Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (26 page)

Cesar knew Roxanne wasn’t the cause of the anguish and tension, but he somehow still blamed her. She was pregnant. She couldn’t decide what to do: One minute, she’d threaten to take out the baby. Then, if he agreed, she’d quip, “I’m keeping the baby. Think your ass gonna tell me what to do.” Eventually, Roxanne did decide to keep the baby, stay with Cesar, but return to her mother’s apartment. Cesar agreed to stay with Roxanne, sleep wherever he could, and see Coco on the side.

Unknown to both Coco and Roxanne, Cesar was also seeing another girl named Giselle, whom he paged whenever Roxanne or Coco couldn’t be with him. Cesar could not sleep alone. Giselle was a neighborhood girl he knew from way back—even before he met Coco. One of Cesar’s friends hid his stash at Giselle’s mother’s, and Cesar tagged along whenever he went to re-up. He hadn’t seen Giselle for years. During that time, she had married, moved to Yonkers, had a son, and divorced. She’d
recently returned to the neighborhood and was living with her mother. Her sister was dating Cesar’s friend Luis.

Giselle and Cesar would meet up at her sister’s place on Anthony. Giselle cooked for him. Cesar stayed up late with Luis and his friends, but Giselle wasn’t a hang-out person; she usually left him to his company and climbed into her sister’s bed with her baby son. After his guests left, Cesar would hide his 9mm Taurus with its two clips in a cigar box on top of a wall unit in the living room that blocked the window to the street. He would have preferred to keep his gun closer by, but Giselle’s son was underfoot. Then he’d push the love seat into the couch, wake Giselle, and carry the baby back to bed.

It’s unlikely that another girl would have changed Coco’s devotion to Cesar. “To me,” Coco said, “I was always with him. I knew we wasn’t together, but to me, the way I looked at it, I was always with him. He didn’t worry because I never was going toward anybody else. He knew that if he was with another girl,
Coco would take me back.
I would.” Giselle, however, didn’t accommodate the other girls so quickly. She made Cesar sleep alone the night after she spotted him on Mount Hope with Roxanne sitting on his lap.

In January 1993, Rambo, a Bronx homicide detective, changed out of his sweat suit and into a Con Ed employee uniform. Hulk’s choice of a disguise was appropriate: gas leaks, like fires, were common in the neighborhood. That morning, a tip had come in, confirming where Cesar had spent the previous night. Hulk and the other undercovers drove to Anthony Avenue. They’d heard that Cesar didn’t plan to surrender quietly.

Rambo, nicknamed for his pumped-up body, was known for solving cases. He’d transferred to the 46th in 1988, when the crack trade was exploding. Tremont, in its heyday, reliably gave him five shootings every week. Rambo was considered a fair cop by the neighborhood’s tough guys because he didn’t harass people unnecessarily. “He didn’t set you up,” said Cesar. “If you didn’t have nothing on you, he wouldn’t plant nothing on you. He’d say, ‘I’m gonna get you, but I’m gonna get you fair and square.’ ” Rambo tracked down runaway daughters and retrieved stereos from ex-girlfriends; he brought Pampers on house calls and handed off twenties for milk. People confided in him; he never made someone who had too much time feel that he was in a rush. He respected the men, and if the women whistled, he was glad to remove his shirt and show off his chest.

During the four months he’d been trailing Cesar, Rambo and Lourdes had become cautious friends. He stopped by her apartment regularly and searched the place every time, but she didn’t insult him, which he appreciated. “She was afraid,” Rambo said. “She didn’t want to rat on her own kid, but she knew if another cop or a rookie saw him, and he was armed, they were going to kill him, and she knew I wouldn’t do that to the kid unless I had to.” Rambo assured her that if Cesar surrendered, he’d take him in safely. Lourdes passed the word along to Cesar, as Rambo expected, but Cesar said again he wouldn’t go without a fight. Rocco planted misleading rumors—that Cesar had fled to Puerto Rico, to Springfield, to Florida.

One afternoon, Cesar went to Big Joe’s, in Mount Vernon, a tattoo shop. Cesar had never been tattooed before. He liked clean, untouched skin. He already had a burn mark on his shoulder from when Lourdes had dropped a pot of boiling water on him. But killing his best friend was a deeper cut, and this tattoo was to be his penance; it was a wound Cesar wanted the world to see.

Cesar boasted to the tattoo artist that the detective Rambo was chasing him.

“He’s a friend of mine,” the tattoo artist said. In fact, unbeknownst to Cesar, Rambo moonlighted for Big Joe as a body piercer.

Cesar added, “When you see him again, mention to him that Cesar was here.” At first, Rambo thought the message was just another false lead. But then he learned that the tattoo, which was just above the boy’s heart, read
Forgive me Mighty, R.I.P.

Rambo rang the doorbell at Giselle’s sister’s. Police manned the fire escape, the alleyways, and the roof. When Giselle’s sister opened the door, several police pushed in. Cesar was lying beside Giselle and her son in the living room, in their makeshift bed. Rambo handcuffed Cesar, then instructed Giselle to dress him. She passed her screaming son to her sister and guided Cesar’s feet into a pair of sweats. Cesar told her to double up on his boxers and socks, so that he’d have a clean pair to wear in jail while he washed the others in the sink. She tied the laces of his Nikes and tucked twenty dollars in his pocket for deodorant and shampoo.

Rambo escorted Cesar to the 46th quietly. He let Lourdes bring in sandwiches and juice. Afterward, Cesar asked him, “So who called the cops on me?”

“You know what was your problem?” Rambo replied. “Too many girls.”

Upon hearing the news, Coco cried, but after she heard that Cesar had been in bed with Giselle, she laughed. “That’s just like him,” she said. The police would have seen him naked. Roxanne had been dissed.

Coco was pregnant. She’d suspected the pregnancy but the first test had been negative. The second test was positive. Once again, she was carrying Cesar’s baby, and once again he was locked up. “I bugged out for a minute. Then I got
happy.
I was like, ‘All right, you know,
finally!
’ I even thought I could write Cesar and give him good news.” The good news was even better because it would upset Roxanne.

Cesar told Roxanne during a visit at Rikers Island, where he was being held. “That was the beginning of the end right there,” he said. That May, in 1993, Roxanne gave birth to their daughter, whom she named Justine. Justine had Roxanne’s eyes and Cesar’s light complexion and wide grin. A friend of Cesar’s named Ace hired a private attorney to represent Cesar, but then Ace was murdered. When the private attorney delivered the news, he suggested Cesar call Legal Aid or plead out. Cesar didn’t trust Legal Aid: his last Legal Aid attorney had advised him to plead guilty to a robbery he hadn’t even committed. The following month, Cesar pled guilty to one count of manslaughter. He was sentenced to an indeterminate term of nine years to life. He would serve at least the nine-year minimum. This time, however, the New York State Department of Corrections classified Cesar as an adult. He was nineteen.

Coxsackie Correctional Facility was the first of many maximum-security prisons among which Cesar would be shuttled over the coming years. Most of Coxsackie’s inmates were young, so there was lots of fighting. Some inmates called it Gladiator Camp. Tito, his old friend from FMP, was there awaiting trial for the murder of his wife. Since he’d last seen Cesar, things had spun out of control: he’d continued robbing drug dealers and doing too much coke. Tito claimed that he had exchanged shots with an intruder, who’d shot his wife, then fired at him; the prosecutors would argue that Tito had killed his wife, then shot himself to cover it up.

Wherever the truth lay, Tito refused to plead guilty. Cesar tried to shake him out of it. Back when Tito only had a gun charge, he’d spent the night before his sentencing curled up at the foot of Rocco’s bed. Cesar wasn’t sure that Tito was hard enough to handle prison, but he knew that the fifteen years the district attorney had offered Tito was better than what he was bound to get if he went to court. Tito was determined to prove his innocence.

Cesar and Tito weren’t on the same unit, but they hung out in the yard. They ragged on the other teams during handball games. They hollered, “East Tremont! East Tremont!” when they played basketball. They sat on the bleachers and talked. They never discussed Tito’s relationship with Jessica, or what had happened to Mighty. They reminisced about better times. They spoke of all the other girls they’d known, or wished they’d known, and wondered who would answer the letters they floated into the world—Tito called them kites.

“The whole thing is about getting bitches to write to pass the time,” Cesar said. Cesar cast a wide net. For starters, his correspondents included Coco, Roxanne, and Lizette. He wrote other girls in care of friends, because he only remembered the girls by nicknames or by their buildings or by their blocks. He told Tito, “We shoulda kept their addresses if this was the kind of life we was gonna lead.”

Cesar’s adult designation made him potentially eligible for conjugal visits called trailers. Trailers were named after actual trailers on the compound, where inmates could spend overnights with their families. To qualify for trailers, wives had to be legal wives. But trailers required a girl with resources—money for the food and traveling, persistence to assemble all the necessary documentation and fill out the required paperwork, and stamina to withstand the duration of her husband’s bid.

Prison was the fulfillment of the empty promise of the ghetto: it positioned you even farther out on the margin of things. Cesar’s ability to sustain vital relationships in the outside world could wither with each passing year. He didn’t have the resources he had on the outside—spotless sneakers, brand-new clothes, his sexual prowess, different girls to impress and experience. Roxanne wasn’t suited for the long haul; he’d yet to see their baby, and her explanations felt like excuses. All prison visitors needed ID, and Roxanne still hadn’t gotten around to getting their daughter’s birth certificate. Coco wanted to make the effort, but she was disorganized and easily distracted. Cesar wondered how long any girl would last without sex. “You try to fill your little black book,” Cesar said. “You’re gonna need a lot of spare tires throughout this ride.”

Eight months later, a friend sent him Giselle’s address.

T
he maximum-security prison in Marianna, Florida, where Jessica would spend the first two years of her incarceration, was the only high-security federal facility for women in the nation at that time. Although Jessica was a nonviolent offender with no previous record, she had to start her sentence in maximum detention because of the length of her term. The women who filled Marianna’s antiseptic units were by and large minority and poor, with lives that in many ways were similar to Jessica’s. The skyrocketing number of women in prison was the unintended consequence of a drug policy that snagged legions of small-timers in the attempt to bring the kingpins down. The perfunctory institutional attitude toward the women reflected their relative insignificance in the war on drugs: a high-tech fortress, Marianna operated more like a public hospital with extra rules than a prison containing violent criminals. The atmosphere was more depressing than punitive.