Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (27 page)

Jessica was popular at Marianna. She had lots of friends and suitors. She spoke up for the women whenever a guard gave them the runaround. She defended people who weren’t even her friends. One time, when an unpopular guard confiscated photographs that revealed her cleavage, Jessica said, “I got implants and that’s that.”

“These are pictures for your family and friends. This isn’t
Playboy,
” said the guard.

“How do you know what
Playboy
looks like?” asked Jessica. The women got a kick out of that.

Prison was certainly less frightening and more boring than Jessica had imagined. She earned her GED. She landed a job with federal prison industries, UNICOR, where her inventive excuses earned her the name “The Idle Queen.” During work, she’d claim she had diarrhea so she could go to her cell bathroom rather than the open one. “I turn on the soap opera, put on the sign ‘Bathroom in Use,’ and I just sit down, and when people walk by I make sounds,” Jessica said. “I can drop sixteen minutes that way.” She fantasized about getting a letter to Mike Tyson, who was also in prison:
Hey Mike, do you remember me? I’m George’s girl.

Jessica kept busy. She wrote to Coco and Edwin and Daisy and George. She wrote to Tito via Coco, and to Cesar, once their inmate-to-inmate
correspondence was approved. She sent all the children in her family birthday and holiday cards. She conjured up aches and pains for the cute prison doctor in the hope that she’d get felt up. She fell for a volatile girl named Tamika and their arguments fought off whole afternoons and nights of the tedium. She signed up for every workshop the prison offered—about religion and parenting and HIV. “I tried to go in that battered women’s group,” she said, “but it was just too much for me. I’m in the sexual abuse group. I couldn’t feel like I’m a battered wife.”

Jessica was eager to share all that she was learning. She sent AIDS pamphlets to her daughters. Jessica’s friends teased her, saying little girls weren’t at risk for HIV. “No,” Jessica said, “but I don’t want them to be ignorant like me on the street.” She wrote her little cousin Daisy, noting, “You should really get this,” on a Xerox she’d included of her GED (not long afterward, Daisy did). Jessica mailed Mercedes a book to help her with her ABCs and tried to dissuade Coco from her eternal wish to gain weight. Jessica had started exercising in the yard. “Don’t get fat,” she wrote, “I have fat on top of fat on top of fat.”

At first, Jessica welcomed her assignment to Florida because her maternal grandmother and several uncles lived there; before Jessica left, Lourdes had promised to move the girls down, so that she could keep in closer touch. The Florida contingent of Lourdes’s family were working people, and whenever Lourdes visited, she straightened out: she’d return to the Bronx fatter, without circles beneath her eyes. Lourdes’s feelings about Florida were nevertheless complicated. She was beholden to her siblings for flying her down there, and she sometimes felt used. She’d end up taking care of her mother, and doing the cooking and cleaning while everyone else went to work. That year, however, Lourdes never even left the city for a visit; things were so bad she rarely left the block.

Lourdes and Milagros had been hanging out and partying in the abandoned house on the corner; during the day, while they slept, Serena tried to keep her baby sisters quiet, in front of the TV. “She was good,” Lourdes said. “She didn’t touch anything.” Elaine stopped by to check up on her nieces; she taught Serena how to heat up a can of SpaghettiOs. She warned her never to open the door, but Serena couldn’t help it. Lourdes’s friends came, and sometimes a neighbor offered to take Serena to the park. Hundreds of miles away, Jessica worried. She said, “The hanging out, the people coming in and out, my daughter didn’t have no privacy.”

Lourdes habitually responded to such accusations with righteous
indignation. There was the time she said she’d found Que-Que’s works inside his boot beneath the bed, within easy reach of the children—three bags of dope, a spoon, and a syringe. Serena had seen her backhand his skinny ass across the room! But Jessica knew the routine. She threatened her mother, “The friends you’re hanging out with are going to lead you to me. Believe me, there is a bunk waiting for you.”

With no one to walk her in the mornings, Serena missed more than two months of school and failed first grade. The Bureau of Child Welfare eventually paid a visit; Lourdes gave up custody. She said she was having a nervous breakdown and was afraid that she would end up hurting the girls. Jessica agreed to move Serena to Robert’s more disciplined house in Brooklyn, where he lived near the Watchtower compound run by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He and Milagros were going to trade children on alternate weekends, to give one another a break. But the twins begged off the weekends at Robert’s and Serena cried on Sundays when it was time to leave for Brooklyn. Robert later admitted that his house wasn’t the most appealing place for a child. His marriage was rocky, and he was struggling with severe depression. After work, he headed straight for bed.

Jessica was the one in jail, but her family on the outside didn’t seem to be doing much better. No one had enough money. Jessica needed commissary for snacks and stamps and hygienes. Lourdes had nothing to spare. Elaine was scraping by. Robert sent only his religious literature. Jessica called Milagros. Milagros said, “She don’t know what it’s like out here. I’m wearing clothes from two years ago. I buy things for the kids.” Jessica’s maternal grandmother sent money orders from time to time, and Coco, too, whenever she could afford $20 from her welfare check. Jessica’s alienation from her family made it tougher for her to completely separate from George. “My mother won’t send me twenty dollars, but when the electric bill wasn’t paid or when they were going to be evicted, who got the money? I got the money. George paid,” said Jessica.

George helped Jessica keep in touch with her daughters. His mother deposited money into Jessica’s account (he’d attempted to wire money from his commissary into hers, but inmate-to-inmate transfers were not allowed). The money bought stamps and phone calls. Inmate access to telephones varied by facility. At the time, $4 to $5 was deducted from Jessica’s commissary account for each call. The calls automatically disconnected after fifteen minutes. Each follow-up call required another $4 hookup fee. The only other option was to place the outgoing call collect, which was, for the impoverished families of inmates, a tremendous burden.
Lourdes had lost her phone service long ago anyway. Milagros eventually placed a block against incoming collect calls; she couldn’t cover the additional bill. Elaine, who also got collect calls from Cesar, limited Jessica to one call a month.

The situation frustrated Jessica. Her girls were too young to write. “By the time I talk to one, and she telling me what she did, and you know, that she loves me and misses me, just talks to me, those fifteen minutes are up. And I gotta call back anyway to talk to the other two, cuz they feel left out. So it’s just before you know it, you have a dollar on your account.”

The calls themselves were difficult. Stephanie would pick up the phone and say to Milagros, “Mommy, Jessica’s on the phone.” Serena stretched the cord all the way around Milagros’s kitchen counter and curled into the receiver for privacy. She whispered “Yeah” and “No” to Jessica’s inquiries. Jessica wondered how she was going to help her daughter deal with what happened to her when she was a little girl while she was just beginning to deal with what had happened to herself. “And I know there is so much more that she wants to say. And that I’m the only one she can say it to,” Jessica said.

Milagros eventually retrieved Serena from Robert’s; Robert said his wife envied the attention he lavished upon his niece. In addition to Jessica’s three, Milagros still had Kevin, and baby-sat several more, including the younger of Puma and Trinket’s two boys. Trinket had been crashing at Milagros’s; she’d testified against the drug dealers who’d killed Puma, and threats had been made against her life. Serena shared a room with her sisters. She taped her photographs of Jessica above her bed. In one, perfect Shirley Temple curls spilled down her mother’s arched back as she squinted in the sun. “To My Baby,” read Jessica’s curvy script. “Look at me, still trying to look pretty. Oh well so much for that! I love you, Jessica Jessica,” as though her identity needed emphasis. Next to them were a few photos Jessica had forwarded from Daddy George.

George sometimes phoned the girls and reported the conversations back to Jessica. He sent them birthday cards. He remembered Jessica on Mother’s Day. Lourdes didn’t; George’s mother did. Rita wrote, in part: “For a wonderful daughter-in-law. I bought another bird and I named it after you. . . . I am so sad about all that’s going on. . . .”

The prison doctor placed Jessica on bed rest after Mother’s Day because Serena’s card had left Jessica distraught. “My daughter put on the picture ‘I love you Jessica.’ My family could’ve said, ‘Serena, that’s your mommy, not your Jessica. . . .’ My face is so red, my eyes is all swolled up,” she said. She couldn’t hold down meals. “I think it’s the stress. Everything
I eat, I throw up and the blood follows.” She eagerly anticipated George’s letters. “Nobody else loved me. Nobody else made me feel love.”

Prisons limit inmate-to-inmate letters to family members or to codefendants for legal purposes. George and Jessica were allowed to correspond because they were both defendants in the Obsession case. Because of George’s previous threats to Jessica, however, their letters were screened, but those parts most important to Jessica—his declarations of love—survived the monitoring. One letter he wrote with his blood. He further backed up his claims with hard evidence of his indifference to other girls: he forwarded photographs sent to him from Jessica’s old rivals—Miranda, the green-eyed table manager from the mill, serving ten years at FCI Alderson, kneeling in the yard; Gladys, the bank teller, looking fat in flannel baby dolls. He sent Jessica lots of pictures of himself. In one, he stood somberly against a prison-drawn mural of the Manhattan skyline glittering with lights. On the back, he wrote, “Here I stand awaiting you. I will always love you Jessica. I have made myself your father figure, I can’t turn my back on you, ever.” On another, he asked, “Jessica Rivera when are you going to be ready for me, and a marriage?”

In the meantime, Jessica reclaimed Mrs. Rivera as her title and used it in her return address. She forwarded pictures of George to Coco and reported, “Me and my husband George are doing well.” He promised to pay the girls’ way to visit her. Coco showed the pictures to Mercedes and Nikki, but she did not grant George a spot on her wall. She didn’t like George for Jessica. “He’s too strict,” Coco said.

During the second summer of Jessica’s incarceration, George told his mother to bring Jessica’s daughters to see her in Florida. Rita and George’s stepfather agreed to take Serena for a few days because she was compliant, but the twins were too much of a handful. Once at the prison, Serena quickly made her place on Jessica’s lap with her head burrowed into her mother’s neck, her legs tightly wound around her waist. She asked Jessica to play with her in the children’s room, but Jessica said, “Just a minute, sweetie, I’m going to talk to Grandma first.” She was catching up on the news about George.

“You aren’t going to spend time alone with me when you didn’t see me for two years?” Serena asked.

“She’s right,” Jessica recalled thinking. “What am I doing? Sitting here with this woman, talking about George?”

Rita was forced to cool her heels with her husband as Jessica and Serena spent most of that first day’s visit in the children’s room. Serena
was thrilled: she had the full attention of Jessica, who happily played game after game of Candy Land. They bought a bagel from the vending machine and heated it in a microwave. Slowly, Serena warmed to Jessica’s questions. She told her mother that a trip to Coney Island had been planned for her eighth birthday, a few weeks away. Yes, she told Jessica, Títi Elaine and Títi Daisy wore her leather coats. Títi Coco’s belly was getting big. Jessica asked about Lourdes. Serena said, “Grandma’s taking the white medicine again.”

Rita was not pleased about the way she had been treated; taking the backseat to a child apparently made her irritable. On the second day of the visit, she and Jessica argued, as they often did. “Come over here, we are leaving,” Rita ordered Serena. Serena grabbed Jessica’s leg and started screaming. A guard asked Rita to give the little girl time to say good-bye. Jessica watched Rita and her husband escort Serena away. She called after Rita’s husband desperately, “Please, please take care of my baby girl. Please don’t let her do anything to Serena!”

That night, Jessica begged the officer on duty to let her call the hotel. There was no answer. The guard said, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. You got as long as my shift.” Jessica finally reached them. She said Rita had decided to cut the three-day visit short by a day; she’d already changed the airline reservations, and they were packed to go. Jessica asked if she could speak to Serena to say good-bye. Serena had spent the afternoon by the hotel swimming pool, and playing in the parking lot.