Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (54 page)

At the same time, Frankie was hanging out with a white man who beat his girlfriend, and he’d started getting more belligerent with Coco. One morning, he demanded Coco make him breakfast, and the situation disintegrated into a fight loud enough to bring out the neighbors. When Coco started tossing Frankie’s clothes out the second-floor window, he shoved her. Nikki, usually unflappable, bolted outside to get Mercedes, and Mercedes came running: “Mommy, you okay?”

“Look at what’s happening in front of my kids! My motherfuckin’ kids! They are not going to see this, you motherfucker!” Coco screamed, and told him to get out. Solemnly, Mercedes watched him pack. He gave her his Roberto Clemente poster and a watch. He told her that he never intended to hit her mother. “I was just embarrassed,” Frankie said. “I didn’t know how to handle it.”

Soon afterward, Coco’s great-grandmother died. Coco felt badly that she didn’t have the money to travel to the Bronx. On the day of the funeral, Frankie came over for a visit and asked Coco if she wanted to get high. Coco surprised him and said yes. Coco hadn’t smoked weed since the one time she tried it when she was thirteen years old. Later, she admitted that she simply wanted to feel close to Frankie. The first time they smoked, she felt paranoid, but the second time was better. The third time, she fell asleep in the afternoon and slept through a good part of the night; Milagros took the babies, and when Coco finally woke up, the older children were still out in the street. Milagros told her that the stillness in Coco’s apartment had reminded her of the homes of girls she’d known who were hooked on drugs. Afterward, Coco could recall little of the episode other than at one point looking in the bathroom mirror and seeing her mother’s face. She swore she would never get high again.

By late August, the obvious influences of camp life had dissolved. If Coco cursed, Mercedes no longer said, “Mommy, please don’t swear.” After failed attempts at employing her fledgling skills as a diplomat in her dealings with her sisters, Mercedes resorted to petulance, then bullying. Her battles with Brittany and Stephanie resumed. Mercedes still sang the camp songs, though. She taught “Boom Chicka Rocka Chicka Boom” to Pearl, who made song sounds as she splashed in the tub. Mercedes taught Nautica, who sang sternly to her dolls. Mercedes even shared the songs with Brittany and Stephanie, who set the lyrics to cheers. Matthew and Michael were too young to say the words but they liked to watch their sisters do flips and cartwheels. Mercedes even sang as she cycled, which was how Coco could tell when she pedaled by the front window and was about to turn at the tree. The way she held the handlebars reminded Coco of Cesar.

Mercedes loved riding her bike through Corliss Park. She would coast down the sidewalk hill and take the shortcut by Milagros’s to avoid the boys hanging out at the basketball court. She would wave to the white ladies who sat at a picnic table smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee all afternoon. She knew the sidewalks, exactly where the bumps made the front wheel hop. She knew where to slow down for the turns on the dangerous sand. The ladies at the picnic table could sense it—the pleasure she took in her sturdy legs, the confidence suggested in the determined chin, the delight of the freedom and the fresh air. They seemed to share her exuberance, even as it passed them by. The smoke from their cigarettes rose in the sun, like haze, and made its way above the poplar trees.

B
y December, Coco and Frankie were back together, but rarely having sex. She told her mother, “I feel like a damn nun.” Foxy replied that she couldn’t imagine Coco with anyone but Frankie. “Show me a perfect person,” Foxy would say, “and I’ll kiss their ass.” Frankie sometimes kept his drugs at Corliss Park, but he himself was usually out: he had gotten a car. Coco wanted him home, but when he was home, she didn’t like his treatment of her girls. One morning, she caught Frankie snapping scissors in Nautica’s face. He said that he was fed up with her demands for food she never ate, but to Coco that was no excuse: “It’s okay if you trying to show them something, trying to teach them, but not to make them feel fear.” She told him that he would never treat his own kids that way.

The violent bickering between them was contagious: Coco yelled at Nautica, who then pulled her mother’s hair and kicked her in the back. Mercedes pounded Nikki, who scratched to draw blood. Pearl clawed at herself, as Coco used to as a child. One morning, Nikki woke up in tears. “I feel like it’s seeing my mother all over again with Richie,” Coco said. The next thing she knew, just before Christmas, Frankie got arrested.

He called Coco crying; she called his mother, who said to Coco, “He made it all this time without getting in trouble, why’s he going to start acting stupid now?” Frankie had been stopped for not wearing a seat belt. He gave the officer his license, but his name had an arrest warrant attached to it. As luck would have it, the warrant was for a murder. Frankie panicked: both he and Coco knew people who’d been arrested and convicted for crimes they did not commit, just as they knew others who’d committed crimes and were still at large, committing new ones; crimes and punishments rarely added up. Even Iris’s husband, Armando, a solid working man, had been stopped by police. Luckily, fingerprints cleared Frankie, and his mother wired Coco money and Coco bailed him out. The episode made Coco seriously consider moving back to the city, where she and her troubles would feel less conspicuous and Frankie could live with her without being subjected to this level of scrutiny from the police. In fact, whenever Coco felt trapped, she fantasized about moving.

But Cesar, whom Coco had written to about her restlessness, told Coco to stay put. He was in solitary confinement again, and he’d been thinking
a lot about his daughters. If Coco returned to the Bronx, she was resigning herself to a lifestyle they’d both tried to escape:

I understand what you mean about Albany being too much for you and Mercedes, but I really don’t want my daughters growing up in the Bronx. Try to move and stay in Albany think of the kids and stop thinking of yourself all of the time. . . . You had those kids for all the wrong reasons, and now you’re paying the price. I know I’m in jail for something
I
did, but with your selfish ass self and your selfish way of living you’ve made things psychologically worse for my daughters and yours. I am not saying you are a bad mother. You take very good care of my kids and I will never take them away from you, but you ruining their minds. But you don’t see this because you’re too busy fucking and having babies after babies by dudes who don’t give a fuck about you or your or (THEIR) kids. . . .

Coco I’ve made my mistakes but I didn’t want you or Roxanne to have these babies because I knew I wouldn’t stay with either of you, but you both gave birth to those girls for the wrong reasons and now my daughters are paying the price along with me. Mercy was the only baby I agreed on having. Don’t get me wrong, I love all my daughters equally and with all my heart. But it hurts me to know they’re suffering because of OUR inconsiderate actions. . . .

You may think that being a good mother is enough but it’s not. I know the effects of growing up in a household with brothers and sisters from different fathers and seeing different men with my Mom and all the other shit you’re doing. It’s not good. . . . I am trying to open your eyes to see the pain you’re going to cause those kids. I know I been through it. The pain is paramount. Start thinking with your mind and stop thinking with your pussy. A child can be physically healthy and seem to be alright, but psychologically trauma is a very serious disease that can effect the healthiest of children and cause serious problems in their life. Look, learn from your mistakes and stop making them over and over again. Why do you think I haven’t had a baby with my wife? . . . You know I’m dying to have a son, but I can’t allow my child to go through the psychological torment that me, Mercedes, Whitney, and Justine and Naughty are going through. . . .

 . . . I’m not saying to stop having sex. I’m saying to stop having babies like if it’s okay. Your having them for all the wrong reasons and all your going to do is cause them pain in the long run. And they are
going to see you and say, Oh, my Mommy’s a hoe. And if she has had kids from a bunch of different men, then it’s okay if I do it. I don’t want my daughters to come out like you or me. . . . Anyway this letter wasn’t meant as a bad one, it was meant to open your eyes. I’m really tired of staying shut and watching you destroy the lives of you and your kids. I hope you take my advice because it’s for the good not bad. Anyway, I want for you to send me a lot of flicks of my kids. . . . Listen, I also expect to see my kids with YOU. Those are our kids, and OUR responsibility. . . . I want to see Mercedes and Naughty with their Mom. I’m bringing this to a close bye bye.

Coco read the letter, then reread it and said, “It makes me feel dirty. It’s bad enough I have them, he don’t have to remind me what I did.” That very afternoon, she left the kids with Milagros and took the bus downtown to the offices of Planned Parenthood.

Coco’s attempts at birth control had been much like her attempts at many other things—well-intentioned and wholehearted, dwarfed by other problems, and eventually forgotten. After Pearl was born, she’d asked the doctor if she could have her tubes tied, and he told her to ask her regular doctor, but Coco didn’t have a regular doctor. She had also asked a hospital nurse, who wasn’t sure whether the procedure would be covered by Medicaid. Coco had meant to pursue it, but within a month she and her girls were homeless, upstate. Since then, she had considered other options, but she also knew her limitations. If she couldn’t always remember to give her own children their medications, how could she possibly remember to take the Pill? Her sister, Iris, had Norplant, which she swore made her queasy, and Coco thought it was creepy to have small cylinders lined up on the inside of your arm. She’d also heard from friends the rumors that the government needed guinea pigs to test Norplant and was encouraging its use mainly among Puerto Ricans and blacks. Coco had debated getting “the shot,” Depo-Provera, but she’d been turned off by the rumors of its side effects. Elaine claimed that it had ended her sex drive; Iris heard that it made girls lose their hair and lose weight, and Coco, at four feet eleven inches and 133 pounds, was still trying to get fat. But Cesar’s letter was the push she needed; she made an appointment for the following morning.

That night, as Coco labored over her response to Cesar, reconsidering and editing each sentence, Mercedes asked her mother if she would write down a letter for her. Mercedes dictated as Coco scribbled:

Dear Daddy,

How you doing? Fine I hope. As for myself I’m confused about something. Mommy’s boyfriend got locked up and she bailed him out. I want to know why she didn’t bail you out. Daddy I’m sorry about telling you about Mom’s boyfriend. I don’t understand. Mom tried to explain to me. I want to hear what you have to say now. Daddy I’m telling Naughty every day that you love her, and when we went to the city she was crying for you. Daddy write back once you get my letter. I love you.
♥
U Daddy

Love,

Mercedes and Naughty

Coco carefully copied it onto a fresh page of paper ripped from Mercedes’s notebook from school before returning to her own letter. She picked her face as she mulled over the final version. “My face is destroyed,” she said miserably.

“And you still picking,” Mercedes said tartly. She listened as her mother read her rebuttal aloud:

Dear Cesar,

What’s up? I wish you were not in there. I know shit is hard for you. What you need to know is that just cuz you’re the one in there, that it’s not hard just for you. It’s hard for me also. If you wasn’t in there, it would’ve made our daughters and my life easier for real. I’m tired of you demanding for me to bring your girls. I’ll bring them if I could. You always made me feel like I had and still have to do as you say, and it’s not like that. . . . I’m tired of acting scared of you or feeling like I have to stay shut from you. I want you to hear me out. You made me cry by the letter you wrote me. You always want to bring the past up too. Whatever I did in the past I want it to stay in the past. I love my future now.