Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Jessica cautioned Cesar. He ignored her. She appealed to George. George wrote Cesar a long letter from prison, addressing him as “my dearest brother in law.” He reminisced about the Poconos. He told Cesar that his staying out all night worried his family. He told him doing real time was no joke: “Remember the white man doesn’t give a fuck about you o.k. . . . he’s going home to a soft bed while your in jail suffering.” George described the loneliness of prison and the feeling of being abandoned by friends. He told Cesar that he loved him and how he hoped they’d cross paths again, “but not in here.” He wanted Cesar to benefit from his predicament. The postscript read: “Take care of your family leave the streets alone. Because all your going to do is die or being in jail—another memory like BOY GEORGE.”

  Boy George’s warning didn’t temper Cesar. He was hardheaded and young and beautiful, bursting with angry energy, all of which probably contributed to his lopsided puritanism. He understood that his actions had consequences, but in this world, the consequences seemed less determined by desire or intention than by the luck of the draw.

  One afternoon that fall, Coco stopped by Lourdes’s. She’d just come from the health clinic on Burnside Avenue. She waited for Cesar. He came home, and she followed him into his room. He stretched out on the bed. She leaned against the windowsill. Nervously, she told him what she hoped he’d feel was good news.

  They’d wanted a baby. They’d never used contraception and they’d been making love—a lot—for over a year. They’d finally gotten lucky.

  “Come here,” he said. His seriousness worried her. He placed his ear against her stomach. Then he leaned back against the headboard and pulled her onto him. She rested her head against his chest. She remembers hearing his heart beating and how he’d brushed hair from her eyes. He loved it when Coco blew-dry her hair and wore it loose and straight, like Jessica’s. Coco tried to believe he was happy about their baby, but “I have a headache” was all he said.

  They fell asleep and woke up and made love. Rocco stopped by. Cesar showered. He and Rocco left. Coco washed the dishes and swept the floor and mopped. She showered quickly; she hated standing beneath the hole in the ceiling above the tub, where there were rats. She slipped into a favorite sleeveless blue dress. She liked the way the material swished around her ankles. She strapped on brown sandals. She dabbed her neck and wrists with Lourdes’s perfume.

  “I’ma see you later,” Coco said.

  “See you later, Mami,” Lourdes said.

  Coco swept down to the street; the air felt good between her toes. She settled into a window seat on the bus. As it climbed Tremont, she spotted Rocco and Cesar on the sidewalk by the Concourse. She peered at Cesar from a distance, without his knowing, just the way she had when she’d eyed him on University before they’d met. Her heart sank—he had his arms around another girl. “I died,” Coco said. At that moment, a small part of her did.

  Back at her mother’s, Coco dressed to fight. She doubled up on T-shirts to avoid giving the street a free show. She tucked razor blades in her ponytail and rubbed her face with her trusty Vaseline. By the time she returned to Tremont, the girl had disappeared. Coco and Cesar had a shouting match in the lobby of Felix’s building on Mount Hope; Cesar reprimanded her for daring to think about brawling with a belly. Within weeks, however, Cesar’s betrayal was eclipsed by his arrest.

  There had been a shoot-out. The police hauled in Cesar, Mighty, and Rocco and questioned them separately. They were all responsible, but Cesar lied to protect his friends, knowing that he’d receive less time as a juvenile. Mighty also tried to take the rap. Rocco didn’t answer any questions; he had a private attorney. Rocco and Mighty got shipped to Rikers and Cesar landed back at Spofford Hall.

  When Lourdes and Coco visited Cesar at Spofford, Coco recognized the girl Cesar had been hugging on Tremont. The girl had tie-dyed Casper, Cesar’s graffiti tag, in Clorox along her impressive thigh. How did she know Cesar was at Spofford? How many times had she visited? “This bitch is not going before me,” Coco remembered thinking. Coco wasn’t ordinarily assertive, certainly not with officials, but she turned to the guard. “When we going in?” Coco might have to share Cesar with other girls, but at least she was pregnant. She hoped to give him a son; regardless, she’d give him his first and therefore always be up front.

  Coco had hopes that Cesar wouldn’t stay in prison too long; boys from her neighborhood were always drifting in and out: Hype, Cesar’s old friend from West Tremont, was at Spofford, and so was Coco’s childhood boyfriend, Wishman, along with another boy Coco knew. She dispensed her optimism in the bottled message of her Christmas cards. They read, “From Cesar, Coco & our new year baby thats coming soon!” All fall, Coco had been cutting school; that January 1990, right after Cesar was sentenced, she officially withdrew.

  Coco was the only one to attend Cesar’s sentencing. She was six months pregnant. Lourdes had intended to go, but she’d been admitted to the hospital after having two seizures; Jessica had promised to be there, but she didn’t show up. Jessica had been hanging around with Papito, a colleague of George’s who was trying to market some of his unconfiscated heroin for him. One night, while Jessica waited in Papito’s car with one of the twins and Papito’s girlfriend, police surrounded them. In addition to 109 heroin glassines, the police found an annotated copy of George’s indictment in Papito’s pocket. Scribbled instructions—“Quiet their mouths”—headed a list that included the codefendants, the U.S. attorneys handling the case, and the judge. The police arrested Papito and detained Jessica for hours before letting her go. Now she was lying low.

  Coco brought sunflower seeds to slip to Cesar at his sentencing, but all she could do was wave. Cesar and Mighty drew indeterminate sentences of two to six years for the shooting. Mighty was sixteen and sentenced as an adult; at fifteen, Cesar still qualified as a juvenile and was sent to the Division for Youth, known on the streets as DFY. Rocco received five years probation. Coco joined another unpopular sorority: not only was she a pregnant teenager, now she was a jailbird’s wife.

  To Coco, the biggest difference between Cesar jailed and Cesar free was attention. “He pay more attention to me when he in,” she said. “When he out, he be hanging with his friends.” But Coco, unlike Jessica, found being in the spotlight uncomfortable. She’d felt more at ease waiting in the wings—monitoring Cesar’s movements through what she’d glean from Lourdes, stringing together hints like a sleuth. Now the relationship was less of a game. Face-to-face in the visiting room with full hours stretched out before them, Coco and Cesar had to figure out new ways to communicate; they weren’t even supposed to kiss. She smuggled in contraband—cherry Now and Laters, Mike and Ikes, sunflower seeds.

  Sometimes Cesar wrote Coco every day—love letters, angry letters, letters brimming with baby instructions and fathering commands. Increasingly neat and intricate penmanship filled pages upon pages. Cesar was attending classes for his high school equivalency diploma, and he began to think about the future, largely in terms of avoiding the past:

  Dear Coco

  What’s up Baby! How are you doing fine I hope. As for me I’m okay, listen Coco what are you planning to do with your life, where are you going to bring up my Kid, Is it going to be safe for my kid, are you going to take care of it or your family is, Coco Im going to let you know ahead of time I dont want nobody hitting my kid unless he or she does something Bad, but if somebodies going to it’s going to be you or me, Not my mother or your mother or anybody else in our families Don’t Let me see my kid all dirty or always shitty, when the baby need’s his or her pamper changed you or another girl change it, Im talking about somebody in your family or my family, not none of your dirty ass friends, Coco the reason why Im telling you all this is because I don’t want anything to happen to my kid, Or better yet our kid we both made it, not only me and not only you . . .

  If love was a race, Coco had to catch up. Hope and need bumped into the emphatic threats if Coco did not write often or w
asn’t home to get his call. Cesar calculated Coco’s value in terms of her ability to protect the baby and her sexual loyalty to him:

  Coco take care of our baby because if any thing happens to it I’m going to murder you I know I always tell you that for little stupid things, but this time I mean it. I better not find out that you had a boyfriend or even attempt to kiss anybody even close to the lips Im going to beat the shit out you, the reason I say this is because I love you a lot . . . if I didn’t love you I wouldn’t give a fuck . . .

  The only future that Cesar saw was the baby; their only joy as a couple had occurred in the past:

  Do you remember in the Poconos when we made love in the jacuzi, in the shower, on the sofa, in the round bed, in the pool, that shit was no joke, I alway remeber that shit, remember the Jacuzzi with all them bubbles coming up in to the water from the bottom, remember when we use to argue and then make love after that, that shit was so good I loved all that shit, but most of all I loved you and still do.

  Maintaining his life on the outside was now hers to do: visiting, delivering messages to friends, supplying sneakers, sending him letters and mailing photographs, which he called flicks.

  In prison, photographs were currency, like food or money. Flicks proved that you existed and that you were still connected to the world outside. As her pregnancy began to show, he demanded belly, but only Polaroids: “I don’t want you to take them with a regular camera because when they develop the film they look at the pictures, So I dont want anybody seeing your body except me, that body is for my eye’s only.” Yet the pictures could not be so explicit they would constitute a violation of the prison’s discretionary rules. Coco could not figure out the official line between acceptable and sexy. How much belly was too much? The boundaries she observed came from the street. Prisons were different. She already knew she could not send pictures in bathing suits, because the prison had sent some back.

  Cesar’s requests became elaborate. He wanted sexy letters—“Tell me what your going to do to me but I want you to talk to me even more dirty than you do now, ok”—and he wanted the sexy letters long: “I hate when you write to me and only write three little sentences about us making love. I hope the next letter you write has like two pages of sex talk only. Do you think you could make me cum in a letter?”

  Cesar rarely confessed his fears in person, but he did on paper. The nights were the most painful. You could not break them, as he had by staying up all night in the street. Nightmares visited:

  . . . Last night I had a dream that when I got out you were pregnant and the father of that kid was Kodak. And in my dream I saw you fucking him, and that you were fucking for along time before I came out. I hope that dream don’t come true, because yo Coco Im going to kill you and him and take my kid.

  In fact, Coco had been seeing Kodak. It was impossible not to: he still lived across the street. Every day, all day, Kodak stood in front of his mother’s building dealing drugs. Coco had no excuse not to talk. After all, words weren’t dangerous. Coco didn’t want to disrespect Kodak; he was her first. Besides, he looked too good.

  Cesar had already heard about their conversations by the time they kissed. Coco had been walking across the abandoned lot near her mother’s building toward Andrews. She remembered it vividly both because of what happened, and because it was the only time she recalled having ever been alone. Her house was never empty, and she never ventured to the store without her little brother or a cousin or a friend. Kodak saw his chance. He approached her and said, “Coco, you look good.” Then he kissed her—a nighttime kiss in the public light of day. Coco felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, and thrilled.

  She lied to Cesar on their next visit. She told Cesar it was a kiss she didn’t want; she said she hadn’t kissed Kodak back. Cesar went crazy. She stood up to leave. He shouted, “Sit the fuck down.” She sat. Cesar berated her throughout that visit, and continued in the mail:

  . . . I know your going to fuck somebody so I don’t put my mind to it. the only thing I realy care about is my kid. . . . you know why I didn’t want a girl that wasn’t a virgin. . . . But that’s okay because your going to regret that believe me Im going to make you pay for what you put me threw and it’s not by hitting you so don’t worry about that. So that’s all I have to say to your dum ass. You better write back every single day to let me know how’s your belly. Alright you dont have to say anything about you because I don’t CARE BECAUSE YOU FUCKED WITH MY HEAD LONG ENOUGH. REMEMBER DO WHATEVER YOU WANT AFTER YOU HAVE THE BABY BECAUSE THAT’S ALL I CARE ABOUT IS MY KID

  The unborn baby helped smooth things over. “Yo when are you going to give birth,” Cesar wrote, more tenderly. He despaired the restricted access he would have in jail. He hated being an absent father, like his own father, who’d moved out when Cesar was just two. “For the next four years I’m going to have to handle it,” Cesar wrote. “But any way at least I have something that’s mine and will never stop loving me. MY KID.”

  In April, a healthy, full-term baby girl arrived:

  Dear: Coco

  . . . Take care of her dont let nobody I mean nobody kiss her face or lips ok. Not even when she get’s older . . . Coco I filled out the Baby-book. She wiegh’s 6 pounds 13 ounces and 1/2 she is 18 inches long has brown hair and blue and light brown eye’s right. Her name is Mercedes Antonia Santos.

  Fatherhood further escalated his demands. Since the baby might get sick in cold weather, Coco was to visit only on warm days. He wanted Coco to document each day he was missing with photographs. Coco loved the assignment; she’d always been a shutterbug, and as long as she didn’t take pictures of the baby sleeping, no picture of a baby could be wrong. (Sleeping-baby pictures were bad luck because the babies looked as though they were dead.) Cesar still made his usual requests, but the questions about Mercedes now came first: Does she still have that rash? That bump on her chest? He built her a toy chest in his woodworking class, which he inscribed: To Mercedes from Daddy. Now he signed off his letters, Father Cesar, Daughter Mercedes, Mother Coco. Fatherhood reorganized the rankings in his heart. Coco had been demoted, but her standing plummeted still further when Cesar learned that Sunny, her ex-boyfriend Wishman’s mother, had attended Mercedes’s birth.

  For a full page, Cesar capitalized his ranting: “YO COCO WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT BITCH SUNNY DOING IN THE HOSPITAL. YO COCO IF I FIND OUT MY KID GOES TO SUNNY’S HOUSE IM GOING TO BREAK YOUR FUCKING FACE.” Then he abruptly retreated to lowercase. It was as if he had suddenly realized there had been a power shift:

  But Coco dont take the Baby from me no matter what happen’s dont take my heart. Because then Im going to take yours out through your mouth. So just keep that shit in mind ok. Take good care of my princes alright. Bye, Bye CASPER ROCK and HIS PRINCES Mercedes Antonia Santos

  The more possessive Cesar became, the more Coco avoided him. It may have been the spring weather, too, and Coco’s feeling free of her belly’s weight. Coco would dress Mercedes, and they would hit the streets. Cesar called and Foxy reluctantly covered for her daughter, using the excuses women always used:

  She took the baby to the clinic.

  She went to get the baby’s WIC.

  She went to buy the baby an outfit.

  Oh, but Cesar, she went to the store.

  Foxy didn’t want to admit that Coco was hanging out again. Coco would leave Mercedes with Foxy and go dancing, or dipping into night pool—hopping the fence to swim after hours at Roberto Clemente State Park. Coco continued to flirt with Kodak. He flirted back. But Foxy resented having to lie to Cesar. She also resented being saddled with another grandchild, and more were on the way—her oldest son Manuel’s girlfriend was pregnant, and Iris was pregnant with her second child. Iris sometimes left her oldest boy at Foxy’s. Luckily, Richie helped; he fed and changed him; he took the child outside with his little plastic car when he went to cop his heroin. Foxy loved her grandchildren, but she had been raising children since she was fourteen and she wanted a break.


  Other grandmothers in the neighborhood would have sympathized. They certainly made their crisp comments, which the hardheaded young girls ignored:

  You made your bed, now you’re gonna fall on it.

  You had fun making it.

  I’m the grandmother, not the mother.

  You’re a woman, not a girl.

  Coco eventually heeded Foxy’s complaints and dropped Mercedes off at Lourdes’s, where she ran into Jessica. Jessica was running around that summer, doing research for Boy George’s upcoming case. Coco got to know Jessica better, and Little Star kept Mercedes company.

  CHAPTER TEN

  George had returned to the MCC by August 1990, when jury selection began for his trial. He needed a girl Friday and an ally. Jessica visited. He helped her bypass the tedious processing procedure with a phony paralegal pass procured by a private investigator. The paralegal pass granted Jessica legal access, which meant no restrictions on visiting hours. Jessica dressed professionally for the ruse. “George likes me to represent myself as a young sophisticated lady,” she said. “I love it. I love to dress up. I like to look important, I like to look sexy.” She wore blazers with tight, short skirts and sheer stockings to show off her legs. Once, she ran into John Gotti. She lugged briefcases stuffed with contraband food. They devised a code for his requests. George would ask, “What are you cooking for the girls?” and he’d amend the menu. “Don’t they want rabo guisado?” he’d say, or, “I thought you were making tostónes.” She packed weed in the cylinders of Hi-Liters, and he brought his empty ones, and they traded. They enjoyed the privacy of a cinder-block attorney-client room. George shadowboxed; Jessica performed little dances; they had sex; they talked. George sometimes kept her there all day. Jessica later said of her paralegal duties, “Nothing legal went on in there!”