Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (63 page)

For the first few months at Shawangunk, the authorities placed him on keep-lock—twenty-three-hour lockdown in his own cell. Keep-lock had restrictions, but it was much better than solitary, because Cesar had access to his property. He could open his locker, or peruse the sneaker box he stored beneath his bed, where he kept his letters, filed by writer and by date. He could look at his hundreds of photographs. He no longer pinned up his pictures, like some of the other inmates. The first few years he was locked up, he’d posted the pictures—wanting the world to see his beautiful daughters and his sexy girlfriends. But now the photographs were too painful. “I was getting really stressed seeing my children grow and not being able to be there.”

Back on River Street, Mercedes placed Cesar’s picture prominently in her new bedroom, on top of the toy chest he had made. Next to it, she put another picture of her father and her godfather, Rocco, taken in the Harlem Valley visiting room. The bedroom, a narrow, dark space off the kitchen, overlooked an alleyway. Mercedes mopped the floor and covered the drafty window with a sheet. There was no closet, but she folded her clothes neatly and stacked them on the floor. She arranged her toys beside them. She made up her bed, which was only a box spring, and posted a notice on her door:

R
ULES

Take your shoes off when you come in.

Don’t sit on the bed.

Knock when you come in.

Don’t come in if I’m not here.

Mercedes had her own bedroom because she was the oldest, and also because Coco didn’t entirely trust her with her sisters alone. “She shakes Pearl as if she really wants to hurt her,” Coco said. Sometimes Mercedes became so angry that she hit Nikki or Naughty, not the way you would hit a sister, but as though she were fighting a stranger on the street. Once, when Coco was reluctant to take her along on an errand because of the chorus of wailing sisters, Mercedes said, “You gotta take me, I’m a problem child. I’ll get into a fight.”

As usual, Coco had her Christmas tree and all her decorations up long before Thanksgiving. She spent most of her first two Price Chopper paychecks on gifts. She reimbursed Mercedes $35 she owed her. Mercedes said, “I’m going to save it. So when Mommy run outta money, or don’t got no gas, or if we hungry, I can give it to her.”

As before, Mercedes and Frankie argued if they were left alone too long. One day, Iris and Coco returned from shopping and found them wrangling on the
sala
floor. Coco and Frankie yelled a lot themselves. They had a big fight in November. To cheer up the house, Coco let the girls open all their Christmas presents, then she immediately began to worry about how she would replace them. Frankie, contrite, tried to help, but then he got arrested for boosting videocassettes from Ames. He’d stolen a gangster movie for himself and a Barney tape for Pearl. Then, the next thing you know, miraculously, gifts from Cesar arrived in the mail. Cesar had gotten the money from Rocco, who’d had a windfall.

Rocco kept Cesar abreast of the news on the street, and Cesar kept Rocco up-to-date with the goings-on inside. Plenty of times, the news overlapped. Those friends and acquaintances who were involved in what Rocco and Cesar called the thug life—full-time or part-time—were constantly shuffling among the prisons, getting arrested or rearrested for parole violations or for new crimes, and occasionally getting released.

Rocco hadn’t returned to prison since his 1993 bid at Rikers. He had succumbed to what he derisively called “a Rick’s life”—legally married, renting an apartment in the north Bronx on a quiet street, holding down two jobs, still not meeting all the bills. The apartment had been robbed while he and his wife and daughter were vacationing in Disney World; Marlene was so upset that she ripped up her birthday gift—theater tickets Rocco had bought for
Miss Saigon.
Now Rocco was back with his in-laws, “back to a rougher place where they have more respect for me and know who I am.” Days, he drove trucks in Jersey; nights, he worked as a support technician for a software company.

Rocco hated the predictability of the straight world. He said he felt dead. He pined for the old glory days of spontaneous brawls and shoot-outs; he missed the excitement and the camaraderie. Much to Marlene’s annoyance, he played Wu Tang Clan constantly. He flirted with a Chinese girl he’d noticed at the desk of a car dealership he passed on the way to his trucking job. But chess was the only thing—besides crime—that engaged Rocco entirely. He competed on-line in the morning and played on the computer at his second job. The first thing he did whenever he visited Cesar was to challenge him to a game.

Around the time Cesar got moved to Shawangunk, Rocco’s situation had begun to unravel. His wife had won a graduate scholarship to New York University; she wanted to become a high school guidance counselor, but even with three jobs between them, they couldn’t cover their expenses. With school, Marlene was too tired to restrict Rocco to living life the harder way. She later said, “He was a pit bull, and I let go of the leash.” Rocco assembled a crew of younger boys and started robbing drug dealers again. “When the struggle’s put on me, this is the only way I knew how to deal with it,” he said. Just before Christmas in 1998, Rocco and two other boys made a successful hit. They came away from a stash house with $150,000—$50,000 each. Rocco bought himself a motorcycle, surprised his disgruntled wife with a Honda CRV, indulged his daughter in presents, and deposited $400 in Cesar’s commissary account.

Cesar spent down the money on sneakers for his three daughters, which he ordered from a catalog; he sent Giselle’s son a $30 money order for his birthday; and he used the rest for Giselle’s third-year anniversary gift. He mailed a rose enclosed in a bell jar to Giselle’s office, with a card that read, “With all my love from your husband, Cesar.”

I
nmates at Danbury called the restless discomfort common to women near release S&SS—short and shitty syndrome. Jessica had a case of it. She slept fitfully, had diarrhea and migraine headaches, and hadn’t been able to hold down food for weeks. She anxiously awaited her box: she was allowed a box of clothing in preparation for her return to the outside world. Jessica’s box arrived with eighteen days remaining on her sentence. “Now I really know I’m leaving, now that my clothes are here,” Jessica said. The friend who’d sent the box had herself just gotten out of prison; she’d planned on dressing Jessica sexy, but sent a sporty style instead—beige sweater, beige underwear and bra, with matching overalls. Jessica tried on the outfit and suffered an anxiety attack. “She couldn’t breathe,” said her roommate, who was happy for Jessica but not looking forward to being left behind.

Release dates were onerous. Inmates with longer terms had been known to try to “steal a date,” which meant intentionally provoking a fight with a woman who was due to leave. Despairing lovers jumped girlfriends to keep them close. Nilda kept a distance, not because she would hurt Jessica, but because she didn’t want to dampen Jessica’s spirits by letting Jessica see her cry, and she’d been crying a lot.

Other risks awaited Jessica on the outside—mainly, the utter precariousness of her life. Boy George, from his antiseptic cell in a supermax prison in Beaumont, Texas, wrote, “ . . . I’ve got a couple of brothers outside who if you find yourself in need they could be helpful. I have no malicious thoughts towards you Jessica, trust in me. . . .” The cement fortress where George lived was connected to a vast compound shining with state-of-the-art high-security technology, laid out in a wasteland of dried-up oil rigs. Some of the small-town guards affected the slang and mannerisms of their inner-city prisoners. George said the only difference between the street and prison, besides the absence of cars and real women, was that it was more dangerous inside. He wore a four-ounce eighteen-karat-gold chain around his neck.

Boy George still knew how to make the most of the little he had to work with. He read more than he had in the free world—Machiavelli, Thomas Harris, the
New York Times,
and
Maxim,
his latest favorite magazine.
His cellie passed along books about Puerto Rican heritage and George read them, mainly as a courtesy. “I don’t care if I got white in me, black in me, European, it don’t make a difference. I’m me.” He was more interested in the Internet.

He’d never inscribed Jessica’s name onto the blank space of his heart tattoo, but on his shoulders, he’d inked the skyline of Manhattan, including the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Below the city,
BOY
arched above two shooting pistols, near 27, a reference to a gang that controlled a piece of the prison black market. On his stomach, he’d added an apple, with a New York Yankees insignia, pierced by two swords. It amused him that in all the years he’d lived in the Bronx, he’d never thought to go to a Yankees game.

Prison had further refined Boy George’s philosophical leanings; he’d become a bit of an avuncular sage. He believed he still knew the best route for Jessica: to find an educated man who was also streetwise, “a person who could teach her and stand to be taught by an individual who has had a life like her,” he said. Jessica’s susceptibility to the influence of others worried him, just as it worried everyone who knew her—her blood family, her prison family, the friend who’d mailed her the clothing box. “She’s easy to convince,” said George. “She thought that sex was the right thing, to give it up to everybody. She’s got to say, ‘Am I gonna be a free-for-all? Or am I gonna be a person who has limits here?’ Is it all about sex, Calvin Klein, is she gonna parlay with that? Or is she gonna say, ‘I got five children. Now that’s a lot of children’?” He paused. “If she doesn’t find the right man, she did all that time for nothing. She did all that time for shit.”

George was thirty-two years old. He’d served nearly a decade and still had a life sentence left. He claimed that he was optimistic about winning his latest appeal, but his confidence sounded strained; there wasn’t much money left for the legal battles. His mother still worked as a hospital aide. But when George spoke of Jessica, he exuded certainty.

Nilda warned Jessica to stay away from anyone who had anything to do with George. Other close friends advised Jessica to keep some distance from her siblings; they didn’t like the childhood stories they’d heard about Jessica’s older brother, Robert, and they didn’t trust Elaine. Where had she been all these years? Nilda understood that Jessica had to reckon with her mother. “Open up your heart,” she told Jessica. “Tell her how she hurt you. Accept it, but what happened, happened. If she denies it, hey, go on.”

With only days to go, Jessica took the last lap of the outposts that comprised her daily prison routine, what inmates called the merry-go-round:
She signed herself out of security and gathered her files from education. She checked out of religion and released herself from medical. A few of the guards wished her well. Nilda prepared a chilikida for Jessica’s last supper, which she served with a can of Coke. Jessica’s closest friends gathered in her cubicle. They sang her favorite song (the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge”). She distributed her property; it was bad luck to carry anything from prison to the free world. She gave Nilda her most cherished objects: two sample-size bars of Dove soap, which she’d snuck home from the hospital, on which she’d carved
Matthew
and
Michael
; her red plastic Hamster cup (Hamster was Nilda’s pet name for Jessica); and a crocheted vest. Jessica also left Nilda a pile of pictures of herself. She broke night her final night in custody and finished a sweater she was crocheting for Nilda’s mother; she would mail it from a post office, so that the gift wouldn’t have a prison stamp.

At 8:30
A.M
. on December 17, 1998, Nilda walked Jessica to R&D—Release and Delivery. At 8:50
A.M
., seven years from the day she was sentenced, Jessica walked out of Danbury Correctional Facility. She had one streak of gray hair below the crown of her head, a skunk’s tail, and she carried twenty extra pounds. She was thirty years old. Prison, she wrote to a friend, had transformed her from “a naive young girl that thought without a brain,” to a woman with a longer view.

While Jessica rode the bus from Danbury to New York, Nilda opened the notes Jessica had hidden in their secret places for her to find. Jessica sat beside a fellow ex-inmate whom she recognized, but didn’t know well. They were both so nervous that they barely spoke, but they held hands. Jessica looked out the window at the farm stands, the highway. She gazed over the Bronx as the bus headed toward Manhattan, then watched the people on the city streets.

Finally, the bus pulled into the cavernous garage of the Port Authority. At the gate, Jessica and the woman disembarked; they didn’t have luggage. The woman stepped into the glare of the terminal to no one, clutching her crocheted knapsack, her hand clamped on a scrap of paper with her halfway house address, petrified. But Jessica was surprised by a small crowd of well-wishers who surrounded her with a happy burst of instructions and laughter and nervous anxiety: Inez, a Danbury friend, who was pregnant, had brought her a bag of clothes; Cathy, another Danbury friend, had brought along her new girlfriend and gave Jessica a Metro-Card (tokens had been the standard the last time Jessica was in New York). The group protectively led her to the express train, which rushed them all to the Bronx: Jessica had just under an hour to report to the
halfway house to which she’d been assigned. On the ride, they caught up on the gossip—which guards had divorced or retired, which physician’s assistant was dating which ex-inmate, who’d gone back to being straight and who stayed gay. Arm in arm, the women escorted Jessica to the block where they had already been, pointed out the building, kissed her, hugged her again, and let her go. It was a violation of everyone’s probation to fraternize.