Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro Read online

  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.

  Without Big Daddy’s contributions—$500 a month in cash, in addition to a running tab at the bodega—Lourdes had to scramble again. No woman with four children could survive on welfare, and now Lourdes also had four grandchildren, another on the way, and a drug habit to support. Jessica and Lourdes fought, ferociously and often. Both women wanted to be taken care of; neither wanted to baby-sit. The cocaine helped Lourdes, but there was never enough of it.

  Life at Lourdes’s now moved in lockstep with the life of the street. The first week of each month, after the welfare check came in, was best—a time to buy things, to feel some sense of agency. Outside, the drug dealers also enjoyed a surge in business. Lourdes stocked the shelves with food and bought what the house needed from the dollar store—King Pine for cleaning and cocoa butter for healing scars and the comforts of air freshener and hair conditioner. She clanked around the kitchen, blasting Latin oldies, cooking rice with gandules and frying her pork chops seasoned with the fresh herb she called the Puerto Rican leaf. She cooked well. Friends and neighbors dropped by, and Lourdes fed everyone.

  Everything changed toward the end of the month when the money ran out. Lourdes took to bed. Elaine cooked rice, which Cesar flavored with ketchup. He stole fruit for his family from a nearby Korean market or snatched bread from a grocery store’s delivery bin. Milagros brought the children diapers and food. She remembered seeing Cesar drink their Similac, then refill the bottles with sugar water, as he’d seen his sisters do. For longer and longer stretches, Milagros lugged the twins back to her mother’s, one under each arm, their skinny limbs dangling.

  That winter, in 1987, Lourdes hit bottom. All the jewelry was in the pawn shop. The phone company shut off the phone. Usually, Lourdes managed to pull things together at holiday times. As far back as her children could remember, she had prepared dozens of pasteles, her specialty dish, which the bodega by the Grand Concourse would sell for her. She’d spend the extra cash on food and gifts. She would buy each of her children a brand-new outfit, and on Christmas Eve, they would all dress and take the subway to Manhattan to have Christmas dinner with Lourdes’s mother, uncles and aunts, and their kids. It was a happy night.

  That Christmas, however, they remained in the Bronx, with Lourdes curled up in bed. Even the birth of Elaine’s baby boy—Lourdes’s first grandson—barely roused her spirits. Occasionally, she shuffled out of her room and made coffee and peed. The dog’s messes dotted the narrow hallway, and if Lourdes stepped in a puddle, she’d yell at her children, then call Scruffy sweetly. Scruffy would run with such excitement toward her that he would skid into her legs when he tried to stop. She’d punt him down the hall. By January, Scruffy had learned to cower at the sound of Lourdes’s voice.

  At the lean end of the month, Elaine’s boyfriend, Angel, set Jessica up on a blind date with a drug dealer named Boy George. Jessica was Angel’s gesture of thanks to George for giving him work. Angel had met George years earlier, on Watson Avenue. Angel was selling crack then, doing pretty well, and George was just coming up. But Angel, like many neighborhood kids, had enjoyed the lifestyle that accompanied dealing and had started using drugs. Then the money couldn’t come fast enough, and now Angel had Elaine and a baby son to support. Boy George, however, had been disciplined. He never touched his product; he rarely drank. In the midst of the hype of the crack boom, he’d had the smarts to concentrate on heroin, and his business was thriving. Years later, looking back, Jessica said, “That was the date that changed my whole way of life.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was a double date: Elaine and Angel, Jessica and George. Jessica had agreed to meet this George under one condition. “If he’s ugly, bring me home at ten,” she said. The evening of January 23, 1988, Lourdes sat by the window gazing down over Tremont. “George pulled up in a car that was like the ocean,” Lourdes said. He saluted her through the sunroof of a charcoal-gray Mercedes-Benz 190. Jessica took one look at him and rescinded her curfew. He was so handsome that she was willing to surrender the next day or two.

  George’s black leather cap matched the black leather trench coat. He’d cropped his dark brown hair close and kept his goatee neatly trimmed. His brown eyes were intent. Like her daughter, Lourdes recognized an opportunity when she saw one, but Lourdes was experienced enough to make a bid for something more reliable than love. Suddenly, she suddenly remembered she could not baby-sit. George understood the cue: he gave Lourdes some high-quality cocaine and $1,000. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard a defensive response like hers, Baby, you can keep my daughter out all night.

  “She just sold her to me for a thousand dollars,” George later said. “I could have been a serial killer and sliced her up, and she just sold her to me for a thousand dollars.” A thousand dollars was nothing to George. At the time that he and Jessica met, his heroin business grossed over $500,000 a week.

  Lourdes’s recollection of meeting Boy George did not include this unmatronly trade-off, but she did recall having a vision whose warning she later shared with Jessica, and Jessica failed to heed: “There will be a man in your life. He is from another road, a high, tight, dangerous road. And if you cannot stay on that road, you should not stay with that man.” That night, however, Lourdes sniffed coke and baby-sat.

  Out in the Mercedes, George popped in a cassette of Guns N’ Roses and sped off. Jessica was intrigued: George listened to rock and roll, like a white boy. He liked R&B music, but the lyrics, all the whining about hardship and heartache, irritated him. George took them all to the movies, to Eddie Murphy Raw, and treated them to dinner. Then he suggested they go clubbing. Jessica had dressed conservatively. (“You know how when you go on a blind date you don’t really know what to wear?” she later said.) She asked George to stop by her mother’s so she could change.

  When she reappeared, George asked, “What happened to the girl who I went out with? You sure you the same girl?” Jessica called her club-style dressing puta. Contact lenses had replaced her eyeglasses. Her hair, which had before been pulled into a bun, now fell around her neck in a soft, loose mane. She’d slipped out of the long skirt and blazer and squeezed into a pair of Spandex leggings and a low-cut body blouse. She’d kicked off the plain pumps and slid on knee-high boots. He wasn’t certain he liked the change, but he was impressed by her gameness. Clearly, this was a girl he could take places.

  George took her to Club 371, his employees’ haunt. A long line of people waited to enter. He strode to the front. Girls eyed him. “I’m gonna get beat up!” Jessica whispered to Elaine excitedly as they followed him in. The hostess seated the foursome in the VIP section, and a waitress appeared with a bottle of Moët. The dance floor smelled of perfume instead of sweat. Jessica got up and performed a little dance for George in front of their table; everyone treated George like a king. They were the only Puerto Ricans; everyone else was black. Boy George preferred not to hire Puerto Ricans. He believed his own kind were more likely to betray him.

  The night ended in two $500 suites at the Loews Glenpoint Hotel, in Teaneck, New Jersey. Jessica recalls that George really talked to her, as few dates ever had. He not only asked questions about her hopes and fears, he actually listened to her answers. She told him what she had never told Lourdes: that Cesar’s father had sexually abused her for years. George ordered room service. He fed Jessica strawberries in the king-size bed. “I felt like a princess,” she said. Finally, life resembled life as Jessica imagined it ought to be: “I felt loved. My knight in shining armor.” Jessica was most overwhelmed by the fact that despite all he’d paid for, George didn’t expect to have sex. Instead, he held her.

  The following afternoon, while George
paid the bill, Jessica waited near a waterfall in the lobby for her sister and Angel. The spread of the brunch buffet dazzled her: sliced fruit fanned out on silver trays, cheese cubes stacked near tubed cold cuts, orange juice chilled in heavy crystal glass. There were huge green olives and bread baked into animal shapes. The food banquet filled a large cloth-covered table beneath two ice swans in a melting embrace.

  Back on Tremont, Jessica lingered in the passenger seat of Boy George’s idling car after Elaine and Angel went upstairs. She could feel the neighbors’ eyes on her in the Mercedes and she loved it. George said, “Get your moms and your daughters ready, I’m taking you out to eat.” He’d return and collect them in an hour. He told her to be on time. He did not like to wait.

  Jessica stripped and jumped into the shower. She told her mother to dress and get the girls ready. Lourdes pulled on jeans and a clean T-shirt, dressed the three girls in what she could find and brushed their hair. She assumed they’d eat locally—perhaps a seafood place on City Island, but more likely White Castle or take-out Chinese. But George liked surprises. He’d even switched cars, exchanging the Mercedes for one of his BMWs. He took them to an upscale Cuban restaurant in Manhattan, Victor’s Café.

  Signed photographs of celebrities and boxers decorated the walls. The maître d’ recognized Boy George. Lourdes hid behind the menu. For the price of one meal, she noticed, she could feed her five grandchildren for a week.

  “Get whatever you want,” George told her. “Don’t worry about what it costs.” Unasked, the waiter uncorked a bottle of Moët.

  The ride home was slow and dreamy. Jessica didn’t often drink, and she was giddy from the champagne. They got stuck in traffic, but the BMW felt airtight, like a little house. George invited Jessica to open the glove compartment. He had photographs there from a recent trip he had taken to Hawaii. The farthest Jessica had traveled was to Bear Mountain, an hour north of the city, on the picnics her family had taken with Big Daddy.