Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (5 page)

Without Big Daddy’s contributions—$500 a month in cash, in addition to a running tab at the bodega—Lourdes had to scramble again. No woman with four children could survive on welfare, and now Lourdes also had four grandchildren, another on the way, and a drug habit to support. Jessica and Lourdes fought, ferociously and often. Both women wanted to be taken care of; neither wanted to baby-sit. The cocaine helped Lourdes, but there was never enough of it.

Life at Lourdes’s now moved in lockstep with the life of the street. The first week of each month, after the welfare check came in, was best—a time to buy things, to feel some sense of agency. Outside, the drug dealers
also enjoyed a surge in business. Lourdes stocked the shelves with food and bought what the house needed from the dollar store—King Pine for cleaning and cocoa butter for healing scars and the comforts of air freshener and hair conditioner. She clanked around the kitchen, blasting Latin oldies, cooking rice with
gandules
and frying her pork chops seasoned with the fresh herb she called the Puerto Rican leaf. She cooked well. Friends and neighbors dropped by, and Lourdes fed everyone.

Everything changed toward the end of the month when the money ran out. Lourdes took to bed. Elaine cooked rice, which Cesar flavored with ketchup. He stole fruit for his family from a nearby Korean market or snatched bread from a grocery store’s delivery bin. Milagros brought the children diapers and food. She remembered seeing Cesar drink their Similac, then refill the bottles with sugar water, as he’d seen his sisters do. For longer and longer stretches, Milagros lugged the twins back to her mother’s, one under each arm, their skinny limbs dangling.

That winter, in 1987, Lourdes hit bottom. All the jewelry was in the pawn shop. The phone company shut off the phone. Usually, Lourdes managed to pull things together at holiday times. As far back as her children could remember, she had prepared dozens of
pasteles,
her specialty dish, which the bodega by the Grand Concourse would sell for her. She’d spend the extra cash on food and gifts. She would buy each of her children a brand-new outfit, and on Christmas Eve, they would all dress and take the subway to Manhattan to have Christmas dinner with Lourdes’s mother, uncles and aunts, and their kids. It was a happy night.

That Christmas, however, they remained in the Bronx, with Lourdes curled up in bed. Even the birth of Elaine’s baby boy—Lourdes’s first grandson—barely roused her spirits. Occasionally, she shuffled out of her room and made coffee and peed. The dog’s messes dotted the narrow hallway, and if Lourdes stepped in a puddle, she’d yell at her children, then call Scruffy sweetly. Scruffy would run with such excitement toward her that he would skid into her legs when he tried to stop. She’d punt him down the hall. By January, Scruffy had learned to cower at the sound of Lourdes’s voice.

At the lean end of the month, Elaine’s boyfriend, Angel, set Jessica up on a blind date with a drug dealer named Boy George. Jessica was Angel’s gesture of thanks to George for giving him work. Angel had met George years earlier, on Watson Avenue. Angel was selling crack then, doing pretty well, and George was just coming up. But Angel, like many neighborhood kids, had enjoyed the lifestyle that accompanied dealing and had started using drugs. Then the money couldn’t come fast enough,
and now Angel had Elaine and a baby son to support. Boy George, however, had been disciplined. He never touched his product; he rarely drank. In the midst of the hype of the crack boom, he’d had the smarts to concentrate on heroin, and his business was thriving. Years later, looking back, Jessica said, “That was the date that changed my whole way of life.”

I
t was a double date: Elaine and Angel, Jessica and George. Jessica had agreed to meet this George under one condition. “If he’s ugly, bring me home at ten,” she said. The evening of January 23, 1988, Lourdes sat by the window gazing down over Tremont. “George pulled up in a car that was like the ocean,” Lourdes said. He saluted her through the sunroof of a charcoal-gray Mercedes-Benz 190. Jessica took one look at him and rescinded her curfew. He was so handsome that she was willing to surrender the next day or two.

George’s black leather cap matched the black leather trench coat. He’d cropped his dark brown hair close and kept his goatee neatly trimmed. His brown eyes were intent. Like her daughter, Lourdes recognized an opportunity when she saw one, but Lourdes was experienced enough to make a bid for something more reliable than love. Suddenly, she suddenly remembered she could not baby-sit. George understood the cue: he gave Lourdes some high-quality cocaine and $1,000. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard a defensive response like hers,
Baby, you can keep my daughter out all night.

“She just sold her to me for a thousand dollars,” George later said. “I could have been a serial killer and sliced her up, and she just sold her to me for a thousand dollars.” A thousand dollars was nothing to George. At the time that he and Jessica met, his heroin business grossed over $500,000 a week.

Lourdes’s recollection of meeting Boy George did not include this unmatronly trade-off, but she did recall having a vision whose warning she later shared with Jessica, and Jessica failed to heed: “There will be a man in your life. He is from another road, a high, tight, dangerous road. And if you cannot stay on that road, you should not stay with that man.” That night, however, Lourdes sniffed coke and baby-sat.

Out in the Mercedes, George popped in a cassette of Guns N’ Roses and sped off. Jessica was intrigued: George listened to rock and roll, like a white boy. He liked R&B music, but the lyrics, all the whining about hardship and heartache, irritated him. George took them all to the movies, to
Eddie Murphy Raw,
and treated them to dinner. Then he suggested they go clubbing. Jessica had dressed conservatively. (“You know
how when you go on a blind date you don’t really know what to wear?” she later said.) She asked George to stop by her mother’s so she could change.

When she reappeared, George asked, “What happened to the girl who I went out with? You sure you the same girl?” Jessica called her club-style dressing
puta.
Contact lenses had replaced her eyeglasses. Her hair, which had before been pulled into a bun, now fell around her neck in a soft, loose mane. She’d slipped out of the long skirt and blazer and squeezed into a pair of Spandex leggings and a low-cut body blouse. She’d kicked off the plain pumps and slid on knee-high boots. He wasn’t certain he liked the change, but he was impressed by her gameness. Clearly, this was a girl he could take places.

George took her to Club 371, his employees’ haunt. A long line of people waited to enter. He strode to the front. Girls eyed him. “I’m gonna get beat up!” Jessica whispered to Elaine excitedly as they followed him in. The hostess seated the foursome in the VIP section, and a waitress appeared with a bottle of Moët. The dance floor smelled of perfume instead of sweat. Jessica got up and performed a little dance for George in front of their table; everyone treated George like a king. They were the only Puerto Ricans; everyone else was black. Boy George preferred not to hire Puerto Ricans. He believed his own kind were more likely to betray him.

The night ended in two $500 suites at the Loews Glenpoint Hotel, in Teaneck, New Jersey. Jessica recalls that George really talked to her, as few dates ever had. He not only asked questions about her hopes and fears, he actually listened to her answers. She told him what she had never told Lourdes: that Cesar’s father had sexually abused her for years. George ordered room service. He fed Jessica strawberries in the king-size bed. “I felt like a princess,” she said. Finally, life resembled life as Jessica imagined it ought to be: “I felt loved. My knight in shining armor.” Jessica was most overwhelmed by the fact that despite all he’d paid for, George didn’t expect to have sex. Instead, he held her.

The following afternoon, while George paid the bill, Jessica waited near a waterfall in the lobby for her sister and Angel. The spread of the brunch buffet dazzled her: sliced fruit fanned out on silver trays, cheese cubes stacked near tubed cold cuts, orange juice chilled in heavy crystal glass. There were huge green olives and bread baked into animal shapes. The food banquet filled a large cloth-covered table beneath two ice swans in a melting embrace.

Back on Tremont, Jessica lingered in the passenger seat of Boy
George’s idling car after Elaine and Angel went upstairs. She could feel the neighbors’ eyes on her in the Mercedes and she loved it. George said, “Get your moms and your daughters ready, I’m taking you out to eat.” He’d return and collect them in an hour. He told her to be on time. He did not like to wait.

Jessica stripped and jumped into the shower. She told her mother to dress and get the girls ready. Lourdes pulled on jeans and a clean T-shirt, dressed the three girls in what she could find and brushed their hair. She assumed they’d eat locally—perhaps a seafood place on City Island, but more likely White Castle or take-out Chinese. But George liked surprises. He’d even switched cars, exchanging the Mercedes for one of his BMWs. He took them to an upscale Cuban restaurant in Manhattan, Victor’s Café.

Signed photographs of celebrities and boxers decorated the walls. The maître d’ recognized Boy George. Lourdes hid behind the menu. For the price of one meal, she noticed, she could feed her five grandchildren for a week.

“Get whatever you want,” George told her. “Don’t worry about what it costs.” Unasked, the waiter uncorked a bottle of Moët.

The ride home was slow and dreamy. Jessica didn’t often drink, and she was giddy from the champagne. They got stuck in traffic, but the BMW felt airtight, like a little house. George invited Jessica to open the glove compartment. He had photographs there from a recent trip he had taken to Hawaii. The farthest Jessica had traveled was to Bear Mountain, an hour north of the city, on the picnics her family had taken with Big Daddy.

A man selling roses approached George’s window. Each stem was wrapped in cellophane and tied with a crimson bow. George bought one for Jessica and one for Lourdes. The man moved toward the next car. George called him back and said, “As a matter of fact, mister, give them all to me.” The man passed three buckets’ worth of roses through the tinted window. Jessica received them like a beauty queen. Roses covered her lap, and her mother’s, and some fell to the floor. They brushed the feet of her daughters, who’d fallen fast asleep, their bellies full.

Not long after their first date, Jessica paged Boy George from a pay phone on the Grand Concourse. Snow was falling. Jessica hadn’t heard from him. She did not have a winter coat. The damp had crept from her penny loafers into her bunched-up athletic socks.

She punched in her beeper code—176. Most girls used the number of
the street nearest their block, as did the managers of Boy George’s drug crew. Sometimes the beeper numbers were messages, a dialect—911 (for an emergency), 411 (you have or need information), 3333*14 (Hi, baby), 3704*14 (Hi, ho). Similarly, if you read the screen upside down, 3704*550 roughly translated to “asshole” and 038*2**06*537 to “Let’s go to bed” (69 being a possible further specification of that). Boy George used 666. He got a kick out of the satanic implication of the code. He was known for having an evil temper, and by then had been involved in several shootouts, yet he never missed a chance to intimidate. One of Boy George’s workers returned the call from Grande Billiards. George went on with his pool game.

“I’m calling for Boy George,” the worker said.

“Oh, hello,” Jessica remembers answering in her softest voice, just loud enough to be heard above the traffic. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.” Jessica had opened many conversations in her life exactly like this. She’d request money, then explain for as long as necessary, facts toppling more facts like a snake of falling dominoes: she needed a ride; she didn’t have money for a cab; she needed a ride to a friend’s house to collect $20; the girl owed her the money; she needed the money to buy milk for her hungry girls.

Boy George took the receiver. His voice was calm but sharp. “Listen, if you are calling me just for money, don’t call. Don’t you call me for money.”

“Mnnn,” Jessica said.

“Where you at?”

“A Hundred and Seventy-sixth and the Concourse.”

“Stay there. Someone will be by to pick you up.”

The worker delivered her to Grande Billiards. She didn’t go in. She waited in the backseat of the car. Eventually, Boy George joined her, with three friends. Again, she asked him for money.

His voice turned impatient. “I only like to say things once. If you calling me for money, don’t call.”

“Fuck you,” Jessica snapped.

In retrospect, Boy George thought he should have served her with a proper beating. Instead, he ordered the driver to head for Lourdes’s building. He dragged Jessica from the car and frog-marched her up the stairs. He noticed that she was wearing the same pair of jeans that Lourdes had worn to Victor’s Café.

“Whose jeans are those?” he asked.