Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (18 page)

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 wasn’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.