glimpse them arriving for
their shifts. They devised a secret code so they could discuss their would-be lovers freely—referring to the officers as inmate lovers, Jackie and Diane. Player’s infatuation sped up the sluggish time of prison, but Jessica really fell for Torres. She began to daydream about their future, once he was divorced and she was released.

Jessica always took her time getting ready for anything, but preparing for her shift at the power plant became an all-consuming ritual. She showered. She rubbed herself with lotion. She never had much money in her commissary, but she supplemented what she could with whatever she could borrow from friends. She slipped into Player’s lingerie, camouflaged by her olive green coveralls. She styled her hair and put on her makeup and dabbed perfume between her breasts. She always finished up with a beauty mark, dotted on the left side, above her lips, which made the cheap lipstick look lush when she smiled.

Jessica’s shift at the power plant became the focus of her life: between shifts, she read and reread Torres’s inspirational cards. She drove Player crazy, nagging her to read aloud Torres’s letters, like bedtime stories to a child; Jessica mouthed whole passages that she’d memorized. Player, who was serving time for embezzlement, saw a pipeline of opportunity running beneath Jessica’s starry love; she arranged for her mother to meet Torres in a nearby parking lot before his shift. Although Torres later denied it, Player claimed that her mother handed over black-market goodies—nail polish, colored contact lenses, Victoria’s Secret lingerie. Jessica never asked anything for herself.

Jessica wrote Serena about her new boyfriend, telling her how they would all be together soon. She announced that she didn’t want to return to the Bronx: instead, they’d all go somewhere happy, somewhere far away. The mention of another upheaval rattled Serena; she missed Jessica, but she didn’t want to leave her siblings. Milagros chastised Jessica for filling the head of a nine-year-old with such plans.

S
hortly after Cesar discovered Coco was pregnant by Wishman, Coco learned that Cesar had been courting Roxanne all along. Unknown to Coco still, Cesar had been writing Giselle and Lizette and several other girls. “He’s a motherfucker and I’m a bitch. We’re both the same and we’ll never change,” Coco said. Like Cesar, she worried constantly about money, and now, even more so, since her departure from Thorpe House was imminent.

For months, Coco had been scheduled for placement in a renovated apartment through the Special Initiative Program, SIP. The tenement was on 173rd and Vyse, not far from where Lourdes had once lived, but construction delays and paperwork kept postponing the move. In SIP buildings, a social worker would be available to help residents like Coco keep their disorganized lives on track, and ideally, with day care and other supports, Coco would find her way back to school or to a job. Coco’s other options were Section 8—a federal rent-voucher program that paid the difference between 30 percent of a poor family’s income and the fair-market rent—or the projects. It had taken Sister Christine some maneuvering to lure Coco away from the idea of the projects, where the housing authority covered the cost of gas and electricity. Coco didn’t pay rent at Thorpe and already couldn’t manage, even with her avid devotion to budgeting. Earlier that winter, Coco had agreed to take a look at the refurbished SIP building, and after seeing the bright, freshly painted place—near a park where her girls could play—she’d returned to Thorpe House thrilled.

But Coco’s open excitement made her the subject of envy among her fellow residents, and she became a target for ridicule. Had she been able to move out quickly, she might have escaped the usual snittiness, but the delays gave the discouragement of others time to take effect. Some of the residents, and one member of the staff, told her how the nuns received a commission for every person they sent to SIP; that men weren’t allowed even to visit; that the staff was nosier than the shelter’s; and that the on-site social worker did double duty as an agent for BCW. The social service system deserved its criticism, and the women were justified in their caution, but Coco never had the chance to figure it out for
herself. She desperately wanted to get discharged from Thorpe House, and also to avoid sharing the news of her pregnancy with the nuns. By June 1994, she was in what she called a fighting mood—looking for trouble to relieve the stress. She could always tell she was about to “mess up” when her hands started shaking.

The chance to fight was one ghetto opportunity that was both constant and encouraged, but Coco usually avoided it; she didn’t want to fight in front of her kids. Now, however, Coco was ready, and she exchanged heated words with a girl at Thorpe who was pregnant as well. When the insults erupted into a physical fight, Mercedes pushed Nikki into the apartment but stayed in the hallway to watch over her mother; the security guard pulled the two women apart. Fortunately, the nuns agreed not to expel them since Coco was due to leave. Unfortunately, the pregnant girl’s enormous boyfriend had just been released from prison. According to Coco’s neighbors, he’d been pounding on her door, making it clear that when he did find Coco, he had every intention of avenging her disrespectful treatment of his unborn baby and wife.

Coco fled to Foxy’s, but it was too crowded for a distraught pregnant woman with three small kids. She canceled her arrangements with SIP, requested her Section 8 voucher, and moved into the first place she saw—an apartment on Prospect, just a few blocks south of Thorpe House. The follow-up worker expressed serious concerns about her safety and the building’s countless housing violations; Sister Christine worried about the risk of rape; Coco assured them she’d be fine. She didn’t mention the man she’d met in the building’s hallway who’d warned Coco about the rats; after all, her mother’s apartment had mice.

The location was convenient. “It’s big and near Tremont where the store’s at, that’s what I’m happy about. It’s light,” said Coco. The window near the fire escape didn’t have locks, but if she craned her head, she could see the display of a bridal shop—three dusty mannequins adorned in white—next to a party-supply store, where she would go for her daughters’ birthdays.

Drug activity was the life force of Coco’s new building. There was no pretense of security: doors were always propped open, and the interior courtyard made for a nerve-racking trip from the sidewalk to the hall. Pigeon droppings formed a putrid sand castle in the building’s crumbling fountain. The mailboxes were bashed in, their little doors dented and askew. People snatched lightbulbs from the hallways.

The disrepair was nothing new, but here Coco was a stranger, without her family to protect her. On Foxy’s block, she was insulated by her connection to the local histories of blood and love. She also knew the personalities and could weigh the threats against knowledge and experience. In this courtyard, there were unfamiliar people, not her girlfriends or her neighbors’ boyfriends or her brothers’ friends. The dangers may or may not have been similar, but the unfamiliarity heightened the sense of risk: the potential for trouble felt random. Hector could no longer be whistled down to escort her and the girls upstairs. “My house scary,” Nikki whispered, summing up the general sentiment.

Coco’s approach wasn’t much different from her approach to the pregnancy—she would do her best with what was in front of her and avoid the rest until she had to improvise again. She soothed her own anxiety by concentrating on Mercedes’s and Nikki’s and calmed their escalating panic by distraction: she plugged in the radio, cranked up the music, and tackled their bedroom first. With her $750 furniture voucher, Coco had bought them bunk beds, a set of couches for the
sala,
and a double bed for herself and Nautica. Beds, she proclaimed, were for sleeping, not bouncing, but she let the girls bounce anyway. She hung a framed picture of the Little Mermaid. Near it, she placed the clown she’d carved at Thorpe:
Cesar and Shorty and our unborn baby, Mercedes, Nikki. Done by Coco. Mom loves Dad, 1993.
She invited their opinions in her whirlwind decorating tour: should the shelf go in their room, for dolls, or in the living room, to display Abuela Lourdes’s
figuras
? In the living room, Coco tacked up peach polyester curtains and spruced them up with a red Christmas bow. She unpacked her beloved pictures, which she arranged beside her girls’ baby shoes.

The larger problems, however, Coco’s touch couldn’t mend: the clogged toilet; the leaking sink; the front door that refused to close without a karate kick; the drug dealer who managed the spot in the front of the building. “Hey, Shorty,” he’d call out suggestively, and, “Shorty, what’s your name?” Coco mumbled hello and hurried by. She also tried to ignore the gutter outside her kitchen window, trimmed with trash—a ball, a diaper (used), a child’s sock, a gnawed Popsicle stick.

The rats made their debut her very first overnight; they were the size of skinny cats and shameless. Coco was shaken. One might bite Nautica. Coco dreaded going into the kitchen—the light didn’t work—but Nautica needed a bottle, and the water from the bathroom sink wasn’t hot enough. But as soon as Coco stepped into the hallway, a rat slithered along the wall and disappeared inside the kitchen door. Coco backed into
the bedroom. Nautica howled until her voice became hoarse. She continued heaving long after she stopped making noise.

The next morning, Coco couldn’t face the kitchen; food attracted rats; the girls were hungry. How could she cook? Wearily, she packed some clothes in plastic grocery bags, gathered up her girls, struggled to lock the apartment’s disjointed door, and retreated to the comparative safety of Foxy’s house. It was the summer of 1994; Coco had left home a year and a half earlier; now she was back, pregnant again.