Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (47 page)

For a while, Jessica dove back into the prison mix. The mix was to prison what the street was to the ghetto. Although the camp mix was watered down compared to the yard in maximum security, Jessica courted the damage she could: she gossiped and dated widely, ignoring the established wives and girlfriends, and she welcomed threats. “She started getting crazy,” said Player. Jessica hooked up with a loudmouthed girl who offended Jessica’s roommates with her belligerence, yet Jessica continued to invite the girl into their room. Jessica’s roommates were “getting short”—their release dates were approaching—and they wanted to finish their time quietly; eventually, they asked Jessica to leave. She moved into a corner cube.

Jessica tried to turn to her family. Her older brother Robert had attempted suicide again. Lourdes and Coco had blocks on their telephones. Elaine had little tolerance for Jessica’s sadness and complaining and requests for commissary money. The additional financial burden of Matthew and Michael was making it hard for her to cover her monthly bills, and her hard-won patience with her own sons was dissolving in the constant wash of the twins’ needs. Matthew’s ceaseless crying kept Elaine’s sons up, so that they were cranky when it was time to get ready for school. Elaine became afraid that she would hurt Matthew and temporarily gave him to her downstairs neighbor. She was making arrangements to send them to Milagros.

Jessica wanted to return to the maximum-security unit, where there was less pressure to behave. She pursued the easiest way back—administrative segregation, the prison’s version of solitary. Some inmates ironically referred to SHU, the secure housing unit, as “a vacation,” because it removed them from the mix, and they could take pills and avoid work. Refusing a direct order was the ticket. So one evening, at count, Jessica remained in the TV room. She sat truculently on the couch in the summer version of her uniform: khaki shorts and a prison-issue shirt. She wore a baseball cap turned to the back.

“Count—you gotta go to your room,” the officer said to Jessica.

“Yeah and what?” Jessica said. “Count me here. I don’t want to go to my room.” Of course, the defiance worked.

A guard escorted her to SHU. There, she vacillated between her choices: opting out or acting out. She wanted to escape, and she wanted to be noticed. Sadness was like falling; sleep was temporary; rage let her feel alive. She slept, then demanded to be screened for bipolar disorder, the diagnosis a doctor had given Robert following one of his suicide attempts. She sought oblivion through medication, which prison medics liberally provided—Naprosyn, Flerexil, Dolobid—and then fought against it. “They think I need to be kept in the fucking dark,” she said resentfully. Imagining her reunion with Serena got her through the worst stretches, with a little help from the voices of the other isolated women on SHU harmonizing to old R&B. The songs lulled her to sleep.

P
earl joined her family in Corliss Park on Mother’s Day, 1995. Milagros collected her from the Bronx and brought her up by Greyhound bus. She was nine months old, with a roaming eye and an oversize head. She was still attached to an oxygen tank; the tubing stuck into her teeny nostrils, which were usually encrusted with snot. She had bulbous eyes, like her grandmother Foxy, who suffered from a thyroid condition. Instead of conveying a distant sadness, though, Pearl’s eyes were disconcertingly wise. Coco felt as though Pearl were trying to teach her a lesson, but Coco couldn’t decipher it yet.

Pearl required at least three daily half-hour treatments on a nebulizer for her severe asthma. Crisis focused Coco’s attention, so the more trouble Pearl had breathing, the better Coco responded. The distended hernia was Coco’s signal to give Pearl a treatment; it was often the size of an apricot. Otherwise, Coco, overwhelmed already, ended up treating the asthma as she did so much else—haphazardly. Pearl’s congested breathing came to seem normal, much like her constant vomiting. Coco was more consistent in her affection; she loved babies, and she played with Pearl for hours. She kissed the stitch marks traversing Pearl’s stomach like the tracks of an angry bird.

But Pearl’s fragility frightened Coco and she had to rely on Milagros more than she wanted to; Milagros, who had worked as a home aide, had nursing expertise. And although Milagros didn’t ask for anything—except once in a while, when her food ran out, for food stamps—Coco’s dependency incurred debts of other kinds. Coco resented the freedom with which Milagros now spoke her mind. It was no one else’s business how Coco raised her kids. Even if Coco didn’t have to take Milagros’s advice, however, she had to hear her out.

Milagros’s biggest complaint was Coco’s softness toward Mercedes. If Mercedes didn’t get her way, she sometimes muttered, “Shoo,” or kicked Milagros, or told Milagros to shut up. Once, Milagros grabbed Mercedes by her collar, and Mercedes ran to her mother, indignant, clamoring that Milagros had hit her—no one but a mother had that right. But Milagros was resolute; no child was going to curse her, not in front of her other kids. After the spats, Coco kept Mercedes at home until Mercedes drove
Coco crazy. Milagros cautioned Coco about what she saw as an even larger problem: If Coco couldn’t make a five-year-old respect and listen, what was going to happen when Mercedes was no longer a child?

From an early age, even before she was a toddler, Mercedes garnered attention for having attitude. A fog of despair so pervaded the ghetto that the smallest gesture of rebellion could seem like a bold, piercing light.
Bad,
said with fond exasperation, was almost always a compliment.

Babies who grunted with frustration at an uncle who intentionally scared them or who kicked when a cousin shadowboxed too close were bad. Bad meant the opposite of cowed or frightened—like Lil Hector, Coco’s three-year-old nephew, when he tossed brand-new sneakers out of Foxy’s window to summon his parents away from their weed-smoking friends. Bad was also behavior that amused teenagers and adults: little girls dancing sexy and talking about “getting mines”; little boys grabbing their own crotches or rubbing women’s thighs; smart-mouthed toddlers using smart-ass words like
yo
and
ho
and
bitch
and
punk.
One of Nautica’s first words was
puta,
and for a time, if she didn’t get her way, she narrowed her eyes and spit.

Bad was encouraged in small children, but its meaning changed as they got older and their cuteness waned. Adults’ impatience might have had something to do with the extra labor of caring for spirited children, and the looming realization that as the children grew in size, they could physically back their badness up. Whatever caused the sudden shift, it took children years to sort out the subtleties, as they learned by excruciating trial and error. Errors took place publicly, and humiliations were routine. For the early years of Mercedes’s life, though, bad remained an affirmation.

Mercedes had long known the value of attitude, but she was coming to appreciate the power of telling Coco what she wanted to hear. Women tended to discourage older boys from gossip but routinely asked girls and younger children, “Who Daddy with?” Children were good sources of information because they were always hungry for attention. Mercedes had the important themes down—love and allegiance and betrayal—long before she developed a sense of proportion or the knack for connecting sequences. She eagerly tailored her stories to her mother’s interest—intrigues concerning Cesar, revelations of neighbors’ hypocrisy, dirt on Foxy’s boyfriend Hernan, whom Coco still despised. Violence always worked as the dramatic lead: “Hernan smacked me.” If Coco threatened to confront him, Mercedes retreated into nonsense songs. By the time she
was five, Mercedes’s tall stories had eroded her credibility in nearly all but Coco’s eyes. Other people secretly called her nosy and bossy; among children her own age, she had difficulty making and keeping friends.

Neither did she get along with Frankie. Too many nights, Mercedes stomped to bed, screaming, “I want my father,” raging until, exhausted, she fell asleep.

Coco longed for Cesar, too. One night, she lay next to Frankie on the blankets she had spread out on the floor of the living room. Pearl slept beside them, breathing congestedly. Frankie said quietly, “You don’t love me.”

“But there’s so many different kinds of love,” Coco replied. “You show me how you feel, we go playing, you treat my kids okay, I guess that’s why I love you.”

“Do you love me like the girls’ father?” he asked.

“I can’t. Like—I don’t,” she said. She later wondered if she should have lied. She hugged him. Her love for Cesar was something altogether different; for Frankie, she felt something more akin to gratitude.

“That’s why I love you, Coco, you so open,” Frankie said.

Coco said soberly, “That’s cuz I been through fucking hell for twenty-one years old.”

Upstate life temporarily freed Frankie from his reputation as a punk. In the city, he was an ordinary, small-time, part-time drug dealer, an employee, a bit of a schemer, a wanna-be. In Corliss Park, among the local white teenagers obsessed with inner-city culture, Frankie was a live representative. He took advantage of their adulation, boasting about his Bronx exploits and presenting himself as tougher than he really was. Coco warned him, “You better stop acting like Mr. Hercules. I’ll be laughing when somebody beat your ass.” But, for a time, Frankie’s reputation covered what he lacked in actual power. He ran drugs up from the Bronx. He was what Coco called “the quiet type,” not brassy and aggressive, less likely to draw attention from police.

The busier Frankie became, the less time he had for Coco and her girls. He joined Coco in bed late at night, long after she had fallen asleep. In the morning, he showered and ate and announced, “Ma, I’m leaving.” He lost interest in playfighting. Soon enough, he stopped bringing dinner dishes to the sink. “Whenever he comes in the house, all he does is play that Sega,” Coco said. Drugs changed boys, and Frankie was becoming less like the boy she’d settled for and more like other boys she knew. Coco needed help with the girls, but she didn’t feel that she could
demand it because they weren’t his. She taunted him about leaving, though.

“Coco, one thing you aren’t going to do is control my life. I’m not gonna be in lockdown,” Frankie said. But people flocked to Frankie if he stayed indoors. The phone rang constantly. Cars idled in front of Coco’s living room window, which overlooked the strip of the parking lot. Boys stuck their heads inside her door:

Frankie in?

He home?

Where he at?

Coco knew it wasn’t good to have boys hanging out in her apartment, but she grew bored stuck home with the children alone. She tried imposing house rules. She shooed her company outdoors to smoke their cigarettes and weed because of Pearl’s asthma, but the neighbors complained about the noise. She let the boys smoke upstairs, in Mercedes’s bedroom, as long as they opened the window and shut the door. But when Mercedes returned home from school she would complain about the smell and the mess they left, making a ruckus until Coco shooed them outside again. Rick Mason, the head of security for Troy’s public housing, also brooded over what was going on at Coco’s: he regularly drove through Corliss Park and slowed down as he passed the cluster of dejected boys who often stood on Coco’s three-by-three-foot porch. Four months after moving into her apartment, Coco received an eviction notice citing violation of the long-term-guest clause of her lease.