Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (12 page)

During the summer of 1988, Boy George ran into Cesar, who was standing with Rocco on Tremont Avenue. Cesar and Rocco hadn’t mended their friendship, but they were on speaking terms. George had a gash on his hand. He explained to Cesar and Rocco that he’d been in a street fight with a guy who really knew how to move.

“So what did you do?” Rocco asked.

“Jumped him,” George said. The next time, however, George wanted to do better than improvise. He remembered that Rocco had boxed and asked him about finding a trainer. “Who’s the best guy at Gleason’s?” George asked.

“Panama,” said Rocco. They agreed that Rocco would introduce them.

“Tell him he’s got to get me to fight Mike Tyson,” George said. When Rocco relayed the message, Panama scoffed. But the next time Panama saw Rocco, he embraced him—Panama had hooked up with George. “I
could have told the guy [Panama] to kiss my ass and he would have done it,” Rocco said. George had started training, but Panama, in his new gold jewelry, looked more like the champion. George even flew Panama to visit his parents in Panama; George had once been similarly expansive with one of his Chinese suppliers, setting him up in a rental house on the beach in Puerto Rico with limousines and party girls.

A carton overflowing with barely used boxing boots sat beside Panama’s desk in his office, not far from a locker jammed with training shorts: George wore them once and gave them away. “You don’t know, you don’t know,” Panama said to Rocco, shaking his head at the extravagance. George wanted to win the Golden Gloves and Panama believed George had more than a decent chance. George called Panama “Papi” and “Dad.” Another trainer approached Rocco and asked, “You got any more friends like that?”

George treated his regimen seriously. “He’d always like healthy foods,” said Jessica. “Vegetables and, you know, things that would cleanse your body, like teas.” He popped vitamins. Instead of soda, he drank cranberry juice. He cycled and jogged. His new schedule left less time than ever for Jessica. Danny became his surrogate.

“George, I want to go to the movies,” Jessica would say.

“Have Danny take you,” George would reply.

“George, I have an appointment.”

“Beep Danny.”

“George, I want to go shopping.”

“Have Danny take you, I have things to do.”

George did not keep his other girls from her. There was no need to. When a guy had money, girls were everywhere. “One-night-stand girls who came back for more,” George explained, “girls who clung to me like a cheap suit. Then there were girls who were my regular jewels of the Nile, more upper class than these regular girls.” One of George’s block managers got sex from a girl for allowing her to sit in his car—without even having to take her driving. Other girls gave it up for a pair of sneakers, or a pack of Pampers, or cigarettes, or a take-out meal. Sex was currency. Sex was also the boy’s right and his main girlfriend’s problem. Jessica perceived the challenge the same way the women around her did—girl versus girl. Jessica did not ask George questions about what he did all the hours he spent away from home. “I’m not the type to ask questions because I don’t like to be asked questions,” Jessica said. But she did try to intimidate the competition. When girls paged George, Jessica
phoned them back. “Don’t beep my man,” she’d say, or, “Don’t you be calling my husband.” Boy George would learn of her defiance and yell, “What are you doing beeping my girls back? You’re not allowed to beep my girls back.”

If George was in the shower, she would jot down the numbers from his beeper screen and dial the girls up a few days later. It was an old habit she couldn’t resist. “Is Georgie there?” she’d ask in her sexiest voice.

“George? Who’s this?”

“I’m his girl. He told me if I needed to reach him I could call him here.”

If a girl paged him on a beeper that he’d left at home, Jessica returned the call immediately. “Hello?” the girl asked expectantly. Jessica let the hope dangle before hanging up.

After Boy George’s exotic trips, the calls would pour in.

“Is John there?” the latest girl would ask.

“No, he’s not, may I take a message?”

“You his sister?”

“No,” Jessica would answer, pausing, “I’m a
friend.
”

In phone conversations with these girls, George sounded like the George who’d whisked her away from Tremont on that first date—mannered, attentive, confident. To one girl who expressed interest in seeing him, he said coyly, “Well, if you could put up with me.” Jessica wanted to grab the receiver and scream,
Bitch, if I can’t put up with him, you gotta be fucking Wonder Woman!
But she just kept quiet, listening in. A girl who did confront her boyfriend was likely to be reminded that there was plenty of pussy everywhere.

Jessica knew when George had a date: he wore slacks instead of jeans. “Why don’t you just wear jeans if you going out with the boys?” she’d tentatively inquire.

“Why don’t you fucking shut the fuck up?” he’d reply.

Jessica understood the consequence of breaking George’s rules—vicious beatings—but she broke his rules fairly regularly. She knew a beating had been bad if she came to consciousness at his mother’s; George brought her there because Rita worked at a hospital. Jessica would wake to Rita’s frowning face. “What did you do this time?” Rita would whisper; she also feared her son. When there was serious damage, such as the time George cracked Jessica’s skull, he turned her over to a private doctor who was paid generously in cash. Jessica called the doctor for other
health-related problems, such as the time the twins had diarrhea that nothing seemed to cure. The doctor always asked after George, whom he jokingly called “the old baby.”

George threatened Jessica with worse beatings than those he’d already administered. “If I can trust you, I can kill you,” he was fond of saying. Jessica knew what he was capable of. That June, the word was that he’d set up Todd Crawford, one of his employees. As witnesses later told it, George had heard that Todd was planning to rob an old friend of George’s named Snuff. Snuff and George had been classmates at Morris High School together; now Snuff dealt crack at George’s lucrative 122nd Street spot. Snuff was one of the few people George’s own age whom he considered an equal. George arranged for a mutual friend to invite Todd and his girlfriend to King Lobster, a City Island restaurant, for dinner. While they ate, Taz, the sometime enforcer, waited in a car in the parking lot. As Todd opened the door of his car, Taz shot him four times in the back. Todd had ordered shrimp scampi for his last meal. George hired Taz full time, paying him $1,000 a week. “Being taken out for shrimp scampi” became a nervous inside joke.

Jessica cautioned her girlfriends about calling her at the apartment, since she was not supposed to give out the number. If George answered the telephone, they shouldn’t hang up; Jessica got punished for hang-ups. She instructed her friends to pretend it was a wrong number. It was tricky, because George disguised his voice as a way of testing Jessica. “Sal’s Pizzeria!” he would say, but with George, the humor always had an edge.

When Jessica answered, there was no need to use his name; her friends’ voices were hushed:

“He in?”

“Where he at?”

“You alone?”

Usually, she was. She saw George late at night if she saw him at all. George would have given Jessica money if she’d asked, but Jessica was more interested in winning his love. “Less money for her meant more money for me,” George said. He teasingly referred to Jessica’s need as her “attention attraction.” It would be years before he understood that Jessica’s desire for attention had the strength of a weed pushing through cement.

Late that summer, Jessica was staying in one of George’s rentals, a basement apartment at the bottom of a flight of stairs on Henwood Place. George sometimes used Henwood as a drop for shipments of guns. The guns came up from Virginia. A runner by the name of Wayne drove them
to the Bronx. Wayne was scheduled to make a delivery during another of George’s trips to Puerto Rico. George instructed Jessica to stay in the apartment until the shipment arrived. Instead, Jessica broke out. She had decided to go dancing with her thirteen-year-old cousin, Daisy. Daisy’s pretty young mother, who had divorced Lourdes’s brother, worked as a cocktail waitress and partied after work. Daisy spent a lot of time alone and bored. She was in awe of her older cousin.

“She makes you feel good about yourself. She’s beautiful, but she doesn’t make you feel that she’s the most beautiful, that’s what I love about Jessica,” Daisy said. Daisy stunned audiences in her own right, with her coltish body, unmarked face, and mane of curly brown hair. Daisy was at the dangerous age, already cutting school and noticing boys. She rode the train uptown to visit Jessica; sometimes she cabbed there, and Jessica paid the fare.

The night Wayne was due in with the weapons, Jessica and Daisy went out to the Herpes Triangle, three popular clubs clustered beneath the elevated subway tracks on Westchester Avenue. Wayne arrived, found no one at Henwood, and paged George. Meanwhile, George had just landed at the airport, unannounced; he didn’t have a set of house keys, and Jessica still hadn’t returned by the time George caught up with Wayne at the apartment. It infuriated George that Jessica had not upheld her part of their arrangement—her doing whatever he told her to do and him paying for everything. But George knew where to find her: Rascal shuttled him to the Herpes Triangle. Danny sat morosely in the passenger seat. George paged Jessica, punched in the number of his cell phone, and waited.

Jessica scooted outside as soon as she received George’s page. She didn’t dare call from inside the club with the music; she dialed his cell from a pay phone on the street.

“Where you at?” George asked.

“I don’t know, I can’t tell, the signs is all messed up,” Jessica lied. Just then, Daisy stepped outdoors in search of Jessica, and Jessica flagged her down. George caught sight of her waving arm.

“I just want you to do one thing for me,” he said in the tone of voice that made Jessica’s heart race. “I just want you to turn around and look down the other side of the street.”

Jessica had a choice: George could beat her at home, or right there on the sidewalk. She chose home and joined George in the backseat of the car. Her decision didn’t matter; before they reached Henwood, he’d already started punching her. Then she realized that she had left her keys
in her coat back at the club. George administered what she later called a double beating—during the ride back to the club, and on the trip back to the apartment again. Then he shoved her bloodied body onto the sidewalk and ordered Danny to bring her inside. As an afterthought, George told him to chop off Jessica’s hair.

“I forgot scissors,” Danny lied. He gently dragged Jessica down the stairs into the building and whispered, “He treats you so bad. I wish I could take you and the kids away.” All Jessica wanted to do was go to sleep.

Jessica continued to violate house rules. Even when she stayed home, she opened the door to visitors. One day, George called from Puerto Rico in a fury after learning that a gold belt buckle with Snuff’s name inscribed on it in diamonds and rubies was missing from the Henwood apartment. As it happened, there were any number of possible suspects: Danny, Rascal, another worker named Dean who had passed through to pay a debt, a friend of Jessica’s named Beatriz, who had relatives in the building, George’s brother, Enrique, and George’s mother, Rita. George made it clear that he considered all of them responsible. By nightfall, his announcement that he was on his way back to New York had sent the apartment into an uproar: Rascal and Rita were turning over the couch and pulling it apart, while Enrique was frantically rummaging through closets and drawers. Jessica sat in the tub fully clothed with the water running, on the verge of hysteria. “George is going to kill me, you don’t know,” she said. When Rascal learned that Beatriz had been in the apartment earlier, he understood: George didn’t like Beatriz.