Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (17 page)

Inside, George languished in the MCC, obsessing about his business, his future, and Jessica’s whereabouts. She brought him pornography and his favorite,
Yachting Magazine.
He’d redesign the two-hundred-footers, adding Jacuzzis to their decks. “I get a scrap paper,” he said, “and I draw.”

Outside, Jessica was enjoying his money. She crammed as many girlfriends as would fit into limousines and treated everyone to dinner and dancing. “With the money, Jessica began to change—like I thought she would,” said Lourdes. “She would spend a thousand at a club—not that I want any for myself, I didn’t—but you take away something from my grandchildrens.” Jessica sarcastically prompted Lourdes’s faulty short-term memory: “Ma, ain’t you forgetting that you get the girls’ welfare checks?” But Jessica did buy Lourdes a washing machine and give her money for the rent and the light.

Soon, Jessica and her little cousin Daisy were going out dancing almost every night. Short and tall, experienced and trusting, Jessica and Daisy made an excellent team: Jessica dated drug dealers, and the dealers had friends who went with Daisy. Jessica introduced her little cousin to the night world. It was a summer of cocaine, clubs, and hotel rooms, and thick, airless visits to the MCC. One boy let Jessica drive his red Corvette.

Jessica inherited the lease to a project apartment from her maternal grandmother, who had moved to Florida. Jessica could not imagine living in the one-bedroom high-rise alone, on 54th Street and Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, but it was a safe place for her to store valuables—too many people passed through Lourdes’s apartment on Vyse. On those nights Jessica and Daisy went clubbing in the city, the apartment served as a convenient place to crash. They also occasionally entertained boys there, but Jessica still preferred to sleep at her mother’s.

From time to time, Jessica ran into Coco there. Coco loved hearing about the adventures of her wild sister-in-law: Jessica once dragged Daisy beneath a car during a shoot-out; another time, she and Daisy went to a hotel with two brothers, and Jessica paid the tab. Jessica had the same way with men that Cesar had with girls. She’d go to Grande Billiards and pretend she couldn’t play pool. She liked to wear white leggings and a low-cut top. With her beeper tucked into the V of her cleavage, she’d ask a handsome boy to help her take a shot. The boy usually would. He’d place his arms around Jessica from the back and she would bend over the table to aim, pressing her butt into his crotch. It was a simple gesture, and it always worked.

Jessica lived the fast life. She took cabs everywhere. “I guess George got me used to that, constantly moving around,” she said. That summer, Little Star traveled by car so often that she balked when Coco put her on a bus to take her to Foxy’s block.

A formidable grapevine connected prison and the street, and news of Jessica’s booming social life soon reached George. He confronted her; she denied the allegations. He yelled at Jessica and complained to his mother, who encouraged him to give Jessica room. To prove her devotion, Jessica agreed to get a tattoo. “If you love me, you’ll do it,” George said. He demanded high quality, not some crude ghetto tattoo drawn by an excon with only two colors and crayon lines. He researched the trade magazines until he discovered a tattoo artist in Elizabeth, New Jersey, who’d been rated one of the nation’s best.

The first tattoo, a heart with a rose high on her right thigh, was elegant.
George.
She opened the slit on her skirt to show George on her next visit to the MCC. “You stupid bitch!” he said with appreciative incredulity. On the elevator ride back down to the exit, one of the other inmates’ girlfriends expressed her exasperation with Jessica: now her boyfriend wanted her to get one, too. Jessica’s next read
Jess loves George,
with an arrow over her actual heart. He promised to get the same one with the names reversed.

In August, four months after he was arrested, the authorities transferred George to Otisville, a holding facility upstate, where he would wait over a year for his trial to begin. With the distance, Jessica’s calendar entries dwindled; their monthly anniversary became the only notation concerning George. By October, the commemorative
George and Jessica’s
anniversary had inverted to
Jessica and George’s
anniversary. On the back page of her little black book she asked hard questions of herself:

1. Is this a punishment from God for me not to be happy

2. Do I really Love this person

3. Do I really wanna be Happy with

4. Could I really wait for George

5. How can I help myself besides him

6. Will I ever be happy

7. Does he really Love me.

8. Do I need companion from another man

9. What will I really do for this person? What are my limits?

10. When I say that I promise I’m promise the opposite or I’m I lieing just a little bit, or do my promises mean nothing.

Yet she continued with her more public testaments of loyalty. Altogether, she got six tattoos in his honor, including a banner reading
Property of George
across her buttocks and a poem, written on a scroll, which unrolled just above her shoulder blade:

George

No matter where I am

or what I’m doing

You’re always there

Always on my mind

and in my heart

It was as if Jessica was trying to convince herself of love from the outside in.

Circumstances forced George to adjust to Jessica’s escapades. Still, he was shocked when he finally listened to the wiretaps. He’d been given copies of the tapes in preparation for his trial; they filled a large box. Jessica received the first blast of his reaction in the middle of the night. She was at Lourdes’s. “What time is it?” she asked.

“Bitch, listen to this.” George played a cassette into the receiver.

“How’d you get to use the phone?” Jessica stalled.

“Don’t mind how I got to use the phone, you fucking bitch, listen to this.” And so it went. The DEA’s wiretaps had recorded the calls she’d made from the Morris Avenue apartment she’d shared with George—her intimate exchanges with Danny and Puma; uncensored conversations with girlfriends about sex and life with George. The wiretaps also explained a mysterious visit earlier that spring by the New York City Police
that had continued to baffle George. An officer had appeared in response to an anonymous report of domestic violence. It was true that George had hurt the twins, who were with Jessica at the time. But George had doubted that his neighbors would have dared to call the cops on him. In fact, a DEA agent had called the local police after overhearing Jessica’s panicked call to a friend.

Jessica claimed the government had framed her: “It’s some white girl’s voice.” She reminded George how she’d stood by him in the most important way—she had refused to snitch on him. She remained one of his only friends. But that type of loyalty wasn’t enough to appease George’s anger. Tombstones, he would say, were going like hotcakes. He fantasized openly about delivering her to Lourdes in separate body parts.

Night after night, in his cell, Boy George played and replayed the cassettes. Jessica’s voice surrounded him. In real time, she was rarely home—or was ignoring his phone calls. He obsessively tried to reach her at the Manhattan apartment, where he caught only her breathy recording for the answering machine, which she’d tailored in anticipation of his prison calls: “Hello, yes, I accept a collect call . . .” Boy George was finally listening to Jessica, just as she was moving out of range.

C
esar had gone from acting like a hoodlum to being one; his tough posture had calcified and become part of his identity. He called himself a stickup kid. As he remembers it, he went from playing tag to hiding drugs in his pocket to carrying guns. “That part where you and your boys go to the movies? I passed right by that,” he said. His friend Tito still dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. Mighty never spoke much about the future, but then Mighty never spoke much. Rocco was more interested in the gangster lifestyle; when asked his age, he would jokingly reply, “Twenty-five to life.” But Cesar liked being a gangster. Like George, he did not equivocate: he took action. He had become FMP’s acknowledged leader.

FMP’s crimes had become more serious. Cesar and Mighty were the boldest, with Rocco and Tito following their increasingly reckless leads. They would listen to Public Enemy to get pumped. They did a daylight robbery on Fordham with a Dillinger two-shot. They hunted for victims on the subway. Mighty often got carried away. Said Rocco, “He had that Napoléon complex, because he was short.” One time, while Cesar cleaned out a guy’s pockets, Mighty pulled off his shoes. Rocco, who had his eye on the man’s white jacket, warned Mighty, “No blood,” but Mighty punched him in the nose anyway, ruining the jacket. Another time, they were riding around in Rocco’s car when they spotted a man with a Walkman and a car radio, looking for a livery cab. With its tinted windows, Rocco’s Caprice Classic passed as one. Rocco dropped off Cesar and Mighty, looped around the block, and the man got in. Rocco sped ahead, collected his friends, and ordered the terrified man to give them everything. “I’m Puerto Rican,” the man begged as Cesar ransacked his pockets. Rocco replied, “We’re not robbing you for your nationality.” When the man shit on himself, Mighty went crazy and started beating him over the head with The Club. “Mighty, don’t make him bleed! Don’t bleed in the car!” Rocco yelled. It was all they could do to throw the guy out on the street before Mighty finished him off. Later, they used Lourdes’s Ajax to clean up the mess.

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.”