Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (35 page)

Cesar didn’t call Coco on her birthday. He’d been transferred upstate and was still waiting for phone privileges. But he’d written her a long letter that Coco read aloud to everyone who’d listen. The day she got it, she read it three times to herself. He wanted the relationship she wanted: “I told everybody up here that you had a girl and they were like, Damn, kid, you can’t make a boy for shit. I told them me and you already planned on trying again. You already said Yes, don’t change your mind.”

He accepted Nikki: “I hate to admit it but it’s also my fault that you got pregnant from Nikki. . . . I made you weak by always arguing with you and accusing you of things.” He expanded her privileges: “Mamita, I’m giving you your freedom.” He proclaimed her a woman. Prison had changed his ways: “The happier I make you, the more loyal you’ll be. . . . Our relationship has no trust or understanding, it’s only based on love and our children. I don’t want it like that anymore. . . . I ain’t never going to find another woman that will do 9 years with me or love me the way you do. I thought I had two women who cared, but they both with other men
now. And that’s Lizette and Roxanne. You are the only one who is still by my side.”

He had only one request:

All I’m asking you is to leave your face ALONE. And don’t cut your hair by yourself, and dress the way I like you to dress. Coco go to the beauty parlor every one or two months to get your hair cut. Dress like you care about yourself. Don’t be wearing no dirty sneakers and stained clothes. Wash your sneakers and shoes. Do your hair, look pretty at all times. That’s all I ask of you. I always dress nice, it ain’t to impress no one else it’s to impress myself and that’s what you have to do impress yourself Coco.

He called her “sweetheart.” “I miss being with you. Talking kissing laughing joking arguing and making love.”

The letter made her sad birthday the best yet.

“Ilovehimmysweetheart,” Coco whispered back.

Foxy rarely told Coco what to do with her children. But ever since Nautica had been born, Foxy had made a point of urging her daughter to get Nautica’s ears pierced; she wanted people to stop mistaking her granddaughter for a boy. Coco wanted to please her mother and stopped by Foxy’s with the girls, hoping to borrow the $10 she needed to do it, but only her brother Manuel, and his girl, Yasmin, and Manuel’s two children were home. Yasmin shuffled out of the bedroom in an oversize T-shirt and slippers, her long hair down.

“Can I have money for Nautica’s earrings?” Coco asked Manuel.

“I’m not a bank,” he said. Manuel was even harder than Iris. He was only twenty-three, but when it came to money, he acted like an old man. Yasmin modeled one of Coco’s large door-knocker earrings. Manuel made a sour face. “You look too womanish with them. Stay like you are,” he said.

Coco wanted much about her life to change. She wanted to marry and get her own apartment and go back to school. Sister Christine had told her about a high school program for young mothers, with on-site day care. Coco wanted to go. “You ain’t going back to school?” she asked Yasmin encouragingly. Yasmin was fourteen.

“I want to,” Yasmin said. “Everybody in school, they make me feel like they smart and I’m stupid.”

“There’s a school for girls like us. You’re supposed to sign up now.”
Coco told Yasmin that her Thorpe friend Jezel was taking training as a day-care aide. Day care didn’t interest Jezel—she was impatient with children, especially her son—but it appealed to Coco because she loved kids.

“I want to go to school, but I need clothes. I won’t go to school until I have clothes,” Yasmin said. She also needed glasses.

“And when you get the clothes, what’ll be the excuse after that?” asked Manuel, heading past her into the kitchen.

“There won’t be no excuse because I want to go,” Yasmin called after him, and rolled her eyes. She scooted close to Coco and whispered, “Coco, I think I’m pregnant!”

“Why don’t you get it checked?” Coco asked.

“Because she’s a derelict,” Manuel said, returning to the couch.

“My brother’s smoking crack,” Coco teased.

Manuel crossed himself. “Thank God that I don’t. Don’t even joke about that.” Nikki climbed onto her uncle’s skinny lap. “You ain’t supposed to go between a man’s legs, Nikki!” Manuel said sharply. Nikki began to cry.

“Explain it to her better, look at her tears,” Coco said.

“You ain’t supposed to go between nobody’s legs,” Yasmin tried.

“Girl or boy,” Manuel added.

“Especially a man,” said Coco. She counted out four of her nine WIC tickets and tucked them in Foxy’s sanitary napkin pack, where the boys wouldn’t dare to look. Manuel surprised Coco by handing her $10 for Nautica’s ears, and by giving Nikki a dollar for her shame.

At the jewelry store on Burnside Avenue, the ear-piercing lady straddled a tattered stool in her bullet-proof safety stall. She wore a gold suede jacket, and her black jeans had silver-fringed holes, strategically placed. Her clothes seemed like an attempt to keep her spirits up. The stereo blared. Gold chains and earrings stuffed the counter. She also had a card table piled high with toys—Barney knapsacks, knock-off Barbie dolls.

“I want this,” Mercedes pleaded, pointing to everything.

“I don’t got the money, Mercedes,” Coco shouted. The music was so loud it was hard to hear.

“Take the baby’s,” Mercedes suggested practically.

“You don’t want your sister to have earrings?” asked Coco.

“She look ugly in earrings,” Mercedes said.

“So you and Nikki have earrings and your sister don’t?”

“Yeah,” Mercedes said. Nikki stood quietly.

Coco held Nautica’s small head while the lady dotted each earlobe
with a Magic Marker. Without warning, she punched the first pink rhinestone through. Nautica sucked in and screamed on the exhale. Tears streamed down Coco’s face. The lady quickly stapled an earring into Nautica’s other lobe.

Coco pushed the earring in. The post dug into Nautica’s head. “They too big,” she said, sniffling.

“I do lots of children,” the lady said flatly.

“Oh,” said Coco, working up her courage. The lady’s tone ordinarily would have intimidated her, but Coco was speaking for a baby. “She’s five weeks old, but—”

“I do
lots
of children just two weeks old,” the lady said. End of chat.

Coco immediately returned to Foxy’s to show her mother Nautica’s earrings. In the elevator headed up, a neighbor glanced at the now unquestionably female Nautica. Her eyes then grazed over Mercedes, then Nikki, then she shook her head pityingly. “Coco, can’t you do anything right? Three girls?” Coco smiled her crumpled smile and shrugged. The woman shuffled from the elevator and, without bothering to turn her head back, added wearily, “That’s the only thing I done right. Had a son.”

The pressure to buy things was always intense in the ghetto, but Christmas created a level of expectation that was unbearable, and the tension was further compounded by the blues that came with every holiday. Foxy didn’t have any money to buy things for her grandkids, so she avoided her own children more than usual. Lourdes lost her sense of drama. Domingo said her battery was “down low.” He urged Coco to bring by the children to recharge her spirits.

Christmas was even worse in prison. Jessica had crocheted hats and scarves for her girls and her nephews and nieces, but didn’t have enough money for stamps to mail them out in time; she knocked herself out with prescription pills. Right before Christmas, Cesar got in a fight in the yard with a Muslim. Guards expected such outbursts around the holidays. Cesar spent Christmas Eve on keep-lock—room confinement—waiting to get shipped farther upstate to an isolation unit. He wrote to Coco, “I fucked up real bad this time.”

Still, Coco always looked forward to Christmas. Unlike her vague plans for marriage and school and getting a job, Christmas was a piece of her future that she could actually envision, and she knew exactly how to make it a reality. She trimmed her door with blinking lights that played a Christmas medley. At the center, she placed a red wreath and
pictures of her daughters. (Foxy trimmed her apartment door with tinsel and added a handwritten note among the miniature gift boxes: “If anyone steals anything from this door, Manuel and Hector live here and will fuck you up bad. Foxy.”) While her bigger dreams prompted doubt and belittling remarks from others, nobody criticized a mother for doing right by her children at Christmas. That year, Thorpe House made the challenge easier: the children received lots of donated gifts, and the nuns provided the mothers with Christmas trees. Coco snapped pictures of Mercedes and Nikki sitting beside the tree, with Nautica sitting in Mercedes’s lap.

But instead of taking advantage of the reprieve Thorpe House had given her, Coco bought gifts for everyone in her extended family—even though she hadn’t paid off her debt to Dayland from the previous Christmas. It was another example of Coco’s self-defeating generosity. But unlike so many of her efforts, which ended in disappointment, watching her family open their presents was truly gratifying.

Not long afterward, in a letter to Cesar, Coco confessed that her old puppy love, Wishman, had been writing her from prison. Cesar demanded that the correspondence stop. He suspected Wishman’s intentions; Cesar, too, was writing other girls, and he was experiencing firsthand what could blossom from a prison correspondence.

For months, unknown to Coco, Cesar had been trading letters with Giselle, the girl he’d been with the morning of his arrest. At first, his notes had been a distraction to pass the time, another line tossed out to the outside world. A letter, even a boring one, improved a day. An excellent letter improved his spirit for weeks. To have your name shouted out at mail call proved you mattered. In the most depersonalized of institutions, an envelope conferred distinction: it was addressed, by name, only and directly to you. If you were a boy with a long term, letters reminded you of what was out there, what else was possible—which was why some lifers preferred no letters at all. Maintaining a correspondence also required imaginative leaps and concentration, skills that slowed the process of becoming institutionalized.

Correspondence could create a future within prison: letters might lead to visits, and visits were gifts. The vast majority of inmates receive no visits. Face-to-face contact gave a boy a better chance at kindling love. The next best thing might be someone on the other end of the phone line, a girl willing to accept your collect call; if she wasn’t interested, maybe she’d introduce you to a sister or a cousin or an aunt. You had to read between
the lines, which was a game—valuable for its fun and distraction even if the objective failed. Lots of boys asked girls for pictures, which were called flicks. Flicks were censored, but like so many of the rules in prison, inconsistency and luck played their parts, and plenty of the pictures got in. The girls dressed in lingerie and posed provocatively. Some girls sent flicks that were fiendish (one inventive woman put lipstick on her vagina for an exclusive print). Giselle was conservative. But during months of exchanging letters, something precious happened—Cesar and Giselle became friends.