Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (11 page)

By the spring of 1988, business got even better: George’s sources rewarded him for his savvy handling of the Pirate fiasco and let him buy more weight directly, which increased his profit by an extra $100,000 for every brick. Suddenly, George needed new mills and extra workers to process the dope; this was when he hired Jessica.

Jessica may have been desperate for money, but love was what she wanted. She wasn’t planning on laboring long as a mill girl. She still had her eye on the boss.

J
essica was equipped with a beeper and briefed about the company codes. Double 0—00—represented work. Add five to the number before the 00 and that’s the time she was due in; arrival times were staggered to reduce suspicion and avert potential robberies. When two mills were open, the number 1 or 2 designated which table she was to report to. Millworkers, like lawyers who worked long hours at big law firms, were collected and delivered home by car service. On Jessica’s first day, she rode to work in luxury.

She reported to a mill in an apartment on Holland and Burke, and the apartment impressed her as well. The place had carpeting, a kitchen set, a bedroom set, and a huge TV. Two large glass tables had been pushed together. Garbage cans filled with lighter fluid flanked each end, in case the police arrived (the heroin would be shoved into the cans, and sulfuric acid—kept on the table—would be dumped on top in an optimistic attempt to destroy the evidence). Guns rested on the table in case of stick-ups—.357s and .38s, a .45, Uzis, an automatic shotgun, and a Mossberg.

Preparing heroin was tedious and exacting. The millworkers tended to be girls and women, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and sisters of exgirlfriends of male employees. George hired by word of mouth; he held the person who referred a girl responsible for any trouble that followed her. At one end of the table, a worker crushed the brick while it was still in its packaging before cracking it, like an egg, into a metal cup and crushing the chunks into powder. At the other end of the table, someone weighed out mannitol, measuring the chalky substance on what would become a fixture of evidence in the decade’s drug trials and a popular reference in gangsta rap: the triple-beam scale.

If the supply had recently undergone a dry spell, less cut was added, and the bags were made bigger to jump-start the sales. As soon as business picked up, however, the bags shrank and the heroin got weaker. If George was at the mill, he added the cut himself. The success of Obsession owed much to its potency; George diluted his dope just like other dealers, but the product he was getting was remarkably pure—87 percent. He compared it to the difference between dollar-store soda and Coke.

The heroin would then be ground in a coffee grinder and repeatedly strained until it was sufficiently fine; then another woman, using playing cards like salad forks, would toss the mannitol with the heroin. Potent heroin was toxic, and the other workers routinely cleared out of the room at this point. Some wore surgical masks to diffuse the noxious smell. The glassines had been stamped ahead of time with the Obsession logo by somebody’s sister or mother or grandmother, who did it as piecework at home. Finally, after the heroin had been carefully measured into the glassines with a plastic coffee stirrer from McDonald’s, Jessica taped the bags closed. In 1987, soon after Boy George first launched Obsession, his mill processed one hundred to two hundred grams of heroin per day, five days a week. By the time Jessica was hired, the mill regularly processed seven hundred grams every sit-down, or shift.

When George wasn’t around, the table could almost feel like family. Workers listened to music and gossiped. A woman might leave the table for the kitchen and cook for everyone. Some sniffed cocaine to stay awake throughout the long shifts. The atmosphere stiffened when George arrived. Some drug dealers believed the best way to protect themselves was to remain hidden, but George had little interest in invisibility. His management style was a familiar combination of bribery and threat. He lorded over the millworkers like an ornery factory owner. He docked workers $300 for showing up late and fired them after one absence—although he often took them back. George also believed in incentives. He sent his table managers and prodigious workers on fully paid vacations to Puerto Rico and Disney World.

George’s ex-girl Miranda was managing the table the first night Jessica reported in to work. At the time, Jessica struck her as unremarkable. She worked slowly, and it baffled Miranda why George was bothering with a scrawny girl who complained about the vinegary smell of the heroin. Then Jessica got her temporarily fired. Miranda and another worker were ragging about George’s predilection for expensive silk shirts, and Jessica reported the gossipers to George. George rehired Miranda, but from then on, she resolved to keep a close watch on her new coworker. Jessica’s mill gig proved short-lived, however; she lasted less than a week.

George promoted Jessica to errand girl and started seeing her regularly. She was pretty, interested without being nosy, quick to recover from his insults, and sharp enough to adjust to the wider world he was inhabiting. He also gave her a place to live: after one of his apartments became hot, he’d rent another and move Jessica into the hot one to cool it down. She shopped for groceries and collected his dry cleaning. Jessica wished for
some commitment, but she accommodated him. Sometimes she accompanied him in public, but she often passed the time without him just as she had without the other boys—talking on the phone, cleaning, waiting, watching TV.

George frequently traveled to Puerto Rico, where his wife, Vada, now lived with their son. Sometimes he brought Jessica along; once, he even put her up at the house. George told Vada that Jessica worked for him, but Vada was skeptical: “She must be a good worker if you brung her all the way here.” After George gave them both money and sent them off to a mall together, Vada kept needling Jessica: “You sure you work for him? You must be a pretty special worker, his most
favorite
worker.” When they got back, Vada reported loudly to George, “Shoo! This girl can talk to men. You shoulda seen the way she was handing out her number!”

“Why you got to say that?” Jessica whispered.

“Why does it matter to you?” Vada answered, not whispering back.

George’s rules at home were as strict as those he imposed at the mills: no visitors—not family, not friends. Never give out his telephone or beeper or cell numbers. No one needed to know where he was headed or where he’d been. No one needed to know his real name if they called asking for him by any of the aliases he used—Tony, or Manny, or John—just take a message. Under no circumstances was she to reveal who he was or where she was or where he lived or which of the other apartments were or were not occupied.

Jessica knew the routines of lying and bluffing and keeping secrets. She was better suited to her life as a concierge than as a mill girl. She loved to interact with people, she had a pleasing phone voice, she was personable and organized. She graciously accepted deliveries. She met George’s rigorous standards for a clean house. “He always liked everything spotless—house, clothing. He never liked to see anything dirty,” Jessica said. “He’d bring home a whole lotta videos and I would just watch TV. I didn’t have to get a job. I was to cook and clean and take care of the things, and I would get an allowance at the end of the week.”

For the first few weeks, the allowance was excellent—$1,000 or more. George surprised Jessica with jewelry. He didn’t want her gold to be thin and bendable, with clasps that broke. It had to be thick. If Jessica liked a necklace—a heart of sapphires, say—George said to his jeweler, “We’ll take that, but make it different.” He added rubies to her diamond Rolex. He bought her a belt buckle with
Jessica
studded in emeralds. Poverty, which limited neighborhood people to shopping at the same cheap
neighborhood stores, meant looking like everybody else. He wanted Jessica customized, like his cars.

Boy George also demanded color coordination. “He matched me up,” Jessica said. No white clothes in winter, nothing stained or borrowed, no jeans with the yellow sheen from the cheap soap at the Laundromat, no vinyl belts sewn to the waist of the pants. He drove Jessica to Greenwich Village and introduced her to the $50 rule. Nothing under $50 was to be taken off the rack. No $10 stores, no V.I.M., no Jimmy Jazz, no Payless. He was generous with his money. After he bought her things, he didn’t demand sex.

Sex seemed to be less of a lure for George than it had been for other boys. When he was in the mood for it, however, George expected Jessica to do what she was told. Jessica performed the striptease scene from
Nine
¹
/
₂
Weeks,
but George was picky. “We just have to do, exactly, everything that was done,” she said. He also liked to act out scenarios from hard-core films. Still, his interest in Jessica was erratic. He wanted her with him, then he didn’t. She could shop all day and club all night and then he expected her to be locked down for a solid week. George could be a loving husband in the morning and a landlord the same afternoon: “Get out of here,” he’d suddenly say. “I don’t want to see your ugly fucking face.” Jessica couldn’t appease him as she had Lourdes or her other men. It wasn’t about giving George what he wanted; subjecting her to the whims of unpredictability seemed to be the point.

As tenuous as her living arrangement was, however, Jessica considered it an improvement. She had everything she needed materially. She had her own bed, space for her own things. Her proximity to someone extraordinary made her special, too. Being one of George’s girls was as good as being the wife of an ordinary boy. “Before meeting him, I never had any hope,” said Jessica. “The only dream I’ve ever had was being married, being committed to one man, living in a little house with a fence and little, you know, playground in the back, and a lotta kids.” She already had the children but neither father had wanted her. Even her children’s love lived elsewhere; when they visited, Brittany and Stephanie cried for Milagros and Little Star cried for Lourdes.

Periodically, George beat Jessica and kicked her out. She’d stay at her mother’s, but more often with Milagros, who was then living in an apartment George rented in Riverdale. Milagros had quit her job at the check cashier’s to raise the twins. Jessica had promised to pay Milagros $2,000 a month in child support, but George had only paid once. Milagros managed to get by on welfare, supplementing her income by working
for George or Puma in a pinch. If Jessica stayed over, they put the girls in strollers and headed to a nearby twenty-four-hour mall. Jessica adored makeup; pharmacies were her favorite stores. She loved beauty products and stocked up on potions and perfumes. She treated the girls to outfits and ribbons. Milagros was too practical to indulge in frills.

Jessica and Milagros always stopped at Toys “R” Us and ended the night at McDonald’s, or in the apartment listening to music and playing cards. George had lots of pornography and occasionally Jessica and Milagros sampled his vast collection. They cracked up over the inventive positions and creative coupling in the videotapes. They snorted cocaine. When Jessica would tease Milagros suggestively, Milagros would shoo her away, embarrassed but pleased. Whenever George was ready to take her back, though, Jessica was ready to go. She left her daughters behind with Milagros. Jessica said, “I did just what my mother did to me.”

Around this time, Miranda bumped into Jessica in a Manhattan club. The well-dressed bitch—Miranda used the word admiringly—standing beneath the flashing lights of Roseland showed no trace of the skinny aspirant from the heroin mill: she’d fattened up. Jessica had a body now—thickened thighs, breasts you noticed, beauty-parlor hair. With the radar of a wounded lover, Miranda understood the significance of Jessica’s ascent in rank. The twenty-two-karat-gold
Boy George
nameplate around her neck flashed a victory sign. Jessica was no longer George’s around-the-way girl, hidden in a stash house. She had been promoted yet again: Jessica was one of Boy George’s mistresses now.