Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (43 page)

Around the same time, Pearl, who had spent six months in the hospital, was released to Foxy’s care. Foxy agreed to keep the baby until Coco got her own place. Meanwhile, Foxy moved back to her own apartment, where Pearl’s homecoming inspired a storm of cleaning. All guests were booted, including Octavio. Foxy had wanted to get rid of him earlier but had been afraid to kick him out; sometimes dealers refused to go. But even Octavio didn’t doubt a sick baby’s right to a good start.

Pearl’s arrival stirred the somnolent building. The baby had so much gear that she required a small parade—her special crib, a brand-new asthma machine, tubing to hook her to the oxygen tank, reserve tanks, bottles of medication, ointments, and jars. Foxy bustled Pearl into the apartment, past the note she had taped to the door: “Absolutely no smoking!
The baby’s home already. Foxy.” Neighbors came by to look at her; the curiosity was not always kind. Pearl had Wishman’s eyes, but watery instead of angry. Her thin face bulged at the cheeks as if she were eating gravel.

Hector, who, like Cesar, had long ago assumed the role of bodyguard of his family, emerged as the primary protector of his infant niece. He moonlighted as a human smoke detector, ushering violators into the hall. He didn’t keep his music down, though—Hector loved his hiphop—and Pearl got little sleep. Nobody was sleeping much but Foxy, whose doctor had given her a prescription for her migraines called Toradol. The injections knocked her out completely. Pearl shivered constantly, as though she were being electrocuted, but the precise cause of this—music, slamming doors, shouting and laughter in the hall, or her illness—was hard to identify.

Still, the smokeless baby room was a haven. Wishman’s fourteen-year-old brother, Shorty, visited his niece every day. Shorty had an ongoing beef with a gang, the Ñetas, and traveled in what he considered a disguise—he walked the few blocks from his mother’s with a T-shirt pulled over his head. Perhaps he felt connected to the fragile baby, a soul whose life was as threatened as his.

Wishman, however, ignored his daughter. If he visited the apartment, he avoided Pearl’s room. Once, he stepped in to check out a crew of girls there, but he didn’t even glance in the direction of the crib. Foxy dismissed him as a bona fide hoodlum. Frankie, on the other hand, had warmed to the child immediately.

Frankie had grown up in the projects down the block from Foxy’s building. He lived there with his mother, younger brother, and stepfather; Frankie’s own father, who was Italian, left home when Frankie was two. Frankie had a talent for sports. After high school, he moved to Florida, where he played minor league baseball and tried out with the Detroit Tigers but didn’t make the cut. “It broke my heart, so I didn’t try no more,” he said. He returned to the Bronx.

Frankie had just split up with his son’s mother when he met Coco. He was nice to Coco’s daughters, and Coco liked that. One afternoon, Coco bought her daughters boxing gloves. It was too cold to go outside, and the girls needed something besides TV to keep them occupied. Hector’s friends snatched the gloves—they were sick of TV also—but Frankie retrieved them for the girls and taught them how to spar. Mercedes and Nautica threw diligent punches. Nikki’s were weak; her lack of toughness worried Coco. If other children grabbed Nikki’s toys, or
her cousins became too aggressive, Coco had to force Nikki to defend herself. Luckily, Mercedes, who was stocky, looked out for her.

Lots of boys lost their patience after a few minutes of play with children, but Frankie didn’t. Coco observed him closely when her children were in his orbit, and his affection toward her daughters seemed real. They wrestled. Nautica dove on top of the thrashing heap and Frankie laughed easily: he didn’t yell if someone’s foot kicked his face. Coco offered Frankie eye-to-eye contact, registering her interest.

Frankie showed his respect and introduced his two children to Coco. He didn’t get along with the mothers, but his own mother did, and he got to spend time with his kids when the mothers brought them to visit their grandmother. Mercedes and Nikki got along with Frankie’s daughter, and Nautica played with his son. A few nights later, Coco put on thin pajamas that caught the outline of her legs. She plunked herself on the couch. Frankie sat on the floor before her. He asked her to please braid his hair and she said yes and he leaned back between her thighs. She did not move. “Can I put my head on your lap?” he asked politely. He hugged her belly and shifted upward, to her breasts. He soon formalized his intentions. He said, “You know, Coco, you know, I want to be with you.”

On Valentine’s Day, he handed her flowers and a heart-shaped box of chocolates. No one had ever done that for Coco. Valentine’s Day was Foxy and Richie’s anniversary. Coco found that auspicious. She spontaneously asked, “Yo, Frankie, you want to live with me?”

Coco reasoned that she had back evidence on Frankie: he was from the neighborhood, her big brother’s friend. She’d shared with him her important secrets—her enduring love for Cesar, her hurt over Wishman’s denial of Pearl. Mercedes seemed to be reserving judgment, but Nikki and Nautica already called him Papi. He said he felt so close to Pearl that she seemed his own. When Octavio gave him work, Frankie bought Pampers for Nautica. He contributed toward Foxy’s rent. Coco believed if the proposal were a bad idea, Foxy would have stopped her. But Foxy wasn’t paying close attention to Coco.

Coco planned to return to Troy and get settled. The housing authority had offered her a three-bedroom apartment in Corliss Park, near Milagros. Frankie would join her as soon as he’d earned enough for the move. He wanted to hook up cable because he liked the sports channels; he also promised to spring for wall-to-wall carpeting, an indulgence for Coco, whose size-four feet were used to linoleum. Said Coco, “Cesar’s not the only one who deserves better, now that I found a man who loves me and my kids.”

Coco and the girls moved on a windy day in March 1995. The first thing that Coco did—even before plugging in her radio—was to mail Cesar her phone number and new address.

Cesar did not love Giselle; he loved Coco. He liked Giselle, but the marriage was initially a mercenary move. He had to be legally married to qualify for conjugal visits, and he needed a girl who could be relied on to visit and to keep money coming into his commissary account. His friends occasionally contributed, but they were in and out of prison and in and out of solvency. Rocco remained his primary contact, but Rocco was changing. His wife had told him to straighten up or risk losing her and his baby girl; after he’d completed work release (scrubbing pots and pans at a restaurant), she’d steered him straight to AmeriCorps. Now Rocco was working as a youth counselor at a housing project. He still talked the hoodlum game, but Cesar sensed a shift.

Cesar badgered Coco and Roxanne to bring his daughters and they usually didn’t. Elaine managed to send him the odd food box, but she struggled. Lourdes couldn’t be counted on. Life on the inside wasn’t anything like his previous bid as a juvenile in DFY. The lonely old-timers around him were depressing. Most never had visitors and didn’t get mail. Cesar had proposed to Giselle as soon as he suspected Coco’s latest pregnancy. Giselle suggested that they wait a year, but to his relief the engagement lasted just six months.

Giselle was wary of Cesar’s hoodlum lifestyle; so many of her relatives were in prison that her mother had had to raise nine children who were not her own. She’d been cautious, even back when they were only passing neighborhood friends. Giselle remembered seeing Cesar zip by on his bicycle. He was always moving, playing, making faces, never staying still. Years later, she’d run into him on the corner of Tremont, his skinny neck drenched in gold. He’d reminded her of Mr. T. She worried about the risk of flashy jewelry. “Put them inside,” she suggested.

“For what? That’s what I got chains for, to put them outside,” he said.

“You might get robbed,” she warned.

“I ain’t gonna get robbed.” Cesar grinned. He lifted his shirt and showed a .45 caliber, snug in his waistband. The next time she ran into Cesar was at her sister’s, when he was a fugitive.

Giselle hid the engagement from her mother, who remembered Cesar all too well from Tremont. The weekend Giselle snuck off to get married, she told her mother she was going away with a girlfriend from work.
Cesar had been transferred to Clinton, a maximum-security prison near the Canadian border; as Giselle’s stomach churned with nervousness the entire seven-hour bus ride there, a few of the other women tried to calm her.

There was a network of support and loyalty among some prisoners’ wives. The regulars informed other wives if a mistress had sat in their rightful visitor’s seat. Guards, too, sometimes hinted to a woman about a guy’s two- or three- or four-timing, or “accidentally” shone the ultraviolet light on another woman’s signature that had been penned in invisible ink. Some of the guards seemed jealous of the inmates’ ability to attract such pretty, young visitors. Some visitors ended up dating guards. Prisoners joked that the guards were so uptight that they must have had less sex with their at-home wives than the inmates had in trailer visits. Veteran wives counseled newcomers about regulations and circumventing regulations, important lessons they’d extracted from protracted dealings with the correctional bureaucracy.

The rural town of Dannemora, New York, was isolated and, to the minority women who visited inmates there, unwelcoming. The outer wall of the prison towered over one side of a stunted main street. Opposite, someone named Ting had a monopoly on local business: Ting’s Store, Ting’s Break-out Saloon, and Ting’s Hotel. The visiting women pooled money and rented a room to shower off the long bus ride and freshen up before crossing the street and heading in.

Rooms at Ting’s were dumpy but tidy. On the back of the door was a sign listing the prison’s visiting hours, along with information about free coffee and where to find the ironing board. But Cesar had warned Giselle not to stay at Ting’s; he’d heard that an inmate’s girlfriend had been raped there, and he’d provided Giselle with the name of a local prisoner’s wife. The woman had followed her husband to Dannemora and rented rooms to other visitors. The lady dispensed advice freely—she’d had her own prison wedding—and charged only $25 for three nights, including meals. Giselle checked in and found it difficult to sleep.