Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (4 page)

Jessica and the twins moved in with Willy at his mother’s, but even with the babies, Jessica had no legitimate place. Her relationship with Willy’s family was shrouded in shame. Puma’s mother accepted Serena, but some of his sisters considered Jessica a home-wrecker, and privately called her worse. She holed up with the babies in Willy’s bedroom, and he sometimes got physical when he was drunk. Trinket paraded through with Puma’s precious son, trailed by Milagros. Milagros said, “Jessica was always sad and alone. She would be in the room by herself. Nobody talked to her. They all loved Trinket. They knew what Jessica did.” Milagros made a point to stop and say hello. Sometimes she visited without Trinket, and she and Jessica started becoming friends.

Puma ignored Jessica around his family, but they still got together on the sly. Once, he slipped Jessica a note. She met him at a nearby bus stop. He bristled: “Hearing you with my brother, don’t you know how bad that
feels!” Jessica was moved that Puma cared. Puma discouraged Willy’s affection, though:

“Why you going out with her? She’s a slut.”

“You picture her the way you want,” Willy would reply defiantly. “I’ll picture her with me.” But it was hard for Willy to hold on to his private image of Jessica when the real girl had such wide appeal.

By November, Willy had also become involved with a girl who lived upstairs. One rainy night, after an awful fight, he kicked Jessica out. Desperate, Jessica called Milagros from a pay phone: she was standing with the twins, drenched, on the street. She had two plastic bags that held all of her things, two two-month-old babies, and no welcoming place to go.

The call didn’t surprise Milagros. Plenty of people moved house to house—she had herself—and girls with babies had it extra hard. They would move in with boyfriends and their mothers, but more people created more problems, and the welcomes wore out when the money thinned at the end of the month. Mothers’ husbands or boyfriends’ brothers or grandfathers and uncles couldn’t stop their roving hands. Or a boy could get too possessive when a girl moved into his bedroom and mistake her for a slave, or the mother-in-law wanted a baby-sitter for her other children instead of a daughter-in-law, or the family was just plain mean. Some grandmothers were unable to tolerate another crying baby; some had already lost their own babies—young ghost mothers gone to crack. Or they resented the young lovers, especially if they had no love of their own.

Sometimes girls turned to men like Felix, a friend of Lourdes’s who lived on Mount Hope Place, just around the corner from East Tremont. Lourdes would send her daughter to Felix when she needed cash. Occasionally Felix gave Jessica money as well, but Jessica hated going there alone. Sometimes Lillian went along, but Felix drank, and the girls would have to fend him off. Worse-off girls stayed in abandoned buildings, with other teenagers and adults on the run from other crowded apartments. But even for a girl who gave up what she had to—sex or pride or the mere idea of independence—the rate was unpredictable, and for gorgeous, sexually untethered girls like Jessica, the length of the welcomes at other women’s apartments seemed especially short. It didn’t help that Jessica wasn’t in any hurry to clean or cook. Girls with attitude discovered that the shirt your man’s sister gave you suddenly turned into a loan, and when a twenty went missing, nobody said it but everybody was staring at you. Even if your man backed you up, you were left in the house while he went to the street. A little
brother or sister or nephew or niece might bring you a plate of food or keep you company, but it was impossible to feel at ease.

That night, Milagros did what she’d done for other girlfriends countless times: she took Jessica in. Milagros was living with Puma and Trinket, but she told Jessica to take a cab and meet her at her mother’s apartment, in Hunts Point, where Milagros had been raised. Hunts Point was a heavily industrialized area, even rougher than East Tremont. Streetwalkers worked the barren blocks after the warehouses shut. Career junkies dragged themselves to Hunts Point when every other option failed, nine lives lived, waiting to die. Milagros waited for Jessica outside her mother’s building and paid the driver. She scooped up the babies and led Jessica up two flights of stairs. She fed Jessica and the twins. The twins fell asleep, but she and Jessica broke night. Milagros’s bedroom window overlooked the Bruckner Expressway, and cars and trucks rushed in and out of the city, headed west, to New England, or upstate. They talked till the sun rose, their voices mixing with the traffic din.

Milagros readily devoted herself to Jessica, and Jessica didn’t discourage her. When Jessica retreated to Lourdes’s a few days later, Milagros offered to keep the twins so that Jessica and Willy could try to work things out. Trinket knew Milagros well enough to recognize the foolishness in such an offer. “Here she comes with her big ass to save the day for another unstable person,” Trinket complained. To Milagros she said, “You’re making Jessica’s life easy. How responsible is that?” Milagros’s mother worried that Jessica might take advantage of her daughter’s generosity. On the other hand, she herself had been effectively raising a little boy from the building named Kevin, whose mother spent her time running the streets. Milagros assured her mother that she was watching the twins only temporarily.

Things at Lourdes’s were getting out of hand. The apartment was filling up—a sure predictor of trouble. A friend of Big Daddy’s named Que-Que, whom Lourdes claimed as a long-lost brother, was regularly crashing on the couch. Lourdes had been partying heavily with him and a woman downstairs who practiced Santeria. Willy occasionally brought money for the girls and spent the night with Jessica. Milagros also stayed with Jessica, on the weekends or after work. She had a job as a teller at a check-cashing place. Elaine had moved back from her father’s, after a male relative had molested her, and Lourdes ridiculed her for having thought she could survive away from home. Elaine had briefly dated Willy’s brother, until Jessica brought her to the hooky house and introduced her to Angel, a
wily drug dealer with a good sense of humor and a moped. No one had much time for Cesar, who was running wild.

The line between having fun and getting into trouble wasn’t always clear. Lourdes and Big Daddy had always partied on the weekends, but now Lourdes was using during the week as well. She’d also been shirking her wifely duties, and Big Daddy was getting fed up: she disappeared for hours, then whole afternoons, and then it got to the point where she sometimes stayed away all night. She returned in the morning just in time to cook Big Daddy’s breakfast and send him off to work, after which she took herself to bed. There were other danger signs: Lourdes, who was vain, cared less about her appearance; her house was no longer spotless; cereal and SpaghettiOs replaced cooked meals.

Big Daddy was a good-looking young man with a job, and he felt entitled to the privileges of his advantages; he’d tired of acting like a husband to a woman seven years his senior who was behaving more like a teenage girl than a wife. He did not mind that Lourdes used cocaine as long as she still had sex with him five nights out of seven, but now she gave excuses; he remembered asking, “You mean I gotta give you twenty to cop to give me some?” Lourdes saw it differently. She needed money—every woman did—but his touch felt unbearable. Although he denied it, she was convinced that he’d cheated on her, and she was sick and tired of serving him.

Big Daddy found better-paying work as a janitor. For a while, he was also dealing cocaine, but he quit because he said that Lourdes kept dipping into his supply. According to his calculations, she was snorting a gram or two a day; she insisted that she knew how to pace herself and that she never used more than half a gram. When Jessica and Milagros wanted to go out, they gave Lourdes cocaine to baby-sit.

By the spring of 1987, the house was packed: Besides Jessica, Serena, Cesar, Robert, Elaine, Lourdes, Big Daddy, Lourdes’s alleged brother, Que-Que, and the guests, there was Elaine’s boyfriend, Angel, and Shirley, Robert’s girl. Elaine was pregnant. Shirley was also pregnant, and her father had kicked her out. Ordinarily, Lourdes used her welfare benefits to pay the basic bills, while Big Daddy covered all the additional necessities and any luxuries. But with the company and the drugs, they could not keep up.

That summer, Big Daddy finally issued an ultimatum: the drugs or him. Lourdes physically attacked him as he began to pack his things; she then went into a seizure, but Big Daddy still left. Lourdes assured her worried children that the separation wasn’t permanent—she just needed time to herself. Jessica, who had been sleeping out on the couch, moved
into Lourdes’s room. Soon afterward, Cesar returned from school and found a man stepping out of the bathroom in a towel. His mother was combing her long black hair, which was wet. “What about Big Daddy?” Cesar asked, devastated. “He only left three days ago. That’s not even enough time to work it out!” Jessica was sent back to the couch, resentful and furious. She said, “Big Daddy really loved my mother. My mother left him for an asshole who didn’t even pay the rent.”

Milagros took the twins for a while, but Little Star stayed behind. Days could pass without her seeing sidewalk, even though lots of people came and went—everyone who was living there, their friends, and friends of friends. When Lourdes was out of bed, she badgered her daughters to take the child outside—both to give her a break and Little Star some fresh air. Sometimes Jessica brought Serena with her on her rounds: to the bodega, to the pay phone, to Puma’s drug spot. If someone offered Jessica a ride, though, she left her daughter with whatever friend was willing to keep an eye on her.

That summer, Serena started to cry whenever she peed, and after a few weeks, Lourdes threatened to hit Jessica if she didn’t bring Serena to the hospital to be checked. When Jessica and Elaine finally took her to the emergency room, the doctors discovered that she’d been sexually abused. She was two years old. Jessica was detained. A police officer interviewed her and explained that he could not release Serena into her custody. Lourdes had to sign for her.

At home, anger shouted down the sadness: threats sailed; guilt was leveraged; everyone and no one was responsible. Serena had been unsupervised in the company of so many different people it was impossible to know whom to blame. There was that dark-skinned friend of Cesar’s who was simple and liked to play with the girls when they were in the tub, and the family friend’s brother who’d taken Serena into an apartment to use the bathroom one night while she was hanging around with Jessica on Crotona. How about the boyfriend of Lourdes’s who would go into the bedroom at night when the girls were making too much noise and hit them until they cried themselves to sleep? Lourdes ordered the young men who came in and out of her apartment to the hospital for physical inspections. Underneath all the indictments and posturing, however, bad mothering was considered the true culprit: Lourdes blamed Jessica; Jessica blamed herself. And somehow, Serena got lost in the noise. All the women in Serena’s life had been sexually abused at one time or another, and their upset seemed to be less about the child’s trauma than the overwhelming need, precipitated by the crisis, to revisit their own.

Soon afterward, Lourdes ran away. She made it only as far as Que-Que’s brother’s girlfriend’s, but at first the children didn’t know where she was; later, they often couldn’t reach her. Elaine got a job at C-Town, a grocery store across the street. She cleaned, cooked, and attempted to retain control over what remained controllable. Robert was still working in Manhattan as a paint-store clerk. On weekday evenings, he took a plate of whatever Elaine had prepared and shut himself in his room with Serena. “The twins had each other. Serena had no one,” Robert later said. Lourdes would pass by Tremont when the welfare check arrived, but she refused to come upstairs; Elaine would meet her down by the mailboxes in the lobby. Lourdes kept the small cash allotment and gave Elaine all but $50 worth of the food stamps. Even so, everyone was getting skinny—except for Robert, who stockpiled food in his bedroom and padlocked the door when he went out. Jessica cajoled the girls’ fathers to bring by Pampers and milk, but they didn’t always come through.

For a time, Cesar and Jessica grew closer. He remembered that “Elaine, she be in her own whole world. My brother was in his little world. Me and Jessica was in the same world.” Their world was the street. If she was in a good mood, Jessica was beautiful. She generously shared whatever she had. She set Cesar up with her girlfriends and gave him pointers on how to please women. They had sex with their dates in the same room. “We was real open with each other, it didn’t bother us,” Cesar said.

At the end of the summer, Lourdes returned home. Que-Que, no longer a long-lost brother, now slept in her bedroom. Robert and Cesar each had a bedroom because they were male; Elaine had reclaimed Jessica’s old room, with her boyfriend, Angel; Little Star had a daybed in Lourdes’s room; Jessica was still on the couch. When the twins were there, Jessica put them in a crib next to her; they both cried a lot.