Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (19 page)

In fact, Coco had been seeing Kodak. It was impossible not to: he still lived across the street. Every day, all day, Kodak stood in front of his mother’s building dealing drugs. Coco had no excuse not to talk. After all, words weren’t dangerous. Coco didn’t want to disrespect Kodak; he was her first. Besides, he looked too good.

Cesar had already heard about their conversations by the time they kissed. Coco had been walking across the abandoned lot near her mother’s building toward Andrews. She remembered it vividly both because of what happened, and because it was the only time she recalled having ever been alone. Her house was never empty, and she never ventured to the store without her little brother or a cousin or a friend. Kodak saw his chance. He approached her and said, “Coco, you look good.” Then he kissed her—a nighttime kiss in the public light of day. Coco felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, and thrilled.

She lied to Cesar on their next visit. She told Cesar it was a kiss she
didn’t want; she said she hadn’t kissed Kodak back. Cesar went crazy. She stood up to leave. He shouted, “Sit the fuck down.” She sat. Cesar berated her throughout that visit, and continued in the mail:

 . . . I know your going to fuck somebody so I don’t put my mind to it. the only thing I realy care about is my kid. . . . you know why I didn’t want a girl that wasn’t a virgin. . . . But that’s okay because your going to regret that believe me Im going to make you pay for what you put me threw and it’s not by hitting you so don’t worry about that. So that’s all I have to say to your dum ass. You better write back every single day to let me know how’s your belly. Alright you dont have to say anything about you because I don’t CARE BECAUSE YOU FUCKED WITH MY HEAD LONG ENOUGH. REMEMBER DO WHATEVER YOU WANT AFTER YOU HAVE THE BABY BECAUSE THAT’S ALL I CARE ABOUT IS MY KID

The unborn baby helped smooth things over. “Yo when are you going to give birth,” Cesar wrote, more tenderly. He despaired the restricted access he would have in jail. He hated being an absent father, like his own father, who’d moved out when Cesar was just two. “For the next four years I’m going to have to handle it,” Cesar wrote. “But any way at least I have something that’s mine and will never stop loving me. MY KID.”

In April, a healthy, full-term baby girl arrived:

Dear: Coco

 . . . Take care of her dont let nobody I mean nobody kiss her face or lips ok. Not even when she get’s older . . . Coco I filled out the Baby-book. She wiegh’s 6 pounds 13 ounces and 1/2 she is 18 inches long has brown hair and blue and light brown eye’s right. Her name is Mercedes Antonia Santos.

Fatherhood further escalated his demands. Since the baby might get sick in cold weather, Coco was to visit only on warm days. He wanted Coco to document each day he was missing with photographs. Coco loved the assignment; she’d always been a shutterbug, and as long as she didn’t take pictures of the baby sleeping, no picture of a baby could be wrong. (Sleeping-baby pictures were bad luck because the babies looked as though they were dead.) Cesar still made his usual requests, but the questions about Mercedes now came first: Does she still have that rash?
That bump on her chest? He built her a toy chest in his woodworking class, which he inscribed:
To Mercedes from Daddy.
Now he signed off his letters,
Father Cesar, Daughter Mercedes, Mother Coco.
Fatherhood reorganized the rankings in his heart. Coco had been demoted, but her standing plummeted still further when Cesar learned that Sunny, her ex-boyfriend Wishman’s mother, had attended Mercedes’s birth.

For a full page, Cesar capitalized his ranting: “YO COCO WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT BITCH SUNNY DOING IN THE HOSPITAL. YO COCO IF I FIND OUT MY KID GOES TO SUNNY’S HOUSE IM GOING TO BREAK YOUR FUCKING FACE.” Then he abruptly retreated to lowercase. It was as if he had suddenly realized there had been a power shift:

But Coco dont take the Baby from me no matter what happen’s dont take my heart. Because then Im going to take yours out through your mouth. So just keep that shit in mind ok. Take good care of my princes alright. Bye, Bye CASPER ROCK and HIS PRINCES Mercedes Antonia Santos

The more possessive Cesar became, the more Coco avoided him. It may have been the spring weather, too, and Coco’s feeling free of her belly’s weight. Coco would dress Mercedes, and they would hit the streets. Cesar called and Foxy reluctantly covered for her daughter, using the excuses women always used:

She took the baby to the clinic.

She went to get the baby’s WIC.

She went to buy the baby an outfit.

Oh, but Cesar, she went to the store.

Foxy didn’t want to admit that Coco was hanging out again. Coco would leave Mercedes with Foxy and go dancing, or dipping into night pool—hopping the fence to swim after hours at Roberto Clemente State Park. Coco continued to flirt with Kodak. He flirted back. But Foxy resented having to lie to Cesar. She also resented being saddled with another grandchild, and more were on the way—her oldest son Manuel’s girlfriend was pregnant, and Iris was pregnant with her second child. Iris sometimes left her oldest boy at Foxy’s. Luckily, Richie helped; he fed and changed him; he took the child outside with his little plastic car when he went to cop his heroin. Foxy loved her grandchildren, but she had been raising children since she was fourteen and she wanted a break.

Other grandmothers in the neighborhood would have sympathized.
They certainly made their crisp comments, which the hardheaded young girls ignored:

You made your bed, now you’re gonna fall on it.

You had fun making it.

I’m the grandmother, not the mother.

You’re a woman, not a girl.

Coco eventually heeded Foxy’s complaints and dropped Mercedes off at Lourdes’s, where she ran into Jessica. Jessica was running around that summer, doing research for Boy George’s upcoming case. Coco got to know Jessica better, and Little Star kept Mercedes company.

G
eorge had returned to the MCC by August 1990, when jury selection began for his trial. He needed a girl Friday and an ally. Jessica visited. He helped her bypass the tedious processing procedure with a phony paralegal pass procured by a private investigator. The paralegal pass granted Jessica legal access, which meant no restrictions on visiting hours. Jessica dressed professionally for the ruse. “George likes me to represent myself as a young sophisticated lady,” she said. “I love it. I love to dress up. I like to look important, I like to look sexy.” She wore blazers with tight, short skirts and sheer stockings to show off her legs. Once, she ran into John Gotti. She lugged briefcases stuffed with contraband food. They devised a code for his requests. George would ask, “What are you cooking for the girls?” and he’d amend the menu. “Don’t they want
rabo guisado
?” he’d say, or, “I thought you were making
tostónes.
” She packed weed in the cylinders of Hi-Liters, and he brought his empty ones, and they traded. They enjoyed the privacy of a cinder-block attorney-client room. George shadowboxed; Jessica performed little dances; they had sex; they talked. George sometimes kept her there all day. Jessica later said of her paralegal duties, “Nothing
legal
went on in there!”

Jessica also ran errands. She flew to Florida on “confidential business” and trekked up and down Fifth Avenue shopping for his outfits for court. George’s sartorial demands were exacting. He wanted only patterned pullover sweaters. The slacks had to have cuffs. The socks had to match the slacks. Jessica carted dirty clothes to the dry cleaner’s and clean ones back to the MCC. She carted sneaker boxes of cash to his broker on Wall Street, who briefly hired her as a receptionist. “George would call. ‘How’s the stock doing?’ And I’d be like, ‘Reebok’s going up!’ ”

Her grandmother’s Manhattan apartment turned out to be a convenient place for Jessica to stay on trial days. George expected her in the courtroom. Jessica said it was because he loved her; George said her presence in the courtroom reduced the risk of her being subpoenaed to testify.

George also expected her to continue visiting him at the MCC. One night, on her way home, some boys robbed her on the platform of the Fifty-ninth Street station and took her engagement ring. She was glad she
had taken that portrait: What Jessica valued, perhaps more than the relationship, was the evidence of it.

At Harlem Valley, a juvenile detention center in Wingdale, New York, the boys divided themselves by block and neighborhood, just as they did at home. Cesar’s connection to Boy George preceded him. Cesar said, “When I got there, they be like, ‘Yo, that’s Boy George’s brother-in-law,’ and guys be coming up and saying, ‘Yo, I knew Boy George.’ ” But Cesar chose not to exploit the association.

Harlem Valley had the best conditions Cesar would experience during his prison years. At the time, juveniles were still treated like teenagers. George could place only collect calls; Cesar could receive calls and dial outgoing calls directly. George had to ask Jessica to send in photographs. Cesar shot his own rolls of film with a camera the staff let the teenagers use. He mailed Coco pictures of him sitting in his cinder-block room, on his Ninja Turtle sheets. George’s Walkman had only an AM radio; all cassettes had to be mailed directly from the distributor. Coco sent Cesar homemade mix tapes, her selections encoding private memories. George bribed guards to bring in food from Little Italy and Chinatown. Cesar ate the home-cooked food that Lourdes brought in Tupperware.

At first, Lourdes visited often. Her home cooking reminded Cesar of the happiest periods of his childhood, when life was the way he liked it—predictable and strict. He still remembered those first months in the Bronx with fondness: Lourdes had continued working off-the-books at a factory that made costume jewelry. In the morning, she prepared oatmeal for everyone—her special kind. After school, they waited for her in a pizza parlor near the factory. There was a bedtime. You even had to ask for water. “Without the men, we lived a structured, disciplined life,” Cesar said.

Harlem Valley was strict. The guards inquired about Lourdes’s packages. They sniffed them and tested her dishes. They phoned her in the Bronx and said, “Mrs. Morales, you coming up?” They placed orders; the extra cash helped. If Cesar managed to reach his mother before she visited, she told him about the menu.

“You want that, Papi?” she asked.

“I guess that’s all right,” Cesar said. He liked everything she cooked.

Lourdes hoped prison might teach Cesar lessons she had not been able to. She wasn’t optimistic but didn’t see a choice. At least Cesar was safer at Harlem Valley; none of the kids had guns. Two bigger boys had already jumped him and stolen his sneakers. Rocco saw the bruises
during a visit and snapped a Polaroid for evidence. But Cesar refused to press charges—he’d handle it privately; making a reputation was the only way to ensure that other boys didn’t mess with him. Rocco eventually passed along the disturbing photograph to Coco, who placed it facedown in an album. Sometimes she slipped it out of the plastic sheets, kissed the black-and-blue marks on his swollen face, and tenderly put it back again.

Lourdes willed herself to believe Cesar could protect himself in juvenile. She knew machismo often wilted under pressure, but he’d owned up to the consequences of his bad actions, and Cesar was a fighter. She said, “A ratter will never become a man. He will become an insect.” They could say what they wanted about her, but when it came to her baby, she could hold her head high on the street.

Of the thirty-three defendants originally charged in the Obsession case, only George and five codefendants rose for the entrance of Judge Shirley Wohl Kram on the opening day of the first trial. One of them was Miranda, who, at the time of her arrest, had been out of George’s life and the drug business for two years and refused to plead guilty. Her sister also went to trial; she was a bank teller who’d only briefly worked at one of George’s mills. Most of the other lower-level workers accepted guilty pleas; they had little useful information to trade. 10-4, Rascal, and Danny were facing thirty- and forty-year sentences, and hoping their cooperation would cut down their jail time. In exchange for 10-4’s testimony, the U.S. attorneys agreed not to prosecute his son.