Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (72 page)

That next Friday, Coco received a certified letter stating that her attendance was required at a superintendent’s hearing the following Monday morning. She had a right to be represented by an attorney, to cross-examine witnesses opposing Mercedes, and to present witnesses and other evidence on Mercedes’s behalf. Mercedes would be punished further if she was deemed guilty of insubordination. Thirty-one pages of disciplinary records were enclosed. Coco didn’t know what
insubordination
meant, but she knew the situation was serious. In her panic, Coco mistakenly assumed that the superintendent’s hearing concerned the sex allegation of the previous week, and that the school was going to take Mercedes from her.

Coco did what she usually did when frightened—she compulsively talked to friends and family in the hope that someone would know how to help. No one had much experience with constructive outcomes, but everyone had a story about losing a problem child: Milagros knew a mother who’d lost her daughter through PINS; Frankie’s friend White Bobby’s son had been shipped to a group home; three of Coco’s cousin Bambi’s kids were fugitives from foster care. Foxy predicted that her granddaughter was going to run away, just as she had, just as her older sister—Bambi’s mother—also had. Foxy was thirteen years old when she took off with Manny, Coco’s father, who was twenty-three. “He swept me off my feets,” said Foxy, although her father’s brutality had contributed to her urge for adventure. They stayed with Manny’s uncle in Philadelphia, until Foxy became pregnant and Manny messed around with the uncle’s girlfriend and the uncle told the young couple to get out. Manny started beating Foxy upon their return to the Bronx, where they lived in his parents’ house.

But Foxy claimed that she had never regretted running away, as harrowing as the experience had been. She was a girl when she left, and a woman when she returned. She said, “I was real good until I ranned away. That’s when I became a bitch.” Bitchiness was an important survival tool.

Foxy believed Coco shouldn’t fight the authorities if they wanted to send Mercedes to a group home. Coco, however, remembered how Foxy had fought when the authorities had tried to take Hector. Coco agreed with Mrs. Cormier, who took an affirmative approach: she thought Mercedes needed someone to take her places and give her things to do.
Otherwise, Mrs. Cormier could imagine the alternative—a boy’s car stopping to give Mercedes a ride, or the lure of gangs that were migrating to Mercedes’s neighborhood. Hector, still smarting from his year in prison, believed that fear was the best teacher; how else would respect get instilled in his hardheaded niece?

But Mercedes had already had more than enough hardship and fear and humiliation for several lifetimes—nights in unsafe buildings; cold waits on the hard benches of homeless shelters, police stations, courtrooms, and welfare offices; she’d been uprooted eight times in eight years. Her mother struggled every single day of her life. Her father was in prison. Terrifying seizures plagued her little sister. Drugs rendered the adults she loved incoherent; her godfather was permanently paralyzed. Sadness threatened to engulf every corner if her anger couldn’t keep it at bay. She’d witnessed countless acts of violence involving parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, strangers, police. Raised in poverty, Mercedes had weathered innumerable sudden crises, but perhaps even more insidious was the fact that—despite them—little changed. Fear organized whole seasons of Mercedes’s experience, and she was probably still frightened: she just didn’t show it anymore.

Coco reread the official-looking letter. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing Mercedes. It was this kind of moment, during Coco’s own adolescence, that had made the drugs so hard for Foxy to resist. Coco said, “So much is in my head, I feel I’m gonna crack.” Then the phone rang; it was Milagros. Did Coco want to go dancing to celebrate Mother’s Day?

Milagros seemed to have lost interest in nursing school and had lately been going clubbing every weekend. Coco disapproved of Milagros’s partying, and her women friends, but Coco needed music, and she was in no position to turn her nose up at the company. She wanted to shake off the stress. She put La-Monté to sleep, threw on some clothes, and left Mercedes in charge of the children. She met Milagros at Broadway, a new club in Albany.

Usually, Coco strode straight to the dance floor. That night, she sat at one of the tiny cocktail tables and watched other people dance—Milagros laughing with her girlfriends, older couples dancing Spanish. She slumped down, like Mercedes at her classroom desk. But instead of sleeping, like her daughter, Coco placed her heavy head in her small hands and wept.

Foxy’s call woke her the next morning; she wished Coco a happy Mother’s Day, a ritual Foxy never forgot. After they finished talking, Coco shuffled
into the kitchen to warm La-Monté’s bottle and discovered Frankie, tears streaming down his face, his barrel chest heaving, his hands gripping the edge of the dish-filled sink. He’d recently discovered that his mother had cancer, and the prognosis wasn’t good. Coco had been trying to get him to talk about it, but they’d get interrupted by one of the children, or he wasn’t in the mood, or Coco was too tired from work. Frankie left.

Jessica called next. She and Coco had not been in touch often, but they kept up with each other’s news through Milagros and still felt close. “It could be years, she never forgets me,” said Coco. Throughout Jessica’s incarceration, Coco had always sent Jessica Mother’s Day cards. The recognition meant a lot to Jessica, who still acutely felt her own failure as a mother.

Jessica had had a difficult year with Serena. Serena was failing ninth grade yet again, and Jessica had recently come home from work to discover her daughter in the apartment with a boy. When Serena took the phone, she sounded as unhappy as her mother. “Happy Mother’s Day, Títi,” said Serena.

“Thank you, Mami,” Coco said.

At the hearing, the associate superintendent suspended Mercedes indefinitely and ordered the principal to file for a PINS petition on behalf of the school. Before Mercedes would be considered for reentry, she was required to attend at least two sessions of counseling. In the meantime, a tutor would visit her at home and she would report to a probation officer. Coco was relieved; she had expected worse.

Outside, Coco hurried after Mercedes, who broke into a run. “You all right, Mercedes?” Coco called after her.

“It don’t matter. It don’t matter,” Mercedes said, her voice cracking. By the time her mother caught up with her, she’d succeeded in beating back the urge to cry.

At home, Mercedes retreated into her dark bedroom, which sat off the kitchen at the back of the apartment, climbed beneath her comforter, and turned on her TV. On the paneling hung a drawing Cesar had commissioned from a prison artist shortly after Nautica was born—three inscribed hearts chained together—
Daddy, Mercy, Naughty.
Coco hovered in her doorway. “I feel sick. I can’t talk,” Mercedes said, and Coco let her be.

There was no need for words. “I know exactly what’s wrong with my child,” Coco said. “I know, that’s why I don’t need counseling. I am tired of saying the same thing. They ask me, ‘Do you know what’s running
through Mercedes’s mind?’ I know exactly what’s wrong with my child.” She paused. “I know what the answer is—Cesar. . . . Everything is just missing him.”

Mercedes had turned eleven in April. For the first time ever, Cesar had forgotten her birthday. It was then that her good behavior at school suddenly ceased.

Cesar had been overwhelmed by the responsibilities of his busy new prison life. The previous August, shortly after Rocco had moved into a wheelchair-accessible apartment, Cesar had been transferred to Woodbourne, a medium-security facility. Woodbourne was the calmest of the ten prisons he’d been in. Most of the inmates were in their late thirties and older. Almost all of them programmed, which meant that fights were kept to a minimum. Cesar was used to prisons where stabbings happened daily; at Woodbourne, months passed between incidents. At first, medium-security status unnerved him. He’d wait by his cell for a guard to escort him to the package room until the guard said, “What are you waiting for?”

“It’s wild,” he excitedly told Rocco. “You can get up and go!” For fifteen minutes of every hour, medium-security inmates were “clear to move.” Cesar’s enthusiasm for the tiny, substantial pleasures was contagious; he was one of the few people capable of temporarily distracting Rocco from his despair. Cesar was assigned to a dorm that housed the state’s deaf inmates. He began to learn how to sign.

Cesar also enrolled in college; the drug war had sapped the budget for New York State inmate education, but Woodbourne had one of the few degree programs available. Cesar’s program was inmate-run. Twenty-five men started, and Cesar was one of only six who survived the first term. Students had one year to complete a three-year workload. The inmates were tough professors, but if Cesar graduated, he’d receive a Certificate of Ministry in Human Services. He loved school.

Cesar took five classes, which covered subjects like homiletics and world religions. Three typed essays were required every week. Cesar didn’t have enough money for a typewriter, so he borrowed them from his classmates. He had to wait until they’d finished their homework, which meant he usually broke night typing. Under the pressure of these unaccustomed deadlines, he’d forgotten to send Mercedes her birthday card.

Back in the Bronx, Rocco broke night playing chess on his computer. The stainless-steel bathroom features of his new wheelchairaccessible
apartment reminded him of a cell: “I feel like I’m in jail sometimes. Toilet flushes like a jail toilet. Bars on the window. Nothing to do.” Cesar immersed himself in papal history and politics; Rocco devoured gangster magazines. Rocco came across a profile of Boy George in
Don Diva
(“For the Ghetto Fabulous Lifestyle”) in its special issue on kid kingpins. Pictured in a film reel on the cover, under “The Eighties,” was Boy George’s head. While Rocco pined for his outlaw days, Cesar had been thinking about the ways in which idle time on the street had eased his way toward criminality. He said, “For me, crime was attention. Responsibility got strapped on my chest when they said, ‘There’s no food in the house.’ You get praise for doing wrong. I didn’t see it as wrong, because helping my family is right.
How
I tended to my family was different.
Why
is because we didn’t have. The sequence led to the boy that created me.”

Rocco and Marlene had divorced, but Cesar and Giselle’s relationship was stronger than ever. Giselle regularly visited Cesar with their baby girl. Giselle’s father had left when she was young, and Giselle was determined that Cesar be a presence in their daughter’s life. Cesar hated the long gaps between his other daughters’ visits: “I don’t think it’s fair, you know. But I’m not saying it’s Coco’s fault. I gotta understand that she got all them kids, and she going through her own problems and sometimes I say, you know, I ain’t got it that bad.” But Cesar hungered for news about Mercedes that was positive. Coco tended to write for advice when Mercedes was having trouble. Lourdes’s dispatches tended to seize on evidence of other people’s flawed mothering. Cesar knew little about Mercedes’s accomplishments. He longed to know what made his daughter happy, what thoughts absorbed her, what activities composed her daily routine. Pictures no longer satisfied his curiosity. In his letters, he made a point to acknowledge her strengths instead of reprimanding her for her weaknesses. In one recent letter, she had described her softball team. She disliked the team name—No-Smoking Kids—which she found silly, and she wished that instead of donated T-shirts, they could have real uniforms. She mentioned an outfielder who’d missed a ball—“That girl was looking stupid,” Mercedes wrote.