Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (48 page)

On the walls of a converted room of the Victorian house occupied by the Troy Housing Authority, photographs hung of derelict houses renovated, broken homes now fixed. Coco’s eviction hearing convened in an old living room that still had a fireplace. Beneath the eighteen-foot ceilings, Coco looked especially short. The ears of her recent bunny tattoo peeked above the neckline of her short-sleeved striped shirt. She’d dressed the girls neatly and styled their hair in tiny nested buns. Coco hunched over at the end of the long conference table, clutching Pearl on her lap like a shield.

Rick Mason sat by a suited housing administrator at the other end. Coco recognized Mason from his frequent laps of Corliss Park. She gulped out her explanation before the hearing opened, falling back on the same story used by hundreds of women in public housing before her—no man lived in the house, it was just her and her children. She was so anxious about getting evicted that the urgency of her explanation sounded
worse than the truth. She said Frankie visited every day from the city—three hours, each way—but never spent the night.

“Is he employed?” the administrator asked.

“Um, no.”

“That must be pretty expensive,” he remarked. “Coming up from the city every day.”

Coco had to be careful not to say anything that would threaten Frankie’s monthly Social Security check; she wasn’t really sure why he was eligible for it, but she knew that it was how he got by. And if he lost his SSI, his mother risked losing her subsidized apartment in the Bronx, where he was still registered as a dependent.

Luckily, the Troy Housing administrator prattled on with the questions Coco expected. Frankie’s address. Whether he had friends in Troy. Had he fathered any of her kids? Coco emphasized Frankie’s restriction to her porch. The administrator seemed unconcerned; the hearing was the first step of a longer process, and he was bored. “You are going to be sure to tell him that if he comes to Corliss Park, he will be arrested,” said the administrator perfunctorily. All that was left was the paperwork.

Throughout the hearing, Rick Mason waited, his muscular arms folded across his well-pumped chest, leaning back in his chair like a smart-aleck boy in a boring class. “Is it my turn?” he finally asked.

Mason knew about drugs firsthand; he’d had a serious cocaine problem when he was younger. He had also grown up in Troy public housing; he and his mother and seven siblings had moved into Troy’s high-rise Taylor Homes after his father died. Mason credited public assistance with saving his broken family. He believed that girls like Coco and their children deserved chances they weren’t going to get otherwise. Over the last few years, he’d watched, with some amusement and plenty of pride, the excitement with which the new arrivals from New York and Puerto Rico greeted the ordinary public housing apartments he patrolled. But Troy was bankrupt; industry had fled, and local politicians had used a HUD grant intended for public housing to bring the city a hockey team. Now drugs were wrecking what was left of his embattled hometown. His son and a brother were Troy police officers, and they’d told him about the drugs coming up from Brooklyn and the Bronx. He didn’t blame boys like Frankie for Troy’s problems, but Mason was a pragmatist, and the drug dealers were identifiable targets.

He looked directly at Coco and spoke; he was neither rude nor friendly. “There are people constantly in and out. I’ve gone over there and knocked on the door. You were not there and your children were not
there. There is your boyfriend, and all his little friends, in and out of the house. Tell me, what’s going on? I go to the door and an old man in an undershirt opens the door. There are little kids all over the place. Tell me what’s going on.”

“He doesn’t stay in the house,” Coco lied. “He stayed outside, on the porch.”

“Don’t tell me what I did see and didn’t see. I was there, and you weren’t.”

“I don’t know what you mean, an old man in his underwear. Frankie don’t even be in his underwear,” she said nervously. The fight for the lease was momentarily forgotten. Mason had waged the most hurtful allegation anyone could—that she wasn’t protecting her children.

Mason’s voice rose. “There were all kinds of people in and out, in and out, and your boyfriend, sitting on that lawn chair like he was the big king of the castle. We may not be from the Bronx, but we ain’t stupid,” he said. “Your kids shouldn’t be exposed to that, and neither should other people’s kids.”

The administrator interrupted, eager to conclude: “Do you understand now, is it agreed, that should he come on the premises, he will be arrested? Will you sign a statement agreeing to that effect?”

Mason continued, “Because if I see him around there, he’s going to be arrested.”

Coco agreed to sign an interim contract, which would be effective for eight months. She promised that she had no other tenants besides her and the girls. If all went well, she would return to a regular lease.

The administrator arranged his papers and packed up, saying, “Now, we don’t want to have any more trouble. Life is hard enough without getting evicted.” His eyes darted over Mercedes and Nikki and Nautica, their backs pressed against big kelly-green chairs lining the wall, their legs sticking straight out; they looked scared. He added, “And you have your hands full.”

“Mommy?” Nikki croaked.

Mason rose and offered Coco his hand. “There are enough good men in Troy to keep you outta trouble. He’s gotta stay out.”

The first thing Coco did when she got back to Corliss Park was drag the lawn chair to the sidewalk and dump it in the garbage. Then she marched straight to Family Dollar. Mercedes wheeled Pearl’s oxygen. Coco bought several packages of decorative white picket-fence pieces, trooped back to Corliss Park, in no mood for nonsense, and shoved them in her lawn. She clamped a bouquet of plastic red and yellow flowers
to one of the ankle-high picket-fence posts and waited for Frankie to come home, so she could tell him that he had to go.

Frankie didn’t last in the Bronx. He later confided to Coco that he had felt displaced at his mother’s house. His younger brother had claimed his old bedroom. His mother, who worked part-time for a bookie, did not approve of sons whose nights extended through to afternoons on her couch. Outdoors, he risked encountering people he owed money to: Octavio, the drug spot manager; Delilah, the loan shark; the mothers of his two kids. He returned to Troy. After several furtive nights at Coco’s, he started spending most of his time with some friends who stayed in a rickety second-floor tenement on Second Avenue, near River Street.

The apartment served as a hangout and a stash house for crack arriving from the Bronx. They dealt out of the Phoenix Hotel, using a room that had been rented by a crackhead. Business was great. The gram that brought $30 in the city brought in $100 in Troy, and they could unload fake product because upstate customers were easier to intimidate and dupe. “There are a lot of dummies up here,” said Frankie. “In the city, they ain’t playing that.”

But the pace of dealing crack was too much for Frankie—“Too
fast
,” he said, “too fast, it like gets you scared.” He was constantly coming up short, and he was also lousy at collecting debts; overdue addict accounts, even in Troy, required threats and the occasional beat-down. His languid personality was better suited to dealing weed.

So he started dealing weed out of the Second Avenue apartment, where he split the bills with another recent Bronx transplant and two white boys, who opened the flimsy door to a shifting collection of bored friends, acquaintances, and customers. Frankie had been smoking weed so long that he could estimate the weight of a bag by sight. He wasn’t ambitious; he mainly wanted to earn enough to keep himself in smoke. He went weeks without going to the city, then might go every day for a week. He sometimes took the bus, but the police occasionally patrolled the buses and the stations; he preferred his local teenage customers to drive. The teenagers relished the opportunity to go to the inner city on a mission evocative of—albeit more unsettling and less exciting than—those adventures depicted in rap videos on TV. The white boys provided Frankie with a cover—their cars were less likely to be stopped on the Thruway. The ride was also more comfortable than the bus, and they didn’t ask for contributions for tolls or gas.

What Frankie loved most about his new arrangement, however, was
the freedom. He’d lived under women’s rules most of his life. Now, at twenty-four, he blasted music at any hour—not Coco’s slow jams, but rap, much of it hard-core, which Coco forbade. On Second Avenue, there were lots of abandoned houses, and the people who lived there rarely called the cops for small disturbances. He could watch his pornography whenever he felt like it. Baseball games weren’t interrupted by Mercedes’s whining for cartoons. There were fewer reminders of all the people he was letting down. The best things about his relationship with Coco continued much as before. Only their intimate life quieted.

He still showered at her apartment, because his roommates left the bathroom a mess. He ate at Coco’s when his ulcer flared up from all the greasy pizza and microwave cheeseburgers. But Coco was usually asleep whenever he surprised her at night, and stealing privacy during daylight with four children was impossible. In the morning, if he managed to pull her into the shower, Mercedes would be pounding on the bathroom door before they’d even kissed. Even without interruptions, the situation was fraught; when Frankie told Coco that she was beautiful, she’d start crying. She had been picking her face and arms and the reachable parts of her back.

Pearl’s illness flattened Coco. Frankie no longer accompanied her on the merry-go-round of doctor appointments, and she couldn’t manage the long waits alone with a baby, a toddler, and two kids. Just taking the bus was risky because Nautica was prone to tantrums and Coco’s hands were full with Pearl and her portable oxygen tank. Sometimes Mercedes would fall asleep so deeply that she couldn’t be politely roused.

Frankie had to be badgered to stay home with more than two. Nor could Coco burden Milagros too frequently because Milagros now had Jessica’s baby boys, and Matthew and Michael were fearful and clingy. When Milagros did watch the girls, Mercedes and Brittany and Stephanie got into fights, so Mercedes always ended up accompanying Coco.

Coco never had enough money for a taxi. Money was tight. Frankie generally kept his earnings to himself. Coco had to make $10 last the three weeks from the day she did her grocery shopping until the end of the month; Pearl had been approved for Social Security income for her disabilities, but the checks hadn’t yet been transferred. The girls still needed coats and beds. Coco would say, “I know these ain’t your kids, Frankie, but you ain’t helping out in any way.” For a spell, Frankie would pass along food stamps given to him by one of his customers. But Coco always needed—comfort, Pampers, milk.

Mercedes started combing through Frankie’s pockets for spare change
when he was in the shower or sleeping. One night, a glassine of crack fell out, and she brought it to her mother; Frankie claimed he’d picked it up when another dealer had tossed it, midchase, while running from cops. Coco secretly wondered if Frankie was using. Something was also up with Mercedes; she complained constantly that her teeth were hurting her, and by the end of November 1995, she was taking up to five baths a day.

Coco shared her frustrations about Frankie with anyone who would listen. She urged Serena to recognize what was going on beneath appearances. “He look like he haven’t changed, he be all nice and sweet, but he has changed,” Coco said. But Frankie did look changed. In fact, he looked terrific. His posture had improved. His shirts no longer sagged. Somehow his eyelids had quit drooping. His face shone from fresh shaving; his sneakers were brand-new. Coco noted wryly, “You more fly.”

“For real?” Frankie responded, mistaking the hard nut of assessment for a compliment.

In December, just as Coco was reaching her breaking point, Frankie brought his son up from the city for an extended visit and left the child with Coco. She began to suspect that Frankie wanted her stuck in the house, saddled with the kids. Coco had never considered him a player, but neither had she known him to be popular, and now he was. She dispatched Mercedes, with Frankie’s son, to investigate. They spent a day at the stash house. Aside from some gossip, Mercedes had little to report. Coco visited the apartment unannounced, bearing food. “I don’t want you starving. Whatever goes on between us, you have to eat,” she said disarmingly.

Half-dressed white girls, the wives and friends of Frankie’s friends, lounged on the old couch, knobby legs holding up their chins. They struck Coco as shameless—parading around in nothing but oversize T-shirts not only in front of Mercedes, but in front of their husbands’ friends. White boys did not seem to mind their girls’ obvious disrespect. Coco heard they gave up sex easily. Boys didn’t have to buy Troy girls Pampers or milk or let the girls keep the change for cigarettes. Coco didn’t barter, either, but she allied herself with the demeanor of the Bronx.

Even though Coco had been the one to tell Frankie to leave, she felt that he’d abandoned her. She blamed Rick Mason and castigated the Troy Housing Authority. She fantasized about returning to the Bronx. In the meantime, Frankie prospered and hung framed prints of his favorite pro wrestlers in the stash-house living room. He assured her that the
arrangement was only temporary, but when he signed up for cable, Coco believed he’d never come home.