Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (13 page)

George arrived at Henwood and interrogated everyone. He doubted that his blood family would rob him. Rascal and Danny earned plenty of money. Dean was already in the doghouse for getting arrested three months earlier with $22,000 of Boy George’s money and one and a half pounds of his heroin; it seemed unlikely Dean would have done anything so stupid as rob George intentionally. Jessica then confessed that Beatriz had also been present. Dean later testified that George beat Jessica and decided to have Beatriz killed, using Dean as bait. George told him: “Jessica’s going to call her, and you take her out.” Whether Jessica ultimately made the call was never proven, but the date was somehow arranged.

It was raining when Dean collected Beatriz that evening, in one of George’s company cabs. Beatriz’s aunt waved down to her niece from the fifth-floor window and watched the chauffeured sky-blue car pull away. In the backseat, Dean passed Beatriz cocaine that George had provided—“to keep her happy.” Drug-related homicides weren’t the highest
priority of the police. Beatriz shared the cocaine with the driver, who brought them to Ferry Point Park, a secluded spot beneath the Whitestone Bridge. There, in the shadows, Taz, George’s hit man, sat waiting. The plan was for Dean to get out of the car—ostensibly to go to the bathroom—and to somehow get Beatriz out of the car, too. So Dean shamed her for snorting in front of the driver: “Respect yourself. Stop sniffing in front of the man so much.” As Beatriz stepped out to join Dean, Taz approached and shot her twice from behind. Immediately her body went into spasms; Taz moved forward, grabbed her shoulder to steady her, and shot her again, then again. The gun jammed. Taz and Dean ran for their cars. Beatriz fell to her knees, screaming, “Dean, help me. Please don’t leave me, please.” Later that night, George sent a man named Moby back to the park to make sure that she was dead.

Jessica was so distraught that Danny called George in a panic—Danny was afraid that Jessica was going to hurt herself. George instructed Danny to try to calm her down. George visited Jessica but got irritated by her hysterics and left. Danny, however, felt for Jessica; by this point he was spending more time with George’s girlfriend than George was. Danny tried to comfort her. They began an affair that night. Shortly afterward, Jessica was questioned by homicide detectives, but nothing came of it.

Years later, during his testimony at Taz’s trial, Rascal remembered the escalation of fear within the Obsession organization that followed Beatriz’s murder. George reminded workers that if they came up short, or slacked off, “a Taz special” could be easily arranged. Nearly everyone was subjected to these threats, Rascal said, but “Jessica in particular.”

T
hat December, Lourdes was facing eviction from her apartment on Tremont. She owed rent and the super claimed she ran a den of drug activity. Robert was no longer there; he had moved to Florida and become a Jehovah’s Witness. “There was no way I was going to have a criminal record, guilty by association,” Robert later said. Elaine and Angel moved in with Angel’s mother, who lived around the corner. To help out, George agreed to float Angel a brick of heroin on consignment. But impatience got the best of the family business team. Instead of diluting the dope and bagging it for a 120 percent profit, they immediately unloaded the brick for $30,000 and the family went on a spending spree. Lourdes celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday with two gold wedding bands: she married Que-Que legally, and the newlyweds abandoned the apartment on Tremont for a new start in another run-down tenement on a street named Vyse. The relocation wasn’t much of an improvement, although Lourdes hooked up a telephone and some of the rooms had rugs. But just having the means to move boosted Lourdes’s spirits. She threw herself a wedding reception to celebrate—a weeklong party that spent down what remained of the cash, much of it on coke.

George blamed himself for the fiasco and claimed that he would have killed them all for disrespect if they had not been Jessica’s family. Lourdes had proven herself to be a straight-out fiend, he said, and had only Jessica to thank for her life. From then on, he avoided Lourdes’s apartment; if Lourdes was that heedless of her daughter’s safety, she wouldn’t think twice about setting him up. Lourdes said, “I didn’t even know where my daughter lived.” George also wanted Jessica to stay clear of Vyse. Sometimes, when he left the apartment on Henwood, he locked Jessica in from the outside. He tolerated Jessica’s occasional visits to Serena but didn’t want the child underfoot. Children were unwitting messengers, and Serena was three—old enough to answer nosy questions but too young to hold to a lie.

Jessica did, however, trust Cesar with her address. The basement apartment sat on a dead-end street, not far from Tremont. Jessica generally shied away from Vyse after George’s beatings, but one day, Cesar surprised her. He inquired about the bruises. Jessica assured him, “Me
and George just had a little fight.” She didn’t want Cesar to get involved; she knew that her brother was crazy enough to try to set things right. Cesar had his own code of chivalry: he’d always defended her reputation on the street regardless, whether or not the gossip was true.

Cesar’s own reputation might still have been small-town to Boy George’s big-city standard, but Cesar was recognized and avoided on East Tremont. That winter, he’d reunited with Rocco, and together with two other boys, they’d formed their own little crew. The boys called their street family FMP—Four Man Posse. Besides Cesar and Rocco, there was a short, quiet boy named Mighty, and a worrier named Tito. Each boy, in his own way, came from Tremont—Rocco still lived next to Cesar’s old building; Mighty lived around the corner, on Echo Place; Tito lived across the street. “That was a nice little rugged corner of the Bronx that breeded a lot of jailbirds,” Cesar said. The boys knew every corner where the ghosts of notorious local crimes still hovered, legendary acts committed by boys who were now locked-up men. If place was identity, years of scaling rooftops, dangling from fire escapes, and riding bicycles through the narrow alleys had made Tremont theirs. Tremont raised them up.

The boys played Manhunt and Knock-Out. Knock-Out was their favorite. One boy would pick an unsuspecting male passerby and the other boy had to knock him down. Whichever boy succeeded, won—
Mike Tyson,
they would shout,
crowned!
They robbed a bicycle store and armed themselves. They bought an M1, a .45, and a shotgun and set about committing robberies. They added two .357s, a .38, a .45, an M1, and a Tech 9 to their arsenal. They stashed the guns under Cesar’s bed and above an awning near his old elementary school. Jessica worried about Cesar and asked Boy George to talk some sense to him. One night, Boy George invited Cesar up to Grande Billiards to play pool.

The bouncers waved the boys through the first security check at the downstairs entrance, past the other customers waiting to be frisked. Clearance at the second security checkpoint went just as smoothly. The pool players saw Boy George approaching and surrendered the coveted center-floor table. Cesar felt that standing with Boy George was like being in the gangster movies he loved.

George played the part. He counted out $1,000 and placed the bills on the table. He said, “Cesar Augustus. I’m going to tell you what. You win, it’s yours.” George was the only one who ever addressed Cesar formally. Cesar won the game. He won the $2,000 game after that. He won until
the pot reached $49,000, after which George said, “One more game for everything.”

“Everything but a thousand,” Cesar said knowingly. George was testing him. As expected, George won the final round. Cesar asked George to give him work.

George discouraged Cesar: “If something happens to you, I don’t want your mother blaming me.”

Now and then, when George would spot Cesar on the street and give him a lift, Cesar would still try to convince him: “Man, let me work for you!”

Without glancing at the bouncing beanstalk in the leather passenger seat beside him, Boy George would answer, “You’re not a stupid kid, Augustus. Go to school, go to school,
go to school!
”

Some days, Coco headed for Cesar instead of classes. If she couldn’t find Cesar around the bodega at Andrews Avenue, she boarded the 36 bus and headed east. She shied away from self-assertion, but when it came to hunting down Cesar, she was dogged in her pursuit. “I would just pop up,” she said. Usually, Cesar wasn’t home. He was courting trouble, or ducking out from the consequences of trouble he’d caused, or, unknown to Coco, flirting with other girls on nearby streets. Coco sometimes arrived in the afternoon and found Lourdes sleeping. If Lourdes woke in a dark mood, both Little Star and Coco knew not to ask for anything, not even a glass of water.

If Lourdes was feeling energized after an argument with her husband, she would enlist Coco to help her clean. They’d turn the radio to Lourdes’s favorite Spanish station—93.7 WADO. She would lean on the broom and introduce Coco to the mop. Coco would fill a bucket with hot water in the bathtub, then pour in the King Pine cleaner that Lourdes kept beneath the sink. She’d lug the bucket to Lourdes, who would be singing and sweeping and cursing up a dusty storm.

Coco would mop while Lourdes lifted furniture and ashtrays and children, placing them wherever they wouldn’t topple—on the kitchen table, on the beds, on the couch. After mopping came laundry. Lourdes did not like to go anywhere, even to the Laundromat, alone. Coco accompanied her. Back home, they’d string a clothesline along the hall to dry the leggings and baby T-shirts and baby socks, and the damp-clothes smell would blend with the King Pine, scenting the apartment. But even with dinner done and the laundry hanging, with Jessica’s three girls bathed and changed, their hair done, Lourdes’s anger was not necessarily used through.

The best days were when Coco found Lourdes cooking. Lourdes’s beauty shone in the kitchen, and Coco loved to see her bustling among her steaming pots. With one hand stirring
arroz con pollo
and the other holding a Newport, Lourdes did dance moves in her slippers, belting out lyrics, clamoring for Coco to pass her the shrimps or to
Stay out of the way, baby, this pot is hot!
Ordinarily snooty neighbors would knock on the door, rendered shameless by the enticing smells. “The people from the building come to my house to eat my food,” Lourdes said. When there was money, Lourdes was proud that she could provide so well for so many hungry mouths. When she didn’t have money, neighbors pooled change for the ingredients, as if it were Sunday night and people were collecting for a bag of weed.

Never would Lourdes stoop to cooking with the store-bought jars of Goya or packets of Sazón that her lazy daughters used.
Sofrito
had to be homemade. She valued her
pilón
—her mortar and pestle—even more than her statue of Saint Lazarus and her Irish friendship wedding ring. “When I move, it’s the first thing I pack,” she said. Food made any apartment feel like a home—even Vyse, which to everyone’s distress was infested with rats. Her mother had given Lourdes the
pilón
as a gift when she was fifteen years old; Lourdes had been cooking for nine years by then.

Coco loved rainy days because bad weather temporarily released the grip of the streets: Cesar stayed indoors and his friends stayed home. Coco would show up and, without a word, start taking her clothes off. “Wait,” Cesar would say, “I’m not even awake.” They spent whole mornings and afternoons in bed, having sex and playing Nintendo. Cesar had a fancy bed with a mirrored headboard. Coco, at those times, felt as if all life were happening there. Sometimes, if Cesar wasn’t in the mood to make love, Coco could convince him.

“She would just take the sex from me,” Cesar said. At first, it unnerved him, but he grew to like it. Coco was provocative without being nasty. They talked, too. Cesar asked her things:

“Do you love me?”

“Yeah,” Coco answered.

“But why? What you love about me?”

“Everything about you.”

“You are not telling me what I want to hear.”

Direct questions made Coco nervous. They reminded her of her stepfather, Richie, and that she never did well on tests. Mercifully, such moments were usually interrupted because something was always going on at Lourdes’s house, and Cesar’s friends never stayed away for long.