Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (7 page)

Like Cesar, Coco was looking for distraction—anything but the same people doing the same old things. She wasn’t a church girl and she wasn’t much of a schoolgirl, either, but she wasn’t raised by the street. She was a friendly around-the-way girl who fancied herself tougher than she could ever be. She liked action, although she preferred to watch from the periphery. Boys called her Shorty because she was short, and Lollipop because she tucked lollipops in the topknot of her ponytail; her teacher
called her Motor Mouth because she talked a lot. Coco’s friendly face held the look of anticipation even in repose.

That afternoon, she and her best friend, Dorcas, were looking out of Dorcas’s mother’s third-floor bedroom window, as they often did after school—knees balanced on Dorcas’s mother’s sinking bed, elbows planted on the ledge. The window overlooked University Avenue, a main artery that ran through Morris Heights, where Coco lived. The bedroom window gave the girls a good view of the bodega on 176th near Andrews Avenue, “right where they sell drugs at,” Coco said. Sometimes Coco propped herself up and out of the window altogether, her square upper body pushing out from the brick wall as if she were a wooden figurehead jutting from the bow of a ship. But her brown eyes weren’t squinting to see the horizon. Coco lived in the present; she was looking down, over the street. The bodega’s appeal for the girls was the boys their own age fooling around out front: boys talking to other boys, boys eating Cheez Doodles, boys idly bouncing basketballs, boys in cleats, boys with their boom boxes, on the way to Roberto Clemente Park for handball or to Aqueduct to finish twelve-hour shifts dealing drugs.

In other windows were grown women—mothers in their twenties and grandmothers in their thirties, older women weathered by years of poverty’s slamming seas. These women rested their fattening elbows on flattened pillows, cushioning the edge of the window frames. The much older women—the great-grandmothers in their fifties—had lost interest in the drama: they kept the curtains closed. Coco, however, courted consequence; she was still a girl, and she still assumed a connection between what she was doing and what she wanted and what might result. And what she wanted right then was the fine light-skinned boy in the red leather coat on the street below, straddling his bicycle seat.

Cesar’s friends called him Casper because he was so white. His graffiti tag names, which he’d scrawled in fat letters on most of the buildings near his mother’s block, were LC (Lone Cesar) and PBC (Pretty Boy Cesar). He also used Big Rock, but he preferred PBC. He covered a mole on his substantial forehead with the band of his baseball hat, which he always turned to the back. He was self-conscious about his ears. He thought they were too small and that they stuck out. Coco knew only what she saw—an agile boy with full lips, serious brown eyes, and a flat nose, who knew how to dress. Cesar’s sneakers were scuffless. His clothes were pressed and clean.

“Damn,” Coco said to Dorcas. “That guy look good.” He wore his curly blond hair short, in an Afro. He walked sexy, dipping his slender hips as
he loped. He squinted as though he had just sucked on a lime. Coco could not quite keep him in view because he kept moving and cars kept driving by, getting in the way. He went into the bodega, then reappeared. She lost him in the cluster of boys by the battered pay phone. She caught sight of him again. Then he was gone.

Some days later, Coco and Dorcas left their window post and stood out in front in the shade of Dorcas’s mother’s building, across the street from the bodega. The move was strategic; they stood at boy-level now. Coco may have been shameless about flirting and flaunting her chubby body, but she liked whom she liked and, in her own time, she would let the lucky boy know. When Cesar showed up again, she smiled her crumpled smile and gave him her best eye—a raccoon eye, because Coco outlined her eyes with liner, applied as thick as crayon. But Cesar didn’t seem to notice her. Coco’s boyfriend, Wishman, foiled the next attempt, and Cesar had left by the time she’d shooed him away.

Coco next saw Cesar when she was walking to the store. Cesar blasted out of a nearby pool hall, chasing a man he stood no chance of catching. As he passed her, he spit out a Now and Later candy in a spray of blood, and a stream of obscenities followed. It turned out that the man had wrongly accused Cesar and his friends of overturning his car, which he’d parked in front of the pool hall, and when Cesar had cursed the man out, the man had pistol-whipped him. Now Cesar was scrambling for backup, trying to mobilize The Andrews Posse. The challenge was, as always, to get the boys organized. “Ooh,” Coco remembered thinking, “my baby’s gonna fight.” Coco was a member of TAP’s unofficial auxiliary. Boys needed girls at times like these as decoys. Police were less likely to stop a boy accompanied by a girl. Coco grabbed the arm of a boy her sister used to like.

And that’s when Cesar noticed Coco—which placed her in a quandary: she didn’t want Cesar to think she had a boyfriend besides Wishman, but if she let go of the other boy’s hand, he could get into trouble, and that would be her fault. To her relief, the moment dissolved in the ensuing commotion, all the yelling and jostling and undirected threats. Everyone assembled, eventually, but by then the pistol-whipper had long since fled.

Yet the incident did its deeper work: the outburst relieved frustration and gave the bored teenagers something new to talk about. Revenge provided an excuse to connect, and another sort of hormonal communication replaced the desire for a fight. Cesar did not speak to Coco, and Coco kept the most important questions to herself. Did he have a girlfriend?
What did he think of her? Darkness descended over University and it was growing cold, but the headlights from the cars felt summer bright.

The smallest hope had a way of vaulting Coco into overdrive; just on speculation, she broke up with Wishman. She needed him out of the way in case Cesar wanted her. Wishman acted unconcerned, but Wishman’s mother, Sunny, told Coco she was sorry to hear of the split. She liked Coco: Coco struck her as the type of girl who could anchor a restless boy like Wishman without expecting too much. Sunny had hoped for this match, since trouble seemed the destination of this particular son. Sunny, who was large and easygoing, could tell that Coco had heart—that she could hold her own in a fight—but she also possessed a sweetness. Coco wasn’t greedy. She didn’t curse. She was happy to feed Sunny’s baby and change a diaper and go to the store to buy Sunny a loosie when her Newports ran out. Sunny would never tell Wishman what she thought—she did not want him all into her business, either—but she memorialized her hope for his softer landing by taping Coco’s photograph to the refrigerator door. Now Wishman would be reminded of Coco every time he got a drink.

Coco lived in the heart of the inner city, but to her it was more like a village: her world was made up of roughly five square blocks. Its emotional center was her mother’s apartment on the top floor of a six-story building off University Avenue. Just down the street was a high-rise housing project that staggered back toward the Deegan Expressway. The projects were another country; Coco traveled there only with her mother, Foxy, and her stepfather, Richie, who liked to do battle on the handball courts. Coco visited other outposts more often: the emergency rooms of North Central and Bronx Lebanon, where Coco waited for hours whenever her younger brother had a seizure or her older brother had an asthma attack; her grandmother’s apartment, a five-minute walk away; the apartments of friends, who were mostly relatives by blood, and who hosted birthday parties, baby showers, christenings, and coming-home parties whenever the prison let somebody’s son or boyfriend out. There was Burnside Avenue, where Coco went shopping whenever her mother had money for the big purchases—shoes and coats. There was Fordham Road, where she attended school.

And yet there were important distinctions within this circumscribed world. Church people generally lived their lives separate from the people who hung around outside. Some working people kept their kids on lockdown to protect them from the street; some kids stayed outdoors,
afraid of what awaited them inside. Everyone traversed the same stairwells and corner stores and bus stops, but sometimes moving in opposite directions. There was a kind of swing shift: the hanging-out folks straggled home as the working people headed out; the working people returned just as the streets were heating up. Even within households, these tensions persisted: Foxy worked full-time, while Richie, her longtime boyfriend, was a heroin addict; Coco loved the street, but her older sister, Iris, was a homebody.

Trying to do right wasn’t necessarily rewarded: the bulk of the housework fell to Iris. In fact, Iris also shouldered a fair share of the parenting: Foxy managed a clothing store called the Rainbow Shop, and she didn’t get home most nights until ten or eleven. Iris cooked, fetched Coco from the corner, and fielded phone calls from the schools, where Coco and Hector, the youngest, were always getting into fights. Foxy liked to say, “I have to kick Iris’s ass outside and kick Coco’s to stay in.”

That fall, however, Foxy was easing up on Coco because she had more pressing worries; Iris was pregnant, at fifteen, and threatening to move out. Foxy liked Iris’s boyfriend, Armando—the teenagers had met at a summer youth program, and Armando was devoted and responsible—but Foxy didn’t see how she could manage without her eldest daughter; Iris made it possible for Foxy to work.

Iris didn’t want to abandon her mother, but she longed for peace—a peace she hadn’t even known was possible until she’d spent two quiet weeks with a family upstate one summer, as a camper with the Fresh Air Fund. She hated the constant fighting at her mother’s; someone was always taking someone else’s something, someone needing or getting hit or crying or complaining or bickering. Iris had enjoyed the refuge of Foxy’s sister Aida, who lived in New Jersey, but Aida had recently started using drugs, overwhelmed by problems of her own. Before she fell in love with Armando, Iris hid out in the bedroom she shared with Coco and entertained herself by rearranging the furniture and changing the clothes on her Barbie dolls. Now, she hid out in Armando’s room.

Iris also hated Foxy’s boyfriend. Richie was unemployed, and because Iris stayed indoors, she got the brunt of his restlessness, some of which he subdued with heroin. Iris was tired of serving him—preparing his coffee, watching his nature shows instead of cartoons, and after he nodded out, dousing his cigarettes. Once, Richie overdosed in the bathroom while Foxy was at work. Coco screamed hysterically, and their older brother, Manuel, ran to get a neighbor, but Iris prayed that Richie wouldn’t make it.

Iris had hated her own father, too. She remembered doing cartwheels in the hall at school when she received the news that he had died. Coco, who was eight at the time, scratched her face until she bled. She had been his favorite. When Coco was younger, and he tossed her in the air, Iris would try to distract him, so he would drop her. Or Iris would hide beneath the bed with the cat, tease the cat to the point of torture, then throw it at her father’s feet and watch him get clawed. She cooled his diabetes medication in the freezer. When Foxy finally kicked him out, Iris was secretly pleased. But as far as Iris was concerned, Foxy had simply traded one useless man for another. Now Iris’s pregnancy made her more outspoken, and she disrespected Richie to his face.

Coco, on the other hand, concentrated on Richie’s positive qualities. He was handsome—light-skinned, with blue eyes—and he and her mother matched: Foxy had green eyes and platinum-blond hair. They looked beautiful together when they danced, and he made her mother happy sometimes. Richie also took the time to teach Coco the Hustle. He was intelligent; he read books; he registered Coco for her first library card, and he helped her with her homework. Ever since Iris had come out pregnant, Richie had been warning Coco to guard herself and aim for a better life.

Exactly how she was supposed to do this was unclear, but Coco might have instinctively understood that success was less about climbing than about not falling down. Since there were few real options for mobility, people in Coco’s world measured improvement in microscopic increments of better-than-whatever-was-worse. These tangible gradations mattered more than the clichéd language of success that floated blandly out of everyone’s mouth, like fugitive sentiments from a Hallmark card. Girls were going to “make something of themselves” as soon as the baby was old enough; boys were going to “do right” and “stay inside”; everyone was going back to school. But better-than was the true marker. Thick and fed was better than thin and hungry. Family fights indoors—even if everyone could hear them—were better than taking private business to the street. Heroin was bad, but crack was worse. A girl who had four kids by two boys was better than a girl who had four by three. A boy who dealt drugs and helped his mom and kids was better than a boy who was greedy and spent the income on himself; the same went for girls and their welfare checks. Mothers who went clubbing and didn’t yell at their kids the next tired day were better than mothers who did.